CHAPTER SEVEN

While his twins were just leaving the party, Mick was just arriving home. He hurried up the winding staircase to the master bedroom, flung open the double doors, and found his wife in her white silk bathrobe on their white leather lounger sipping tea. When he saw her sitting there as if nothing had happened, he finally relaxed. And walked up to her.

Roz looked at him as he approached her. His suit coat open, his hands in his pants pockets, he looked like a man too exhausted to stand. "Where are the twins?" Roz asked him.

"On their way."

Roz nodded. "Good. "If they have to overreact, I'm glad they're doing so with our children. They didn't have to overreact with me."

"They followed my orders."

"Your orders suck."

"Tough."

"I don't like your orders."

"Tough."

Mick could see a smile appear on her face. "Asshole," she said affectionately.

Mick inwardly smiled too. She was a handful on her best day. Drove him nuts on all her other days. But he also knew he wouldn't trade her for the world.

He leaned down, lifted her up, then sat down and placed her between his legs. She leaned her back against his chest. He kept his arms around her. And for several minutes they remained as they were: she in her bathrobe. He in his suit. Both enjoying doing absolutely nothing for a moment.

Roz loved how patient Mick could be with her when she knew patience didn't come easily for him. But whenever she went through an ordeal, he allowed her to talk about it in her own time.

After several minutes, she talked. "Some guy was arguing with a person I assumed was the restaurant manager. Then he shoved the manager, the manager fell backwards, and we're thinking it's about to go down. They were going to fistfight. Then the next thing I know the guy pulls out a gun and starts shooting. My client and I were about to get up and run, but before I could make any kind of move your guys grabbed me and got me out of there so fast my head was spinning. I was like what the fuck?"

"They did what they were supposed to do," Mick said as he held her.

"But that shooting had nothing to do with me."

"You don't know that."

"I do know it, Mick. I was there. I saw when the fight broke out."

Mick wasn't going to be convinced until he saw the tape. "I'm just glad you weren't harmed."

"Ahh, that's so sweet," Roz said with a smile and leaned sideways so that she could turn back and see his face. "For real?"

"Sometimes not so much," he said, and she laughed. "But this time?" He stared into her sweet eyes. "Yep. I'm glad."

Roz knew that was as affectionate as she was ever going to get from Mick, and it was light years away from how stone-cold he used to be. She appreciated it. She puckered her sexy lips and Mick leaned down and kissed them. But as soon as he tasted her, he knew a simple kiss wasn't going to cut it.

They continued kissing as he moved her up, cradling her in his arms, and bore down onto her mouth with a kiss that became even more ferocious the longer they were at it. And when Mick opened her robe and his mouth moved to her breasts, she knew it was not going to be a kissing session only.

After several minutes of massaging her breasts to the point of stiffness, and massaging between her legs to the point of wetness, Mick lifted the bottom part of her robe, unzipped his pants and pulled it out, and positioned her just enough to enter her.

Roz steeled herself for his hard entry, adjusted herself to his unbelievable fullness, and then relaxed as he expertly did to her body what no other man had ever been able to do. Mick knew how to move inside of her.

For nearly twenty minutes they made that wonderful, sweet, relaxing kind of love. Mick pushed in and almost out of her for what seemed like a hundred times. But just being inside of her made him feel so blissfully spellbound that he knew it was Roz, and only Roz, who was able to take him there. In his youth it was what he used to call a once-in-a-blue-moon fuck. But after being with Roz, it was an everyday fuck. It was how she rolled. She never gave him anything short of the best he'd ever had.

It was so good that he found himself cumming before she came.

But not for long. She was right behind him, cumming hard too. Her back leaned harder against his front and his front leaned harder against her back and they both came with a thunderous cum. It reminded them just why they got married in the first place. But it also reminded them just how much farther they still had to go to get back to this level of wonderment in their often tumultuous marriage.

They remained as they were for several more minutes. Mick was still throbbing and Roz was still pulsating, as it took both of them serious time to come back down from that high they'd been on. But just as they were grounding themselves again, they heard the front door open and the sound of the twins calling their names.

As they could hear them running up the staircase, Mick pulled out of Roz and put his still-throbbing penis inside his pants, while Roz closed up her bathrobe and tied it up. Then the twins could be heard hurrying across the landing and then bounding into their parents' bedroom as if they didn't know what boundaries meant.

Mick watched his teenagers as they hurried to their mother to make sure she was okay. They asked her all sorts of questions about what happened and how did she feel about it, and Roz, the kind of mother who never stifled their children, answered every question. They clearly loved her and was concerned about her. They barely gave him a glance.

There was a time when Mick, growing up in the most dysfunctional family ever, at least in his view, did not want kids. But he was around Duke and Jackie's age when he had his first one. Five baby mamas later, they were his last ones.

Jackie looked just like Roz, with that perfect dark skin and bone structure, and an elegance about her even though she was just a teenager.

Duke, like Teddy, didn't just look like his father but he had similar mannerisms and temperament. He could go ballistic if you pushed him too hard. But unlike Teddy, who was built for that mob life, Roz already told Mick that she'd kill him in his sleep if he allowed either one of her children to go anywhere near that life. "I don't care if they're built for it or not, you'd better not even think about it," she warned him with a knife in her hand.

But she was wasting her breath. Mick had already decided that himself. He blew it with his older kids in so many ways. He was too busy living that thuggish life to be bothered with kids. If it wasn't for Roz coming into his life, he doubted if he would have been anything more to his children than their and their mothers' financial support. Although two of his six children were gone, Teddy and Gloria and the twins were still around, and he was fully involved in all of their lives. But that was only because of the woman he still held in his arms. The woman the twins were now listening to with their undivided attention. The glue of their family.

Then his phone rang. He pulled it out and looked at the Caller ID.

"Who is it?" Roz asked.

"Your Detail Chief."

Roz put it on Speaker before Mick could object. He gave her a hard look, which caused the twins to grin, and then he answered. "Yep?"

"It's all-clear, Boss. The shooter had been threatening one of the employees all week. The manager had barred him from coming there, but he decided to show up tonight anyway. But it had nothing to do with Mrs. Sinatra."

"Told you!" Roz said as if that vindicated her belief that they had overreacted.

"Do you have the video?"

"Yes, sir. We got a copy before the cops could take possession."

"Send it to me," he said, and ended the call.

"Can we go back to the party now?" Duke asked.

"No," Roz said.

"But I was kicking everybody's butt."

"No," Roz and Mick said in unison. "I've got an additional team running deeper background," Mick added.

Roz, who was still sitting between his legs, turned and looked at him. "On who?"

"The manager. That shooter. Every employee that ever worked there. That's who," Mick said.

Duke stared at his father. He'd always thought of him as the best of everything: the best looking dad in the whole school. The best fighter of any dad around. The best provider. But especially the baddest gangster that ever lived. Not even his brother Teddy or his Uncle Sal could hold a candle to Mick the Tick. And it wasn't just because he was the toughest, although he was. But to Duke, nobody but his dad would have thought to even dig that deeply. He admired that. Although that other part of his dad, the best lover part and all those women part, including girls at his own school who actually asked Duke to hook them up with his father as if they were insane, he could live without.

"Go take a shower and go to bed," Roz suggested. "It's been a long day."

"Bed?" Jackie asked. "It's not even eleven yet." She looked at her brother. "I'll play you, Duke. Bet you won't kick my butt."

"Bet that," said Duke, and the twins took off, leaving their parents to get back to doing what they could tell they had just finished doing when they first walked in.

When the twins had gone and closed the doors behind them, Roz leaned closer against Mick. "I'm glad they didn't find anything."

"So am I."

"I'm sure all of that other digging isn't going to find anything either."

"We'll see," Mick said as he untied her robe and began massaging her down below again.

Roz didn't at first think she was in the same headspace for another long-behind round with Mick. But by the time his massaging had finished, and he was entering her again, she was so there that she refused to let him stop until he was in so deep that he couldn't go in any further.

It felt so good to Mick, and because he knew it was going to go on even longer than the first time, he pressed the button that locked their bedroom doors. Then he carried her to bed.