WinonaIshouldn’t have slept with him. I should have walked away and never indulged the pull I had toward him.HJ said I wouldn’t feel anything, and I normally never did.Except with him.With him, I felt every stupid thing I never wanted to feel again.Pleasure and pain.Hope and dread.Longing and fulfillment.Hate and love.I told him I was going to the bathroom and slipped out the back door into a dark alley behind Heathen’s Bar. Cole was out there smoking a cig and offered one to me. I let him light it and pulled in a hard drag before turning from him and walking away.“Winona, sort of wanted to talk while you enjoyed the cig.”I waved over my shoulder. “Another time, Cole.”His laugh carried down the alley as I turned the corner quickly. I didn’t need to stay any longer and face HJ. His dark stare would grate my raw nerves, and I would have to admit to enjoying him screwing me in the back of the bar more than I enjoyed sleeping with most men.I sighed and took another drag of t
WinonaWhen Dallas waltzed back in with his sons by his side, I was sitting up in the bed. Sebastian scanned the scene immediately, like a sponge soaking everything in. He’d grown up to be the tall, dark, and handsome Italian the whole city loved. Most everyone knew ofhim and his charisma, and he’d become the infamous heir to the mafia throne. He’d also kept a bit of his charm with me, was there when I needed him. Carlos idled behind, like a feline never really concerned with what anyone else was doing. Maybe that was the benefit of being younger with less responsibility.“Sebastian has news,” said Dallas.Dallas’s oldest son stared at me. “You’re too valuable to be doing what you’re doing.”His words pummeled me, made me feel like something more than I was. More than just someone who did a job for them.“I’m fine. Nothing happened.” I shrugged and tried to shake off the feeling of belonging. “I wasn’t paying attention when I should have been.”“Even if you had been, it still could h
WinonaThey left a bodyguard outside my room the whole night.Which was overkill, considering I got the surprise of my life when I peeked out my door to find HJ staring at it from a chair he’d slid over.I opened it wide to glare at him. “What are you doing? You should face the other way in case someone tries to kidnap me.”“That’s what our bodyguard here is for. I’m here to watch for the real danger: you sneaking off and doing something stupid.”I slammed the door as loudly as I could. Then I opened it wide and slammed it again for good measure.Still, I slept like a baby wrapped in a very safe cocoon. Was this what it felt like when my father was still living? Was this the family dynamic I missed so much?The next morning, he was gone. I was left with just the security. “Dante, can you stop staring out into the abyss and make yourself useful this morning?”“Winona girl, you’re going to wreck this family, you know that?” he said as he turned to me with a sparkle in his greenish-blue
HJ“Do you have anything about this damn move under control?” I bellowed at Winona. She was shoving clothes into a cardboard box that Carlos, Sebastian, Dante, and I had brought over.“Oh, shut the hell up!” she screamed, holding up a shirt against herself in the mirror as if this was the time to determine what she wanted to pack.“Why the fuck are we doing this today?” I growled at Sebastian. We should have given Winona a year to pack up her stuff because a week wasn’t long enough.Ever the know-it-all, he stood stoically and replied with his arms crossed, “Because it has to be done today.”I didn’t hide my anger as I ripped the shirt from Winona and threw it in the box. “Try shit on later. Throw it in a box, and we’ll carry it down to the moving truck. I got stuff to do tonight, and at this rate, we’ll never be done by then.”She curled her glossed lip at me and peered around my shoulder to see Carlos moving a vase from her table. “Be like Carlos. Do something constructive like pa
WinonaWe got along more than fine.Sebastian moved mountains for me when he needed to.He wasn’t home much, but food was brought in most of the time for me. The dayshe was home, he cooked. Like, gourmet-meal cooked. He made pesto chicken with arugula and prosciutto one night, and I seriously almost took him to bed.We’d lived together two weeks, and the man was pretty much a saint every time he walked in. He removed his shoes, was quiet if he returned at night, cleaned up after me and himself. He even let me watch the shows I wanted to. Georgie always had on the news and wanted to talk politics, and Jimmy wanted to watch porn and do things a teenage girl shouldn’t be doing.Sebastian was incomparable to the others. He was like a Stepford boyfriend.“Want me to change the channel?” I asked one night while he scrolled his phone, sprawled out on the oversize chair near the couch. I realized that a historical romance with a duke telling the main character he wanted to marry her might n
WinonaWe walked around each other on eggshells for a few days after that. He didn’t try anything again. When he left me a couple of days later, he told me to take an SUV out if I needed to, to be careful about where I went.He was trusting me and giving me space when he shouldn’t have.I tried to steer my mind to the fact that Sebastian was here for me, wanted me, and that he trusted me to take control where I wanted to.Still, my mind veered off course and found its way to the man who didn’t want anything to do with me. HJ hadn’t called, hadn’t texted, hadn’t come to visit Sebastian in an effort to see me. He’d avoided everything we were, and now I wondered if it was because he was as broken as me. He’d lost his father by his own hands. The one person he should have been able to rely on made HJ exercise the monster in him in the most brutal way. He protected the family by taking his dad’s life.When I got to Heathen’s Bar, the host greeted me with a smile and waved me in. Every hea
HJI pulled her down into the black hole. It swallowed us up and ate us whole.Our light was gone.She orgasmed in my bar’s bathroom with one lone tear streaming down her face as I tookher heart and soul.I pumped my cock into her almost violently two more times before I buried my seed in her. Our breaths were labored, struggling for life after reaching something way beyond it. I hadn’t come like that with another woman ever.I backed away from her and took in her bruised lips, her wrinkled clothing, her mussed hair, and knew if I couldn’t keep away from her, we were doomed. With her, I only had tunnel vision. I couldn’t see past her blinding light to real threats to the family, couldn’t keep a clear head, and definitely couldn’t put the family first.I’d marked her neck, and the beast in me wanted to do it again and again, to lay by her side and snarl at anyone who looked at her. It didn’t care about anything else.And that was the problem.I was the monster. I had to keep it tog
WinonaIthought seeing HJ with Sebastian would be easier.He stood there in that boutique unscathed by my being there with another man. I was certain he had no true feelings except hate toward me after screaming at me to leave the bar.Not that I cared.Except that I did. Except that I couldn’t stop thinking of him sliding in and out of me, of how his eyes pulled me in, of how my body gravitated toward him and was repelled by anyone else now.He was supposed to care a little too. We were supposed to be bound by our inability to bind to anyone else.So I pushed every one of his red do-not-touch buttons.“Get the fuck back in the dressing room and change,” HJ said in a low voice.“What crawled up your ass?” I put a hand on my hip and waited for an answer.“You’re purposely trying to rub me the wrong way today, Winona.” “Maybe I’m rubbing you just the right way.” I winked at him.One of his massive hands went to the back of his neck, and he pulled on it hard as he sighed up to the ceili