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  Armor

  by Alexa Land

  A Firsts and Forever Series Novella

  Copyright 2017 by Alexa Land.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission in whole or in part of this publication is permitted without express written consent from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is purely coincidental.

  This gay romance contains adult language and sexually explicit material.

  It is intended for ADULTS ONLY.

  Dedicated to Jera,

  Friend and Reader

  With Love and Thanks

  Thank you also to

  Kim, Ish and Ron

  Your help was

  much appreciated!

  And thanks to

  My Firsts and Forever Series

  Group on Facebook

  for your support

  and enthusiasm

  The Dombruso Family Tree

  The Dombrusos are a Sicilian-American family living in San Francisco, with a long history in organized crime. While the younger generation isn’t really involved in anything illegal these days, enemies made over the last two centuries won’t let them forget their family’s past.

  Dante, Vincent, Gianni and Mikey Dombruso (in order from oldest to youngest) are brothers.

  They were raised by their grandmother, Stana Dombruso (Nana), after their parents were murdered.

  Jessie used to work for Nana as a chauffeur/assistant. She considers him family.

  Nana is married to Ollie (her second husband).

  Dante is married to Charlie (All In is their story, Firsts and Forever Series, Book 2)

  Vincent is married to Trevor (Salvation is their story, Firsts and Forever Series, Book 5)

  Josh is Vincent and Trevor's adopted son; the couple also has twin babies.

  Josh is dating Darwin. Darwin is living with Nana because his parents kicked him out.

  Gianni is sailing around the world with his boyfriend Zan (Belonging is their story, Firsts and Forever Series, Book 8)

  Mikey is a widower with three young sons. He’s dating a woman named Marie.

  Nico Dombruso is their cousin. He’s dating Luca Caruso. (All I Believe is their story, Firsts and Forever Series, Book 10)

  Constantino (Connie) Dombruso is Nico’s brother (and the Dombruso brothers’ cousin). He’s dating Andreo Natori. (Hitman’s Holiday is their story; the Christmas novella is book 10.5 in the series)

  Andreo is Luca’s half-brother. They’re both the sons of Sal Natori, the man who murdered the Dombruso brothers’ parents.

  Nana had three sons: Paulie, Alberto (Al) and Rudolpho (Rudy). Paulie was Dante, Vincent, Gianni and Mikey’s dad. He was killed when they were little. Al is Nico and Constantino's father. Al and Connie both became hitmen. Rudy was married twice and has several children, including Jerry and Carla.

  The Road So Far

  (Please note: contains spoilers for earlier books in the Firsts and Forever Series)

  Dante put his cousin Jerry in charge of the family when he decided to retire. But Jerry’s judgement was called into question when he took out a hit on Luca Caruso and Luca’s brother Andreo Natori, after Luca started dating Nico Dombruso. Luca and Andreo are Sal Natori’s sons (the man who murdered Dante’s parents), and Jerry incorrectly saw them as a threat. When Dante found out, he removed Jerry as the head of the family and got him to cancel the hit (this happened in All I Believe, Book 10 in the series, which is Nico and Luca’s story).

  Dante came out of retirement and took control of the family once again. Angry and humiliated because his power was stripped from him and his judgement was called into question, Jerry went to work for the Messinas, a rival family. The Messinas and the Dombrusos have a long history of conflict.

  In The Distance (Book 11 in the series, which is Jessie and Kai’s story), a mysterious arsonist trapped the entire Dombruso family in a nightclub during Ollie’s bachelor party and set the building on fire. Everyone escaped at the last minute with only minor injuries, but the arsonist and whoever hired him remain at large.

  A year and a half has passed since the fire. Dante is becoming increasingly frustrated as he searches in vain for clues and the trail grows ever colder. He’s aided in his search by some of his family members and by the police department’s lead arson investigator, Cameron Doyle, who’s become a close friend. There’s some indication that Dante’s cousin Jerry may have had a role in the attack, possibly with the aid of the Messinas. But Jerry’s gone into hiding, and until he’s found, Dante can’t get the answers he needs.

  Dante has always been his family’s armor, the thing that keeps them safe, and he won’t rest until the people behind the fire are caught. He not only needs to make them pay for what they did, he also has to stop them before they strike again. Because next time, the Dombruso family might not make it out alive.

  Table of Contents

  The Dombruso Family Tree

  The Road so Far

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  For More from Alexa…

  Chapter One

  “I got my dick stuck in the door! You need to come help me, Dante!”

  It would be weird to get that phone call from anyone. The fact that it was my grandmother on the line should have made it even weirder, but instead, it made perfect sense. That probably said a lot about my life.

  Charlie bit his lip to keep from laughing as he looked up at me. My husband and I were on the couch with my phone on speaker, and his head was resting on my thigh. I met his gaze and mouthed the words, God help me before asking, “What are you talking about, Nana?”

  “You’ll see! Just get your ass over here, and make it quick! I’m having a hard time keeping Tom Selleck away from my dick!” For reasons that made sense only to my grandmother, that was what she’d named her big, hairy mutt, and I had to wonder what exactly he was going after.

  She disconnected the call, and Charlie chuckled as he sat up and put his e-reader on the coffee table. “So much for a quiet evening at home,” I said as I tossed my newspaper aside. “Want to come with me to see what the hell that’s all about?”

  “Of course! I can’t wait to see what Nana’s up to this time.”

  We both got to our feet, and I pulled Charlie into an embrace. Marrying me had been a package deal, I fully understood that. My crazy grandmother was only part of what I’d brought into his life. At least she was harmless, though. That couldn’t be said for all of it.

  “Hopefully this won’t take long,” I told him as I rubbed my cheek against his dark hair. “Then we can come right back to the couch and get comfortable again.”

  Charlie ran his hands down my back and said, “You know Nana’s predicaments are always more involved than we think they’ll be. But whenever we do make it back home, I suggest heading someplace other than the couch.” His hands slipped a little lower, and he grabbed my ass and pulled me against him.

  My cock instantly responded. I kissed his earlobe, then bit it lightly and pulled back to grin at him. “You’re evil. You know that, right? Getting me worked up a moment before we head out the door! What am I going to do with you?”

  He looked up at me with a sparkle in his green eyes. “I’m sure you’ll think of lots of things when we get back here.”

  “Count on it.” I nuzzled his hair and bre
athed in his clean scent. But then I had to make myself let go of him and focus on the task at hand.

  We both put on our shoes when we reached the alcove at the back of the house, and Charlie pulled a blue ski jacket over his T-shirt and jeans while I strapped a shoulder holster over my black sweater. I opened a gun safe on the top shelf of the coat closet and checked the clip on my Beretta M9 before securing it in the holster. For good measure, I tucked a compact .22 in the waistband of my pants and pulled the sweater over it before donning my wool overcoat. Charlie didn’t blink at any of that. He just punched a code into the alarm panel, and we stepped through the back door and made sure it locked behind us.

  We’d owned the house for five months, and I glanced back at it as we crossed the yard. Before buying it, we’d lived in an apartment above our restaurant on a busy street in the Marina District, but that had to change for a lot of reasons. Not only had it been noisy and not very private, it was also nearly impossible to maintain decent security with hundreds of people streaming in and out of the building every day.

  Our new house was a beautifully restored 1920s Modern with streamlined art deco details, and it had the advantages of privacy and decent security. Plus, it was just a couple blocks from Nana’s house. Given how frequently we were over there, that proximity had been a strong selling point.

  We unlocked the heavy, wooden gate at the back of our property, and when we stepped into the alley, I paused to look both ways. Not that I really expected anyone to be lying in wait for us at nine p.m. on a random Wednesday night. It had just become habit.

  Charlie took my hand on the short walk. He did it automatically, and I loved that. Even after four years together, I never took it for granted. I never took anything for granted, not when I fully understood that each day I had with him was a gift, and tomorrow was in no way guaranteed.

  Nana’s house came into view in just a couple minutes. The enormous Queen Anne Victorian was as subtle as my grandmother with its shimmering rainbow façade and matching rainbow stretch limo in the driveway. She was a rabid supporter of the LGBT community, which had started when I came out to her in my late teens. I’d known she’d be supportive, but I hadn’t expected her to take it to that level. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. Nana never did anything halfway.

  Her rainbow palace sported a new feature that evening, and Charlie chuckled and said, “Well, there’s your problem.” A pink, wooden sculpture of a huge cock jutted out the front door at a forty-five degree angle, making it look like the house had a hard-on. The thing had to be eight or nine feet long, and it was so wide that it filled the doorway.

  We let ourselves in through the wrought iron gate and met Nana’s husband Ollie and two teenagers on the front walkway. I’d naïvely assumed when my grandmother remarried that her new husband would take over a lot of the problem-solving that routinely fell to me. Instead, he was as bad as Nana, so now there were two feisty senior troublemakers in the family, instead of one. “Thanks for coming, boys,” he said with a sheepish smile. Ollie was stocky and a foot shorter than me, and he was dressed in a tuxedo and a pointy, gold party hat. He reminded me of a cartoon character. “Stana was sure we could get that shlong to fit through the door. Turns out, we were overambitious.”

  Charlie asked, “Where’d it come from?”

  “We went to a fancy end-of-the-year fundraising dinner tonight for the LGBT community center where we volunteer. They were auctioning off artwork made by some of the young people who visit the center, but nobody was bidding on King Dong. You know your grandmother, Dante. She took pity on the artist and dropped a grand on that thing, so he’d feel encouraged and whatnot.”

  I asked, “How’d you get it home?”

  “The sculptor and his friend delivered it in a big truck. He’s inside with Stana. We came out here to push while they pulled,” Ollie explained.

  I raised an eyebrow and said, “Because you thought it’d be nice in the living room?”

  “We were gonna put it in the front yard, but of course the blowhard across the street immediately raised a fuss, so we thought we should bring it in before he absconded with it.” I grinned at the mental picture of Richard Huntington, the neighbor in question, trying to run down the street with that thing. He’d been a thorn in my grandmother’s side for years and was less than accepting about her various eccentricities. It was no wonder he’d had something to say about the giant junk. Ollie added, “I’m gonna go inside and see if I can do anything from there.” He hurried around the side of the house and disappeared through the gate.

  I turned to the skinny, auburn-haired kid to my left and asked, “Are you here with the artist?” He was maybe eighteen or nineteen, had more freckles than I’d ever seen, and wore a green sweatshirt so baggy that it looked like four of him could fit in there.

  The kid shook his head. “No man, I live here.”

  “Since when?”

  “Monday.”

  I tried not to frown at that, but pretty thoroughly failed. My grandmother and a friend of hers were in the process of opening a shelter for homeless LGBT teens and young adults in a converted firehouse, but they were bogged down in a sea of paperwork. In the meantime, Nana had begun finding strangers on the street and bringing them home with her until the shelter could accommodate them. For some reason, I was the only person who saw a problem with that.

  The other teen intervened at that point. That one I knew and liked. Darwin was dating my nephew Josh, and Nana had taken him in when she found out his family was less than accepting about the fact that he was transgender. Darwin said, “This is Emmet, Dante. Don’t worry, he’s a good guy.” Based on what, the fact that he’d gone two whole days without running off with Nana’s jewelry?

  An excited yip came from inside the house, and we could hear my grandmother yelling at her dog, “No, Tom Selleck! Get off my dick!” I grinned at that, despite myself.

  Darwin said, “That wooden willie is the canine equivalent of catnip. We tried to put Tommy in the backyard, but he almost knocked the door down so we had to let him back in. I have no idea why he’s acting like that.”

  Rather than offer theories about the particular set of glitches hardwired into that mutt, Charlie and I climbed the stairs to the porch, and both of us stared at the phallus for a moment while trying to decide on the best course of action. The one good thing I could say about it was that the artist had gone for cartoonish rather than anatomically detailed. The latter would have just been nightmarish, Jack and the Beanstalk meets Lorena Bobbitt, and my God, why was I thinking about that?

  I grabbed the pink prick and tried to shove it through the doorway, but the thing didn’t budge. Not even a little. Next, I tried pulling it out, but that didn’t work either. I got it in a headlock and tried to wrestle it out, which made Charlie chuckle and snap a picture with his phone. I hid my grin as I shot him a look.

  My grandmother called, “I don’t know what happened! We were all tugging on it real good, and then it just got jammed up!”

  I peered through the gap near the top of the doorway. Nana was wearing a pink, sequined gown and a rhinestone tiara. Beside her, a pair of long-haired, thoroughly confused-looking guys were engaged in a deep discussion about the peen predicament while one of them held the dog back by its collar. I interrupted them with, “Bill and Ted, one of you push on the base while I try to pull it out. It’s never going to fit through this doorway. I don’t even know how you got that much of it in.”

  “Perseverance, dude.” That came from the blonder of the two, who handed the dog off on his companion, sat on the floor, and braced his sneakers against the base of the sculpture. “Alright, let’s do this thing!”

  Charlie and Darwin joined me. All three of us wrapped our arms around it and pulled, and my husband said, “Who would have guessed we’d end up wrestling a monster cock this evening?”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore,” I told him as I put my back into it.

  When all of that proved totally unsucce
ssful, the three of us straightened up, and Charlie looked at me and said, “You know what this needs, right?”

  “Lube.” He and I said it in unison.

  “Hang on,” my grandmother called. “I’ve got just the stuff!”

  “Of course she does,” I muttered under my breath.

  She hurried out of the foyer and returned a minute later with a huge bottle of anal lube, which she shoved through the gap at the top of the doorway. I started to ask, “Nana, why do you have.…” But then I decided I didn’t want to know, and said, “Never mind.”

  She answered me anyway. “It was on sale! I went to the sex shop to pick up a case of rubbers for the boys, and I couldn’t pass up a bargain!”

  I asked, “What boys?”

  Darwin muttered, “Don’t look at me.”

  “Nana keeps a big bowl of condoms on the desk at the LGBT community center where she volunteers,” Emmet explained. “She also stuffs them in my jacket pocket whenever I tell her I’m going out. I mean, it’s nice she’s concerned, but come on. Do I really look like Studly McScoresalot?” The kid colored under his freckles.

  I opened the lube and drizzled some on both sides of the doorframe, and Charlie said, “That’s just dripping off. You’re going to need to work it into the crack.” When I glanced at him, he grinned.

  Sadly, he wasn’t wrong. I handed Charlie the bottle and pulled off my overcoat, because cheap lube and Italian wool were a terrible combination. I then tossed the coat over the porch railing and pushed up the sleeves of my sweater.

  When I turned to face Emmet, the kid looked stricken. He took a step back from me, his wide, green eyes locked on the gun at my side. I held my hands up, trying to seem nonthreatening as I explained, “I have a permit to carry concealed.”

  “Dude, I don’t care about the paperwork,” he stammered. “Why the hell are you carrying a gun?”