Bitter Spirits (19 page)

AIDA STARED AT WINTER'S HARD COCK. SHE COULDN'T HELP IT.
It was long and shockingly thick, jutting proudly from a forest of dark curls. And it curved upward at the end like the stalk of a shaded plant desperately seeking sunlight.

His knuckles brushed her belly as he casually took himself in hand. One stroke pulled the foreskin back to expose a fat, glistening tip. “What do you think?” he asked, half mischievous, half serious, as if he already knew the answer but wanted to hear her say it.

What did she
think
?

She thought he was bigger and more exciting than anything she'd seen before. She thought maybe the crazy pornographic drawing on that wicked postcard of his wasn't as exaggerated as she'd believed.

After another stroke, he aimed toward her hip and rubbed himself across the scars there. It could've been crude; it wasn't. He was speaking to her in a primal language she was disarmed to realize she not only understood, but craved.

She wanted to speak that language, too.

When she reached between them, he guided her hand to replace his. He was shockingly hot and smooth, velvet over a core of steel. The fingers circling his girth did not meet her thumb.

She ran her palm down his length and felt him shudder. His hands cupped the back of her head as he kissed her hotly, his tongue filling her mouth above as he filled her hand below. She was inexplicably happy, feeling an urge to pleasure him, to make him feel as good as she'd felt last night. He made low, hungered noises as she stroked him with more confidence, then pulled back on a groan. “You have to stop,” he said in a gravelly voice. “I've wanted you too badly for too long.”

A thrill raced through her.

He urged her toward the bathroom door, grabbing the round tin off the vanity along the way, then herded her to the bed.

Rain pounded on the balcony a few feet away. Cool wind carried scents of the city into the room—concrete and rust and brick—as they crawled onto the bed together. He dropped the tin on the embroidered matelassé coverlet and wrapped her in his arms, kissing her mouth, her neck.

Pleasure rippled over her, flooding her body from the outside in as they rolled together. They were skin to skin: her breasts pressed against the whorls of hair covering his chest, his erection trapped against her belly, her legs tangling with his, intertwined. Just this indulgence alone was an extravagance, and she explored the planes and contours of his body, touching him freely without shame.

Such a joy.

She marveled at how solid he was. Not just his chest and arms, but his back. Muscles she'd never felt before on another man. Her hands found the twin dimples above his buttocks that she'd often fantasized about touching since spotting them at Velma's. And when she pressed her fingers into those dimples and traced their shape, his mouth opened wide against her cheek—

And he
bit
her.

Not hard. Not gentle, either.

It was startling. Strange. And it sent desire racing over her skin in waves. When he licked the place he'd bitten, her hips pushed against him, a response she couldn't have controlled if she tried. He pushed back, rubbing his length against the triangle of hair between her legs. “Are you wet for me?” he whispered against her cheek.

“Yes.”

He frisked her curls with questing fingers, cupping her as she spread her legs. When he touched her aching center, she cried out and moved against his hand. “All of this for me?” he murmured, kissing her ear as he began stroking her. “You're amazing.”

Her eyes fluttered shut as she gave in and relished the intense sensations he stoked up as he rubbed a thumb down and around her clitoris, making her whimper. It was too much, too intense. “Please—”

“Please, what?” He slid a thick finger inside her. “This?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded far away as he stroked her, putting pressure against the same aching place he had the night before. A second finger stretched her. Then he pushed deeper, twisting those fingers inside her, as if he were testing.
Making a way for himself
, she thought, and contracted around him, testing back. He groaned.

Extracting his fingers, he rubbed his thumb along her swollen entrance and pushed himself up to kneel on one knee. She lay on her back and blinked up at him, squirming under his touch, her gaze moving over his chiseled, aroused body. He took her hand and guided it between her legs, pressing her own fingers on top of his, slick and warm. So foreign and intimate to feel him there. Until he moved his hands away. She started to retreat as well, but he stopped her. “No, keep them right there.”

“Winter—”

He reached for the metal tin. “I want to watch you keeping yourself ready for me.”

She hesitated, but savage instincts took over.

“Yes, just like that. Most beautiful thing I've ever seen.” He watched her dazedly for a moment, eyes hooded, then pried the lid off the tin and retrieved a small piece of rolled rubber cinched in the middle by a sleeve of paper. She'd never seen one before, and watched in fascination as Winter removed the paper band and fit the rubber sheath over his tip. “Don't stop,” he instructed, eyes between her legs. Only when she continued did he unroll the sheath over the length of his cock, practically strangling it.

“Looks uncomfortable,” she said, more compliment than criticism.

“It's a tight fit. But you'll be even tighter, and I can't wait. Come here.” He slung an arm under one of her thighs and tugged her closer, parting her legs wider, until he was kneeling between them. Prodding her fingers away, he took himself in hand and rubbed the head back and forth through her slickness. It felt extraordinary. Better than his fingers. And when he settled himself against her entrance, her heart hammered furiously.

Everything seemed to pause as her awareness sharpened in that hanging moment. She smelled the city rain, felt it mist across her arm as the wind blew. She felt the mattress springs beneath her back. Saw the diffused light from the bedside lamp and heard the alarm clock softly ticking.

And then he pushed inside her, and it all disappeared.

She cried out in surprise, her shoulders coming off the bed as her muscles tensed. It was too much, all at once. He was too big; she was too small. An unyielding fullness that stretched her uncomfortably. And he was barely inside her. Without thinking, she tried to scoot away.

“It's okay,” he assured her in a strained voice, flattening his palm on her stomach while the other hand reached for her hip. “Just relax. I'm not going to move.”

She remained propped up on her elbows, breasts heaving, willing herself to calm. But she didn't have to try. He was right. It was okay. It was
so
okay, after a few moments she found herself tilting her hips upward to urge him deeper inside. He groaned and pushed with her, then retreated, pulling all the way out. Her body instantly changed its mind and decided she was now empty and aching, which was far worse than before. “Winter,” she pleaded sharply, unable to communicate anything more. By some miracle, he understood, and was pushing back into her again, this time fully, all in one long stroke.

Nothing had ever felt so good.

Nothing.

The moan that came out of her mouth twined with his, carried through the open balcony doors, and got lost in the storm as he began moving inside her. She tried to remain still, vaguely remembering Freddy's complaints that she moved too much, but when she lost herself and rotated her hips, Winter said in a tortured voice, “That's right—grind on me. Christ, you feel good.”

She fell back and adjusted her legs, trying to find a place to put them. Everything about him was big—even his hips—and she was unsure of herself. He seemed to understand her floundering and lowered himself over her body, resting his weight on forearms that pressed into the mattress on either side of her head. Then he hooked one of her legs around his waist and sunk deeper into her.

“O-o-oh.”

“Too much?”

She wrapped her other leg around him in answer.

“Dig your heels into my ass,” he commanded roughly. She did. It opened her legs wider and changed the angle again.

“Yes!” she cried out with more enthusiasm than intended. “Oh yes!”

He chuckled in response, and she felt so happy, she laughed, too, breathless. Then his mouth found hers and she accepted it, greedily kissing him back as he rocked into her steadily. A lock of dark, damp hair brushed across her face as he dipped his head to her neck, sucking and kissing. His shoulders bunched. She ran her hands through the hair on his chest, then skimmed around his sides, feeling every taut muscle in his broad torso tight and hard and shifting beneath her exploring fingers as he moved.

She made strange, savage noises, but he felt so good, she couldn't make herself care.

“Aida, my God,” he whispered against her ear. “You feel like heaven. So perfect. Even better than I imagined.”

Her pleasure was honed by his words, abruptly quickening. The slick muscles at her center wanted to clench and bear down on him, but he was too big. She cried out in frustration, feeling the urgency of what was coming, almost frightened by it.

And it was gathering within her with alarming speed.

If he'd brought her to orgasm the night before with his fingers and mouth, that was one thing. This was wholly different. He was
inside
her. Sharing the same pleasure. Filling her. Surrounding her. She was humbled by the intensity of emotions that bloomed at the horizon and raced her thundering heart.

“Goddamn,” Winter cursed appreciatively as her center constricted around him again, this time with greater success.

“Oh,
God
, Winter! Please don't stop.”

“I won't, I won't,” he said, pumping his hips with urgency. “Come for me,
älskling
.”

She grasped his solid shoulders, slick with sweat. Her breath caught as she tightened around him a final time. Deliverance rocketed her to great heights and the world fell away. Euphoric spasms pulsed through her center, bringing wave after wave of astonishing pleasure. She shook. She whimpered. And just when she began to fall back down to earth, Winter pounded into her a handful of times with such intense strength, she opened her eyes to watch him.

Mouth slack and wide, he bucked, squinted his eyes closed, and bellowed out an extended cry that reverberated through her as he shuddered in her arms like a great, divine beast taken down by a single bullet.

She didn't know if she was the gun that fired the bullet or the hunter who'd pulled the trigger, but when he rolled to his side, taking her with him, and she heard his heartbeat pound in time with hers, slowing and heavy, she felt an unyielding sense of brutal possession and knew she had made a terrible miscalculation.

She was the one who'd been shot.

WINTER TOOK ONE LAST SWIG OF COFFEE, THEN PUSHED THE
rolling cart away from the bed with his bare foot. Two in the afternoon might be a brow-raising time for breakfast service, but the hotel staff didn't argue when he phoned down the request.

“That was the best meal I've had in years,” Aida said from his side, propped up on feather pillows. One bent freckled leg peeked out from beneath the white sheets. “Maybe there's something about your pro-breakfast stance.”

He rolled onto his left hip to face her. “Stick with me and you'll eat breakfast every day.”

She gave him a slow smile and closed her eyes, the picture of satisfaction. This is how he wanted to see her, stretching like a cat, cheeks flushed, eyes lazy. Unable to do anything more than lift a spoon. “Are they your customers?” she asked.

“Who?”

“This hotel.”

“No,” he said, eyeing the open condom tin on the bedside table. Only one of three left, dammit. He should've bought another tin. He'd never gone through an entire one in an afternoon; then again, he'd never bedded a woman who was so eager to help him empty it. “They aren't one of my customers. They just lost their supplier.”

She cracked open one eye. “Does this have to do with the raid last night?”

“Raids, and yes.”

“Tell me everything. Where did you go after you left?”

Winter heard his father's voice somewhere in the back of his mind, reciting a list of rules for bootlegging.
Never tell a woman details
was one of them. He'd warned him that pillow talk was the downfall of many a great man, and forbid him to tell even Paulina where their warehouses were, who their customers were, when the mother ships from Canada came into port. And he never did, mainly because Paulina never wanted to know.

While he was trying to decide how much to tell her, his eyes fell on the golden locket around her neck. “What's inside?” he asked, fingering the engraved floral pattern on the front.

“Just a photograph.” She sounded defensive, which set off warning bells inside his head. He clicked the small mechanism on the side before she could stop him. A tiny oval photograph was set inside. A young man.

“Who is this?”

“No one.” She tried to shut it, but he wouldn't let her. “Stop. It's just Sam.”

“One of your lovers?”

“No,” she said. “Sam Palmer. My brother.”

Winter was confused. “You told me you lived with a foster family.”

“I did. The Lanes. Sam and I were rescued from the earthquake together. He was a year older than me.”

He studied the photograph with greater interest. Perhaps there was some resemblance, hard to tell. Then he remembered what she told him when they were walking in Chinatown.
Everyone I've loved is dead.
“You said Sam
was
a year older than you. Is he . . .”

“Sam and I lived with the Lanes together in Baltimore until he turned eighteen. He joined the army in 1916 after President Wilson called for volunteers.”

“Did he end up in the war?”

“He got assigned to a cantonment in Virginia. He was there for six months, and was due to be deployed overseas when America entered the war. He was shot during a training exercise. Just a fluke accident.” In a blink, her eyes became bleary. “I didn't take it well. We were inseparable. He was my only real family—you know, flesh and blood.”

“I'm sorry.”

She gave him a tight smile. “The Lanes were killed in a train derailment a month later. I was seventeen. They had some money—not a lot, but they weren't poor. Only, they never officially adopted us. They thought they had, but Sam and I kept our surname. We called them Aunt and Uncle since we were little. And I think the surname confusion was mishandled in the paperwork. I don't think they ever knew. Mr. Lane's brother showed up for the funeral, and within two weeks, he'd fired the staff, sold the house, and dumped me off at an orphanage. This photograph is the only thing I was allowed to take with me. That and the clothes on my back.”

“Christ alive, Aida.”

“Good old Emmett Lane. Lovely man,” she said sourly. “I'd only met him once before. He never gave a damn about his own family, much less Sam and me, so it wasn't a big surprise in hindsight.” She snapped the locket shut. “Anyway, I lived in the orphanage until I finished school. It wasn't pleasant. When I turned eighteen, I got out of there as fast as I could and struck out on my own. Sam always told me to be independent, count on myself, no one else. And he never was afraid of my talents—he encouraged them.”

“Could he . . . do what you can do?”

She shook her head. “I started seeing ghosts when we moved to Baltimore. The Lanes just thought I was having nightmares about the earthquake, but Sam believed me. I didn't know I had channeling skills until he introduced me to another medium before he joined the army. Mrs. Stone. She took me under her wing after I left the orphanage. Gave me a room for a few months, showed me how to make money with my talents. Got me on my feet.”

“And you've been on your own for ten years?”

“Never look back, always move forward—that's what Sam always said. He wouldn't want me feeling sorry for myself, so I don't. I just keep getting up every day and moving along.” She smiled again, this time more genuinely.

“Live in the moment,” he said, repeating her sentiment from the night before.

“Exactly. Sam believed in the value of independence, and I honor his memory by appreciating today.”

So confident. But anyone could see the sadness beneath her bravado.

They were alike in a way. Both had lost their parents, and though he'd lost Paulina, Aida had not only lost a second set of parents, but her brother.

And then she was forced to support herself with no family help?

He tried to imagine Astrid in the same predicament and wondered how she'd fare. It made him feel ill to think about her utterly on her own. And even without the bootlegging fortune, even when they were just a fishing family, no man in his household would abandon a female. Not Astrid, not his mother, not Greta . . . not even Paulina. What kind of man does that? Not a real one.

Winter suddenly felt both more pity
and
respect for Aida.

“There. Now you know the story of my life,” she said.

He pushed her bangs back from her forehead and kissed her there, softly, lingering. When he pulled back, she met his gaze and something passed between them. Something that made his chest tighten. He just wasn't sure what it was.

She quickly redirected the subject. “So, you were about to tell me what happened last night with the raids.”

Oh . . . that again. He'd only known Aida for a couple of weeks, and already he'd violated all sorts of rules with her—his father was probably rolling over in his grave. But when she looked up at him with those big brown eyes, all he could hear was her angry accusation during their fight on the ride back from Ju's:
I told you things about me.

And now she'd told him even more.

His father had been right, no doubt. It was a sensible warning. But Winter was tired of being sensible. He'd tell her everything, give her the combination to his basement vault and all his bank account numbers if she'd meet him in this hotel room every day. As long as she'd look up at him like this, trustful and expectant, genuinely curious about his work—not plugging her ears and pretending he was somebody other than he really was, like Paulina had.

“You haven't seen the headlines?” he asked.

“You might recall waking me up,” she said, lifting the sheet to cover her breast. “I came straight here, because I apparently have no self-control around you.”

His heart leapfrogged joyfully. He dropped a kiss on her nose and sat up to fetch the newspaper from the cart. “There were five raids at five hotels last night,” he said, pointing out the
Chronicle
's headline. “All of them were executed within minutes of one another. The Feds were tipped off that this man would be personally delivering a big shipment to one of the hotels.”

Aida skimmed the article, reading aloud under her breath. Her fingernail traced the caption below the old man's photo. “Adrian St. Laurent. He looks like a nice old grandfather.”

Winter snorted. “I've known him for years. His operation is smaller than mine, though he used to be part of the Big Three in the Bay Area—and before you ask, yes, I'm one of them.”

“Oh, I seriously doubt any of them are as big as you,” she teased, circling a finger around his thumb as she continued to read the article.

“Keep talking like that and I'm going to be forced to call up the desk and beg them for a bellboy to go out to the druggist for another tin.”

“And I won't be able to walk out of here. Tell me more about the bust.”

He slipped an arm beneath her head and settled his leg across hers. “St. Laurent does a lot of cheap deals, but he also has half the hotel business in the city. Had, rather. The Feds' tip was on the nose. They found him in the Whitcomb, eating dinner in the kitchen while his crew unloaded a quarter million in rum for a big fund-raiser party. Had enough evidence to haul him in. Just like that, he's gone.”

Winter was shocked when he got wind of the bust last night. If he had any lingering worries about St. Laurent being responsible for his hauntings, those doubts were now gone.

“But why did the Feds show up at the Palace if they're your client?”

Winter folded the newspaper and tossed it on the floor. “They weren't three years ago. Used to be St. Laurent's, but he made a deal with my father when he thought the Feds were after him back then.”

“So last night the Feds thought the Palace was one of his.”

“Yep.”

“They weren't after you.”

“Nope.” He ran his fingers over the curve of her shoulder. Her skin was so soft, he almost worried his calloused fingers would scrape it, but he couldn't stop himself from tracing random lines of freckles that led to the ridge of her clavicle.

“Do you think that this has any connection with what's going on with you?”

“Raids happen all the time, and there's no indication of anything supernatural going on with this one. But there are two things that worry me. On that first night when I was poisoned, St. Laurent told me something was changing in Chinatown. The tongs who control the booze there are getting pushed out of business.”

“And the second thing?”

“Rumor is that the Feds were tipped off by someone in Chinatown.”

“O-oh.”

“Odd that there's unrest in Chinatown's booze distribution, and someone's attacking me from Chinatown, and now St. Laurent gets hauled away on a tip from Chinatown.”

“More than odd.” She stared out the balcony doors. “I was thinking about the ghost last night, and those dragon buttons. You think it's a coincidence that they were sewed on, and you know someone in Chinatown with a sewing factory . . .”

“Ju? No. Couldn't be him. That truly has to be coincidence.”

“Are you sure? What if Sook-Yin is upset that you haven't been seeing her? What if Ju takes your rejection of her as a rejection of him? And at that lunch, he did make a point about how successful you've become—warned you people would be jealous of that success.”

As much as he hated to admit it, things
had
been more relaxed between him and Ju back when he was still visiting Sook-Yin. “I don't know. Ju isn't a big tong leader, but he's not stupid, either. Besides, if he wanted me dead, he's had plenty of opportunities to kill me. Why all the hocus-pocus with the magical poison and the hauntings? Doesn't add up.”

“Maybe you're right.” She gave him a thoughtful look. “The hotel we're in now wasn't raided. Were they one of St. Laurent's customers?”

“They
were
raided.”

“Why aren't they shut down like the Palace?”

“Prohis didn't find any booze. I talked to the manager this morning. Apparently St. Laurent was behind on shipments. Regardless, they are now without a supplier, and in light of everything I just told you, I think it's possible whoever ratted out St. Laurent did so because they either wanted him
out
of business, or they
want
his business.”

Intelligent eyes squinted up at him; he liked the way her nostrils flared when she did that. “Is that why you got this room? You waiting to see if anyone shows up to offer the hotel booze?”

“Believe me, I was thinking about you when I checked in.”

She hooked her leg around his while her fingers toyed with the line of hair that bisected his stomach. Christ, she was just as bad as he was—they couldn't stop touching each other. “But . . .” she prompted.

“But I might've taken last night's events into consideration when I choose the Fairmont specifically. So I'm going to be nice to the hotel manager, and wait and see what transpires.”