Hit Me (The Bailey Boys #2) (17 page)

“Which makes things complicated. Because...”

Because he kissed her then. Closed that small space between them with three strides, dropped his hands to her waist and drew her hard against him, pressed his mouth to hers – hard like the grip at her waist and then... a pause, a slight drawing away, eyes locked on hers... and now softer, tender, lips and gently probing tongue.

She reached for his waistband, found a button and popped it open, her fingers sliding down inside, finding that mat of short, wiry hair.

Pulled her mouth away from his, and dragged soft lips down the line of his neck to the top of his t-shirt.

Popped another button.

Another.

Now she could reach inside, find hardness and wrap her fingers around it, move it to the side and then upright, the flat of her hand pressing it against his hard belly.

Eye contact. Her thing. Locking him into her gaze as she rolled her hand from side to side. Licking her lips, enjoying the tease.

Dropping to her knees, eyes still fixed on his.

Pulling his jeans down across his thighs. His shorts.

Now his dick stood proud, long and broad.

She took it in both hands, started to pull and twist, sliding the skin around the shaft’s hard core. Letting one thumb come to press on the underside, that sensitive ridge of folded skin between shaft and head.

Brushing him across her soft lips, her cheeks.

Parting her mouth so that now her tongue slid across the slick head of his dick, sweeping side to side.

His legs were trembling – an involuntary echo of that night at Sotogrande when roles had been reversed and she had been the standing one, the one whose legs had shaken so hard she feared she was going to collapse, black out even, the whole thing had been so damned intense!

Strong hands moved to cup her head now, one on the crown and the other at the back, fingers buried deep in her hair.

She opened her mouth, felt his length sliding deep, coming up against the back of her throat.

She swallowed, felt that bulbous head in her throat. Started to choke and drew back against the pressure of his hands. Swallowed again, as he started to thrust, long, deep swings of the pelvis, drawing back and almost clear before thrusting deep once more.

With one hand she clung tight to the base of his shaft, and with the other she cupped his balls.

He wasn’t going to last long like this.

She could tell from the urgency of his movements, from the tension in his body, from the way his balls drew upward, everything tightening.

And then, with the hand around the base of his shaft she squeezed. Hard. Stilling him. Catching him just as climax had been about to take over.

Eye contact again. A slight shake of the head.

Not now
, that look said.
Not yet
.

When she finally allowed him to climax he was going to have earned it, and she had barely even started on him yet.

And in the morning she was gone.

I rolled onto my side, the sheet bunched up around my waist.

I listened for sounds of movement from elsewhere in the apartment, but there were none.

She really had gone.

I’d tried to make it easier for her. Tried to stick to the basics. A business transaction. Logistics. Push everything else aside.

But when she came to my apartment it was late, and when a woman like Imelda Sanchez turns up at your door at close to midnight, when she meets your look with those dark, seductive eyes...

There had been unfinished business between us after that party at Sotogrande, that encounter in the gardens. We couldn’t leave things as they were.

But even so, we’d stood, awkward, distant. Trying to keep things businesslike, detached.

Trying, and failing.

...you love me, and that changes everything.

And you love me.

What a strange way to say those three words. Strange, yet deeply intimate: the shift from
I
to
you
.

And now she was gone, and all that remained was for me to make the arrangements that would remove her from my life forever.

§

I made some calls. First to Fearless, because he knew everyone on the Costa: the bent coppers, the hospital staff open to bribes, the small-time hoods who thought they were much bigger than they really were.

“You going to watch your back, kid?” he asked me, in a way that made it perfectly clear he wasn’t going to believe any answer I gave him.

“It’s all good, Fearless,” I told him. “I’m being careful.”

“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

I followed up on a couple of contacts he’d given me, then climbed into the Corolla and headed down the coast to San Pedro.

I loitered outside the New Duchess for ages before going in. Couldn’t quite work out what I was going to say, why I was even there. Suddenly this made everything seem very final.

Dean took one look at me, grabbed a couple of bottles of Estrella, and came out from behind the bar and led me out onto the terrace.

“What’s up, bro’?”

I shrugged, wouldn’t meet his look. “No big deal,” I told him. “Just a spot of bother. I’m dealing with it.”

“Anything to do with that Bulgarian bird you were shagging?”

I did a double take. “She’s not Bulgarian,” I said. But he’d clearly made connections. And if Dean had worked that much out then who else might have seen or heard something? Had we been less discreet than we’d believed? Had we got carried away and taken too many risks?

There were good reasons I didn’t do spontaneous. Good, life-preserving reasons.

“I’m taking care of it.”

Dean didn’t believe me. Him, Fearless... why did nobody believe me today?

“So why you here?”

“Just making sure everything’s okay. No more trouble from those East Europeans?”

Dean shook his head. “Not a peep,” he said. “I hope you haven’t had too much grief for getting them to take the heat off?”

I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said. “I dealt with it.”

“And we’re grateful, kid. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded. He’d have done the same for me. That’s how we were, me and him.

“So why come out here now? Not that you’re not welcome.”

“We don’t do this often enough, do we? Crack a beer. Talk about life and shit.”

“We don’t. So what have you been up to, over in Puerto Libre? You keeping Fearless in line?”

I told him some of it. That I was doing a bit of security work. That I’d done a few jobs for the gangster who’d had his eye on the Duchess just to keep him sweet – that Markov had assured me that had all been a misunderstanding and the Duchess was off-limits now. I told him about the Colombians’ place in Sotogrande, and that Jack the Knife was making a name for himself out here on the Costa.

“Who’d have thought?” Dean said to that. “He always was a wily bastard, but I’d never have credited him with what it takes to make it out here.”

At one point we paused, took long sips of our beer, and then Dean glanced at me and said, “You know what this reminds me of, times when you used to get like this? Before you went into the cage.”

MMA. My cage-fighting days. The calm before the storm.

It was true. There was a sense of finality to this. Like with Imelda, where every kiss had felt like it could be the last, and every snatched moment together was so much more valuable because we might not get another.

I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Just sharing a beer with my bro’, know what I mean?”

And so we cracked a couple more beers and talked about life and shit, and for that hour or so it was like old times, the two of us together, sharing that moment of calm before all Hell broke loose.

§

Markov had me on a security job the following night.

There was a delivery due, a big lump of money changing hands – an occasion fit for a display of muscle.

This was much more my kind of thing. No cat and mouse, no setting myself up as a target and relying on other people, as it had been the night we snatched Jack the Knife.

This was simple: a trade, a bit of respect between the two parties. Good, solid business.

Yeah, right.

We drove up to a commercial district tucked into the hills on the outskirts of Puerto Libre. I don’t normally carry, but tonight was different and I had a Glock 17 tucked into a shoulder holster under my jacket.

The meet was in a bar called Nightingale’s. I took the door with a kid called Stefan, as Markov and Georgi went inside and took a table towards the rear.

The place was half-empty, just a handful of tourists – Brits and Germans at a couple of tables, a bit leery from a night touring the bars.

The barman had nodded as we arrived – from the look on his face this place was either owned by Markov, or under his ‘protection’. Now, the barman went to the tourists’ tables and started to clear their empties. He said something, went to take a half-full pint glass and they protested, but then he said something else and they fell silent and started to gather themselves to leave.

Within minutes we had the place to ourselves, all according to plan.

It was interesting seeing how Markov operated.

I’d been in on dozens of meets like this over the years, in places like London and Amsterdam where it was usually more discreet. But Markov came to Nightingale’s because he liked the place, simple as that. He didn’t seem to care how open he was about it, and thought nothing of emptying the bar to suit his own purposes. Nothing of setting up a couple of lines of coke on the table top and snorting it through a rolled-up 500 euro note – a ‘bin Laden’, as they used to call them because while everyone knew they existed, no one ever actually saw one. The scarcity of those big notes was allegedly because something like 95% of them were tied up in criminal activities, and I could vouch for that: I’d seen a few of them in my time.

So this was it. Life on the Costa del Crime. Tugging my forelock to the likes of Hristo Markov and, if he had his way, Jack ‘the Knife’ McGill.

Life in London had been so much more simple.

Out on the street a Lexus with tinted windows cruised past, and I wondered if that was the Colombians checking out the territory.

I patted the Glock through my jacket, nodded in response to a curious look from Stefan, and resumed my surveillance of the street.

I was focused, in the zone, everything on track.

Or at least I was until Imelda Sanchez turned the corner, approaching the bar.

She looked spectacular, in a long, slit skirt and a silky top bunched around her breasts, bare at the arms, her glossy black hair pinned up on the crown of her head.

She barely paused at the door, barely glanced at me. Silenced Stefan with a look when he made as if to block her way.

“She’s with Markov,” I said to the kid, who clearly didn’t know her, showing he was new to all this.

She entered the bar and it was a second or two before Markov glanced up and noticed her. Then he did a double take, stood, took a step toward her.

“Imelda?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Now Imelda hesitated. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and she said, “I... You left a message. Said to meet me here.”

Markov’s eyes narrowed.

“No,” he said, finally. “That is not so.”

“You–”

He silenced her with a look. Took a step towards her.

And then it all happened at once.

The Lexus with tinted windows swung by again, and this time came to a halt a short way up the street.

“Boss?” I said. “I think they’re here.”

Markov hissed something at Imelda, and she shrank away, and when I turned back to the street again I saw that I’d been wrong. It wasn’t the Colombians at all.

Four men piled out. Tracksuits and baseball caps and shades, and the unmistakable dark glint of gunmetal.

“We have action,” I said, reaching inside my jacket for the Glock.

Sometimes you just have to fire first – a single shot, taking out a tail light on the Lexus. The four stopped in their tracks. That bullet must have passed right between them, and they knew it, and now they were trying to work out if I was a really good shot or a really bad one.

Then one of them raised a pistol and fired.

I ducked behind a pillar, and hoped Stefan had done likewise.

I heard sounds from inside Nightingale’s – shouting, and the clatter of furniture. A moment later Georgi was in the doorway surveying the scene, Markov at his shoulder.

And then I saw movement from deeper within the bar. Two dark figures emerging from a door at the rear, moving fast.

I ducked down and darted into the doorway, barreling off Georgi. He swung wildly at me, presumably thinking I’d turned on them, only pausing when I shouted, “Inside! It’s a decoy.”

Already I had my pistol raised, taking aim, but a hand on my wrist knocked it sideways.

Markov?

“Boss?”

He shook his head, still holding my wrist, a grim look on his face. He indicated with a flick of the eyes and I saw why he’d stopped me.

At the rear of the bar: two men in black, one waving an assault rifle and the other... both fists clamped around Imelda’s wrists, dragging her in a half-run half-stagger back through the doorway from which they had emerged.

Markov had stopped me from shooting because they already had Imelda and she was in the line of fire.

A split second and they were gone from sight.

I pulled away, straightened. Looked back over my shoulder and the dark Lexus was pulling away already.

I sprinted the length of the bar, came to the doorway and paused, gun held to my chest.

Peered through into the gloom of a stairwell. Couldn’t see anyone loitering and stepped through.

Stairs up, and another door swinging open to the rear.

I passed through and emerged in a narrow alleyway.

Looked left, right, but there was nothing.

Somewhere in the night wheels squealed and an engine growled.

Someone joined me. Markov. He smelled of sweat, cigarettes and alcohol.

“She’s gone, boss. I couldn’t do anything.”

He nodded.

“You did more than any other piece of shit in this place,” he hissed, nodding back into the building where Georgi and Stefan must be.