Oh my God. I have fallen for him. How did this happen so fast?
Ezra’s hands snake around to my bottom and clutch my cheeks tightly, pulling me up on my toes, rocking our lower bodies together. “I need you bad, little girl.”
Heat presses to the backs of my eyelids. Do I have to push Ezra away in order to save him? Save my father?
“I’m sorry, but…” With a shaky breath, I shove away from Ezra. “It…well, it would be impossible for somebody with a prison record to give me this kind of life.” I try to give him a haughty look, but the unshed tears in my eyes probably make it unconvincing. “I’m happy right here where I am. And what we did was nice, but I’m not going to jeopardize my happiness. My future. Okay? S-so I think it’s best if you leave me alone.”
Skeptical eyes travel down the front of my body. “You’re going to stand there with a straight face and ask me to leave you alone? You’ve soaked clear through that tight, white thong since you saw me again in the kitchen.”
Red-hot heat suffuses my face. “I said what we did was nice. I didn’t deny it.”
“I found a virgin who gets a tickle in her belly when I’m railing her like a beast. A virgin whose legs spring open when I growl at her. That’s not nice, princess. That’s game over time. That’s marry her and get her pregnant time.”
“Your mother is going to hear you,” I whisper furiously. “You can’t just talk to me like that. It’s rude a-and—”
“And it makes you want to lie down and spread ’em all over again.”
“Stop it.” I press my thighs together to hide the fact that they’re growing slick with my arousal. How dare he? I’m trying to save the world here and he’s taunting me. “Anyway, you might have given me that tickle in my belly, but you, um…didn’t deliver the second time.”
When the smirk vanishes from his face, I immediately regret my words. “I hadn’t touched anything but my own hand in seven years, princess. It’s a wonder I lasted two seconds in that little coin slot pussy.” He catches my robe in a fist and yanks me up against him. “You want me to deliver, show me where you sleep. I will fuck you to high heaven.”
I’m about to say yes, please and point him in the direction of the stairs, because I want nothing more than to have this man in my bed. I want his rough, inked-up skin in my sheets. I want him to grunt and sweat and use me for his own satisfaction. And I might have let him take me upstairs if Leeza didn’t rush into the entryway with a wild look in her eyes.
“Your father is coming home, Ophelia. Five minutes away,” Leeza wheezes, looking pointedly at her son. “You can’t be here. No men in the house. Especially men who look like you. I’ll be fired so fast, my head will spin. Please, Ezra. Go.”
Sympathy fills my chest for Ezra. He can’t help being menacing. He’s probably used to using his size to his advantage in prison. Now he’s home and it’s a disadvantage. That has to be awful and confusing. I glance up to find him looking at me with a furrowed brow.
“You really want me gone, princess?”
No. “I think it’s for the best.”
His throat works. “Permanently?”
I take a deep breath and move away, belting my robe for the ninth time since coming downstairs. “Like I said,” I whisper, looking down. “You won’t be able to make me happy.”
He tilts my chin up until I’m forced to meet his gaze. “When I was twelve deep inside you, Ophelia, you told me I was booked solid. All yours. Remember that?” His breath tickles my mouth. “Did you mean it?”
“No,” I manage, the lie sitting like acid on my tongue.
“Bullshit,” he bites off. “I’m going to learn your secrets.”
“You’re going to wish you didn’t.”
Leeza wrestles her son away from me. “Please, Ez. I need this job.”
I watch a reluctant, pissed off Ezra leave with a yawning pit in my stomach.
Within seconds, I miss his touch. Will I ever see him again?
The look he sends me before walking out tells me yes.
I’m not getting away from him that easily.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ezra
There’s something Ophelia isn’t telling me.
When she walked into the kitchen and saw me standing there, her eyes lit up with joy before she hid it. Ever since she told me to leave, that I can’t make her happy, I replay that moment in the kitchen over and over just to stay sane. And it’s not easy keeping my head right when I need her this much. I’m not the kind of man who lets the arrival of another man make him run and hide like a pussy. If I didn’t think it would get my mother fired, I would have taken Ophelia upstairs to her bedroom, regardless of her father’s impending arrival.
I tried to go back to Queens and regroup. I did. But I found myself back on the Upper West Side, standing in the shadows across from Ophelia’s sprawling townhouse. The need to see her is all encompassing. Invisible hands strangle me around the neck. I won’t get a decent breath until I’m looking at her. Or more likely, until I’m drilling her sweet little cunt and I give her that second orgasm she was deprived of two days ago.
My lips peel back in a snarl just thinking of her unsatisfied. It’s eating me alive.
Her father left hours ago in a limousine and now that she’s home alone, it’s taking everything inside me not to kick the door down and kidnap her. To take her somewhere we can be alone and uninterrupted, so I can find out what she isn’t telling me. I don’t know why my instinct that she’s keeping something to herself is so strong, but I have to believe in it.
Otherwise she’s telling the truth and she doesn’t want me around.
Needing to get closer to her, I wait for a wave of taxis to zoom past, then cross the street. There’s a stone staircase leading to the entrance, but the steps are bathed in light and I don’t want to be seen, so I move along the right side of bottom of the staircase—and that’s when I see her through the sliver of glass along the front door.
The glass is slightly beveled, but I would recognize her face in a sandstorm. What I don’t expect is to find her scrubbing the entryway floor on her hands and knees.
What the fuck?
Not that I don’t hate the idea of my mother performing manual labor, but I’m pretty sure scrubbing the floor falls to the maid, not the resident millionaire.
Hell. If she left with me, she’d have to scrub her own floors, wouldn’t she?
At first.
I would bust my ass to give her a better life. I would do whatever it took so she could sleep in silk sheets, eat at the finest restaurants and sun her beautiful ass on international beaches. I wasn’t always a fucking criminal. Once upon a time, I had aspirations of being more. A lot more. I was working my way up through the ranks of one the biggest car parts manufacturers in the United States. I might not know much, but I damn well know how to make a car purr like a kitten and that earned me a spot in the boardroom, a place I never thought I’d be.
A couple of good calls and smart decisions later, I was poised to become a partner.
That’s when I found out the company was importing a lot more than car parts.