Free Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto by Contemporary Romance Page A

brought her home had had a hard on the size of a salami. Wouldn’t take them long to get their business done and then she and Frankie would plunge into the job of finding her sister and getting her—and her baby—home alive.
    Using the app on her phone, she timed her pity party, not risking one extra second. If she went too short, the pent-up frustration smoldering in her bloodstream might consume her. If she went too long, she’d be left with nothing but cinders and ash. She indulged her helplessness until the buzzer sounded and then she slammed the stupid elevator button so hard, she jammed her knuckle.
    She cursed, but the machinery cooperated; the gears moaning as the car descended. While she waited, she re-played the message that had come in earlier from her mother, the one she hadn’t had the heart to delete. Aida had gone on and on about how grateful she was for the luxurious hotel stay Marisela had arranged, but she threw in a few jabs about not being home to supervise her cooks at the restaurant on Christmas Eve.
    Her heart eased as her mother prattled about how the Morales family had been supplying food for Noche Buena for a generation and how the cooks couldn’t possibly prepare the traditional Cuban Christmas Eve menu without supervision. Marisela knew for a fact that each of them had been soaking black beans and roasting pigs since they were wearing short pants and running around the beaches of Havana, and yet, she listened, drinking in her mother’s every nervous word, filling her chest with the warmth of normalcy even as the heat of the stuffy parking garage caused a sheen of sweat to form at her nape.
    This was some Christmas. No cold. No snow. No family. No guarantee that their family would ever be together again, if she let herself think of Belinda as gone forever, which she wouldn’t. For the first time, Belinda’s Asperger’s might work to their advantage. Though the syndrome manifested in different ways for different people, for Belinda, it dulled her emotions—and right now, knowing her sister likely wasn’t as terrified or lost as anyone else might be in the same circumstances gave her comfort.
    It wasn’t much, but she’d take what she could get.
    “Hey,” Frankie said, sliding his hand across her shoulder as they walked inside the lift. “You okay?”
    He laced his fingers into her hair, then tugged her toward him so that she could lay her cheek on his chest. A tightness pulled between her breast bone—a sharp pang she couldn’t allow herself to feel—not until Belinda was back home, where she’d never fit in, but always belonged.
    She pulled away. “I’m fine.”
    “You were attacked. Your pregnant sister was kidnapped and your best friend nearly blown up. It’s okay to be upset, vidita , even if just for a minute.”
    “I don’t get upset.”
    “No, you get pissed,” he said, his gaze infuriatingly compassionate. “But you’re not even that.”
    She smacked him in the chest, hard, as she pushed away. “You can’t read me all the time, Frankie. I’m so angry, I could explode and take out this entire building. But I can’t let it out. Not until I have those bastards within striking distance.”
    He had the good sense to drop the topic. They rode up to his floor—the fifth—in silence, both of them actively ignoring the smell of sex and sweat captured by the stagnant air. Dios mio , Marisela would have loved to lose herself in the mindlessness of a good fuck right now, but she couldn’t, not even if it cleared her head. She couldn’t take a chance that even a short distraction would result in Belinda staying with her kidnappers one more minute.
    Once upstairs, Frankie insisted they eat, so they broke into the plastic containers filled with cold chicken and rice he’d swiped from his mother’s house and popped open cans of caffeine-rich sodas while Marisela made calls to various Titan offices on the off-chance someone had not abided by the company order that