Loan Shark Love

The night is dark beyond the window, the quiet streets only illuminated by the flickering lamps on the building and the dim streetlights on the sidewalk. Rose’s mouth is on my neck, kissing smoothly.

I drag two of my fingers up the inside of her leg, and she shivers under my touch.

My fingers find the lace of her panties, and I pull them gently to the side. Rose lets out an almost silent gasp, digging her fingers into my back. When I slip my fingers inside, I wish we were something else, I long for a bed to lay her down on.

I pump my fingers slowly in and out. She’s soaking wet, squeezing around me as she breathes into my neck. I curl my fingers, and I have to quiet her when she lets out a soft moan. Her moans are for my ears only.

I want to hear her moan in my ear while my length is inside her.

“Grey,” Rose gasps breathlessly, pausing with her mouth pressed to my skin. To anyone in the restaurant, it would look like her head is just resting on my shoulder. No one would guess that my fingers are inside her, and I like that.

“What is it, Rosie?” I mutter, pulling back a little, touching my forehead to hers.

“It’s just…,” she begins, hesitating. “I need you to know that I’m a virgin.”

My body sings with her admission.

No one else has ever loved this woman the way I plan to. No man has worshiped her body the way I want to.

She’s mine.

This heart-stopping woman will experience her first time under my hands.

“I promise not to bend you over this table,” I tell her, and she laughs softly, loosening up as I gently pull my fingers from her. “We have time, Rosie.”

Suddenly, the restaurant erupts with screams and gunfire.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rose

I can honestly say that I’ve never been in the middle of a shootout before.

My dad would completely lose his mind if he knew that I was dodging bullets in a pizza shop. He would also lose his mind knowing that I was just tangled two seconds earlier with an older man, feeling each other up in the middle of said pizza shop.

I want to go back to that moment, to think of Grey’s fingers and his mouth, but I’m too busy hiding.

“Shit!” Grey grunts, pushing me behind him where we ducked by the booths. “Stay down low, Rosie!”

That brings a thrill of warmth to my chest.

Even with my terror threatening to choke me, that nickname on his lips makes my chest grow warm.

Grey is shielding me with his body, holding me against his back with one of his strong arms. I can tell he’s afraid by the slight shake in his hands, but it doesn’t show on his face. Instead, he looks furious, he looks as if he wants to tear someone apart.

What are the odds that we would be in a pizza parlor on the same night as a robbery takes place?

“We have to get out of here,” I tell him, though it’s not something that he doesn’t already know. “They won’t care about us, they just want what’s in the register.”

“Come out, come out wherever you are, Kingston,” calls a deep voice from somewhere by the front door. “We know you’re in there, you asshole!”

I look at Grey, at what I can see of his back, and my fingers dig into his hip. Grey tenses up, and I can see that he reaches for something with an almost imperceptible twitch of his fingers.

He’s reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

We’re in danger, and I realize that Grey is the kind of man to look it right in the face. And while I don’t like violence I find I’m even more attracted to him than I was before.

“This isn’t about money,” Grey tells me in a hard whisper. I can hear the strain in his voice, but it’s not because he’s afraid of anything. “They’re looking for me.”

“Who are they? What do they want from you?” I ask in a whisper, I can hear footsteps crunching over the broken glass from the windows, and my heart stutters.

“I have a lot of people who would like to see me dead,” he says with a sigh. He glances over his shoulder at me, and his deep voice is a soft whisper. “But I won’t let them hurt you. We’re getting out of here, and I’ll live to fight another day.”

Fight?

Who the hell are we fighting?

At the front of the restaurant, the men are still calling for Grey, trying to draw him out of his safe spot.

Grey is smart enough not to take the bait from them. But then….

“That pretty girl at your side needs a real man,” one of the men suddenly calls out. “I think I’d like to give her a little spin. She won’t need you after that.”