Page 12 of Caught Up

Whatever the case, it was a problem. One I wanted to avoid because I didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe I could hide out in the bathroom for the rest of coffee hour.

I sighed. No, I couldn’t be a coward, not with my grandmother out there waiting for me. She’d been the one to call me the other night during dinner with the news that my father had disappeared for what felt like the eighth time in my life, and before we’d gotten off the phone, she’d coerced me into coming here with her. I couldn’t abandon her now, not before she had a chance to show off her “wildlysexcessful” (her words) granddaughter to all the “prissy old bitches” (again, her words) she was forced to endure Mass with.

I took a deep breath and opened the door. I was getting ahead of myself; there was no reason to panic. Junior had never been one to participate in anything growing up, and it was a minor miracle that his mother, Moira, had wrangled both him and Alec here in the first place. I couldn’t for the life of me picture them sitting down at a table full of old people and politely carrying on conversations for the next hour. It would be like two wolves taking a nap with a herd of sheep.

Feeling bolstered, I smoothed my hands over my dress and left the bathroom. Everything would be fine. The Trocci brothers were long gone by now.

I pulled up short just after rounding a bend in the hall. There, leaning against the wall with one knee bent and his foot propped behind him, was Junior. His hands were in his pockets, head tilted back, looking like the epitome of calm. Meanwhile, at the mere sight of him, my heart was trying to break free from my chest and throw itself at his feet like a teenager at aK-popconcert. Embarrassing, but that was still better than what myvaginawas doing.

Ignoring the dampness in my underwear, I started walking again. Junior heard me coming and rolled his head sideways, pinning me with a gaze that made me think our meeting like this was no accident and he’d been waiting for me.

“Hey, Lo,” he said in that rough, accented voice of his. You could take the man out of the neighborhood, but you couldn’t take the neighborhood out of the man.

I narrowed my eyes at him. Lo was short for Lauren Olivia. I hadn’t heard that nickname in years. Not since I was forced to switch schools. Memories of what Junior had done back then swam to the surface. Or more like what hehadn’tdone. The way he’d left me all alone to deal with the fallout by myself. The way he’d blocked my number, stopped coming to church, pretended I never existed at all. This sonofabitch was the main reason I now had aone-strikepolicy with romantic partners.

The memories put some steel back into my spine, had me lifting my chin, meeting his bold look with one of my own. “Junior,” I said, my tone as neutral as I could make it.

I planned to stride right past him and go back to forgetting he even existed, but in a fluid motion, he hooked his fingers around my arm. The hallway blurred, and before I knew what was happening, my back was to the wall and one of his hands was pinning my wrists overhead. His other hand slid around my hip, his thumb stroking over my stomach in a way that spoke of possessiveness, familiarity, like we did this all the time.

I sucked in a breath to either scream or moan (my body was very confused right now), and ended up dragging in a nose full of his cologne, something dark and far too sinful for church. How the hell had I gone from walking past him one second to getting pinned against a wall the next?

Panicking that someone would notice us, I glanced right only to see the back of Alec filling up the door to the hall like a bouncer at a club. Sonofabitch. Junior had definitely planned this littlerun-in.

I lifted my eyes to his, ready to tell him off and then run like my life depended on it. Because it felt like it did. Junior was dangerous, and not just because he scrambled my brain, but because he worked for his father. Doing what, exactly, I had no idea, but I knew it involved the mob, and I’d seen enough shit growing up in Little Italy to know that smart people stayed as far away from the Mafia as possible. But when my eyes landed on Junior, I froze. He was looking at me like he used to all those years ago, in stolen moments when no one was watching.

His gaze roamed over my face, intense,electric, before settling on my lips. That damn thumb was still tracing tantalizing circles over my stomach, and the hand holding mine to the wall gripped so hard it felt inescapable. I couldn’t think with him this close, couldn’t remember all the reasons he was a bad idea.

He licked his lips, a hungry look entering his eyes that went straight to my traitorous vagina. Damn it, I’d spent too much time fucking myself lately, and not enough time fucking other people.

“Did you miss me?” he asked, his voice low and intimate, for my ears only.

“No,” I forced myself to say. “I’ve barely thought of you at all. After what happened, you became nothing to me, no one.”

My tone made the words sharp enough to cut, but Junior only smiled, one arched brow climbing as he finally lifted his eyes to mine. This close, I realized they weren’t just green; they had flecks of amber in them, too, explaining why they always looked like they were lit by some inner flame.

“This is how you respond to no one?” he asked, gripping me harder, his gaze running over my body.

I glanced down, horrified to see that I was arching into him against my will. It must have been some horny church ghost possessing me. Some nun who’d lived an entire life of celibacy and now that she was dead, all she wanted before she passed into the afterlife was one rough fuck.

“The power of Christ compels you,” I muttered, desperate to expel her from my body.

Junior’s lips twitched. “You trying to exorcise me, Lo?”

“I heard that’s what you’re supposed to do when the ghost of an ex shows up.”

He glanced down again, to where I wasstillarching into him. “Doesn’t look like it’s working.”

“Don’t let it get to your head,” I told him. “It’s just because you come in a pretty package. Too bad it’s empty inside.”

Look, was it my best insult? No, but I was a bit distracted trying to banish Sister Mary Francis from my body before she made me do somethingtrulystupid.

“Awww,” Junior said, his grin widening. “You think I’m pretty.”

Damn it. I’d forgotten what asmart-asshe was.

“Let me go,Nico,” I said, using his full name, his father’s name, in an effort to put somemuch-neededdistance between us. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I don’t want any part of it.”

“Funny,” he said, ignoring my request and leaning in instead. His chest bumped against mine. Lips ghosted over the shell of my ear. The scent of him filled my nose, and despite myself, I dragged in a deep breath just to get another hit of it. If hell had orgies, his cologne was what they smelled like: dark, smoky, with a seductive hint of spiced musk and the subtle tang of sadism. “From what I remember,” he whispered into my ear, “you would have begged me to put my hands on you like this in high school.”

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