Page 112 of The Woman in the Hollow
He actually jerked back as the woman reached out to touch his bicep.
Actively working not to look like I was defensively storming over there, I slid around Dante, my hand on his belly.
“Hey!” I greeted him as the other woman stepped back, brows pinched.
“Hey, babe.” Dante’s smirk said he knew exactly what I was doing. And, what’s more, he liked it.
He leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to my lips.
“This is Hazel,” he said, speaking to the other woman. “Hazel, this is Amanda.”
“Ashley,” the woman corrected.
“Right. Ashley,” Dante said in a way that told me he’d screwed her name up on purpose.
“What? Oh, hey!” the woman said, waving to an invisible friend behind us. “Well, nice meeting you. I have to go.”
She scurried away.
And once she was gone, Dante smiled down at me.
“Staking your claim, huh?” he asked. “I like it,” he added before I could answer.
“I wasn’t going to come down but she was being pretty bold.”
“She wasn’t taking no for an answer,” Dante admitted.
“Should I get myself a unitard for the gym?” I asked, glancing over to look at the two of us in the mirror.
“You’d rock it,” he said. “But I don’t want anyone else looking at this ass but me,” he said, giving said ass a hard slap that dragged a laugh out of me. “Now, get, so I can keep these arms strong enough to throw you around back at home.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” I said, leaning up to give him a quick kiss on the cheek before walking away.
I made my way back upstairs, heading over to the stair climber, deciding that if he was going to keep his arms strong for me, I was definitely going to keep my ass perky for him.
Apparently, all it took for me to fall in love with working out was the promise of fun, sexy times with a really hot guy.
It worked to jazz us both up, it seemed, because as soon as we were out of the car back at his place, Dante tossed me over his shoulder, carried me up to the primary shower, and we spent an hour showing each other how much we loved the other’s body.
Dante - 1 week
“Christ,” Domenico sighed, rubbing his eyes. “This is fucking exhausting.”
I put down the phone I was looking through.
“You’re not wrong.”
“This Family needs its own dedicated hacker. We barely know what we’re doing.”
All the capos had spent the last week looking through confiscated electronics we’d taken from all the soldiers and associates.
It was part of a multi-step plan to be sure that Big Ed and Don had been the only rats in our organization.
The problem was, shit was easy to hide these days. Folders inside folders. Fake apps. Cloud storage. Not to mention that pretty much every guy not only had a cell phone, but a burner, tablets, laptops, and smart watches.
“Once we track down that hacker who attacked Hazel, we could probably stop all this.” Dom powered up a tablet. “A couple hours of careful torture and we’d have a list of names.”
“I’d sign up to rip out the fingernails,” I offered, thinking of the bruises on Hazel’s shoulders that were starting to go green and yellow around the edges as they healed.
