Page 42 of Bad Medicine

“I guess you’re right,” Linny conceded, squeezing me back. “Men are perpetually overrated, aren’t they? Still, they do have a few attributes I can appreciate.”

“Linny!” I scolded, but I couldn’t hold in my laugh.

I’d never admit it, but at that moment, my thoughts drifted back to one man in particular whom I thought might not have been overrated at all.

And I was starting to regret pushing him away.

Chapter eighteen

Rocco

“Rock,areyouevenlistening to me?”

Enzo’s aggravated voice cut into my thoughts, most of which were centered on the food in front of me.

“Of course I am,” I lied, trying to decide between another of the spiced mozzarella balls or little skewers of tomato, basil, and, yeah, more mozzarella. “You’re going to New York. Again.” Finally settling on the spiced ball, I popped one into my mouth and reached for a second. “What else is there to know?”

“A whole fuck of a lot, actually,” he growled, but I’d grown immune to his bad moods a long time ago.

Don’t know what the fuck he had to be in a bad mood about, anyway. It’s not like his life wasn’t fuckin’ perfect at the moment. He got the girl, he got the bad guy, and he’d come out of the whole thing smelling like roses.

He and Francesca had also managed to bargain their way out of the De Marco crime family in New York, making them both free to run things here in Vegas exactly as they saw fit.

Fucker was even getting laid on the regular.

I knew, because he and Francesca couldn’t keep their bloody hands off each other. It was disgusting.

As for my own self, I was in a serious dry spell.

After I’d made a spectacular ass of myself that night atSin Cityall those weeks ago, trying to make Mia jealous, I’d scraped off the blond girl and decide to spend the night wallowing. Since then, I’d managed to completely avoid getting any tail at all.

It wasn’t like it wasn’t offered to me; I worked at a fuckin’ bar and a porn studio. Trust me, it was available.

But for some goddamn reason, that woman had gotten into my head, and I couldn’t shake her.

See, for as long as I could remember, I had wandered around this town feeling like a fuckin’ king. Enzo and me, we’d been hustling these streets since before our balls dropped, nothing and nowhere was out of our reach.

If we wanted a drink, we got it.

If we wanted to fight, we won it.

And if we wanted some pussy, well, the ladies in Las Vegas knew the score. They lined their beautiful asses up like a pretty kitty buffet.

But now, things were different, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

First, it was Enzo. Not that I didn’t like Francesca. I mean, if a woman was gonna lock that man down, it was only ever gonna be someone like her. A woman who could knock you over with either her smile or a roundhouse to the face.

Dealer’s choice.

I didn’t begrudge them their happiness, either. Their relationship had been like a lit stick of dynamite from the word go. Between death threats, dirty cops, deranged exes, and a fuckin’ car bomb, it was not the kind of courtship that just anyone could have survived.

But they did, so there you go.

Mazel tov, or whatever.

The other thing that felt different was me. I mean, I had been living this life for over twenty years, and as much as I was reluctant to admit it, it was getting kinda tiresome. Drinking, partying, staying up all night. I wasn’t old, but shit, I sure felt that way sometimes.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the work. I did. I fuckin’ loved what we did.