Page 97 of Faded Gray Lines
“Make love to me.” Pressing a hand against my chest, she turned her cheek into my palm and closed her eyes. “Make it okay—just for tonight.”
Picking her up, I carried her into the bedroom, tasting her lips the whole way. After what we’d just shared, it felt wrong to touch her any other way but reverently.
She was the mother of my child.
My everything.
After laying her on the bed, I divested both of us of our clothes as she watched me through half-lidded eyes. The hunger was still there—still violent to the point of having to take a few moments to calm myself so I wouldn’t drag her hips up and drive into her with the punishing force of the anger boiling inside me. My emotions were too tangled for that. I refused to allow her body to take the brunt of someone else’s sins.
“Mateo?” I opened my eyes to her sweet voice questioning my hesitation. “Are you okay?”
Hovering my lips over hers, I fed myself inch by agonizing inch into her warmth until her tight walls squeezed me like a glove. Leighton dug her nails into my sides, arching her back and moaning my name.
“Now I am,mi amor,” I whispered, kissing her slowly. “Now I am.”
Thirty-Two
Leighton
The incessant bangingwas the first thing I noticed.
Rubbing my eyes, I lifted my head off the pillow and blinked at the alarm clock. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and whoever was outside the door sounded like they were about to take it down.
I rolled in Mateo’s arms and tucked my head under his chin. “One of your Carrera men is here.”
He threw his heavy thigh over mine, drawing me closer and all but crushing me against his chest. “I didn’t send for any men,” he rasped, his voice scratchy.
We stilled, both our eyes widening as his admission registered. We stared at each other in a rare moment of silence before the storm erupted.
I slapped a hand over my mouth and rolled away from him as he flung himself across the mattress, gathering his clothes from the floor.
“Fuck! Get dressed.” Shoving his muscular legs into his jeans, he jerked his T-shirt over his head and grabbed his gun from the nightstand. “Stay here,” he demanded as I buttoned my shorts.
I stared after him as he flung the bedroom door open and stomped down the hallway. When I told him last night I was tired of reacting, those weren’t just frivolous words. I was done being anyone’s victim and being trapped in his bedroom alone while he faced whoever was about to break down the door wasn’t happening.
Following after him, I stopped beside the end table next to the couch and eyed the decorative ceramic lamp sitting in the middle of it. Backhanding the shade, I grabbed the thinnest part of the lamp just below the lightbulb and swung it over my shoulder like a baseball bat.
Mateo froze, turning around and throwing his head back with a hiss. “Can’t you do one fucking thing I ask you to?”
I tightened my grip on the lamp. “No.”
“Mateo Cortes,” a voice boomed from the other side of the door, “this is the Houston Police Department. Open up.”
My mouth dropped open. In another life, the police would’ve been a welcome presence, but the last nine days opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know existed. One where the men who swore to serve and protect wore self-serving duplicitous masks while the ones condemned as the faces of evil righted wrongs written off by the straight and narrow.
“I’m going to need to see a warrant first.” Standing just to the left of the door, Mateo held his gun in position, every muscle in his body tensed.
There was a quiet lull at first, with no response to his challenge and no further banging on the door. Confused, I let out the breath I’d been holding, the lamp slipping from my hands and resting on my shoulder.
Then it came. The voice I never expected to hear—gruff and almost hoarse sounding with a harsh coating that rattled my eardrums. Like a chair being scraped across a dingy floor.
“Leighton, are you in there?”
I lost all sense of what was happening as the lamp slipped from my sweaty hands and crashed to the floor. “Alex!” I gasped. “Mateo, open the door! He knows where Stella is.”
Still gripping his gun, Mateo squeezed his eyes shut, pacing a few steps before turning back and dropping his hands in defeat. Shaking his head, he unlocked the door, barely having a second to step back before four armed police officers stormed in, knocking him into the wall and taking his gun.
One man pinned him with a forearm against his chest. “Mateo Cortes?”
