I snarled at him and unzipped my fly, swiftly bringing my dick out into my hands. “Does this look like a mangina to you?”
He blinked and looked away, shielding his face with this hand. “Jesus, Javier. Put that thing away.”
I kept my cock out for a moment, stroking it once, before putting it back.
Este peeked through his fingers and lowered his hand when he saw it was safe. What a homophobe.
“Is it always hard,” he asked, “or just when you’re looking at me?”
“Just when I have a wet cunt in my bedroom, waiting for me to stop talking to you so I can go back and fuck it. What do you have?” I waved at him dismissively. “Why don’t you go and enjoy your hand?”
He made a sound of displeasure and started to leave. “One more thing,” he said, pausing before he opened the door.
“Yes, what now?” I asked curtly, resisting the urge to roll my eyes.
“Where is Luisa right now?”
I frowned. “I told you. In my room. Waiting to get fucked.”
“Alone?” he asked, drawing out the word.
“Yes, alone,” I said, mimicking him.
“How many guns do you keep in your room, Javi? A nine millimeter under your pillow. Your thirty-eight super in your drawer. An AR-fifteen under your bed. Am I right?”
I didn’t say anything although my pulse quickened curiously.
“I’m just saying,” Este said gravely. “Be careful when you open your door.” He left the room with a morbid look on his face.
Shit.
But Luisa wouldn’t shoot me. Would she?
Of course she fucking would, I told myself quickly. She’s still your fucking hostage and she’ll do anything to escape.
I exhaled sharply and picked up my pistol from underneath my desk, quickly checking the chamber. I really fucking hoped I wouldn’t have to use this.
I left the office, seeing Este head down the stairs in the opposite direction. Some backup he would be anyway. I gripped the gun in my palm and eased myself down the hall toward my bedroom. I paused outside the door and put my ear to it, listening. I couldn’t hear a thing.
Taking in a deep, steadying breath and hoping for the best, I quickly turned the knob, my gun down by my side, and pushed the door open with my shoulder.
Luisa was on her knees on the bed, naked, my 9mm in her hands and aimed right at me.
I automatically had my gun pointed back at her.
The sexiest Mexican standoff I’d ever been involved in.
“What are you doing?” I asked, taking a cautious step toward her, not lowering my gun for a second.
“Leaving,” she answered, her eyes hard. She was distracting as all hell, her tits and pussy and that gun. I don’t think I’d ever been so turned on so quick and in such an untimely situation.
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“I’m going to ask you nicely to let me leave, and if you don’t, I’ll shoot you.”
A grin broke out across my face. My god, she couldn’t be more perfect.
“If you shot me, you’d kill me,” I said, taking another step. “Then who would make you come all the time?”
“My fingers,” she said, her double grip on the gun tightening. “And I’d shoot you in the knees. I don’t want to kill you. I’m not that bad.”
I cocked my head. “No, you’re not. But you could be.”
Her face remained serious. “Please, Javier. Don’t make me do this.”
“Don’t make me do this. You know the minute you shoot me, I’m going to have to shoot you. And I hate to brag, but I’m a terribly good shot, no matter the range. The odds of you hitting me, even from this close, are very low. Have you ever even fired one of those before?”
I could see she was taking aim at a spot right beside my head, perhaps to scare me, perhaps to kill me. “Easy!” I yelled at her quickly. “If you let that gun off, everyone in the house will be up here and I won’t be able to protect you from them.”
A venomous expression came across her dark eyes. “You didn’t protect me before.”
“And I have been paying dearly for it,” I told her sincerely, taking one more step so I was almost at the foot of the bed. “Luisa, please, put the gun down and let me get back to fucking you.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I need to go. I need to make sure my parents are safe and then I’m going to disappear.”
“How are you going to do that?”
Her lips pinched together for a moment. “I have a friend, Camila, she’s in Cabo. I could call her and—”
“No,” I stated, imploring her with my eyes. “You can’t. You won’t get to her in time, and she won’t get to them in time.”
“Please just let me go,” she said. Her tone was weaker now, as was the look in her eyes. They seemed nearly lost and hopeless.
There was a peculiar hollow feeling in my chest.
“I can’t do that,” I told her gently. “You know I can’t. I must keep you here until I hear from Salvador. If I let you go, it would ruin everything for me.” I gave her a pacifying smile. “Besides, don’t you know I’ve grown kind of fond of you?”
She swallowed. “You just want to use my body,” she said, her voice dropping slightly as well as the barrel of her gun.
“And I’ve grown very fond of doing so.”
As soon as I said that, I moved quickly. I lunged forward, hitting the gun out of her hands and it went clattering to the floor, then I tackled her into the bed, pinning her arms above her. Her eyes were filled with a mix of anger and desperation as she writhed under me.
I held her arms tighter, my face bearing down on hers. “I can’t blame you for trying, Luisa. And I was the fucking fool who was thinking so hard with his dick that I didn’t realize I left you alone when I shouldn’t have.” I lowered my head so my lips lightly grazed hers. “But you know what,” I said huskily, “I don’t regret any of it. Because that was the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And you, my darling, you’re really starting to be a queen.”
I bit her lip and tugged on it for a moment. “Now, if your adrenaline is pumping like mine is and you’re done with gunplay for the day, I say I flip you over and fuck your brains out.”
“You can be so heartless,” she sneered against my lips, but she didn’t turn her face from me.
I sucked her lower lip into my mouth and felt her body respond underneath me. “My dear, you don’t need a heart to fuck. Just a big dick.” I thrust my erection against her stomach for emphasis and grinned.
Her eyes widened appreciatively.
She was a goner.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Luisa
I thought the days leading up to Salvador’s negotiations would take forever. The not knowing, the fear, the anxious anticipation—they all had ways of making the time drag.
Instead, the three days passed by me in a blur of sex and ecstasy. It was naked flesh and intimate fluids, languid limbs and earth-shattering orgasms. It was Javier’s eyes in a million different ways: intense during sex and soft after coming, playful while we were in bed and glacial when we were with others. It was the way our bodies melded together that was absolutely captivating, addicting, and strangely freeing.
I started to feel like I knew his body inside and out as he did with mine. I learned what he liked, what he didn’t like, what he craved. I knew the things to say that would make him fuck me breathless, and I knew what to say when I really wanted to piss him off.
And all this time, these days of mindless passion, I never had the urge to run again. Maybe fucking me was one way of keeping me under control. Maybe me fucking him was doing the same. I didn’t know. But as much as I feared my future, I made myself live in the now. The now was all I had, and I made sure to enjoy every last drop.
I knew very well what Stockholm Syndrome was. I knew it was common. I just didn’t think it applied to me. Because the women who fell for their captors that way, it was considered so strange and unusual
that it needed a clinical name. It was an issue that could be diagnosed.
The longer I was with Javier, feeling myself stir, my wings stretch and flutter, I felt as if there was something so terribly right about it. When a woman is captured from her home, she is forced to contend with another man, one who wants to bring her harm. When I was captured from my home, I was forced to contend with a man who was better than the one I was taken from. Bad still, of course. Javier was terribly bad. But he wasn’t the worst. And when I caught him staring at me sometimes, I could fool myself into thinking that he could possibly be the best.
But Javier himself still remained an enigma to me, despite the feelings I slowly found myself needing from him. For all his grace and tenderness that he sometimes bestowed upon me, there was this shield, this wall up around him that, for all my beauty and blow jobs and sweet conversation, I could not penetrate. He kept himself distanced from me and it made me frustrated and a little mad. Not necessarily because I needed to know what he was thinking, what he felt for me, but because I hadn’t done that with myself. The both of us knew something horrible was coming up, and he was the only one who had the strength to protect himself from it.
Me, I knew I was done for. But at least I got to live a little in the process.
At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
“What are you doing out here?”
I turned to see Javier strolling toward me, hands casually jammed in his linen pants pockets. I’d only left his side a few hours ago and had come out to sit on the stone bench by the koi pond.
“Feeding the fish,” I told him, lifting a few pieces of bread I nicked from the kitchen.
He stopped behind me and gazed out thoughtfully at the lotus. A breeze caught a few strands of his shaggy hair, the sun highlighting the gold in his eyes. Times like this I could pretend I lived here and that there wasn’t a horrible world outside the beauty and blooms.
He eyed the bread and ran his hand along his strong jaw in amusement. “You do realize that koi fish need special food.”
I shrugged. “I thought they were like your pigs and they’d eat anything.” The other day he took me down a path that passed through a clump of trees at the edge of the yard and we ended up at a farm of sorts. He showed me his pigs. I’d learned how Franco’s body had been disposed of.
He took a seat next to me. “Not quite.”
Somewhere beyond the flowers, the gardener Carlos, a nice little fellow, started up his lawnmower. The sound was so mystifying. It reminded me of the traces of suburbia and normalness I used to see when driving into Cabo San Lucas.
I glanced over at Javier, wondering if he ever found it odd how normal and peaceful his life seemed to be on the outside when it was anything but. I wondered if he orchestrated it that way, to keep all this beauty and elegance around him in order to balance all the bad. I wondered if he had ever come close to making this place even more domestic than it was, if he ever dreamed about having a wife, having children.
“So what happened between you and Ellie?”
He went rigid for a moment before his gaze settled sharply on mine. “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know. I’m curious.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously and he shifted in his seat. “Why are you so focused on my past?”
“Because the past makes you who you are. I want to know why you’re this way.”
“This way?” he repeated with a wry smile. “Luisa, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve always been this way.”
“Then what happened? Humor me.”
He clasped his hands together, his watch jangling.
“In a nutshell,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “I was trying to help her get revenge. I was also trying to show her who she really was, or who I still thought she was. In the end, my help did nothing. She’d changed. She played me. She threw me under a bus so she could be with another man, some dumb fuck, and laughed while I was taken away. I’m sure she knew I ended up in prison. I’m sure it only cemented her decision to be good. That was all the thanks I got for trying to help.” He shook his head, anger simmering in his eyes. “People are so fucking ungrateful.”
“So she broke your heart.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Don’t mistake broken pride for a broken heart. No man wants to look like a fool. Because of her, I lost almost everything, and it took years for me to get it all back. That isn’t something you can forget overnight.”
Now I understood the shield.
A few moments passed us by. One white and orange fish did several laps around the pond, eyeing me hopefully every time he came near. I thought about what Javier said, how he saw something in Ellie that he wanted to bring out of her. Her truth.
Finally I looked to Javier and shyly asked, “Will you help me?”
His brow furrowed delicately. “Help you what?”
“Help me see who I really am.”
He smirked. “I think you’re already finding that out. One day at a time.”
“But there are no days after tomorrow,” I said, trying to keep my voice as flat as possible.
Tension broke the surface of his face but he reined it in. “I guess you’re right. So what are we to do?”
Something, I screamed in my head. Anything!
I gulped my thoughts down so they didn’t dare escape from my lips. “I don’t know.”
He eyed Carlos who was now mowing behind a flowering bush then looked back at me. “You do,” he said, his heady gaze trailing to my lips. “What we’ve always done.”
He reached for my shoulder and slipped off the strap of my dress with his index finger. His eyes fastened to mine as he gently eased me back so I was lying flat on the bench. In moments, his pants were unzipped, my underwear was pushed to the side, and my leg was straight up against his shoulder. He pushed into me in broad daylight, while the lawnmower whirred in the background and the flowers perfumed the air with their delicate fragrance.
Even though I felt completely exposed to the living, breathing world that whirled around us, I was absolutely captive to the private one between us. When I came, my nails raking down his back and into the loose linen threads of his shirt, I was holding on to more than just him; I was holding on to the day, the moment, the second.
The time where I was queen.
And where I was free.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Javier
It was the middle of the night when Luisa woke me, just a few hours before dawn, before the day came and I would get Salvador’s call.
As usual, she woke me up in the most exquisite way—her naked body pressed against mine, hands in my hair, lips on my chest.
“What time is it?” I groaned, both from lack of sleep and from the way she pushed herself against my dick.
“Does it matter?” she asked softly.
I opened my eyes and made out her features in the waning dark. “No, it doesn’t. Not when you’re like this.”
Her pearly teeth flashed in a gorgeous smile. “Good,” she said. She trailed her fingers down the side of my face and that smile slowly vanished. I didn’t even have to ask why. I knew why. I knew what was coming. I was doing everything I could to steel my mind against the impossible choices I’d have to make in a few hours.
“Javier,” she whispered, my name sounding like heaven. “What are you going to do to me?”
I grinded my jaw, trying to keep it together. “Don’t ask me this.”
“But you must know.”
“But I don’t know,” I whispered harshly. “I’ll know when the time comes.”
“Will you promise to be the one to shoot me? Like you said.”
“I never said I would do that.”
“Will you promise?” she repeated, running her hands into my hair again.
“No,” I told her. And I was telling the truth. “I will not shoot you. I will not harm you. I will not kill you. Do you feel any better?”
She shook her head, and I could s
ee how wet her eyes were. A tear drop fell on my chest and the hollowness beneath it grew. “I don’t feel better, because I know the others will. Salvador will not want me.”
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “We don’t know that!” I hissed.
“And then so what if he does! Can you let me go? Can you watch me go back to him, to be his wife again?” She pressed her fingers into her tearstain and swirled it around my heart in angry circles. “Is that what you’re still capable of?”
Yes. I had to be.
“Luisa,” I said carefully, looking into her shining, desperate eyes. “You can’t save me.”
She smiled, letting out a caustic laugh. “I don’t want to save you,” she said, bringing her face closer to mine. “I want to join you.”
I stared at her, completely dazzled by what she had said. Even with everything that I was, she didn’t want to change me, she didn’t want to save me. Perhaps it was because I was so beyond saving. Either way, she saw who I was and all my filth and she wanted to roll around in it with me.
She had become my equal.
And in the morning she would become nothing.
“Did he say when he was calling?” Este asked with a hint of annoyance.
I couldn’t even answer him. My eyes were trained on the new flip phone lying on my desk in front of me. It was the exact same scene as the week before, except there was one difference. Este was right. Luisa had compromised me.
It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to do what I needed to do. But it meant that though I looked annoyed on the surface, I was being crushed underneath.
“Well, Javier told him exactly a week,” The Doctor said mildly. He adjusted his hat on his head. “I suppose Salvador could take him literally or not.”
“If it’s literal then he’s already late,” Este said. I could feel his eyes on me. “Are you sure Juanito is a good enough guard, Javi?”
I jerked my chin into a nod. They wanted Luisa guarded during this so I sent Juanito to do the job. The man had his flaws, but I knew he wouldn’t hurt her and would obey me. Someone like Este couldn’t always be trusted. My mind started picking that apart, wondering if perhaps one day I could get rid of Este before he attempted to get rid of me. My mind wanted to think about everything except what was about to happen.