Page 28 of Dangerous Men (Fortune City Mafia #1)

SYDNEY

I’m exhausted by the time we lock up the shop for the night. Emotionally and physically spent.

Sebastian—the asshole doctor with a tongue like a sharp knife—stays until nearly close, packing up and calmly slipping out the door without a word to either Jade or me just minutes before we lock up.

I spent my day trying to avoid him, keeping to the bookstore and out of the café, not wanting to waste any more time on him.

He’s nothing at all like Alec or Ash. He’s a rude prick, and I’ll be quite happy if I never have to speak to him again.

When I’d brought him his order, I’d thought we could at least be friendly.

Get to know one another. Ha. Fat chance of that, now, after the way he spoke to me.

The way he looked at me, like I was something disgusting stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

Like my very existence was an inconvenience to him.

Asshole.

I don’t care that Alec asked him to be here.

He has no right inserting himself into my business.

I don’t appreciate him keeping tabs on me.

And I really don’t appreciate that, even though he’s shown me nothing but disdain, I kept finding reasons to creep close enough to spy on him.

Whatever Ashton and Alec have awakened in me needs to calm down, because there’s no reason whatsoever that I should be drooling over a man who is that much of a dick.

Even if he is tall. And handsome. Smart. He has nice hands, too, and?—

I slam the cash drawer on my register a little too hard after I finish counting it for the night, furious at myself for even thinking about him, and Jade looks over her shoulder at me, frowning.

“Everything all right there, Syd?” she asks, flipping our open sign to closed . The store’s lock clicks as she engages it.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “It’s just… You know,” I wave my hand in the air, “ men .”

Jade laughs. “Why do you think I have nothing to do with them? No one needs that sort of stress in their life.”

“A shame I’m so tragically heterosexual.” I sigh.

“That is a real shame,” Jade agrees, nodding. Then she grins, snapping her fingers. “What you need is a girls’ night. Tonight. With pizza and ice cream and estrogen and crying. That’ll clear you right up. Get all that nasty male right out of your system!”

“That…sounds perfect, actually.” I smile at her. “My place?”

“I’ll even let you pick the movie,” Jade answers.

Two hours later, we’re upstairs in my apartment, cuddled up on my massive couch and surrounded by junk food and pizza, all while Alicia Silverstone gives an impeccable performance as Cher in the 1995 cinematic masterpiece, Clueless.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for the classics.

“So.” Jade sets her plate of pizza aside and gives me a Cheshire Cat-style grin. “Sydney. My sweetest and most bestest friend in the whole entire world…”

“I don’t like where this is going,” I say around a mouthful of pepperoni pizza, narrowing my eyes suspiciously at her.

“It’s time to spill the beans. I want details. Lurid and smut-filled details. All of them.”

I swallow my bite of pizza, reaching for my glass of wine and not meeting her eyes as I say, “Jade, my love, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Nope, we’re not doing the whole demure and cutesy thing,” Jade says, waving her hand as though batting my words away. “When I left you at the charity banquet, you had not one, but two of the most gorgeous men I’ve ever seen in my life hanging all over you. And now there’s a third one?—”

“Do not speak to me about that man,” I interrupt, glaring at her. “He’s an asshole, and I won’t even have his name uttered in this apartment.”

“A hot asshole,” Jade corrects. And when I refuse to acknowledge the truth of that statement, she adds, “Who spent the entire day staring at you, by the way.”

“Because he’s a weird stalker,” I insist. I leave out the part where I spent most of the day staring at him, too.

Jade shakes her head with a laugh. “Never mind him, then. Forget the sexy stalker who shall remain nameless. You still owe me details, Sydney. I want to hear everything . What happened between you and Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome, anyway?”

On the TV, forgotten in the background, Cher huffs dramatically and insists I totally paused!

I know Jade won’t let it go until she gets what she wants, and secretly, I’ve been dying to tell her, anyway.

“Well…” I pick at my pizza, tearing off bits of crust and not meeting her eyes. “After you left, we uh… we ended up in the penthouse… and we”—I gesture vaguely—“well… you know.”

“If you can’t say ‘we had sex,’ you lose your privileges of having it, Sydney. That’s my one rule. You know that.”

Jade has a lot of “one rules”—enough to fill a book—but they’re all good rules to follow.

Never book a flight the day before a holiday.

Always stock up on candy the day after Halloween.

Super glue can be used in lieu of surgical stitches in a pinch, but don’t you dare try that with duct tape. Those sorts of things.

“We didn’t actually have sex,” I admit to her. “Not technically, anyway. But we… fooled around.”

“That’s still sex,” Jade corrects. “But I’ll ignore that, because it’s about damn time you and Tall, Dark, and Handsome did something other than mentally undressing each other in front of me.

” From the grin on her face, you’d think she was the one who ended up with a millionaire between her thighs.

“How’d the other one take it? The blond one, who looks like he belongs on a movie set? ”

I clear my throat, eyes locked on my pizza.

“Well, actually… he was there, too.”

When I glance up, the look on Jade’s face is almost better than what Ash and Alec and I did together. Jaw hanging open, eyes comically wide, Jade stares at me in shock.

“You didn’t! ” she gasps.

I grin. “Well, I sort of did, yeah.”

Jade squeals, clapping her hands together. “Oh, Sydney! I am just… I’m just…” I think she might cry. “I’m so proud of you! ”

I duck my head, hiding my face behind my hair and grinning.

“Did you enjoy it?” she asks.

“I loved it,” I admit. I squirm a little in my seat even thinking about it. “Every second of it. They were very…attentive.”

“So does this mean the three of you are…” Jade pauses, considering how to say it. “An item? A throuple?”

“No!” I answer too quickly, before even giving it much thought. “At least… I don’t know, actually. Alec asked me out, and I said yes, so… Maybe? Is that…weird?”

“Sydney, my love, my best friend in the whole wide world, my everything ,” she says. “I have been running in queer spaces long enough to know that polyamory isn’t anything weird . It’s not even that uncommon.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. There’s no way that could be true, right?

“Honestly, it’s about time you straights caught up,” Jade tells me. “You’re always like… ten years behind everything. It’s embarrassing for you all.”

“Have you ever tried it?” I ask. “Dating multiple people, I mean?”

Jade pulls a face. “Never. Sadly, I am simply too much woman for most people to handle. Even as a group.” She stares into space, sighing dramatically. “It’s my curse, really.”

I giggle.

“Listen…” Jade turns serious. “I’m happy for you, really I am, but… are you sure about this? Not the multiple partners thing,” she adds quickly. “But with him, I mean. Mason Sterling.”

My plate is now full of shredded bits of crust. I brush crumbs from my fingers and pick up a new slice of pizza. “What do you mean?”

Jade shifts uncomfortably. “Look… I know you missed a lot when you left for college. When we were growing up, there were so many blue laws, gambling was still illegal, and?—”

I swallow my bite of pizza. “And what?” I ask.

The college I attended might have only been an hour from the city, but it could have easily been one hundred, considering how cut off I was from local events.

It had been a shock when I’d moved back to see how much the city had changed in just four short years.

How unrecognizable it was from the place I grew up.

“And then… suddenly, those laws started disappearing. Sterling hotels started being built all over the city,” Jade tells me. “Out of nowhere. And, a few months later, the mayor is out after a huge scandal, the entire city council has been replaced, and?—”

“There’s no way you’re saying what I think you’re saying, Jade.”

“—and overnight gambling is legal again,” Jade continues, speaking over me. “And before the end of the year, there are three Sterling casinos inside the city limits, like they’d known. And just like that, Fortune City is the gambling capital of the country.”

I frown. “What does any of this have to do with Alec?”

But I already know the answer.

“Sydney…” Jade pulls a face. “Look, I might not have recognized him when he was coming around the shop, but… even I know the rumors about Mason Sterling. And his… organization.”

My heart sinks a little. Because she’s right. I know the rumors too.

For all his charity work, for all his donations to various causes to help uplift the city, the Sterling name isn’t one tossed around lightly in our city. It carries weight.

It makes people afraid .

“There’s no way those rumors are true,” I insist. “There’s no way Alec is?—”

“—the face of organized crime in Fortune City?” Jade finishes.

I wince.

After I’d graduated college and started paying more attention to local politics, I was shocked by the transformations that my city had gone through.

Most of it for the better, sure, but… There was no escaping the rumors surrounding the sudden changes.

The abruptness of it all. Politicians flipping their opposition to gambling entirely, and those who were staunchly against it…

Simply disappearing. Some resigned in disgrace from scandal after scandal hitting the news, but others just…vanished.

“He’s a nice guy, Jade,” I insist. “You’ve met him! He’s not some mafia crime boss.”

“People can be more than one thing, Syd.” But when my face falls, Jade backtracks. “Look, I don’t think I fully believe the rumors, either. I mean... for some of this stuff to be true, he’d have to have the entire police department and the city government on his payroll, right?”

I nod, a bit reluctantly.

“And that stuff only happens in movies. Or in poorly written novels by authors who have no idea how the mafia works.”

“Hey, those authors do a lot of painstaking research,” I protest.

“I’m just worried about you,” Jade finishes. “You’re my best friend, Sydney, and if I just stood by and let you get hurt again?—”

I flinch, and Jade abruptly stops mid-sentence.

“What do you mean again?” I ask, dread creeping through my veins as I stare at my plate. She doesn’t know, does she? There’s no way she…she could know.

Jade swallows.

“You don’t talk about it, Syd, but I think…. I think things between Chase and you were a lot worse than you’ve let on. He wasn’t just a callous dick. I think it’s time to admit that he was emotionally abusive to you.”

I say nothing. And my silence speaks more than words ever could. I fidget with the food on my plate, not meeting her eyes.

“He made you feel small. He made you feel less .” I can hear the anger creeping into Jade’s voice as she speaks. “And I… I should have done something, you know? I should have helped. Because you’re not small, Sydney; you’re wonderful, and you never, ever deserved to be treated like that.”

I look up at her, then, a swell of emotions thick in my throat.

“I feel like I failed you by letting him get away with that for so long,” Jade admits. She stares at the TV screen, like she can’t bring herself to look me in the eye. “Like I should have done more.”

I take her hand. “You never failed me,” I tell her.

“Well, I feel like I did. And I feel like if I let you get involved with a mafia boss, without at least making you stop and consider the consequences, that might be a best friend failure, too,” Jade explains.

“He’s not a mafia boss!” I protest, laughing.

“Even if he is,” Jade tells me with a straight face, reaching out to snatch a piece of crust from my plate and tossing it in her mouth, “at least he’s a hot mafia boss.”

As if! Cher declares from the TV.