Page 27 of Strike Fast

He relaxed and closed his eyes at the familiar sound of her rubbing oil between her practiced hands. She smoothed it over the length of his back and across his hips with light strokes, then she leaned her weight into her hands and he couldn’t hold back a deep groan of mingled pleasure and pain.

The woman might be seven inches shorter than him and slightly built, but she had magic hands, and she was worth double what he paid her. She came to his ranch at precisely nine o’clock each morning he was home, and worked on him for an hour. Her treatments, followed by a soak in his custom-built hot tub, were the best part of his day and the only thing that had helped him ease off the pain meds.

A firmer pressure dug into the side of his hip and he hissed in a breath, tensing.

“Breathe,” she coaxed, maintaining the pressure.

He grunted and held back a retort that it was easy for her to tell him to breathe, since she was the one with an elbow in the side of his ass. But he trusted her, and knew this worked.

So he breathed through the pain, forcing his mind to clear and his body to relax. Soon enough the pain in his hip began to ebb. Juana continued to work out the knot with slow, sure strokes, switching back to her hands now, and it felt so damn good he growled low in his throat.

The sharp cry of a peacock brought his head up. Blinking in the glare of the overhead sun, he found Rex, his favorite peacock strutting his stuff along the strip of manicured grass beyond the deep end of the pool.

“Manuel,” he hollered, annoyed that his massage had been interrupted.

A moment later a young boy of twelve shot out from around the corner of the main house. “Sí, señor?”

The boy was new to the job of helping take care of Carlos’s menagerie, only a week into his routine. “Did you feed Rex his breakfast yet?” he asked in English. The boy’s grandmother had asked Carlos to help him learn more English. Manuel understood far more than he could speak.

“No, señor.”

“Well, hurry up. He won’t stop squawking until he gets fed.” Damn bird was too haughty and demanding for his own good.

“Sí, señor.”

The boy scurried away, calling Rex, who ran after him like an eager puppy, his long, brilliant blue and green tail plumage trailing on the grass behind him.

Juana chuckled as Carlos lay back down and got settled again. “You spoil all your animals,” she said in Spanish.

“I know.” He couldn’t help it. Though he didn’t keep domestic pets, except for a few barn cats who helped keep the rodent population down in exchange for a cozy place to live and regular veterinary checks. He’d amassed quite a collection already: horses, a llama, three pot-bellied pigs, a camel, giraffe, and of course, Rex. The king of the ranch.

All rescues. That was deliberate.

Every creature he owned had been beaten, abused and neglected, with no one to care for them until he had stepped in. Because after being raised by a single mother who didn’t give two shits about him, or the two older brothers he’d lost to gang violence in their teens, he knew all too well how that felt.

He zoned out again when Juana began working on his lower back. Since being wounded in that shootout with the DEA, he was lucky to be walking at all, but his altered gait was pure hell on his body.

His cell rang a few minutes later. From the ringtone, he knew it was Antonio. Carlos ignored it, irritated that his head enforcer didn’t know by now not to interrupt him during his massage from nine to ten.

He was half asleep a few minutes later when his brain recognized the long, gentle strokes that signaled his treatment was almost at an end. His muscles felt loose and pliable, but his dick was rock hard, trapped between his belly and the table.

He might have ordered Juana to take care of that too, but he respected her and her skills too much. Besides, he had an endless supply of whores to choose from. With a single phone call or text, he could have any one of them up here to the house and ready to go within half an hour.

“Will you be getting into the hot tub now?” she asked him.

“Later. You can go.”

She left without a word, and only when he was alone did he return Antonio’s call. His sixty-three-year-old and half-deaf housekeeper—Manuel’s grandmother—was inside. Her hearing impairment a big reason why Carlos had hired her, since she wouldn’t overhear anything she shouldn’t, and therefore couldn’t spill his secrets. She was the only staff he kept at the house, other than his two bodyguards, who patrolled the house and grounds at all times.

“Don’t ever call me during my massage unless it’s an emergency,” he snapped when Antonio answered.

“Right, sorry.”

Whatever. “What did you call about?”

“The next delivery is scheduled for tonight, to Cartagena.”

“How many girls?” He was one of the fewVenenolieutenants involved in the skin trade.

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