Page 5 of Spring Break with a Mafia Prince
My throat tightened. “No. She’s…not with us anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Falcon.” Her hand brushed the back of mine, and I automatically sought her out again, securing her in a firm grip.She didn’t pull away. “I lost my mother to cancer three years ago. That was when my father…he also struggles,” she whispered.
I nodded, tugging her close to my side as we walked along the jetty and the boardwalk that skirted around the edge of the town, following the beach that was almost deserted at close to midnight.
“He shouldn’t have brought you with him tonight,” I said tightly. “That boat is no place for someone like you.”
“Too plain,” she murmured, looking down at the ground and I realized for the first time she was barefoot.
Somehow, that made her all the more sexier, but now I was worried about her damn well hurting her feet.
“Too innocent,” I said abruptly as she turned and led me up a hill away from the town onto a rocky path. I stopped and bent at my knees. “Climb on, Bella. You’re not walking barefoot all the way up there.”
“I made it down.” Her palm pressed lightly to my back as she considered my offer.
I groaned, playing it up, though my thighs did actually ache in that position. “Come on, I’m an old man here. Do me a favor, yeah?”
She slapped at me even as she giggled, and let me hoist her onto my back. Slim legs—almost too slim—linked around my waist as she looped her arms around my neck. Hell, the girl weighed almost nothing at all.
“Fuck it, I’m feeding you tomorrow,” I muttered under my breath.
“Hmm?” She rested her chin on my shoulder.
The scent of berries assaulted me from behind. I closed my eyes and suppressed a groan at the freshness of her right mother fuckingtherepressed against me. Squeezing one calf muscle and resisting the urge to run my hands up and down her legs, I tookthe hill at a run, needing to burn some of my excess energy off before I did something we’d both regret.
“Turn,” she said a little breathlessly when we hit a street corner. “That one.” Bella pointed across the road a white and gray painted three story beach vacationer house complete with a stilted lower level and all the windows and verandas a house could ever need.
I stopped outside its stairs, looking up and up as I let her down gently. “It’s just you and your dad in here?”
“He owns it.” I heard the shrug in her voice before I turned back to her, sliding my hands automatically to encircle her waist.
Her eyes flared wide in the reflected street light, an awareness passing between us. I swallowed and dropped my hands, but the damage was already done.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have?—”
She rose gracefully onto her bare toes and grazed her lips across my cheek. “Thank you for walking me home,” she whispered, her lips still near mine.
It didn’t take a half second’s thought to catch her chin gently between my fingers and turn my head to brush my mouth across hers.
Bella’s stuttered breath matched my heartbeat that slammed once into my chest at full tilt, then stilled.
And I stepped back.
“I’d do it again,” I murmured, unsure which part I meant, the walk or the kiss. Or both. Space gave me clarity, and my heartbeat resumed its normal path.
“Let me give this back to you.” She struggled with the zip on my jacket and though it was in me to watch her fight it, I closed my hand over hers and squeezed instead.
“Keep it. Besides, I want to take you out tomorrow.”
The hell did that come from?
Her eyes widened like they had a second before when I kissed her.
A kiss I wasn’t going to think about because with anyone else I would have pushed her back against the house, forced her mouth open with my tongue, and left her wet and mewling there on the front doormat.
With this girl—I ached to beg her permission to kiss her again, fuckingearn it. If she’d let me.
Bella nodded. “Alright,” she whispered. “What did you have in mind?”
