Gloria was a tie Oz could not steal, and he knew it. To be with Gloria Sinatra, he was going to have to work.
But damn, he thought as he felt the water getting warmer as he bathe. Was anybody worth this much work?
But then the shower door opened. Oz was at first surprised that Gloria, in all of her nakedness, was standing just outside of that door. And then she smiled that wonderful bright-white smile of hers that reminded him that hell yeah, she was worth all that work! “May I join you?” she asked him.
And Oz was smiling too, like some all-knowing Cheshire cat. “I would be offended if you didn’t,” he said.
Gloria got into the shower with him, and he didn’t waste a second. He pulled her into his arms with a slam, with his lips bearing down on her lips even harder, before she could close the shower door.
He was fingering her as he kissed her, and as his mouth moved to her breasts, his fingering intensified. And just as her nipples were reacting to his powerful presence, and as she could feel his erection against her thigh, he slammed her body against the stall, lifted her legs into his arms, and entered her. And he began pumping hard.
Oz was staring at Gloria as he pumped. As he held her legs higher to get deeper penetration. The fact that she had come to him was why he chose her above all those other ladies. She grounded him. She made him be better. She made him feel like the man he always wanted to be. “Oh, Glo!” he kept saying to her as he pumped his ass off. As his member moved in even deeper and those feelings he loved kept intensifying.
Gloria felt the intensity too. She knew making love to Oz was just a Band-Aid over that gunshot wound they needed to attend to. But with Oz, with the way he laid it down, she just couldn’t help herself.
“I’m sorry about tonight, babe,” he was saying to her as he kept doing her. “It’ll never happen again.”
If she had a dollar for the times he said that to her!
“I’m going to treat you to the finest dinner you’ve ever had,” he was saying as she leaned further back and his pumping kept her body moving up and down along that wall as if she was sliding up and down along his rod. “It’ll be just you and me, babe. Just the two of us together. Okay?”
The way he was making her feel, Gloria would have said yes to anything he asked. He was her weakness. “Okay,” she said.
“Pick the place,” Oz said. “And I mean a nice place. The nicest in town. Just tell me the time you want us to meet, and I’ll be there. I’ll break away no matter what’s going on and be there. For you. Okay?”
Gloria wrapped her arms around Oz. This was the man she wanted. He was way too much work. He probably was never going to completely change. But this was the man she loved. “Okay,” she said to him, as he hit her spot one time too many, and she yelled his name as she came.
CHAPTER THREE
“Alexio would sit back cool as ice while Pop and I tried to reason with the guys.”
Oz’s cell phone rang. He picked it up from off of Glo’s kitchen island and looked at the Caller ID. Then he put it back down. “But they didn’t want to hear it,” he continued. “We pay up, they said, or we get three broke legs. One on each of us. And I’m thinking me with a broken leg? That wouldn’t be a good look on me.”
Gloria laughed and shook her head. Oz and his stories about his life back in Greece!
She was standing in a bathrobe at the stove that sat atop her center island, and she was scrambling eggs. Oz was seated in front of her on the opposite side of the island. It was early morning but Oz was in his story-telling mood. Which was a mood Glo liked. What she also liked was that he’d had four phone calls since they’d showered and dressed and made it downstairs, and he hadn’t answered one of them. He was present with her, and she appreciated that. It was all she wanted all along.
“But the thing about my big brother,” Oz continued, “is that he doesn’t like people telling him what to do.”
Gloria was surprised. “Alex Drakos is like that?” she asked. “He doesn’t seem like that kind of person.”
“Don’t you dare fool yourself,” Oz responded. “He’s exactly that kind of person. He likes telling me what to do, and you, and everybody else, but don’t you dare tell him what to do. He won’t lose his cool. That’s not this style. But he hates it. If you know him the way I do, you’ll see it all over his face.”
Oz’s cell phone rang again. Again, he picked it up, looked at the Caller ID, and then put it back down. “Now, mind you,” he continued, “at the time those heavies tried to shake us down that day, my old man wasn’t as big in the mob world as he would later become. The syndicate those heavies worked for was way bigger. They could have squashed us like bugs. But do you think that bothered Alexio?”
“Let me guess,” said Gloria. “No?”
“Didn’t bother him one iota,” said Oz. “He stood up, all cool still, and I tell you if he didn’t knock the living daylights out of both of those tough guys. And he did it with one punch! They both fell over that banister and were crippled for life. On one fucking punch! Two guys knocked down, knocked over, and crippled. On one punch. Even Pop realized Alex was the man from that day on. It was like he ran things without running things from that day forward.”
“That doesn’t even sound like Mr. Drakos,” Gloria said.
“But that’s him. Don’t let that cool Alex Drakos-the-businessman persona fool you. He can mix it up with the best of them.”
“I guess you really don’t know people.”
Oz nodded. “Those, my dear, are very true words,” he agreed. His cell phone rang again, but he didn’t even check the Caller ID that time. He was too busy staring at Gloria. She had what it took, he thought. That was for damn sure. She would make him a great wife, and he knew it. But the very thought of a free bird like him being tied down, even with a woman as wonderful as Gloria, and unable to come and go as he pleased, terrified him. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t seem to get beyond the terror of it all. He continued staring at her. How in the world was he going to ever get beyond that terror?
When Gloria realized his powerful gaze was locked on her, she smiled. She appreciated the attention, but his stare wouldn’t ease up. She smiled. “What are you looking at?” she asked him.
“I’m looking at my woman,” he responded. “Can a man look at his woman?”
“He most certainly can. But you on the other hand.”
Oz laughed that booming laugh she loved. “Tell me about you,” he said to her. “You never tell me any stories about your childhood, do you realize that? What kind of father was Mick the Tick like? Was he a doting father? What kind of stories do you have to tell about him when you were a little girl?”
“There aren’t many to tell,” Gloria said. “He was hardly ever around. And when he did come around I think it was more to have sex with my mother than to see about me. It wasn’t until he married Roz--”
“Roz?” Oz interrupted. “She’s wife number what?”
“Number one,” said Gloria. “She’s the only wife he’s ever had. Like you, he wasn’t exactly the settling down type.”