Last Man Standing

“Answer me, dammit.”

She heaved her body up to fight his weight. “Get off me!”

“Or what, Elena? What will you do, my hot-tempered little virgin?”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Get off me or I’ll scream.”

Instead of doing as she asked, he reached out, clamped his hands around her wrists and wrenched her arms over her head. Leaning forward, he said, “They’re used to hearing screaming coming from these back rooms—that’s why the music is so loud. Go ahead, Elena, wear yourself out.”

She didn’t scream, but she renewed her fight, twisting and wriggling while she began to curse him using every filthy word she knew in both English and Italian.

He shifted his body, and she suddenly felt more of him. Too much of him. She saw his jaw tighten. His nostrils flare. She stopped thrashing.

“I thought you were going to scream,” he taunted. “What are you waiting for?”

Above her head, he collected both of her wrists into one hand, then ran the fingers on his free hand down her throat and over the swell of her left breast. She sucked in her breath, shook her head. “No! Lucky, please…”

“I’m going to ask you some questions, Elena. And you’re going to answer them. Say, yes, Lucky, I’m going to answer your questions. All of them.”

His voice was soft, his breath eighty-proof. Could a person get drunk on fumes? Elena wondered. For she had to be drunk; why else would she have made him that stupid offer? Why else was she suddenly feeling like a cat needing to be stroked?

“Elena—”

“Yes, Lucky,” she managed. “I’m going to answer all of your questions.”

“Frank has no idea you’re here, right?”

She swallowed hard, shook her head. “I don’t think so. He shouldn’t discover I’m gone until around seven tomorrow morning.”

He slipped her top button out of its bound buttonhole. “And then?”

“And then he’ll find the note.”

His hands were warm on her flesh, torturously gentle. His fingers moved to the second button. “The note says what?”

Intoxicated, yes—his breath was making her dizzy.

“What’s in the note, Elena?”

She licked her lips, stared at his mouth. “I told him that I went to visit friends in Miami. College friends.”

She felt his sweet breath touch her breasts and knew another button was lost. She tried not to think about it, about what he could see. About the fact that the bra she wore was pale blue and as sheer as fishnet.

“Mother suggested a vacation,” she said. “I told Frank to tell her that I would call in a few days.”

Another button.

Elena heard herself moan when his lips brushed her mouth. Oh, God… “Piacere,” she whispered.

“Please what, Elena?”

She closed her eyes. “Please…no more. Please stop.”

Immediately his hand lifted off the fourth button, and she felt him draw himself upward. Though he remained straddling her, he let go of her wrists. In an ultrasoft voice, he demanded, “Open your eyes.”

She blinked them open, fought to breathe.

“The lesson here, sweet Elena, is that I could take you with or without your consent. I could take…everything. All of it, as you say. I could hurt you. Scar you. Even kill you. Never play a game you can’t win, Elena. And there are damn few you will ever win if you play with me.”

His gaze dropped to the swell of her breasts, and Elena knew his interest centered on her puckered dark nipples. He stared at her for a few seconds longer, then he began to work the buttons back into the holes.

He was on the second button from the top when he let out a strangled groan—a sound of pure agony that stiffened his body like a knife had been driven into the middle of his back.

Elena watched as he wrenched hard to the right and rolled off her. A second later he was sprawled beside her on his back, his expression fighting an invisible pain.

Lucky recognized the rush of pain and knew what it meant. Flattened out on the bed, he gritted his teeth against the burning sensation racing the length of his spine, and the knowledge of what the outcome would be in a matter of seconds.

Not now, he thought, not the hell now. Not here and not in front of her.

He continued to lie there while the hot pain worked its way into his thighs, then began to melt away, taking with it the feeling in his limbs.

“What is it?”

Sweat beading his forehead, Lucky glanced at Elena. She was sitting up and staring down at him. He would have liked to have been sitting up, too. But without looking like a snake dragging a fifty-pound ball and chain, he wasn’t going to be able to haul his body up.

“What’s happening?” She slid off the bed. “It’s your back, isn’t it? Something happened to your back.”

“What do you know about my back?”

She stepped between his open legs where they hung limp off the bed. “I heard Joey talking to Frank about some kind of surgery you’re supposed to have.”

“You just happened to hear?”

“All right, I was eavesdropping. And why shouldn’t I? In a matter of weeks I learned that my father who isn’t really my father is living a double life. Has two grown sons. And that they all work for the mafia.”

“We don’t work for the mafia, Elena.”

“Sorry. You are the mafia.”

Not liking that definition any better, Lucky checked his watch. The paralysis he’d been experiencing for the past three weeks was erratic. He could be up and moving within ten minutes or down and out for an hour.

“I take it this has happened before. You don’t look too surprised.”

No, he wasn’t surprised. His doctor had warned him that the scar tissue from his old wound had begun to strangle his spinal cord. Internal adhesions—those were the words used—were constricting the blood flow. He’d had a few problems with the scar over the years. But it had gotten a helluva lot worse since Milo’s boys had worked him over a few months ago and he’d wound up in the hospital losing a kidney.

“Should I call someone?”

“No.”