I don’t know if she’s prepared for me to come, but right as I’m about to warn her, she speeds up and pleasure explodes, the evidence pouring out of me and right into her mouth.
She takes it like a champ, swallowing and then running her lips over me one more time to make sure everything’s tidy.
I laugh a little, because she’s still cleaning, even when she’s giving me head.
Elise comes back up to lie down beside me once she’s done. “What?” she asks, because of the laugh.
I shake my head, smiling faintly. “You’re just adorable.”
“Thank you,” she says, pulling my arm around her so she can snuggle into my side.
“Thank you,” I say, leaning over and dropping a kiss on top of her head.
“You didn’t give me an assignment this morning,” she tells me.
“I forgot. You still want me to?”
Nodding, she says, “I like it. Though if we’re going to be staying at Mateo’s again, I can probably help out around the house while I’m there, so I’ll have more to do. I mean, Meg was supposed to replace me and she went and got promoted to wife, so Maria probably has a lot to do.”
“Damned inconvenient,” I agree, my mind tempted to wander back into Mateo’s murky bullshit. I pull back, refusing to go there. This is my time off, I will fill it with Elise, not him.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Who did you love before me?”
I turn my head to look over at her, and she blushes a little.
“I mean, not that you love me,” she amends. “But you know what I mean.”
“There really wasn’t anyone. I know you wouldn’t think so, given my age, but before I got trapped in Mateo’s world, I really wasn’t doing too much. I didn’t expect to live too long given the things I did do, and any… relationships I had were short-lived and usually meaningless.”
“That sounds sad,” she says. “I don’t think I’d ever have a relationship like that.”
“No, I don’t imagine you would,” I agree.
“Are you ever afraid you might get killed doing what you do?”
I glance over at her again. This isn’t a cheerful line of questioning. “Sure. It never really used to scare me, but I’m a lot less keen on the idea now.”
“You weren’t afraid to die?” she asks, propping herself up, resting her chin on my chest.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“I’d be afraid,” she says, quietly. “Like, really afraid. Last night was pretty exhilarating, but I couldn’t do what you do.”
I smile slightly, trying to imagine Elise, even with her little kickass mugger moves, doing what I do. “No, I don’t think it’d be a good fit.”
“I’m gonna stick to making muffins,” she tells me.
“That’s probably for the best.”
“I like that you’re capable of it, but I don’t like that you’re ever in danger.”
“You like that I’m capable of…?”
“Taking care of things,” she says evasively.
“Violence?”
She shrugs. “You do what you have to do.”
I guess living in a mob house throughout your formative years, even if sheltered from the darkness of it, can desensitize even a normal person to that sort of thing.
“It makes me feel safe,” she adds. “When I first met you, when you first defended me like that, it just… right off, you seemed like someone trustworthy. Someone good. When you first came on the scene, I thought you were a Morelli I just hadn’t met yet.”
I scoff a little at the idea. “Really?”
She nods, smiling slightly. “It’s not such a stretch.”
“You can usually tell a Morelli by the look of them, if not by the behavior.”
“I didn’t know. It was a little harder to tell with you,” she says, her eyes drifting to the scarred left side of my face.
“Yeah,” I say, absently touching it. “The Morelli men are uniformly pretty.”
“You’re more intimidating and ruggedly handsome, but I think this has a lot to do with it,” she says, reaching out and brushing my cheek herself. “It’s hard to look at you without it, but if you just look at the one side, you can tell you have a certain prettiness to you, too. The scarring just gives you that ‘don’t mess with me’ look, where Mateo is more… ‘come mess with me. I’ll destroy your life, but don’t mind that.’ And Vince, he’s young, but he’s like the sulky James Dean type. Alec—I really don’t understand where his nose came from, he’d be pretty otherwise. And Joey, he looks the most like you. I think because he has the lighter hair, more golden chestnut than black.”
The mention of Joey makes me sad. “His mom was blonde,” I explain, though she didn’t ask. “Normally the Morelli genes are dominant, but… it happens. Luciana had lighter hair, too.”
“What happened to her?”
“She tried to kill Mateo.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “She was crazy. Like, really crazy. She was technically Matt’s eldest child, and even though there’s no way a woman could head this family, she didn’t want to accept her role. Felt she’d been born to more. It was kind of bizarre, considering he killed her whole family, but when she came back, she sucked up to Matt. Just worshipped him for some reason, like she was somehow at fault for what her mother had done and she wanted to make up for it.” I roll my eyes, because I personally think Belle was completely justified, but the Morelli men don’t accept infidelity. They’ll dole it out, but they sure won’t take it.