Total pages in book: 206
Estimated words: 192184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 961(@200wpm)___ 769(@250wpm)___ 641(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 961(@200wpm)___ 769(@250wpm)___ 641(@300wpm)
When the alarms stopped, I heard the bedroom door open and my hand went to the knife. Then I heard Dario’s loud and panicked-sounding voice. “Tia!”
“Under the bed!” I called out.
“Come out,” he told me.
“What was that?” I rolled out, then scampered to my feet.
He had a gun in his hand, pointed at the floor and a ferocious-looking expression on his face. He walked over to the patio doors and checked the knobs. They were locked. He moved the blinds aside and looked out. Then he opened them and looked out. His whole body tightened for a second and then he turned around and looked at me. I was standing there, arms wrapped around myself but trying to get a read on his expression, which looked absolutely murderous.
“Dario?”
“Get dressed.” He motioned toward the closet absently with the gun. I frowned, looked at it, then went in and put on a pair of jeans, a hoodie over my tank top and sleeping shorts. I slipped on my leather flip flops. I fastened an elastic band around my gathered-up hair into a messy bun as I walked back out.
“Follow me,” he ordered.
I followed him down to the office where a guy I didn’t know personally but had seen at Tom Sr.’s house stood. He looked alert and at Dario, his arms folded across his chest. He gave me a polite nod.
Dario put his gun into the back of his suit pants. It was three a.m., but he was still fully dressed. He motioned toward a chair.
“Relax a minute, Tia. We just need to make sure the house is secured. Someone tripped the burglar alarm and the land line isn’t working. He dialed a number on his cell. “Status update?”
I sat and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.
“Get to the balcony outside the master and do a sweep.”
I frowned. What the heck did that mean?
I sat for about an hour in Tommy’s office with the guy who looked ready to kill. Dario finally came back and told me I could go back to bed.
Tommy was in bed with me, all over me. Fingers, lips, tongue, cock. He devoured me like it hadn’t been a week; it’d been more like a century.
“Missed you so much,” he breathed against my ear while he was thrusting his cock into me hard, so hard. So good…
“Why are you back early?” I rasped. “And did you get a lot done?”
Then my head was banged a little against the headboard with the force of his hips against mine. He rubbed my head and took the brunt, shielding my head with his hand, his knuckles hitting the headboard a few beats, before he grabbed a pillow and shoved it behind my head to shield it, still without missing a beat, without breaking our connection, without stopping his rhythm.
“No one is going to fuck with what’s mine,” he grunted angrily and then he slowed and deepened the driving into me, taking us both to orgasm.
He rolled and I fell asleep on top of him, him still inside of me.
Later on, he told me someone had been on the balcony outside our door and that something had been left. He wouldn’t say what it was, but his eyes were filled with wrath when he said he suspected they were there to hurt me as a message to him. I didn’t know what was going on now, but suspected it was huge. I didn’t know if it was an old threat or a new one. He didn’t want to discuss it and asked me to have faith that he’d protect me.
17
A Week Later…
We were getting ready for Tom Sr.’s welcome home dinner. He’d been released from the hospital several days before and now that it was Sunday, the usual Ferrano family Sunday dinner thing was on, though grander in scale. Lisa had called and told me to make sure we came, that extended family would be there, too, to welcome Tom home. Tommy told me things were tense with his father and that some shit was going on in the business, but said we’d go for the sake of appearances.
The past week had largely consisted of me and Tommy seeing very little of one another. He was closed-lipped about things going on businesswise and hadn’t said anything, really, about his time away. He was gone a lot. When he was home, he was affectionate and sweet, if quiet and preoccupied.
I watched Tessa’s boys a few times and Sarah and I watched Luc’s girls together the day she gave birth to their baby, a 5-pound 2 oz. slightly early but healthy bouncing boy they’d called Nicholas James.
The house security had first been beefed up since the night Tommy came home but then it dropped off, which I found odd. Security dwindled to just Nino during the day and Dex at night, which I asked Tommy about and he said that things weren’t cool with his father and that many of the usual guards were reassigned to other Ferrano projects by his father. He had hired private security to guard the perimeter but had an intense vetting process because of the problems in the past little while so they were all outside the gates.