Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper (13 page)

Then he started running back home, barefoot and bare-chested. He hadn’t realized how far he’d chased the cars until he had to make the trek back. A part of him didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to find out what he’d left behind when he ran out of the house into a barrage of bullets. Those motherfuckers had been shooting at his house! Where his family lived! His gun had been on his dresser. He simply grabbed it and ran out the door and into the gunfire without thinking about anything but killing them.

He should have never made it two blocks over without even a scratch.

The door was still open the way he left it. The windows were shattered. He stepped over bullets that littered the driveway, but he didn’t really see any of it. There were people out of their homes, but the house still looked ominous and unattended to, making it obvious they were all too terrified to help, and he knew why. The anger and fury was almost pulsing off the walls, and the rage had a sound to it. Chuito’s sobbing, harsh and broken with a pleading that sounded foreign to Marcos’s ears.

Chuito begged for nothing—until now.

Marcos ran up the steps and found Chuito on the floor in the living room. He’d expected him to be the one shot, and for a moment, Marcos wasn’t sure he wasn’t.

“Help me fix him,” Chuito was begging in Spanish as he held Juan cradled in his arms. There was so much blood. It was spread out in a wide, crimson pool around the two of them. The phone Chuito was holding to his ear was coated in it. His hand was shaking. “It won’t stop. Help me make it stop. Help me save him.”

Marcos’s heart felt like it had just dropped into his stomach.

It wasn’t Chuito dying.

It was Juan.

Chuito looked up at him, tears streaming down his face. “I’m sorry, Marc.”

He was sorry. Juan was lying there dying, and Chuito was apologizing to him— Why?

Then Marcos saw her lying across the couch. Saw the blood soaking her dress. He saw the wide, set look in her dark eyes, and he knew. He knew why Chuito wasn’t doing anything to save the aunt who had been a second mother to him since the day he was born. It wasn’t callousness or preference for Juan to be the one to live.

Marcos’s mother was already dead.

He’d seen enough death in his seventeen years to know there was nothing in the world that could save her.

It was a weird survival mechanism that allowed him to abandon his dead mother like Chuito had and rush up to his cousins instead. Juan couldn’t die. He just couldn’t. There wasn’t a God in the universe that would leave the two of them completely unscathed and allow not just his mother but Juan to die too. He couldn’t look at his Aunt Sofia when she got home from work and tell her that her youngest son was gone. He yanked the phone out of Chuito’s hand, falling down in the blood and feeling it soak up into his jeans as he shouted, “Tell me what to do!”

“Help is coming,” the 911 operator responded in Spanish, making Marcos realized he was speaking it too. “He just needs to keep applying pressure and—”

Chuito screamed, and then lifted his head to look at Marcos. “He stopped breathing! He’s not breathing!”

* * * *

Marcos jerked awake. His body was coated in a cold sweat, and he was gasping for air, still trapped in the hellish place where every memory was so real and bone-deep it felt like it had just happened rather than something that went down eight years ago. He looked at his arm, staring at the seven blood drops inked into the body of the snake of his Los Corredores tattoo, just to reassure himself he’d gotten revenge.

But it wasn’t helping. The dream had been too real this time.

He put a hand over his eyes when he noticed the burn. He blinked to fight it as he sat there in a bed that had a soft, feather-down blanket that could only belong to a woman. He dropped his hand, staring at the pale pink paisley design, feeling seventeen again.

Coño, how many girls’ bedrooms did he hide in after that night? If he wasn’t fighting, he was fucking to escape the demons. Yet, even as he fought to clear his head he knew this wasn’t just any girl’s bedroom.

He looked to Katie, who was still sleeping deeply. Eyelashes like half moons on her pale skin. Her long curly hair spread out around her. He reached out and picked up a strand of it, finding it as silky in his fingers as it had been the night before.

She looked so peaceful, and he wondered what it was like to sleep like that. The barest hint of a smile tugged at her lips, and he imagined she was having nice dreams. For some reason, that made him feel better. He caressed her cheek, and she let out a little moan, reminding him of the way she’d sounded the night before. His cock jerked, which was nothing short of miracle when he was still fighting the nightmares of his past.

She turned on her side, snuggling into her pink pillow, in her pink sheets, looking so beautiful his chest hurt from it. He wanted to slip beneath the blanket and do things to her that made that pale skin of hers as rosy as everything else in the room, but he held back. They’d done it several times too many before they finally gave in to exhaustion. Against the kitchen table. On the couch. In the shower. Everywhere except the bed. The only thing they’d done in the bedroom was sleep, and he wanted to break it in, but he knew she was likely sore. Hell, he was sore, and it hadn’t been two years since he’d done it.

Marcos tugged the blanket down just enough to see the slope of her bare tits. He admired them for a long moment, but then the urge to touch got a little too much, and he rolled out of bed and went on a search for his clothes instead.

They were on the floor by the door where he’d pulled them off in a mad rush last night. He picked his up, finding them still wet from the rain, well on their way to smelling musty. His underwear was clean enough, but the rest needed to be washed. He picked up hers too, before he headed toward the washer. There were other clothes in the laundry room, so he sorted through them, finding more darks, and did a full load of laundry because he could hear his mother’s voice from the past.

“Ay, chico, water costs money.”

Hopefully Katie wasn’t one of those women who was weird about guys touching their dirty clothes. He doubted it. She was pretty easygoing. He leaned back against the washer after he was done and looked to his phone that he’d pulled out of his jeans, finding a text message from Chuito.

3:12 a.m.

Where the fuck are you?

Marcos wondered if that was how long the gringa was in his room before Chuito got wise and figured out Marcos had bolted.

He thought of saying something smart about taking off after Chuito’s church girlfriend nearly blinded him with her virginal, see-through nightgown, but that was a little too juvenile, and it gave the impression that Marcos was jealous of him, which he wasn’t. Certainly not of the skinny gringa when he had a real woman wrapped up in pink sheets, still rosy from fucking him. And who gave a shit if Chuito had two championship belts and several million bucks in the bank and
no fucking criminal record?
He didn’t care that his cousin had actually made himself into a man who deserved a woman like Katie.

Okay, maybe Marcos was a little jealous of the last part, but that wasn’t Chuito’s fault. What did it matter if Chuito was playing whatever the hell kind of game he was playing with his neighbor?

He finally settled on texting him the truth.

At Katie’s.

’Cause Marcos didn’t play games.

Chuito texted him back right away, even though it was early for both of them.

WTF, Marc! I thought you were going home.

Marcos snorted.

Love you too, pendejo.

His phone rang a second later, but he sent it to voice mail. Chuito sent another text rather than leave a message.

Did you fuck her?

He grinned as he replied.

No, I took a leaf out of your book. We just talked all night.

His phone rang again, and again he sent it to voice mail. The next text wasn’t friendly at all.

Fuck. You.

Marcos decided sarcastic and juvenile sounded like fun after all.

Why don’t you ask the skinny gringa to help you out with the anger-management issues? She seemed willing last night.

He scowled when he saw Chuito’s response.

Because I think before I do dumb shit.

Maybe it was the dream, but Marcos started to read more into the texts. Chuito had always been more levelheaded than him, more prone to think before leaping. Marcos had run out of the house that night into a barrage of bullets, hoping to kill the motherfuckers trying to hurt his family. Chuito had the foresight to stay behind and try to protect everyone in the house.

It hadn’t worked out for either of them.

The regret of it all was starting to wear on him. Maybe that was the difference between them. Marcos just didn’t have anything else. He
needed
Katie, and he wanted to convey that to his cousin, who had obviously succeeded in forgetting where he came from. Marcos couldn’t even fault him for it. He was jealous, but he sure as hell didn’t blame him as he typed.

That’s right, muchacho. We both know it’ll be me taking the next bullet. Might as well enjoy the ride.

He looked up to see Katie standing in the kitchen, wearing a nightshirt she’d obviously slipped on when she got out of bed. She frowned when his phone started ringing in his hand. “Are you going to answer it?”

Marcos looked at the screen, seeing it was Chuito, and shook his head. “No, it’s just—” He turned off the ringer and went to put it in his pocket before he realized he was standing there in his underwear. “It’s nothing. Old bullshit.” He slipped it into the waistband of his boxer briefs as he gave her his full attention. “Did you sleep good, chica?”

She nodded, giving him a sleepy smile, looking properly disheveled with her hair flowing wild and curly over her shoulders. “Very well. Thank you.”

“I did a load of your clothes.” He pointed back to the washer. “Mine were wet, and I went ahead and found some of your darks and—”

“You did my
laundry
.”

“Is that okay?”

“I’ve never met a man who knows how to do laundry.” She laughed. “I have to go to my father’s house twice a week to do his. Grayson’s been taking his to the dry cleaners since we got divorced, and I’m pretty sure my brother got married just to have Lily do his.”

He pulled back. “How hard is laundry?”

She shrugged as she tucked a strand of curly hair behind her ear. “Do you have any other hidden talents?”

“I wouldn’t call washing a few clothes a hidden talent.”

“I would, especially in Garnet.” Katie looked at him, her gaze running over him hotly, making the back of his neck warm and his cock swell. “But the laundry wasn’t the hidden talent I was talking about.”

“You are so easy to please, chica.” He reached out and grabbed her hips to pull her to him. “What’re we gonna do about that?”

She shrugged, a blush staining her cheeks. “I don’t know. Got any ideas?”

Marcos was pretty sure he’d made a commitment to himself to hightail it out of her place once the sun came up and head back to Miami with the taste of her still on his lips. That was the responsible thing to do; instead, he said, “How about I make you breakfast, and we’ll discuss it in bed?”

* * * *

The breakfast plates sat on the nightstand. Both of them were empty because Marcos could make eggs and bacon like nobody’s business. He cooked
and
did laundry. Katie was pretty sure that made him the perfect man, especially given the nice sight he made first thing in the morning, with his inky hair standing up in spikes and those light eyes looking up at her like he wanted a repeat of last night.

Marcos could be an underwear model, Katie mused as she sat straddled over him, drinking her coffee and admiring all those muscles and tattoos.

“Be careful,” he warned, his hands on her hips as he eyed her coffee. “It’ll ruin your afternoon if you drop that.”

She coughed and laughed, spilling some.

“Carajo.” He reached up to take her coffee from her and set it on the nightstand next to the other dishes. “You can’t be trusted with this.”

Katie laughed harder and leaned down to lick the coffee off his stomach by dragging her tongue over the deep ridges of his abdominal muscles. He grunted in response and tangled his hand in her hair.

“I like your mouth on me.” He groaned, holding her hair away from her face as he watched. “
Eres bella
.”

She lifted her head, staring into those beautiful eyes, and then tugged on the waistband to his underwear because his cock was pushing against the top of it, just begging to be set free. She took him in her mouth, wanting to taste because she could sense the restlessness in him.

He told her a few times last night that he
needed
to be gone in the morning. Yet, here he was, making her breakfast and then letting Katie have her way with him. She got the distinct impression he didn’t want to leave any more than she wanted to let him. She
also
got the impression Marcos wasn’t harnessed easily, and she understood. Grayson had tried for many years to keep her in check and where she belonged. It hadn’t worked out.

Maybe they were more alike than she realized.

There was a side of her that really enjoyed the rebellious streak Marcos brought out of her. She realized now that’s what had changed after the accident. That’s where the boldness came from. The rebellion Marcos had unknowingly brought out of her on New Years.

She would never force him to stay here. She wouldn’t even beg and plead and try to manipulate him like other women might, but she certainly wasn’t going to kick him out like he tried to make her promise last night.

If he wanted to stay, she was more than fine with that.

“Ay Dios mio.” He groaned and arched his back when she took him deeper in her mouth while wrapping her hand around the base of his cock, stroking it.

Okay, now that was extremely sexy.

He was just so strong. So daring. So damn tempting.

Having Marcos under her, with his hand in her hair and his cock in her mouth, left her more than a little wet despite being very sore this morning. Who cared? He’d probably leave at the end of the day, because she wasn’t delusional enough to think he’d stay in a place like Garnet.