FIERCED 3: Finale of the Stepbrother Raider Romance Series Read online

  Chapter SIX

  He really is like a superpower hero, the way despite his solid mass, his body is agile and moves like quicksilver when it suits him. Ohh, I moan at the thought of his mercurial body pressed into mine. Already I’m craving him again, hungry for him to fill me and claim my body as his.

  “Luisa, what are you doing outside in the dark?” Monica swishes into the room from her connecting suite, silent as a spider in a gossamer web, all frothed up in a white lace peignoir barely disguising her naked body underneath.

  Fuck, did she hear us talking and plotting my escape?

  “What are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night? Please leave. And it’s Lisa, without a ‘u’.”

  Hearing voices in a locked room, the two security guards on my door, knock and ask if everything’s alright. Monica throws open both doors giving the guys a great show.

  “The nurse is on her way up to sit with Miss Saint James,” Monica informs them as they stare at the floor trying not to fest their eyes on her dark nipples visible through the lace.

  I’m still standing on the balcony wrapped in a fluffed white towel. What the fuck must they think? And what the fuck do I want with a nurse?

  “I don’t need a nurse thanks, I just need some sleep. So if you wouldn’t mind leaving me in peace -”

  “Your father was concerned for your well-being this evening.” She pulls the windows tightly shut and draws the drapes on the calming vista. “He thought it best that you have full time protection right away.”

  Damn, bugger, fuck them and their protection which is nothing more than forced bondage. Now what? I’ll never be able to get out of here when Rocco comes back. I won’t even be able to warn him and when he comes breaking into my room again, they’ll take him for good.

  Monica flusters around the room and checks my bathroom, plainly searching.

  “Are you looking for something in particular? Perhaps you imagine I have a man stashed in my shower,” I snap at her, daring her.

  “Don’t be silly, Darling. Of course I know you’re a nice virginal girl.”

  She tugs the bathroom door shut as the nurse bumbles through the door, talking like a whirling dervish in Italian to the stunned guards. She makes a sign with her hand like a genuflection when she sees the superstar in front of her and almost falls to her knees.

  “Oh my heavens. Good grief.”

  Holy fuck.

  Monica gives her what seem to be very specific, even ferocious instructions for my care and the nurse nods all the while staring at me with slitted eyes like I’m a naughty child to be reared with an iron grip.

  “She doesn’t speak much English, Luisa dearest. You won’t mind not being able to communicate I guess.”

  Yeah, you don’t want me getting her on my side.

  “She has some pills to help you sleep. As you say, that’s what you need most. Good night now, buona notte.”

  Monica swishes back into her suite with my father figure who I am plainly no longer going to be allowed a relationship with now that I have gone full rebellion. Fine.

  “No, it’s okay, no grazie. I don’t want sleeping pills.” I struggle with the dumpy nurse, dressed in a white uniform with a bizarre hat like a bird cage. Then she actually reaches out to pinch my nostrils together like she’s going to feed me a spoon of cod liver oil for my own benefit.

  I’m so shocked, my mouth drops and she forces the pills inside. Before I know it, one has slithered down my throat and the other I catch under my tongue.

  “Hmm, good, Okay.” I nod, making a huge pantomime out of swallowing the pills.

  The first one I can’t cough back up and have no choice but to wash it down.

  “Oh, I’m so tired. Stanca.”

  The other pellet I hold in my cheek as I make a show of getting into bed. The old bag sits right at the side of the bed, facing me so as to observe my every twitch. What the fuck do I do now? Firstly spit out the pill before it dissolves. Will one put me fully to sleep? Can I fight it and force myself to stay awake with willpower alone? I need to be ready for Rocco’s return. I can’t let this witch turn him over to the FBI when he comes for me.

  And then she smiles her grizzly evil twin grimace, and actually shoves her stubby fat finger into my mouth. She ratchets between my pursed lips and scoops around the hollow of my mouth and cheeks until she discovers the hidden unswallowed pill.

  “Do you think I don’t know a faker when I see one?’ she snarls. Her English seems pretty fluent to me.

  “Please,” I say, somehow imagining I can convince her that I have genuine motives. “I can’t fall asleep yet. I, um, I have something important to take care of in just a little while. If I could just stay awake -” Until Rocco gets here and seduces the hag with his disreputable bad boy charm that works perfectly on every woman he lights upon.

  But she won’t listen to my pleading. She bashes me on the back like a big baby needing a burp at the same time she forces water into my mouth so I have to swallow. She obviously has a ton of experience forcing recalcitrant patients to swallow their meds.

  “You don’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m waiting to-”

  That is some strong pharmacology because my tongue is fast losing the ability to form words before my brain does and the lights go out in my mind.

  ROCCO

  She laughs and calls me a superhero. Fuck I love that smile of hers. It lights me up and makes me want to lick those delicious lips like gelato. I’m like a starving greedy wild man when I’m with her, trying to suck her cherry mouth and those constantly pebbled hard nipples all at the same time. I want to gorge myself on her fucking stupendous bod. I want her under me again already, she’s so willing, so into every wild journey we take together.

  I know we’re going to be an amazing team and I have never in my life felt that way about any woman before. Not one of the many has ever moved me to think in terms of a partnership. There have been some stunningly gorgeous and some smart caring woman but none has ever come close to Lisa.

  She somehow changes me. I can’t tell what’s going on inside me right now and it scares the fucking shit out of me but I know I want it more than I want to run away. I can’t imagine a world without her in it. It’s as though we joined the moment I entered her delicious sweet pussy and even apart we’re together.

  I should never have fucking left her again. Those asshole muscle-meat bodyguards grabbed me at the party. There must be some pretty sophisticated cameras monitoring that palazzo because I scoped the joint pretty good and didn’t pick them up at all.

  Four of them surrounded me as Lisa’s asshole dad made his woot woot announcement, distracting the crowd as they smoothly hustled me out. No point fighting back. You gotta pick your battles and surrender when you’re outnumbered so you live to fight another day.

  That’s a thing I learned in Japan as a young teenager. My mother was shooting some ridiculous movie where she played a geisha girl and I begged her to let me study a form of martial art, a version of jujitsu, where the master taught me how to control my body using the power of my mind.

  Some day I’m taking Lisa to Japan. I know she’d get a massive kick out of the photo opportunities in that incredible culture and I want to show her off to my martial arts master – he’ll be damn impressed by the woman that finally tamed me. He always said there would some day be one who would join to me and make a whole. Like fuck I thought at the time, no chick’s gonna get control of this wildman. But now I get what he was telling me and I’m sure Lise feels the same.

  Okay, enough with the trip down memory lane. I’ve got to find a boat in the middle of the night to free my girl from her uncharmed life.

  There’s a beautiful jet black speedboat with soft red leather upholstery idling at a palace dock on the Grand Canal. Lisa will look so incredible sitting in back of that boat, no, standing with me at the wheel with her hair blowing behind her as we jet far away from our crazy parents. It’s not stealing under emergency c
ircumstances. I’m just borrowing it a while for an important mission. And when I go to hotwire the starter, the friggin keys fall out of the dash. Okay then. Sometimes fate just lends her hand.

  I gun the boat in a full circle on the wide canal, the water flat and calm as fabled Venetian glass and head back up to the hotel.

  Lisa’s room is in complete darkness, which is really freaking weird. I figured she’d be ready, waiting breathlessly for me to get back. Fuck, I love how she pants and gasps when I’m buried inside her, her sweet breath rasping into the sinews of my neck.

  Every little thing about her sends my senses spinning. My mind blasts out into space. How does that happen with one particular woman? After hundreds, maybe thousands, what is it about this one that sends me reeling like one of those Irish dancers, hopping and stamping all over the place.

  Another cat burglar bit of gymnastics is required to scale the wall again. She’d better not be playing principessa games right now, acting all helpless for me to come rescue her. We don’t have time for that shit. The curtains are firmly closed, not a crack to peep through but I’m sure there’s no light inside her room and a chill comes over me. I run a card in the gap between the frames to lift the latch and silently enter the room with barely a rustle of the drapes.

  “What the fuck, Principessa, there’s no time for sleeping. Get that hot little ass up out of bed pronto.”

  I’m joking but I’m kinda pissed. She’s passed out cold like she’s downed the worm in the tequila bottle. I really thought she’d be pacing the stone balcony ready to jump over into the water with eagerness to get away with me. Perhaps I misjudged how she feels. Perhaps she only wanted me to get her away from Pappy. Who knows what happened while I was gone searching the city for a speedboat to jack for her sake? Pappy might have convinced her to stay and become the most famous daughter in the world.

  “Step away from the bed or I’ll shoot.” A barrel poking in my back.

  I raise my hands very slowly above my head and do as the voice commands. A female voice, high enough that I know her heart is pounding. I take a slow step back, positioning my boot carefully so that in one lightning move, it slides between her legs, flips around to take her off balance, I twirl around, pining both arms as the ‘gun’ skitters across the ancient floorboards.

  “Perdoname Signora,” I apologize because the woman is almost old enough to be my grandmother and twice as fat. “But don’t stick a man with your hairbrush unless you’re prepared to use it.”

  She’s panting so fast I think she’s having a heart attack. She probably hasn’t been this enthralled in at least a decade.

  “You’re a nurse? A real one.” When I check out the uniform, it comes crashing home that she can only be here for one reason. “Is something wrong with Lise? What happened to her?”

  The cold bile flooding my gut sends me reeling back to the bed. The nurse falls from my grasp back to the floor.

  “Is she dead? Oh fuck, is she dead?” I’m reaching around for a pulse in my girl’s neck, her wrist but there’s nothing. And the stone in my stomach is heavier than the Gates of Hell. No. It can’t be. I only left her an hour ago. And she was so warm then. So fucking warm. And soft. And sensual sweet.

  I knew then that I wanted her with me forever. And now she’s gone. I hurl the fucking bedside table across the room in the rage that rises into my gullet. The light crashes to the floor with the sound of breaking glass and a heavier crack of shattering marble from the table top.

  “Arggghh.” I let out a roar that does nothing to release the enraged grief rising and rising. I need to smash more than one antique table. I need to destroy the whole world to make up for losing the woman I’m smitten with.

  “Hush up boy,” the nurse touches my arm and pulls me into her ample mounds of chest. “She’s just sleeping.”

  “That’s no sleep. What’s wrong with her?” I don’t know if I can believe the strange woman. What if Lisa’s bastard dad has exercised the ultimate control over his suddenly rebellious child?

  “I was told to give her some pills to make her sleep. Her parents said she’d been having terrible nightmares since the ordeal of her abduction.”

  “She was never abducted. I took her on a journey to the refugee camps in Africa so she could discover something of life outside this entrapment.”

  A softening comes over the old lady’s face like she’s disappeared into her memories.

  “All this is a big lie and now she’s trapped worse than before because of me. It’s all my fault.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. Things are never as bad as they seem if you turn them on their head and look at them another way.”

  “I’m not leaving her again. You can’t stop me taking her.”

  “You haven’t invested too much in Lisa. Maybe this situation she’s entangled in, you should just move on. There are plenty of amazing women who would be thrilled to be with you.”

  “You don’t understand. Lisa is not just one more amazing woman. She’s not the sort of woman you can move on from and I have no intention of letting her go without a riot.”

  The nurse jumps at the loud hammering on the door to Lisa’s suite.

  “What’s going on in there. Is everything okay Miss Saint James? Open the door please.”

  Security. Either hotel or government. In a second they’ll be rushing through the interconnecting doors.

  “Leave this to me. I’ll get rid of them,” the nurse promises.

  Chapter SEVEN

  Lisa

  I come around feeling strangely rested and woozy at the same time. Then I see the old woman in a white uniform passed out in the chair beside my bed and it all comes back. How many nights will I be imprisoned with a guard who forces me to swallow numbing drugs? There’s no way I’ll ever be able to escape and be with Rocco.

  Then I notice the antique furniture in a shattered pile at the baseboard. The lamp smashed, the carved wood cracked and one leg of my bedside table hanging off. What the? Only one person fires that much rage.

  “Rocco,” I whisper.

  “He’s not here.” My jailer is still sprawled across her chair. She hasn’t moved but her beady little eyes are watching me. Her white uniform is torn at the shoulder and her hat cocked to one side. The smile stretched across her thin lips is hard to read, either it’s smug because she’s thwarted my plans to escape with my lover or something even worse.

  “What happened to him?” I can barely breathe. Please don’t let him have gone from me again.

  “I had a lover like that once, that would climb through windows in the middle of the night to be with me. He would have done anything to keep me by his side. He promised me over and over.”

  “So where is he?”

  “That’s such an unusual reaction in a man that when you inspire it, you have to make it yours and hang on to it with a rock climber’s grip.”

  Seriously? I hardly think this is the time for some strange woman sent to keep me silent to go tripping off into her delusional past. All I’m interested in is what they’ve done to Rocco and when will he come for me? She’s not quitting the reminiscence yet though.

  “I was working at the film studios, a young woman, not much older than you are now. They were filming a version of Romeo and Juliet starring your new mother. She was so beautiful and besotted in love with her co-star. I was in love with the second cameraman so the whole shoot was a love fest. Your mother got pregnant on that movie and she gave birth to a gorgeous baby she named Romeo in honor of his handsome and God-like father. I would have been pregnant soon too but my lover was killed suddenly in a motorcycle accident.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  And I do truly mean it because it’s so sad to lose the one you love at the height of passion. And her face is looking at me with such sympathy that fear strikes an icy chill in my heart. The words tremble off my lips; “Where’s Rocco? Has—something - happened to him?”

  The screams must have been heard on e
very floor of the hotel. My screeching refusal to accept what the woman is telling me. My father is not in his suite and Monica is with her hairdresser but the aides come running into my room and helpless to control me, decide the doctors are needed again. But they have no idea that it was impossible to live without Rocco at my side. To have someone taken from you before you’ve had the time to build a lifetime of incredible memories to keep lonely life going is too rough a road.

  The nurse will explain to them that I swallowed the entire bottle of sleeping pills while she was in discussion with my father’s aides and doctors on how to handle this ‘situation’. Now I wouldn’t be a ‘situation’ for them ever again. My father and Monica will be free to pursue their important careers without embarrassment from their problem children.

  I didn’t need to have my eyes open to know that my father was fielding all the reporter’s questions right outside my room in a private clinic on the Grand Canal. The picture postcard view was meant for aristo women giving birth to aristo babies, not overdose cases. Although there were no doubt one or two aristo junkies staying there long term.

  “No she had no history with drugs.” My father works the press despite his loss.

  “Yes, we do think this was a reaction to the terrible loss of her new brother.”

  “Yes, it was most likely triggered by the kidnapping ordeal she recently endured.”

  “Yes we will continue to hunt for the terrorist that abducted her. We will not let this be forgotten.”

  “When I’m president I shall make it my primary concern that every parent in America is free from fear for their children’s safety.”

  I know the answers rolled smoothly off his factory assembly-line tongue almost before the questions were asked.

  Nurse Jaquetta

  The young can’t imagine that the old were ever their age once. When Rocco turned from his Principessa lying spread out on the bed in her stupor, to face me, I was hit by a force too powerful to step back from. His face chiseled into beautiful grief from loss of his beloved. His perfect body flexing with the need to punish someone or something for the loss of her. He was a God standing before me, irresistible in his power and presence. I could have refused him nothing, I was like dough in his strong fists.