Page 31 of Desperate Desires

I wore it over my favorite skinny jeans paired with matching high-heeled boots. Make-up on, hair fixed, I was ready to go.

“The driver is here! Let’s go,” Lucy shouted.

I followed the trio of women, plus one baby, outside. Finally, my life was going to get back to normal.

But why doesn’t that sound as good as it should?

Chapter 9-Ono

“Boss? We found Freddy,” Gio said, pushing his cell phone into his back pocket.

It took a few days longer than expected, but I was closing in on the motherfuckers who sent Frankie and Vic D’Amato after me.

I sucked in a deep breath and rolled my healing shoulder.

It still felt tight, but Doc had done a bang up job with the stitches, and I was on the mend thanks to her.

Fuck. I missed her.

I mean, I really missed her.

That wasn’t something I liked admitting, even to myself.

In just a few days—only hours, really, where I’d been truly conscious—Michelle had managed to get under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming.

She wasn’t loud about it. Wasn’t forceful or pushy. And she damn sure wasn’t conceited like some people were.

Michelle was genuine. She was real.

Somehow, that careful, brilliant woman had left a mark on me—quiet but indelible, like ink staining paper from the inside out.

Men in my position prided themselves on being untouchable, on not needing anyone.

Independence wasn’t just a trait. It was a badge. A survival mechanism.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to say I needed her—not yet. But the silence she left behind was loud enough to feel like a void, one I hadn’t prepared for.

I told myself it was the circumstances—unusual, intense, fleeting—that had me so fucked up over it.

I mean, it was her, too.

The woman was fucking beautiful.

Michelle had to be a foot shorter than me, curvy and petite with a banging body that was just so fucking sexy.

Christ, I couldn’t get her out of my head.

The way she opened up for me. The way she let me in.

Her pretty eyes locked on mine, just a shade darker than her smooth brown skin, her tight pussy squeezing my cock—I’d never felt or seen anything better.

Michelle Davis was one of a kind and those hours I’d spent with her were the best of my life.

I tried to walk away. To tell myself she was better off.

But I didn’t believe it. Not really.

Still, how could this woman fit into my life? My business was complicated. Untangling myself from my father’s old cohorts was proving more difficult than I’d thought it would be.

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