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“Your cousin. What’s her name?”
“Oh, sorry. Chandler Murphy.”
“She sounds like a handful. Okay, be safe.”
He was deep in thought, wondering if he should try to connect with his friend, the president, but decided it wasn’t quite urgent enough. But things were definitely shifting in D.C., and the wolves had started to appear from the edges of the forest.
Official darkness. What are you going to do? It is what it is.
Until Moira came up behind him and started to remove his towel.
Chapter Fourteen
Moira worked onhis makeup carefully, meticulously inserting enough eyeliner and shadow, just enough to give him a less-than-Navy-SEAL look. He nearly stopped her at several points, objecting to how much detail she was doing.
“I trust you, Moira. If I don’t like it, I’m going to wash it all off, and you’ll have to just deal.”
“Don’t be silly. It will help. We may have visitors at the gathering.”
“Visitors? Like who?”
She shrugged. “There are always spies. People who just want to know who has a vested interest in our family or the family’s business. Impossible to say.”
“Does anyone there but your family speak fluent English?”
“Oh, I think there will be several. We travel all over the world. You’d be surprised.”
“So what business is it they have here? We know about Francone’s group. Be honest. I need to know.”
“Shipping. They control the ports. They are paid to look the other way sometimes, I think, to help out or make deals. The Don owns merchant ships that sail all throughout the Mediterranean. Not so much elsewhere. They are a relatively small enterprise. But they have a solid hold on Capri.”
“So the big commercial operations will be done from the coast then, Naples, other port cities,” he surmised.
“Yes, that’s right. Those are where the drugs and the human trafficking are done. But they exert some control. The family doesn’t want one of their ships seized, for instance, or held hostage. That used to happen, my mother tells me.”
“But Francone is a cousin of your mother’s?”
She shrugged. “Who knows that story. It was never anything we talked about. But it’s just one of those facts that are known. Everyone in the family knows it.”
She finished, examined him, and smiled. Then she leaned forward and gave him a luscious kiss, purring, “You are so hot, Dimitri. I’m going to be lusting after you all during the party. So unfair,” she said between nibbles.
He brought her over his lap, peeling back the silk robe slowly. The sight of her bare breasts would be what he would be thinking all during the gathering. And what he was going to thoroughly enjoy when he could get all the makeup off.
“Do we have just a little time?” he asked.
She held his head between her cool palms, spreading her thumbs across his cheeks, then fingering his lips. Barely touching hers to his hungry mouth, she said, “Better we crave each other for a few hours. I don’t want to be late. I don’t want to travel at night. Want to get there before and have a few private moments with my family.”
He pinched her nipple.
“Ahh, not fair, my love.”
“Just a little. I’ll just put it in a little.”
She giggled, throwing her head back with that little carefree laugh of hers. Their interludes and lightness of being together softened the tension and the sense of danger all around them. As a way to go, he had to admit, it wasn’t all that bad.
“I don’t want to spoil your makeup, Dimitri.”
“I have an idea.”
