Made for Him: A Mafia Baby Romance (8 page)

“
J
essica
!”

I spin and see a man in a suit running towards me, and for a minute I panic and think it’s Nate, but then I see the bloodstain on the shoulder and the dark hair and my heart soars into my chest.

Matteo.

He’s alive.

And he’s found me.

He wraps me in a fierce embrace the moment he reaches me, his arms like a cage around me, not trapping me but protecting me. I bury my face against his chest and sob.

“You’re alive,” he says in dazed wonder. “God, I thought you were dead or hurt, and I was so desperate to find you. I knew he must have taken you to the shop, and we were on the way there to get you back.”

I turn my head, and through my tearstained eyes, I can see several black cars stopped in the middle of the road. A deadly convoy.

“You were going to come get me?”

“I should have known that you wouldn’t need rescuing,” he murmurs, finding my chin with his finger and tilting my head up. His eyes are a luminous blue under the streetlights. “But we came. To protect the Moretti family’s most treasured possessions.”

His hand drops down to my belly at the same time he brushes a kiss across my forehead.

I slump against him and fist my hands in his suit jacket. “I thought you were dead.”

“The gunshot wound was clean—in and out. My men fought the bikers off quickly enough to get the bleeding under control. It hurts like a bitch, though.”

For some reason that makes me laugh a little. “Sounds like an understatement.”

“You have no idea. And it’s time for us to get in the car, princess. Jimmy and his men will be combing the neighborhood for you.”

I nod. I know he’s right, and it would be stupid to stand out here in the open any longer. Still though, it physically pains me to break our embrace to walk towards the car. I need to keep touching him, keep reassuring myself he’s alive and well. And as weak as it sounds, touching him makes me feel safe. He won’t let any harm come to me while he’s here—Nate can’t touch me while I’m protected in Matteo’s arms.

Matteo must feel a similar need, because as soon as we slide into the backseat of the car and he orders the man driving us to turn around and go to his house, he yanks me into his lap. His lips crash down onto mine, his mouth demanding that I open up to his invasion, which I do willingly, with an eager hunger. Our tongues slip together, his hands roam all over my back and arms and shoulders, and I remember why I feel so right in Matteo’s arms. It doesn’t matter how many bikers are after us, how much danger we’re in, nothing matters except him. Except us.

He tastes like mint, cool and sweet, and my body aches for that cool, sweet mouth to trace every inch of my skin. I long for those lips to kiss the inside of my thighs, for that tongue to tease my most secret places. I slide my hands up his chest as he pushes me back against the seat.

He inhales sharply when my hand brushes against his shoulder—against his wound—and I’m about to apologize when I realize something. I tentatively pull his jacket back. “Is that…duct tape? On your gunshot wound?”

He chuckles weakly. “We didn’t have time to do stitches.”

“Oh Matteo.” It hits me again how much he risked for me when he tried to protect me in the parking garage. “Thank God it only hit your shoulder.”

“I would have happily been shot a thousand times if it meant keeping you safe.” His voice is low and serious. “You know that, right?”

I don’t care that the car is too small or that Matteo’s injured or that there’s a driver who can hear and see everything. I have to tell Matteo how much I love him, and more than that, I have to
show
him.

I swing a leg so that I’m straddling his lap now instead of sitting on it, and I find his hands and bring them to my chest, pressing them hard against my breasts. My nipples bead against his warm palms, stiff and insistent even through the fabric of my dress, and he wastes no time in plucking at them, teasing them to full attention.

He leans forward to kiss my neck, and his stubble scratches a delicious fire all along my throat. I moan, trying to wriggle down onto the thick erection underneath me.

“Please,” I whisper to the car ceiling as he bites at my collarbone. “Please.”

“Right here?” he murmurs against my throat. “We’re not alone.”

“I don’t care. I need to feel you, need to show you—” My words break off with a gasp as his hand drops from my breast to my inner thigh, trailing up under the hem of my dress.

“Need to show me what?” he asks, his mouth still against my throat.

The wide pad of his thumb presses hard against my clit the moment I say it, and the words come out in a fevered rush. “Need to show you that I love you.”

“Oh princess, I already know.”

The way he says it is half romantic, half cocky, and I playfully swat at his uninjured shoulder. “You arrogant bastard.”

Those blue eyes glimmer in the dark but he doesn’t answer me. Instead, he keeps massaging my clit through my panties.

I let out a long, low moan, fumbling with his belt and his pants, needing to have him inside me and unable to wait another moment longer. He shifts his hips up underneath me to help, and the movement makes him wince. His shoulder.

Suddenly, I feel guilty. “Does it hurt too much? We don’t have to.”

“Jessica, there’s nothing short of castration that would keep me from fucking you.”

And at that, the long-suffering driver in the front clears his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve arrived.”

“That just means I’m going to fuck you in our bed,” Matteo purrs in my ear, and the way he says
our
undoes me almost as much as his erotic promise.

Our bed. Our life. Our future.

We drive through the gates and park behind the house. Matteo barks out a strict order for the men not to disrupt us, and then we walk upstairs, his hand tugging on mine insistently. He needs me as much as I need him right now; it’s apparent in the thick bulge of his pants and the rough way he hauls me up the stairs. And it’s definitely apparent in the way he pins me against the hallway wall with a fierce, hot kiss, his body hard and unyielding against my soft, curvy one.

“I thought they’d hurt you. I thought they’d kill you.” His voice is raw as he confesses his pain against my lips. “Jessica…I wanted to die when I thought you might be dead. Just the idea of it made me go mad.”

I twine my fingers in his hair. “I felt the same way. I love you.”

“I love you,” he growls back, and then I’m being lifted in the air with his hands under my ass. I wrap my legs around him and he opens the door to his room, stepping inside. I go to kiss his temple, his hair, and his earlobe, but he’s gone still. Frozen against me.

I look down to his face and see that he’s not looking at me but that he’s looking straight ahead, his face a blank mask I can’t read.

“Matteo?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I do the worst thing I can do. I turn and look to see what he’s staring at. Matteo mutely lets me slide down to my feet as I do.

And then I see it. See
him
. My heart plummets to the floor and stays there, beating frantically.

“Uncle Jimmy,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

He steps out of the shadows into the middle of Matteo’s darkened bedroom, a gun clutched in his hand. His arm isn’t raised, and for now the gun is down by his leg, but it’s still present, still an imminent threat. I know from our heated kissing session in the car that Matteo has a small pistol clipped to his belt at the small of his back, but could he get to it and use it before Uncle Jimmy fired his own weapon? I don’t know.

Whatever happened this afternoon in the garage has taken its toll on my uncle. His forehead is bandaged and dried blood streaks his long gray beard. One wrist has been wrapped hastily in gauze. His eyes are bright and wild with exhaustion and anger.

“Jessica, come over here,” he says, and there’s none of his usual fatherliness in his voice, none of the usual affection and softness. Of course there wouldn’t be—he must have heard that I escaped the shop and ran away. He must realize by now that I want to be with Matteo, that I will fight to be with Matteo.

“No, Jimmy,” I whisper.

“Goddammit, Jessica,” my uncle swears viciously. “Get the fuck over here right now before I come over there and make you.”

I step into Matteo automatically, and he immediately wraps a strong arm around me.

“No,” I say again, in a steadier voice this time. “I’ve made my choice. I choose Matteo.”

“You’re going to choose him over your own family?” Jimmy asks. “Over me?”

“He is my family now,” I say, jutting my chin up in the air. “He’s the father of my child.”

“Oh, right. Your Mafia baby. How could I forget?”

“How did you get in here, Jimmy?” Matteo asks. He pulls me even tighter to his side, so tightly that my arm has to slide behind him, and as it does, I feel the hard lines of his pistol against my hand. I can tell by Matteo’s intentional stillness that this was his plan in holding me close.

Maybe he can’t reach for his gun without being seen, but I can.

As Jimmy explains in almost gleeful detail how he bribed one of Matteo’s lieutenants to give him the house security code, I slowly lift Matteo’s jacket and work the heavy pistol out of the holster.

“And I knew the minute Jessica escaped that she’d wind up here,” Jimmy continues. “So I had Nate lead the search of the neighborhood, while I came straight to your house myself. You left it unguarded, and with the code, it was all too easy. You might as well have left the lights on and coffee in the pot.”

“I sent all my men to help me find Jessica,” Matteo says. “And all those same men are waiting downstairs, armed to the teeth and waiting for any excuse to kill you and your boys. If you surrender now, I’ll consider letting you live.”

“That’s not going to happen, Moretti, for a couple of very good reasons. The first being that I don’t believe for a second that you wouldn’t kill me given half the chance. The second being that surrender is entirely unnecessary—the boys are on their way here now, and when they get here, they aren’t going to play nice. Every single one of your men will be dead.”

“And you’re going to kill me now?” Matteo asks. He sounds calm, completely detached, as if discussing the Dow Jones forecast. “In front of your niece?”

“I didn’t want this,” Jimmy says. “I tried to keep Jessica apart from this.”

“Other than killing her parents, you mean.”

For a minute, I can’t breathe, can’t speak. I wish with everything I have that my mind would go blank, that I wouldn’t be able to process Matteo’s words, but of course that’s not what happens. My mind swallows the words and digests them, wraps around them and brands them into my memory. My imagination runs wild, mixing real memories of that awful night with morbid fantasies of how he could have killed them.

Because I don’t doubt that he did kill them. His silence is incriminating, yes, and his criminal history even more damning, but more than that, it’s a truth I know in my gut. I feel it in my bones.

He killed them.

And when he meets my eyes, all doubts are erased.

“Jessica,” he says. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Is it true?” I can barely force the words out of my mouth. My hand is frozen on Matteo’s gun, unable to move. “Did you do it?”

Under his bushy beard, my uncle’s jaw works, as if he’s searching for the right words to say. Matteo beats him to the punch, however, his voice low and steady in the dark room.

“He owed money to some very bad men, money he had to pay back right away. He’d exhausted every avenue, every possible source of money. Except for that juicy life insurance policy your parents had taken out. They’d named him as the recipient, expecting that he’d use it to take care of you. It was enough money to save his skin and then some. The only thing I’m curious about is how you did it, Jimmy. Did you tamper with the engine? Fray the brake lines?”

A flash of real irritation passes over Jimmy’s face, as if the most aggravating thing happening right now is Matteo’s lack of mechanical knowledge. “It’s not that simple to make a vehicle crash, Moretti. It’s not like you can clip a few cables and then sit back and wait.”

“Then why don’t you enlighten us?”

Jimmy closes his eyes for a minute, and Matteo squeezes my arm. Not an affectionate squeeze—a prompt. He wants me to get his gun.

I finish pulling the gun out of his holster and hide it behind Matteo’s legs as my uncle opens his eyes. “I didn’t want it to come to this,” he says finally. “I wanted Jessica safe and taken care of.”

“I would have taken care of her,” Matteo replies.

“She can take care of herself,” I interject, my hand growing sweaty around the pistol grip. But I’m thankful for all the guns around the shop, for all the times one of the boys showed me how to use one, because I know how to readjust my grip, exactly how to slide the safety off.

Jimmy raises the pistol. “It’s too late for that,” he says sadly. “This situation has gotten too out of hand to be resolved any other way.”

He pauses for a minute, his eyes look haunted. “And it was a code I uploaded to the computer in your parents’ car.” There’s a note of pride in his voice as he reflects on how clever he once was, solving his problems at the expense of my parents’ lives. “Once the car rose above sixty-five miles an hour, it triggered the acceleration and deactivated the brakes. After that happened, it was only a matter of time…they crashed within seconds. The doctors said they died on impact.”

There are tears in my eyes as I ask, “Why are you telling me this?”

He takes a deep breath. “I just don’t want you to die thinking that they suffered. I don’t want you to think that it was easy for me. Or that
this
is easy for me. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

His face twitches as he steels himself to squeeze the trigger, as his hand tightens around the gun, but my face does nothing, my heart does nothing, as I raise Matteo’s gun and unload the clip into my uncle’s chest.