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Chapter 1
Romeo
“I’m No Gentleman Series”
I stumbled out of the hotel, hands taped behind my back, one of Nico’s beefy sweaty men holding on to them. The large sweaty man dressed in black was having a worse time in this heat than I was having this unceremonious night. A night I thought would end with me having a satisfying sexual experience and a new boyfriend.
Some would say all good things came to those who waited. Well, they lied. I’d been waiting for the time when I could fall in love and ride off into the sunset, but instead of love I was having a rude awakening, because the man I thought would take me away from this hellhole and tell me he loved me had been the one I was running from in the first place.
I stopped and looked at the beefy man sweating and coughing, and for the first time I wished he’d drop dead. “What are you looking at?” he questioned.
“You. You should lose weight if you plan on making it to your thirties.”
“Who the fuck are you, a fucking doctor?” He asked the right question. No, I wasn’t, but anyone with common sense could see that he was one steak from a heart attack or stroke dressed the way he was.
Didn’t he know better than to wear black in the hottest place beside the desert of Arizona and Nevada. This was Texas, and if he wasn’t careful he could get a sunstroke, but how I wished it was in the middle of the day, instead it was in the dead of night, and another one of Dante’s men clutched my shoulder with his hard wide meaty hand, ready to use the other to place tape over my mouth, or put his fist through it where I’d lose all my teeth if Dante ordered him to silence me once more.
Pushing my boundaries was what I lived for, and you could say I’d met my quota today. But I had one more thing I wanted to push, and that was how I intended to find out if the man I thought Dante was, was indeed the cold heartless bastard like his brother, or the man I felt inside me in bed where I could still feel his heartbeat against my skin.
I stopped once I stepped outside of the motel and into the parking lot. The hot dry air blew past me leaving my hair tingling, and my face feeling as if I’d been hit by a baseball bat. Maybe I had been from behind, but I was still standing, and I quickly dismissed that notion.
When I caught my breath and my mind began to function, I stood in one spot unwilling to move, then I turned quickly, gazing at the man I’d fallen so easily and so stupidly for, and so deep into him where even when he told his men to take me for a ride, in the trunk of his car, I was in denial.
But no longer, because when I gazed into Dante’s eyes they were empty, and he looked right through me, and past me as if he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were dead. Previously I’d felt his heart beating on my back, and the warmth of his kisses on my shoulders and the nape of my neck, but now nothing. Therefore, I took a chance. One last chance to find the man I thought had held back loving me because he had obligations to his work and to a woman.
I could have worked with that, but now I wasn’t so sure, and still I pressed on.
“I have something to say to you, Dante,” I barked.
In the darkness, I could smell Dante’s cologne. It had been overpowering me like his natural scent, and I couldn’t free my senses from it because for those few moments I smelled his body, smelled his hair, and his odor when his arousal rose and ebbed like a wave in the ocean before overtaking me in that rented room, and inside that hard bed, drowning me forever.
“What is it?” His voice was low and disinterested. There was a coldness that wrapped his words, unlike the warmth of his body had wrapped me earlier, and had me believing that this was the stranger whom I could fall in love with, and he would protect me with his life. Where did I get that? He never even told me that he would protect me from Nico. He never said he wouldn’t let anything happen to me, and he never vowed he would lay his life on the line for me if it came to that.
As usual I was living in my mind and I’d convinced myself that Dante was the one. I was indeed delusional and stupid, and my father was right.
Young and stupid and searching for something that would elude me because I was sure I would die once I got this off my mind. And when I woke from my dream and left those thoughts behind me, I felt as if this was the man I’d likely kill if I were a killer. Obviously, he was one or I wouldn’t be headed for the trunk of a car in a hot desert town going west to the Nevada desert where there was a hole dug with my name in it.
“Do you want me to put tape over his mouth?” the driver said in an unaffected drone voice, like an executioner, as if this was par for the course when you were a condemned man.
Standing and locking eyes with Dante, he lowered his eyes. “Look at me, you bastard,” I insisted. I surprised myself, but what the fuck. What did I have to be afraid of now? I had his attention, and for some reason I’d lost the fear of dying.
Immediately Dante strode up to me, grabbed my jaw, and leaned and spoke into my ear. “What the fuck do you want and have to say to me? Say it.” His voice was low, but strong and aggressive.
I paused surprised. I shouldn’t have been. Then I said those fated words, “I will never love you, or trust you again. And if for some reason I survive this, you’ll be the one who will get fucked.”
The men began laughing. I meant it literally and figuratively. Then I saw Dante’s deep dark eyes, and there was a profound hurt playing inside his soul when he narrowed those eyes and curled up his lips to the side in a false grin.
Good. I got a blow in even if it was empty and hopeless.
When Dante swallowed and seized control of his emotions, he locked eyes with me, and shot back, “That’s because you’ll never get the chance.”
“Never is a long time—” I countered.
“You’re right. Never is a long time. Now put that tape over his mouth, and blindfold him and throw his ass into the trunk of the Caddie,” I heard Dante say to his men. They quickly obeyed with a bit of a snicker. One man pushed me to move along, after they had done as Dante had instructed.
I measured my steps as I inched closer to the car, trying to slow down the inevitable. I heard the opening of the trunk, then I felt a large powerful hand over my chest, and down I went into the trunk, and the trunk slammed closed after the men and Dante cleared up what was supposed to happen to me.
“What do you want us to do now, Boss? There’s several sites we can drop him in. I could put him out of his misery now, and we won’t have to worry about him trying something stupid and causing more trouble. I could strangle him, and then drop him into that hole, and then when Nico asks if we took care of Romeo, we could safely say we did.”
