Coming Home (Morelli Family 6)

I roll my eyes. “I wasn’t going to ride to her rescue.”

“Yes, you were,” she says, still smiling like we’re flirting, even though we’re definitely not. Now both of her arms are around my neck, her legs wrapped my waist. “Don’t you do it. Be a dick for a little while longer. Dicks get far better results than nice guys.”

I sigh, catching her around the waist and tugging her off to the side. “Fine.”

“Don’t look, either. She’ll watch. Pretend you don’t care enough to check. I promise you, she’s watching.”

I shake my head at her, smiling. “I thought you were coming on a little strong tonight, even for you.”

Jessica winks and flounces away from me. “I got your back.”

—

We play in the pool for a while longer, then we get out and I chase Jessica around for a minute, whipping the towel at her.

Ben’s gone upstairs already. He got bored of watching Jessica flirt with me in the pool—he doesn’t care, he just mostly only finds her worth paying attention to when she’s naked. I think it’s fucked that she’s with him, but hey, if she’s satisfied, that’s her business.

Once we dry off I chill downstairs with Jessica for a little bit, then we both head off to our respective bedrooms. Mia is already in bed when I get there. She’s curled up on her side away from me, but I can see she’s wearing one of the bra and panty sets I bought her tonight. Her hair is damp, so it looks darker than usual. Visions of her ass emerging from the pool are floating around my head again, making me hard.

I need to fuck her soon.

Maybe tonight.

It’s not very late so I doubt she’s asleep, but she hasn’t moved, despite clearly knowing I’m in the room now. I head to the bathroom to get out of my wet clothes. I’m feeling a little optimistic. I pull on a pair of boxers and climb into bed with Mia.

I love sleeping next to her again. It’s one of the things I missed most when we were apart—just the feel of her skin against mine, holding her while we slept. Toward the end I stopped holding her because things got so bad, but I spent a lot of nights since regretting that. I should’ve never let that happen, either.

“You look good in these,” I tell her, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her toward me.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, rolling over to look at me. Her eyes drift from my face to my shoulders, across my bare chest. Then they drop lower, as if to check if I wore anything to bed, but they dart up fairly quickly once she sees I did.

“See anything you like?” I tease.

Mia rolls her eyes, faintly smiling. “If I have to meet anymore Morellis, can you only introduce me to the ugly ones?”

I laugh at that. “There aren’t a lot of ugly Morellis, honestly. Inside we’re all fucked up, but not so much outside.”

“That’s so unfair. You should all be ugly so it’s easier for people to stay away. Instead you have all these sexy bodies and beautiful faces and you pull us right in. It’s not right. Someone made a big mistake with this family.”

I shrug. “At least you know you’ll have pretty babies.”

“Look who suddenly wants babies,” she murmurs, lightly poking me with her index finger.

“I’m still kind of glad I didn’t give you one back then. I should’ve, it would’ve been smart, but he would’ve still taken you, and I’d be pretty pissed off if Mateo ended up raising my kid.”

“You resisted all this back then. You didn’t want to bring any more innocents into this family, remember? That was never my favorite decision.”

“Well, apparently you were never going to have any with him, either,” I point out.

She’s quiet for a minute, watching my chest instead of my face, then she says, “He was going to give me a baby. We were waiting on Meg to okay it, but even if she didn’t, he said he would eventually.”

I really don’t want to talk about him, but she’s calm, and even hearing that doesn’t rile me like I expect it to. Maybe we can talk about him for a minute. “Doesn’t seem like that’s fair to Meg,” I volunteer. “If she wasn’t okay with it, why would he want to hurt her like that?”

“It wouldn’t have been about hurting her; it would’ve been about giving me what I wanted. Mateo accepts there are casualties when he makes a move, but… he likes to give me what I want. He loves me.”

I was hoping she would be less Mateo-centric tonight. After our conversation about him on the balcony, it seemed like I actually got through to her a little bit.

“He loved Meg, too.” Mia’s eyes move to mine, and I raise my eyebrows just a little, still calm, but reminding her. “Remember that? Remember when she was his mission? Remember when he was willing to burn Chicago to the ground for her? Now he’s willing to burn her for you. What happens to you when it’s some new girl?”