AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Listen, I don’t have a good answer for you. Okay? I really don’t. All I can say is that I liked you a lot the second we met, even though you were acting like a complete idiot. I wanted to keep you around.”
I’m convinced he’s telling me the truth even though he’s done nothing but string me along the entire time I’ve known him. Why should I believe him now? I’m not sure, but something in my gut tells me that he’s sincerely sorry for the way he spoke about me.
I allow my shoulders to drop a little. “Okay, fine, but I need you to tell me everything from now on. I don’t want any secrets between us, especially not if my involvement with you could get me killed.”
He thinks for a moment. “I’ll tell you everything, but only when it’s safe. Until then, I promise that you’ll be out of harm’s way and away from Luka completely. I don’t want you near him either,” he says, reaching out to me and stroking my cheek.
As soon as he touches me, I feel a flash of warmth spread all over me. It’s been easy to keep my head focused and rational before now, but as soon as I feel his skin against mine, all I want is to feel him all over me.
But not like he was in his office. I want to see him, to look deep into his eyes when he’s inside me. I want to see his soul, or at least know that he has one.
“You know, it was extremely rude of you to follow me up to my office and spy on me. That’s a very unattractive quality for a lady like you to have,” he says, smiling deviously. “I feel like I need to work some of that petulance out of you.”
The warm feeling shoots through me again, this time settling between my legs. My face flushes, and I know that Akim can see right through me now. I can’t even pretend to play dumb. I know exactly what he wants.
“Then maybe you should punish me for it,” I reply coyly, keeping my voice low and smooth to keep Regan from hearing me. I don’t even know if she’s still awake or if she can hear me at all.
Akim grabs me by the throat, lightly but with intent, and walks me backward into my bedroom until my knees hit the edge of the bed, and I fall onto the mattress.
“Flip over,” he growls.
I roll onto my belly, my heart skipping a beat when I feel his hand gripping the waistband of my sweatpants. He pulls them down to my mid-thigh, leaving my panties on as a tease.
“You’re going to have to stay quiet unless you want your roommate to hear this,” he says as he pulls back his hand to spank me.
15
Akim
“You know, I feel like I know so little about you despite how much I think about you. Sometimes, I’m worried that I’m making up a fake version of you in my head,” Delilah says, cuddling close to me after nearly two hours of passionate sex.
“I don’t talk about myself a lot, especially not with women,” I reply.
“Why not? I feel like you can probably get any woman you want. There must besomeonewho knows all of your secrets,” she replies with a slight chuckle.
I know she’s just curious to find out about other women I’ve been with, at least the ones who have known me like she does.
Even though she knows me better than anyone else right now, there’s still a lot I haven’t told her. She knows about my life in the States, the businesses I run, and the fact that the club is just a front for laundering money.
All of these secrets, I would be better off not telling her. Yet she knows.
And somehow, I haven’t been able to talk to her about who I am.
“What is it that you want to know, exactly?” I ask, hoping to let her lead the way in order to avoid giving up too much at once. I like Delilah, but I still don’t know how much I can trust her with the pieces of me that I’ve been hiding from the world for so long.
“Tell me about your parents,” she says, opening her eyes fully for the first time since she woke up. She’s gazing at me with those big green eyes like I’m about to give her the secret to the universe, and all she wants to know is what my parents were like. No other woman has ever cared like that.
“Okay, well, my mother was a seamstress, and my father was a professional gambler. My mother made very little money, but what she did make, she kept hidden from him. He was good at what he did, but the nature of his work made his income shaky at best,” I begin, doing my best to remember the details without allowing the resentment towards my father to show on my face.
“Is that how you got involved with the mafia?” she asks, absently stroking my arm.
“Yeah, but it isn’t how you think it is. I watched my father get the shit kicked out of him by loan sharks because he pissed away all of our money on a bad dog fight. I saw how those guys intimidated my father, how much power they had over him, and I wanted that. I hated feeling so helpless and unstable all the time,” I recall.
“But you were just a kid then. Did you form your own gang or something?” she asks, sitting up a little as her interest is piqued.
“Not necessarily, but there was a man who owned a corner store as a front for his mafia affiliation. I got to know him as a kind of father figure. He must not have viewed me as a pathetic loser like my real father because he let me in on his trade,” I continue.
Delilah thinks for a moment. I know what she’s doing; she’s probably contemplating how appropriate her questions are in terms of my upbringing, how likely they are to offend me if she says the wrong thing.
