Never Look Back - a Gripping Bad Boy Mafia Romance Read online

  I didn’t know why I kept coming to these things. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me. But I walked out, said goodbye to the last few stragglers and walked home in the cool night air. It was just a temporary thing. My life was looking up. I had nothing to be unhappy about. So what if I still had some weird sexual hangups left over from a weird time in my life? I’d stop attending these meetups just as soon as Leo and I married. Obviously. I loved him. More than anything. And he’d run screaming if he knew …well, any of this.

  The walk home was quiet. My head squirmed with thoughts that I shouldn’t be having. I pictured a dirty, alterative reality unfolding, parallel to my own. As I walked home, alone, chaste and reasonable, another version of myself was busy living out a different story. This Sophia stayed behind and flirted with the too-long-hair guy, and asked him to come home with her. This Sophia was reckless. Horny. So desperate that she couldn’t even wait to get indoors and instead pulled the guy into a dim alley on the way there and fucked him right on the street.

  I picked up my pace. Leo would be waiting at home for me. The thoughts, however, still followed. When I walked past a dark, empty alleyway I took a quick detour and found myself instantly cloaked in darkness and cold. I threw my back against the chill brick wall and squeezed my eyes shut. Before I could stop myself, one hand freed itself from my pocket and I thrust it between my legs, rubbing desperately at the ache there, hidden from view.

  My fingers worked furiously over my clit as I succumbed to the images rushing through my mind. Bad things. Forbidden, filthy thoughts.

  I saw the guy from the meetup in front of me. “I knew this is what you’d like, you dirty girl…” I imagined his worn jeans in a bunch. His too long hair.

  The hunger inside me reached fever pitch as that Sophia collided with this one. My fingers worked furiously and soon I choked and gasped as I came thundering to a secret orgasm, sweet relief flooding all through me. Heart still pounding and a thin sheen of sweat prickling at my brow, I hurriedly straightened my clothes and raced out of the alleyway, towards home.

  I hated myself then.

  I was going to be better.

  Starting tomorrow, I was going to be better, I swore to myself.

  Chapter Seven – Leo

  “The trouble with being the kind of free agent you’re trying to be is that it often feels like you’re playing broken telephone. The Costa Ricans aren’t exactly known for their savvy business practices, you know?”

  I was paying this lawyer a disgusting amount of money per hour, and it unsettled me that even a tiny bit of that hour was going towards casual wisecracking. I led him to the back office and set him up at the makeshift desk, where he started to offload his briefcase of documents.

  I had a million things on my agenda today. The problem with setting up the whole export operation was that everything needed to be ready all at once, but every step required the previous step to be in place first. It was a house of cards built out of catch-22s.

  I hated walking around this empty warehouse; so empty it felt like an aircraft hangar. I walked around doing casual calculations in my head about how much money was being bled away every day with every square foot that went unoccupied.

  This business would be a tight, money-making ship once it got off the ground, but it was eating ungodly amounts of cash to get it there in the first place.

  “Want some coffee?” I said with a little flourish. The place was certainly brimming with the stuff since my most recent trip had seen me coming back with a giant bag of ‘samples’. Beautiful, polished brown-black beans from Tarrazu, it was luxury coffee with a superstar profile: the body of a supermodel, low acidity and an aroma so deep and strong you could feel it at the back of your throat.

  My distributors were chomping at the bit – in fact a coffee house in San Francisco was currently being built that wanted to stock my beans exclusively and were hoping to open in a month – and I had a few reps coming over this afternoon to discuss pushing a few loads to blenders up north who had just had a falling out with their main supplier and were looking for something that could give them a Fairtrade stamp on their menus.

  It was a tremendous amount of responsibility. A massive undertaking in which I personally shouldered most of the risk. A lot was riding on me pulling all of this off. But I loved it.

  I sat down at the desk, handed the lawyer his coffee and tried to make sense of some of the documents he had pushed over to my end of the table.

  “Oh, wait a second. When were the inspectors here?” he said, eyes zooming in on one particular paper in a folder I had handed him.

  “Uh, I don’t know. Months ago. It was one of the first things I did, to get it out the way.”

  He shook his head and put the document down again.

  “Yeah, no, you’re going to have to get an updated check I’m afraid. See, you’ve since installed the washrooms and plumbing to the rear of the premises, correct?”

  “Correct…”

  “In that case, they’ll need to go ahead and do another inspection before we can move on with the next step…”

  I could feel my nostrils flaring.

  “But this certificate is good for a year…”

  “It is good for a year, but you’ve altered the property, you see, so in the eyes of the law it counts as a whole new property. I’m sorry, we can’t move forward unless I have this clearance.”

  Fuck, I hated this shit. The endless list of stamped and signed documents, the endless mountains of regulation I had to wade through, all at great expense. I rankled at the thought of having this guy in my office again. He saw me rubbing my face and smiled apologetically, then handed my folder back. I knew the asshole would charge me for a full hour even though he’d scarcely been here long enough to take two sips of his coffee.

  “Do I have to pay again for a whole new inspection?”

  He stood up and gathered his things in his briefcase.

  “You’ll have to take that up with your individual providers,” he said formally, and extended his hand for me to shake. I shook it, grumbled something or other and saw him out.

  It was a bad start to the morning.

  I checked my watch – at least I’d have a little time now before the circus of reps started for the afternoon. I sat down at my desk, undid the top button of my shirt and threw my feet on the desk. I grabbed the remote and turned the TV on to catch an interesting looking news segment.

  Some footage of a pair of sniffer dogs walking in the airport followed by a professorial type talking into the camera. I turned the volume up.

  “The problem with substances like this is that even when what’s being sold is correctly labelled, the consumer often vastly underestimates the potency or simply doesn’t know what they’re doing, so they overdose…” the man said, waving his hands.

  I had been vaguely been following this story in the papers for the last few days, but was surprised to see how alarmed people still were. They were saying it was worse than anything the country had seen before. A new, scary compound called ‘PK’ was coming out of Eastern Europe, people were dying, the police had yet to get a handle on any of it.

  I took a sip of my piping-hot coffee.

  At least my soon-to-be drug empire was legal, I thought, cynically. But it got me thinking about Vito. He wasn’t featured in this segment, but everyone knew that at some point, the mob had to be involved. That was the way it worked around here – if there was a big enough pie out there, you could be sure these guys had their fingers in it, no question. In fact, with how big this whole PK thing was, it was basically a given that Vito and his guys were at the heart of it.

  I wondered about the inspectors. About all these hurdles the lawyer was throwing my way. It grated on me that an honest businessman like myself was wasting time with useless legislature while parasites like Vito ran around unchecked for literally decades. It made me feel like a chump just knowing that he had never had to deal with building inspectors, never had to pay to ap
ply to have a fucking toilet installed at his workshop, for crying out loud…

  I slammed my feet back down on the floor and marched over to get some more coffee.

  Maybe, though …maybe there was a middle ground between getting involved with Vito outright and merely taking the best of what he had to offer. Maybe I could use him, too. I knew that if I was one of Vito’s cronies, I’d be done with a month’s worth of bureaucratic bullshit by lunchtime today.

  As a thin stream of chocolate colored liquid drizzled out the coffee machine, I chewed down on my lips and tried to think. Maybe it wasn’t all or nothing. Maybe I was making life hard for myself by not taking the golden opportunity right in front of me. Would it be the end of the world to take a little help from Vito Roselli? It wouldn’t be forever, just till I got a leg up on my own, till I could run the whole outfit more legitimately.

  I had always complained to Sophia that the crap part about growing up without a family is that it’s so hard to make new connections – personal connections, business connections … but wasn’t Vito my one, original family connection? Look, part of me hated the guy, but he had money, he had clout, and he could make a lot of my problems go away overnight, I knew that much for sure. And now with Sophia and the wedding …well, a little extra certainly wouldn’t go amiss right now.

  I took the cup and pressed the hot liquid to my lips.

  No way.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t continue down that thought process …that was how bad men got to be as powerful as they were – good men let them. I didn’t care if I had to fill out forms for the next year, I would do this on my own steam, and Vito and his clowns could fuck off. I was decided.

  My phoned pinged and I pulled it out of my pocket, catching an email from the lawyer. He found another document that wasn’t correctly signed and would need to see me again once I could procure another properly authorized copy. I cursed loudly under my breath and went back to my office.

  I stared at the giant painting of Costa Rica on the wall. Sophia had been so happy when we visited a year ago. I could see her beaming, nearly-sunburnt face under her big straw hat as she paraded around in her bikini in the hotel room, dancing to salsa music and slightly tipsy. It was a good look on her. She loved to dance. And I loved to watch her dance.

  We had gone out late every night to the salsa clubs and laughed and drank till the sun came up. On our last night there she had gotten that naughty look in her eyes and accosted me in the elevator up to the room. I had kissed her so hard it was as though my life depended on it.

  I swallowed the last of my coffee and woke up the laptop. I had work to do. There was no point daydreaming about any of that. That Sophia was in the past now.

  Chapter Eight – Sophia

  When I was younger, I thought that farmers’ markets like these only existed in the movies.

  Cute little tents with shiny, happy vegetables lined up in rows, and people milling around with golden Labradors and shiny, happy faces as they bought their organic vine tomatoes or their beeswax candles or their eggs from chickens that had lived a nicer life than many humans… it was all too pretty. Too perfect.

  Of course, I loved coming out here with Leo early every Sunday morning to pick through the offerings, but deep down, it was becoming clear to me that what I loved best about these outings was the fact that I could avoid The Great Standoff.

  I don’t know when The Great Standoff started happening to us. Maybe it crept up on us both slowly at first, but it was a full-blown, weekly phenomenon now.

  The Great Standoff was all about sex – or the lack of it. All week it felt like Leo and I dodged one another when it came to fulfilling our ‘quota’. The opportunity to make love was always there on the table, always in the back of both of our minds, but the game was to see how distracted we could both pretend to be so that the opportunity floated away and we could both breathe a sigh of relief and claim that our schedules were busy, and we’d just have to wait till next time.

  But on Sundays, there were no distractions. And we had all the time in the world. Leo liked morning sex. A lot. He was a deeply sexual man, and the only man I’d ever known who could come three times in one session …and be ready to go again in an hour.

  Sometimes he’d poke me in the back with his hard-on and smile and say nothing, but I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed. He’d stroke and tease my neck, and wrap his warm hands around my waist and grind his hips against mine as I slept. Sometimes he’d ask outright, and I’d laugh and tell him sure, but if we do then we’ll get to the farmer’s market too late and then it’ll be so busy we won’t get parking…

  And so these days we just went to the farmer’s market instead. An ‘alternative’ famer’s market, and the double meaning in the name wasn’t lost on me. I wasn’t an idiot. I could tell it irked him when weeks went by and the fire between us died right down to cold ashes. Sometimes there was no way to avoid it, and we’d steel ourselves and have a little morning romp together. That way, I felt like at least could ‘reset’ things and could buy myself some time. But these encounters were awkward enough that he’d back off for a few days afterwards.

  It was a problem.

  I hated how things were. But I didn’t know how to fix them. I was good at impulsive, here-and-now decision-making. I don’t know why my body had stopped responding to him. But it had. This whole long-term relationship deal was completely alien to me. And wasn’t it normal for people to lose interest in one another over time? I had no idea. Nobody had ever stuck around with me long enough.

  For the time being, though, things were holding up. Barely. I think. Leo seemed a little distant, a little preoccupied, but I chalked it up to all the new developments at work.

  He held my hand tightly as we strolled through the market, bonding a little over the fact that this week’s Great Standoff had been successfully avoided and now we could just buy some zucchinis for dinner in peace.

  “Hey, these are cool,” he said and drifted over to a tent. I followed to see him holding up a giant string of dried red chilies, arranged in a tight whorl so that they made a cute-looking garland.

  “But baby, what would we do with so many chilies?”

  He put it back down again.

  “I was just saying. I didn’t want to get it or anything,” he said, and we kept walking.

  I’m sure all the women that walked past us wondered how such an amazing guy had ended up with a tramp like me. I’m being serious – Leo was distractingly good looking. His two-tone eyes weren’t even the most noticeable thing about him. He was built so solidly. Even when he wasn’t weight-training, he had a natural heaviness to his frame, and at nearly six and a half feet, that solidness gave him a sort of gravitational pull that seemed to catch the eye of every passing girl in a three-yard radius.

  He had chestnut brown hair, tanned, freckled cheeks and lips that I had only ever seen once elsewhere: on a marble bust of the Roman Emperor Augustus we saw together in a museum the year before. They were the most insanely sexy lips. Shapely, curved on the top and bottom, suggesting some kind of perpetual kiss. He was completely unaware of how hot they made him look, though, and was always absentmindedly chewing or sucking on them.

  Even though we were in a pretty serious sexual lull, it didn’t mean I couldn’t see how gorgeous he still was. Or, for that matter, how gorgeous strangers in the street thought he was, too.

  It didn’t matter though.

  He had proposed.

  For the time being, I had ‘banked’ him, and as long as I kept my slate clean and quit my stupid obsession with my Wednesday night ‘salsa classes’, I’d be fine. The sex would pick up again, I was sure of it.

  “Oh my god, look at this!” he said and guided my arm away again. I was steered towards a community notice board that Leo was excitedly pointing at. He read it out loud.

  “Everyday Tantra – Workshop for Couples. Intimacy, Balance, Connection. It’s a weekend retreat …” he said and scanned the details of the poste
r.

  “This is your kind of thing, isn’t it baby? Hippie sex stuff. I’m down it with. We should totally go,” he said and flashed me a goofy grin.

  I laughed.

  “Baby, do you even know what tantric sex is?”

  “Uh …sure I do. It’s like meditation, only sexier,” he said, and shrugged. I raised a teasing eyebrow at him. He continued. “Yeah, I’m keen. It’s been a while since my third eye’s been, you know, opened.” He held his hands in a silly prayer posture as he eagerly read the fine print. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Oh, my god, you’re actually serious.”

  “Of course I am.” He had taken his phone out and was snapping a picture of the poster.

  “But baby, you don’t’ even know what it is, though…”

  “Isn’t that all part of the fun?” he said and took my hand again. “Fine, bossy boots, tell me what it’s all about then. Unweave the rainbow for me, go on I’m listening.”

  “It’s actually a very serious spiritual practice, it’s a very ancient set of techniques and rituals that…” He had on his goofy face again, pretending to listen to me intently. I laughed and slapped his arm. “Stop it!”

  “Stop what? I hear you. Very serious. Very spiritual, got it. I have just one question, though.”

  “Yes…?”

  “How much actual boning do you think there’ll be?” he said, hands in Namaste and eyes twinkling. I couldn’t help laugh again. I loved when he got into this playful mood of his, even though the topic was a little too close to home this time.

  “How much? Oh, it’s loads. I mean, see all these people drinking their matcha smoothies? It’s not for their health. Oh no. It’s so they can keep up their stamina for what goes on in those classes, believe me. That’s how baby hippies are made, didn’t you know?”

  “Let’s do it!

  “You wouldn’t last two minutes,” I scoffed.

  He gave me a hurt look. “What? That’s not true. I’d win so hard, those sex hippies wouldn’t know what hit them.”