Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (31 page)

He worked his way up, lavishing attention on her other breast, flicking his tongue over her nipple until it ached for more, and then he forged a path up her throat to her mouth and plunged his tongue between her lips.

She folded her legs and hooked her ankles against the small of his back, and that shift brought his cock right to her. With the merest lift of her hips, she took him in, and she was so wet for him that he slid deep by simply reacting to her movement.

He tore his mouth from hers with a gasp and then went still, and Tina suddenly remembered about his breathing. It was labored and heavy, with a rough edge on his inhales. She knew the sound and knew he was struggling. He was horizontal, too, and that made his fight harder.

His tank was where he’d left it, at the door. They’d have to break apart for him to get it, and they needed to change positions, but when she moved in that way, he held her in place and shook his head. He dropped his head to her shoulder, at her good ear—he always leaned toward her good ear—and she listened to him fight to regain his lungs. His chest heaved unsteadily against hers.

And somehow, through her worry and attention for him, Tina’s arousal grew. She was dripping wet. The muscles holding him inside her quivered, and her own breath shook. She held onto him and fought the urge to flex and thrust while he struggled to breathe.

Finally, he moved on his own, rocking against her, each thrust slow, steady, deep, full, until he’d built a rhythm in time with his recovering breath. She breathed with him, moved with him, and felt every atom of their bodies joined.

They didn’t rush. They weren’t rough with or demanding of each other. They held each other and moved together, breathed together, felt together. As one. And when Tina’s pleasure in their connection became a need demanding release, Joey was with her, his need keeping time with hers.

Both shaking, both silent but for their breath, they came together.

When it was over, Joey eased out of her but didn’t loosen his hold. He pulled her with him as he rolled to his back and settled her body on his. His breathing seemed heavy, but fine. Almost normal.

“Want to stay,” were the first words he’d spoken since they’d begun. They rumbled against her deaf ear, on his chest.

Tina nodded and held on. She never wanted him to leave again.

~ 21 ~

She was so fucking skinny now. It made him want to wrap her up in bubble wrap and tuck her into his coat.

After weeks with her jaw wired shut, and with everything else she’d suffered through, Tina must have lost twenty pounds. She’d been slender before—not skinny, and not without curves, but she hadn’t carried extra weight. And she was only average height, maybe a little shorter. She hadn’t had twenty pounds to lose.

Now, her ribs, collarbones, and hip bones stood out, and her knees and elbows seemed too big for her legs and arms. As he sat behind her on the bench in the gym and steadied her arms, he worried that even the five-pound dumbbells she was working with were too much for her frail stems.

Joey remembered that post-recovery weakness. It was much more than weight loss, more than fatigue. It had felt as though his body had aged fifty years. Joints ached. Muscles constricted. Everything inside him had been stiff and almost
dusty
. And he’d been fit as fuck before his injury.

Tina wasn’t a workout warrior and had never been. She led an insanely busy life, and her jobs kept her moving. She wasn’t an overindulger in either food or drink. So she’d had a decent—a
beautiful
—body naturally. Soft and sleek, a little jiggle in her rear, and a very fine rack. But she wasn’t toned, and her muscles weren’t used to the work involved in working out.

Joey had been surprised when, late one night earlier that week, she’d stood naked at her full-length mirror and pounded on her protruding hipbones. When he’d come up behind her and laid his hands over hers, calming her, she’d met his eyes in the mirror and said, “Gym.”

Once she’d found her first word, each day she seemed to have another, or sometimes a few. She wasn’t able to write yet, or build sentences, and she had to think about the way she formed each sound, but she was improving at a pace that had everyone hoping for a miracle now—that she might fully recover, or close to it.

In the two weeks since she’d first said
Mimi
, she’d gained a couple dozen words and was always pushing for more. Her therapist, Nancy, had said that the process would replicate the way she’d first learned to talk and write as a child, though it might go more quickly, especially if she worked hard and smart.

Tina was a smart, hard worker.

Which was why she was at the gym with him again, for the second time this week. Between the two of them and their respective verbal limitations, it had taken a few minutes to figure out that she wanted to join him at the gym, that she was willing to get up at his ungodly construction-worker hour to do it, and what she wanted to accomplish while she was there.

She wanted to reclaim the strength in her body as well as her mind, and now that she wasn’t working, at the RTC or at the market, at least not for the foreseeable future, she had time on her hands. Her recovery had become her job.

She was far more motivated than he’d been right after his injury. He’d wallowed for a long time, but she’d shaken off the bulk of her despair and depression quickly, as if they’d been wounds like all her others and had healed at the same rate.

Of course, he hadn’t had the love of his life at his side when he’d first come home from the hospital eleven years ago.

Tina did. She always would.

In leggings and a beater for her gym gear, with a pair of black Chucks on her feet, and a bandana around her head to cover the very short hair she hated, waving five-pound weights around, she looked like the newbie she was.

As she finished a second set of seated dumbbell chest flyes, her arms shook, and she was dripping sweat. Joey wrapped his hands around her hands and brought them to the bench between her legs. He kissed her bare, bony shoulder.

“Enough.”

She shook her head. “Mmmore.”

He took the dumbbells from her and stood to take them to the rack. “Enough. …Don’t get hurt. …Take time.”

The loud huff behind him as he racked the weights was plenty effective in conveying her irritation. Grinning, he picked up a set of forty-pound dumbbells and went back to the bench.

She made way for him and stood over him while he lay back on the bench for his flyes.

“Sh-sh-shshow…ffff.”

Hearing that she’d tried for ‘showoff’—and ‘sh’ was a new sound—his grin widened until it nearly broke his face. “Yep.”

~oOo~

On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, Joey was alone in the office. They closed down for this week and Christmas week, and ran a skeleton crew throughout the holidays, working only on the most critical interior jobs, but years ago Joey had made a habit of coming in a few times during the week while it was perfectly quiet, so he could focus on the next season’s schedule.

Tina had therapy and then was spending the afternoon with the Pagano women. The Cortis and Paganos were having Thanksgiving dinner together this year. They’d even managed to get Genie to agree to come along.

Tina’s mother had a special wheelchair that she could be strapped into, and they had a van that was adapted for it. But Genie was proud and vain, she was ashamed of her current condition, and she refused to leave her house—or even her room—except for doctor visits. This Thanksgiving would mark the first time since her stroke that she’d been out in the world to socialize.

She’d agreed because Tina’s first full sentence had been to ask her to come.

Joey was standing in the reception area, digging through Nikki’s overly complex filing system for a missing piece of an RFP, when the front door opened and let in a push of cold air. Expecting to see one of his brothers, he turned.

Angie had come in.

Tina was making bounding strides, improving noticeably every day. Joey’s speech had improved, too, over the past three months. Slightly. It was as good as the best it had ever been since the shooting, but it was no better. He’d come to terms with the reality that his way of talking would always be slow, difficult, halting, and incomplete. He’d stopped thinking of himself as stupid because of it, however.

He would always have to work to speak, and when his emotions or stress levels were high, he would have to work harder. Facing Angie for the first time since the hospital, Joey felt a powerful surge of anger and wariness. So he didn’t even attempt to speak.

“Joey. I saw your Jeep outside. Looked like you were the only one here, so I thought I’d come in.” Angie held out his hand.

Joey stared down at it. He should shake the man’s hand. He
wanted
Angie to be reunited with his family. His own issues with him aside, Tina needed it. There was a hole in that house, and it needed to be filled.

But he hated the son of a bitch, and he blamed him for Tina’s hurt. He could forgive Nick more easily than Angie because Tina was not Nick’s blood. She was Angie’s.

And that was the point, right? Angie was Tina’s family. And someday, he hoped, his own family.

As Angie’s offered hand faltered, Joey caught it, and they shook. He could feel Angie’s relief in his grip.

“You’ll talk to me?”

“What?”

“I just…I need your help, Joe.”

There was a cluster of leatherette arm chairs in the corner that were supposedly for waiting clients, but that wasn’t really how business worked these days, so they never got used. Joey waved toward them, and he and Angie sat down.

Anger and wariness prevailed in his mood, so Joey sat rigidly and waited.

The tension between them was old and deep. It reached back to the very first days that Angie had been a Pagano man, during the brief period that Joey had been as well. It reached back to the death of James Auberon, Sabina’s first husband. A sadistic bastard who had done horrible shit to Sabina.

Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie, the Pagano Brothers for whom the organization was named, had intervened, bringing their business into a family matter. They had killed James Auberon for what he’d done to Sabina. ‘Killed’ wasn’t nearly a strong enough term for what they had done to that man. Annihilated was better. Deconstructed. And they’d kept him alive for as long as they possibly could.

Joey and Angie had both taken part. It had been something of an initiation for them into the business. A test. Joey had been sickened by what he’d been told to do. He’d done it, but he’d been literally sick, puking in the middle of Auberon’s bloody mess, and he’d almost cried.

He’d had nightmares for months after; even after he’d been shot, still that night haunted him. To this day, he sometimes had flashbacks.

On the other hand, Angie had been energized. And he’d had nothing but contempt for Joey’s struggle with it. Their friendship had ended while they were still covered in James Auberon’s blood and guts.

Angie had brought that night up when he’d threatened Joey in the Corti dining room.

Joey had known that night that he wasn’t cut out for a life in the Uncles’ world, but he hadn’t known how to get out. Technically, he could have simply asked; he hadn’t been anywhere close to being made yet. But he had made a clear rhetorical statement when he’d gone to the other side of the pews—a statement to his father above anyone—and the thought of crawling back to Pop had made him just as sick as cutting pieces out of a screaming man had.

The shooting had at least given him an honorable way out and reconciled him with his father. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that his disabilities were a fair exchange, but it had at least done that.

Angie cleared his throat and chuckled awkwardly. “I, uh…I didn’t plan this. I was driving by and saw the Jeep, and I just pulled in.”

“You want…help?” Joey hated to speak around Angie. Tina’s brother had always been an ass about the way he talked. And that confrontation in the Corti dining room so many months before still burned.

There was no derision in Angie now. “Yeah, yeah. I’m goin’ out of my head, Joe. I need back in. I thought I could be okay on my own, but it’s eatin’ into me in bad ways. I need my family.”

Joey shrugged. He didn’t know what to do to help.

“You won’t help me? I know I’m a bastard. It’s easier that way. But this is too much. I don’t know…I don’t know how to make things right. I guess I forgot how to apologize.”

“There’s no…no sorry, Angie. …No right.” He didn’t have the words to say Angie had already apologized, and that doing it more wouldn’t help. In a situation like this, with so much damage, an apology did nothing. There was no way to make things right.

That didn’t mean Joey was unwilling to help, for Tina’s sake, but he didn’t know what could be done.

“Fuck!” Angie raked his hands through his gelled hair. With his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, he continued, “She just wanted a ride. Things were hot, but we thought they were on the cooling side. We were still keeping eyes open, but hoping the trouble was over. Julie was handled. J.J.’d renewed his oath. I was at the arcade with the Face, leaning on Slattery. Tina called and wanted a ride. I put her off, but she was gonna walk home, and the storm was so fucked. I didn’t want her making that walk, in the dark and the rain on her own. I’m a bastard, but not that bad. I thought I could run out, get her home, get back. I thought the storm would keep trouble away.”

He looked up. “What they did to her…I can’t stop seeing it.
Hearing
it. All night, all day, it’s in my head. Fuck, Joe. I’d
never
—I hold everybody at the end of my arm so shit like this won’t happen!”

Joey had one idea, and it could blow up in everybody’s face. But it was all he could think of. “Come…Thursday. Dinner.”

“Thanksgiving?”

Joey nodded. “Our house. Two o’clock.”

“I’m invited at Nick’s.” Though both sides of the Paganos had shared most holidays for years, Nick and Bev sometimes hosted Thanksgiving for the men of the Pagano Brothers and their families.