Primal: London Mob Book Two (6 page)

It’s your fault,
a voice whispered in her head.
You’re the one who had to go to Madrid.

The voice was right. This danger wasn’t at all due to Farrell. But someday — she hoped — this danger would pass. She and Lily would be able to move back into the little flat in London, walk the streets unafraid, without someone like Leo trailing them every step of the way. The current danger was temporary. Being with Farrell would mean new danger. Never-ending danger. It would mean armed guards and panic rooms, security systems and television monitors. Danger as a way of life.

“Follow me,” Farrell said, stepping out into the hall.

He closed the door behind them and rearmed the alarm, then started toward the front of the house. They made a sharp turn down the other hall and continued through the kitchen to the terrace doors.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He turned to look at her. “I want you to feel safe, Jenna. This is the only way I know to do that.”

He opened the glass doors, and Jenna followed him out onto the terrace. The air was hot and arid. A faint breeze blew in from the trees beyond the house, and she caught the scent of rosemary mixed with oranges.

“Where is Lily going?” Farrell asked, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket as they crossed the stone terrace.

“With Ernesto and Anthony,” Jenna said. “To see the goats.”

They stepped onto the lawn and Farrell chuckled. “The goats are an endless source of fascination to the children.”

She looked up at him, trying not to notice the way his shoulders pulled at the T-shirt, the patch of skin visible between his collar, the way his thighs stretched the faded jeans. “Children?”

“Ernesto isn’t the only one here who has children,” he said. “This is a working farm of sorts. We sell oranges, bottle olive oil, even make wine. It takes more people than you might think. A lot of them have children.”

“And they all live here?” Jenna asked.

“Not all of them,” he said. “But quite a few. The others live nearby. Their children sometimes accompany them here to work.” He hesitated. “I like having them here, although I’m not often here myself.”

She heard the pain in his voice and turned her attention to the field spread out in front of them. She had never put any kind of limitation on Farrell’s time with Lily, but she knew it wasn’t the same as seeing her every morning and night, as reading her a bedtime story or smelling her hair straight from the bath.

They crossed over from the grass to a stretch of dry brush leading to a stand of trees surrounding the property. Farrell stopped a few feet from the tree line and lifted his hand to his mouth, whistling into the trees. A moment later, Jenna heard the thud of boots on the ground, and a brick wall of a man in black tactical gear stepped from the shadows. He was holding what looked like a semi-automatic weapon, and she was almost positive those were grenades hanging from his belt.

“Mr. Black,” he said.

“Sinclair,” Farrell said. “Call the men, will you?”

“All of them?” the man asked.

“All of them.”

The man shouted into the trees. “All hands on deck. That’s an order.”

For a few seconds the air was nothing but the thud of boots, followed by the shuffle of footsteps through dried grass. One man stepped from the trees.

Then another. And another.

When it finally grew silent, the men were lined up around the property, no more than twenty feet apart. She let her gaze sweep the field, shielding her eyes from the sun. The men were like shadowed statues, still as stone, and while she couldn’t make out the details of the ones across the property — they were no more than a smudge in the distance — she had no doubt they were as well armed as the men in front of her.

“This is…” She shook her head. “This is crazy.”

His face was stony. “Protecting you and Lily isn’t crazy. I made a mistake in Cornwall. When I say it won’t happen again, I mean it.”

She turned away from the men, overwhelmed by the show of force that had been assembled for them.

Farrell nodded at the man named Sinclair. “Thank you. You can go back to work."

The man gave a signal with his hand, and the other men stepped back into the trees. When Jenna scanned the property, it was as if they’d never been there at all.

“Why do they stay hidden?” she asked.

“I don’t want to scare Lily,” he said. “Or you. They monitor the property from the trees, and they have a direct line of communication to the security room inside the house. It would take the army of a first world country to get through them to the house, but if someone tries, they’ll alert the house, and the house will immediately go into lock down.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means you and Lily and anyone else who’s vulnerable goes straight to the panic rooms with two of my most deadly men while everyone else deals with the threat.”

Jenna rubbed her arms, trying to banish the chill she felt in spite of the summer heat. “So Lily would be locked up then? Waiting for you to eliminate whoever might be coming after her then?”

Farrell’s face hardened. “You can’t have it both ways, Jenna. You want her to be safe, but you want her to be free. That’s not how the world works, and I think deep down you know that. I’ve done everything I can to make fortifications — to this estate and the others I own — invisible to the naked eye. But I won’t let you down again. If someone wants to come for you, they’ll have to come through all of this first.” He hesitated, his voice hardening. “And then they’ll have to come through me.”

She didn’t need to ask how hard that would be. The impossibility of it was evident in his voice. Someone would reach her and Lily over Farrell’s dead body.

She shuddered. She didn’t want to think about Farrell being hurt. Didn’t want to think about Lily being under the kind of threat that required armed guards and panic rooms.

“Can we go back now?” she asked.

He nodded. They didn’t speak on the way back to the house. She wondered if Farrell was thinking about the impossibility of their situation. Of the impossibility of compromise between true safety and the kind of preparations that had to be made to insure it in his business.

Then again, Farrell didn’t think anything was impossible. He was utterly convinced of his ability to move mountains, to defy even death. Looking up at him, she almost believed it.

F
arrell leaned back
in his chair, rubbing the stubble at his chin and thinking about Jenna. He’d been torn about showing her the security measures at the villa. He wanted her to know she was safe, but he knew how sensitive she was to the idea of being locked up, to having Lily overly sheltered from the real world.

He didn’t mind sheltering Lily from the real world a single bit. In his experience, the real world sucked. He’d rather see her running barefoot in Tuscany, playing with goats, riding horses in Cornwall, playing on the beach in the French Riviera in full view of discreet but heavily armed guards.

In the end, he’d come clean because he didn’t want secrets between them. Jenna wasn’t the kind of woman to bury her head in the sand. She wanted all the information, and she wanted to make her own decisions about what to do with it. He wasn’t going to pretend to be a different kind of man. Not even for her. It would only hurt them both.

He was who he was. He loved her like no one else ever would. He could protect her and Lily like no other man could. But the decision to come to him had to be hers, and it had to come with full knowledge of who he was and what his life meant.

Not that any of that made it easy to stay away from her.

In fact, it was fucking hard. He’d stood behind her last night, her body warm and fragrant with the smell of her perfume — vanilla and something old fashioned that made him think of wild roses growing out of old stone. He’d wanted to slip his hands up her shirt, claim her breasts before he took her from behind. He knew exactly how she would feel. How hot and wet. How tight. He knew the way she would arch her back as he grabbed her hips, drove into her over and over. He knew the way she would sound when her breath caught in her throat as she climbed toward orgasm, the feel of her pussy tightening around him, making it harder and even more pleasurable to drag out of her, sink back in.

He shifted in the chair behind his desk, adjusting his cock. Fuck. What kind of power did this woman have over him that he couldn’t even think about her without getting hard? Without wanting not only to fuck her senseless, but to own her body and soul?

“They’re here.”

Leo’s voice broke into his thoughts, and he looked up to find the other man standing in the door of the study. “Bring them in.”

“Want me to frisk them?” Leo asked.

“Not necessary.” Farrell pulled his weapon from the waistband of his jeans and slipped it into the top drawer of the desk.

Leo disappeared into the hall and returned a few minutes later with a tall, willowy brunette. She was trailed by a dark haired man in an expertly tailored suit that Farrell recognized as Armani.

He stood, held out his hand as the woman came into the room, her stride easy and purposeful in five inch heels.

“Carolina.”

Her full lips turned up at the corners in a smile that was both amused and provocative. “Farrell Black.”

Her eyes raked his body dispassionately, someone not in the market for a car but window shopping nonetheless. He took the opportunity to get a read on the woman who had inherited her father’s business after the fall of the Syndicate. Agostino Barone had been head of th

e Florence territory under Raneiro Donati. Unfortunately, he’d been so closely tied to the man that he’d been extradited to the US and imprisoned along with several of his Italian cohorts. Farrell had met him a handful of times and had been slightly unsettled by the calculating look in his eyes, the brevity that made it difficult even to carry on a conversation.

He’d been surprised to hear that his eldest daughter had inherited the business. Organized crime the world over was still largely a man’s world. There were exceptions, but they were just that, and Carolina Barone was certainly among the most exceptional of all.

“Please, sit,” Farrell said, gesturing to the leather chair on the other side of his desk.

She did, and he got a glimpse of long, lithe legs through a slit in the black dress that hugged her curves like liquid ebony. Behind her, the bodyguard stood to one side of the door, legs slightly apart, hands crossed in front of his body. Leo mimicked the position on the other side of the door. It was the worst kind of posturing, but it was necessary. The Syndicate may be dead, but their world was alive and well, ruled by rituals and tradition that went back hundreds of years. In London, Farrell made the rules.

But they weren’t in London anymore.

“To what do I owe this invitation?” Carolina asked. Her English was accented just enough to be charming.

Farrell smiled. “I offered to come to you.”

She waved away the statement. “It's a pleasure to get out of the city in the summer.”

He nodded. “I wanted to let you know I’m in town.”

She regarded him with cool brown eyes. “We no longer operate under the rules of the Syndicate.”

“I’m aware,” he said. “Nevertheless, I wanted to do you the courtesy, and to make it clear that my purpose here is… personal.”

She raised a perfectly groomed brow. “Personal?”

“That's right.”

She tapped one manicured hand on her knee. “Anything I can help you with?”

He thought about it. “How tuned into arrivals and departures are you?”

“In Florence?”

He nodded.

She favored him with a patronizing smile. “Would you have asked my father such a question?”

“No,” he said. “I would have gone straight to Raneiro.”

She waited a beat to reply, and he wondered if she was considering his response or simply trying to throw him off guard.

He should have wished her good luck. The only person who threw him off guard was currently wandering the villa, oblivious to the fact that he’d soon be leaving her here with Lily while he went to Amsterdam.

“Fair enough,” Carolina said. “Suffice it to say I have my ear to the ground, particularly at the municipal airports and the charter terminals. Why do you ask?”

“I need to leave my daughter and her mother here,” he said. “And I need to know they’re safe.”

She didn’t bother to hide her surprise. “Your daughter?”

He held her gaze. “That’s right.”

She tipped her head. “You’ll be leaving them here? In Tuscany?”

“Yes, but I’m concerned about their safety, and I need to know if someone… unusual comes to town.”

“This is Florence,” she said. “You’ll have to be more specific than unusual.”

“Specifically, I need to know if a heavily armed contingent arrives by charter, or in lieu of that, someone powerful who seems to have no reason to be here.”

She sighed. “You would make my job easier if you could give me a name.”

“I’d love to,” he said. “But I don’t have one yet. That’s why I’m leaving town. I need to pin down the threat. Right now I only know that I narrowly prevented my daughter and her mother from being murdered in an alley in London, and I can’t be sure that whoever ordered it won’t keep trying.”

She looked down, studying her nails. “And does this have anything to do with what happened in Cornwall?”

He wasn't surprised that she knew about the invasion in Cornwall. Their world was, for all intents and purposes, still small. Word traveled fast and far.

“It does.”

She looked around the study, gazed out the window. “You appear to have good security here.”

“The best,” he said. “But if this goes as high as I think it does, it may not matter. I need all the help I can get. Let me know if you suspect someone might have found them, and I will be in your debt.”

She smiled. “In my debt?”

He nodded.

“I rather like people in my debt. Some more than others.”

If it had been anyone but Carolina Barone, he might have thought there was sexual innuendo in the words. But her gaze was cold, lacking any kind of personal interest. His eyes skidded to the guard manning the door. Farrell recognized the other man as one of Agostino’s guards, but there was something new in his eyes. Something proprietary. Was it possible Carolina was having a fling with her bodyguard?

Interesting.

“Then you’re in luck,” he said. “Will you let me or Leo know if you get wind of anything unusual?”

She stood, smoothing her skirt. “I can do that, although I can’t promise you security. Without the Syndicate, the rules are… in flux. I’m not looking to make enemies. I simply want to continue my father’s business in his absence.”

“I understand,” Farrell said, standing. “Fair warning is all I ask.”

“That I can do.”

He shook her hand, marveling at the strange combination of cool, soft skin and the grip that made it clear Carolina Barone wasn’t someone to be trifled with, however elegant she appeared.

“Thank you.”

She smiled. “You’re welcome. I hope I get to meet your daughter one day.” She hesitated, and a something sad seemed to pass over her features. “I rather like children.”

She turned, and Farrell couldn’t help admiring the straight line of her back, the curve of her hips and she sashayed to the door. There would never be a woman who set him on fire like Jenna, but from a purely clinical standpoint, he would bet money Carolina was the toast of Florence, possibly the whole of Italy.

Her bodyguard watched her hungrily as she approached, held the door, then exited on her heels without a word. Leo followed, presumably to show them out. He reappeared in Farrell’s study a few minutes later.

“Can we trust them?” he asked, leaning against the door.

“I think so. As much as we can trust anyone,” Farrell said.

Leo nodded. “Now what?”

“Now I tell Jenna I’m going to Amsterdam. I need to find Erik Karlsen. And the sooner the better.”

“She’s not going to like it,” he said.

“Irrelevant,” Farrell said. “She’s safer here. She’ll do as she’s told.”