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CHAPTER TWO

Santo

“Jesus Christ,” I hissed, breaking off mid-stride when I saw someone moving around my kitchen.

“Charming as always,” Smush said, rolling her eyes at me. “If you got up before ten, you wouldn’t even know I was here.”

“You been talking to my mom?” I asked, making a beeline for the coffee pot, brows pinching when the light was off and the contents cold.

“Your lady friend turned it off before she left,” Smush told me as she pulled toothpaste and floss out of one of the bags. “She was pretty. Should I tell Aunt Giulia to start planning the wedding?”

“Why do you hate me?” I asked, dumping the pot of coffee, figuring it just made more sense to get some on the road now. “She’s already breathing down my neck. You think it’d be enough that Nino, Mass, and August got women and are popping out kids.”

“That is a Grassi mother,” Smush said with an understanding smirk. “They’re not satisfied until we’re all married and reproducing. If you think you have it bad, imagine how hard she is on Valley.”

That was likely true. And my sister spent a lot more time around my mother than I did. She had to be getting nagged relentlessly.

“So what was wrong with this one?” Smush asked as I went into the fridge to grab a yogurt, seeing she had already restocked that for me.

“What do you mean?”

“The girl. She was super pretty. And sweet.”

She was.

“Nothing’s wrong with her.”

“But you’re not going to be calling her again.”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“We both just wanted some fun,” I told her. At her dubious look, I shrugged. “She was just in town for a wedding. She’s back to California tomorrow.”

“Convenient.”

“Hey, I’m not against finding the right woman. Until then, I’m just as happy to find a lot of the wrong women.”

Smush shook her head at that. “Shouldn’t you be at work by now, slacker?” she asked.

“Eh, just doing my rounds today,” I said, finishing the yogurt and tossing it in the trash.

We didn’t exactly talk details about our work with the women in the family. If shit went down, we wanted to make sure they had plausible deniability if the cops ever tried to lean on them. That said, they were part of a mob family; they understood a lot of the inner workings.

Some days involved meetings. Others, working on new money-making schemes. But a lot of days were just days when we did our rounds. Meaning, we played bag man for the family, collecting the protection money from local businesses.

As a whole, the family made most of its money from the docks. And we all contributed to scoring new jobs that came through them. Or working security to make sure shit went smoothly over there.

That said, if we wanted to make more money—and we all did—we had to find our own jobs. Some legit—like Lucky’s pizza places, Luca’s restaurant, and Matteo’s wedding venue—others not so much. And when it came to mafia business, the protection racket was the oldest in the book. You give us a little cash each month; we make sure no one fucks with your business.

Normally, lower-level guys in the organization would be the bagman. But we didn’t run a crew like the New York Families. We were a small operation run entirely by blood relatives.

That meant that some of us had to do the dirty work. Most of that fell on me and my brother Dante. Sometimes on our cousin Milo, since he was the youngest and greenest of us. But Milo had been proving himself hungrier than me and my brother. He was always off doing some big job, bringing in money, proving his worth.

I was happy to have my place in the Family, but I was also happy to be somewhere in the middle in terms of work. I made more than enough money to afford a nice lifestyle.

And I liked to sleep in.

Smush nodded as she gathered all of my bathroom supplies. “Are you all done up there?” she asked.

“Yeah, but can you toss down my phone?” I asked, patting my jacket and pant pockets, realizing I must have left it on the counter.

“I better not hear it spouting some alpha-male-bullshit podcast,” she told me over her shoulder as she made her way up the back stairs to the second floor.

The house was a somewhat new purchase on my part; one I’d only made after a lot of nagging from my mother, who insisted that no woman was going to see a future with a man who didn’t have a nice, comfortable home for her to raise her babies in.

What can I say? Giulia Grassi could be a bit… traditional about gender roles. And, hey, I kind of needed the tax shelter, so I went ahead and bought the house. I wasn’t like my brother or some of my cousins, though. I wasn’t interested in fixing up an old place. So I went ahead and bought a house that had been completely gutted and redone by the previous owners.

“Here,” Smush said, holding out my phone to me, still crooning out some Billy Joel until I slid my finger to silence it. “You know what you need?” she asked, going back to her reusable bags to start shoving them into one another.

“What’s that?”

“Some damn furniture,” she said, waving around. “You literally don’t have a dining table. Or a couch. Art on the walls. Window treatments.”

“The windows came with those built-in blinds,” I said, shrugging. “They do their job.”

“Men,” Smush said with an eye roll. “Maybe Aunt Giulia is right; you do need a wife.”

“Hey, I have you to keep the house running.”

“If you think making sure the toilet paper doesn’t run out is running a house, there is no helping you,” she said, leaving out the back door.

Alone, I did a tour of my house, trying to see it through the eyes of someone who wasn’t living there. Well, sleeping there, at least. I didn’t spend much time at home, save for early mornings or late nights.

It never really occurred to me that maybe the reason I avoided the place I called home was because it was so damn empty.

There was no place to sit and watch the games when they were on, so I just went over to one of my brothers’ places. There was no dining table, so I went to my mom’s place for dinner.

My bedroom was the only space that had any furniture, and even that was minimal. I had my bed and nightstands simply because they’d come with me from my old place. But I relied on the big overhead light because I hadn’t thought to buy lamps for the nightstands. There was only a small dresser, so everything I wore was in the walk-in closet.

Aside from when I’d first moved in, my mother hadn’t been to my place. I could just hear what she’d have to say about it if she came around this long after I’d started calling it home to find it so empty.

“What woman would want to settle down with a man who can’t even remember to buy a couch?”

Maybe she had a point.

Where the fuck did you even go to buy a couch?

I shook my head at myself as I tucked my phone in my pocket. I would figure the decorating shit out later. First, I had to go scrounge up some money from the local businesses.

The first stop on my list was Phil’s Autos. It was a place that had been around my entire life. Just a simple, old-school mechanic shop with six bays, four lifts, and a group of mechanics who seemed to know what they were doing. The place was always pretty busy, anyway.

But for the past two months, the shop had been open odd hours, if at all. I hadn’t been able to collect our money in all that time.

As a whole, I liked to give people a little grace. Everyone had shit going on. And, clearly, if the place was only open for odd hours here and there, something had to be going on. Sickness or a family emergency.

Still, I could only let it slide for so long. It set a bad precedent for the other businesses that paid us and did so on time each month.

I’d passed by the night before to find it bustling like it used to be, so I figured that whatever had been going on was over with.

The owner’s busted old red-and-white pick-up was nowhere to be seen. Parked in its place was an equally old and busted little orange hatchback with faded paint on the hood and cherry-printed seat covers.

So… not Phil.

But maybe new office staff.

Lord knew the place needed a little feminine energy.

I was all for authenticity, but just because Phil and his crew were old-school mechanics didn’t mean the place couldn’t benefit from a smiling face. And maybe some softer touches in the waiting room.

When I climbed out of the car and made my way inside, though, it wasn’t a woman I was met with. It was the same old shop manager I’d seen a dozen times before.

He was in the middle of handing keys back to a client, assuring them that there was nothing wrong with the brakes in such a strained way that I couldn’t help but think the owner of the car brought it in frequently to get checked out.

I waited for them to shuffle out before moving up.

“I’m here to see Phil,” I told him when I didn’t see recognition on his face.

“Phil’s dead,” he said, point-blank, no tiptoeing into it.

“What?”

“Dead,” he confirmed. “Had a heart attack sitting in his car at work a couple months back.”

So that was why the hours had been so wonky.

I probably should have known that. But it wasn’t like anyone thought to call the local mob when their loved one died.

“Right. But you’re still open, so…”

“Got a new owner. Relative,” David said, looking like he wanted to be rid of me already, so he could get back to work. And to be fair, there looked to be a lot of cars waiting to be worked on.

“Right. Well, can you take me to him?”

That, for some reason, got the man’s lips twitching for a second before he pressed them into a straight line.

“Why the fuck not?” he said, pushing through the door to the garage.

I was familiar enough with this place. Sometimes, Phil came out to my car to pay me. Other times, he was too busy to remember the schedule, and I had to be led into the back where the office sat tucked to the side of the garage.

It was a partly glass room, but Phil almost always had the blinds drawn to get some privacy.

The same was true now, only the door was also closed. Which wasn’t normal. Phil had been a bit of a control freak, always wanting to hear what was going on.

David rapped a fist against the door three times.

“Company,” he called, then turned and pushed open the door.

Which was rude as fuck.

And I couldn’t imagine why he’d done it.

Until the door swung open to reveal the new owner.

A woman.

But, fuck, not just any woman.

The most gorgeous one I’d seen in a long fucking time.

She was all soft curves in a bright floral dress that was almost hilariously out of place in a garage.

Her golden blonde hair was left loose around her delicate, round face.

She’d been leaning over on the desk, staring hopelessly at the piles of paperwork, but her posture stiffened as she turned to find me standing there, her pretty light brown eyes wide.

“Oh, uh, hi,” she said, shaking off her clearly frazzled mood to offer me a megawatt smile. “Sorry, did we have an appointment? I’ve gotten a little turned around today. Trying to figure out the, uh, books. If you can call them that. My uncle kept most of his records in old paper ream boxes. In absolutely no order whatsoever.

“I mean, would it kill him to learn how to spreadsheet? Granted, I don’t know how to spreadsheet either, but I didn’t own a business that required them. I guess I need to learn how to spreadsheet, huh? Sorry, did we have an appointment?” she asked, getting to her feet, making her skirt dance around her legs.

Suddenly, I was having all sorts of images flash across my mind. Like slamming the door, pressing her back against the wall, dropping down on my knees, and getting lost between her thick thighs, like suffocating myself with those perfect fucking tits of hers, like yanking down her panties and surging inside of her.

“No. Well, in a way. I have a standing appointment with Phil,” I explained, willing my cock to behave as she just stood there with all that pretty.

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry to tell you, but my Uncle Phil—“

“Is dead. Yeah, the shop manager said that. Just like that, in fact,” I told her, watching her roll her eyes, a soft smile tugging at her plump lips.

“I’ve come to find that David can be a bit…”

“Rude?” I supplied.

“I was going to say ‘blunt,’” she said. “Which can be a bit refreshing. Sometimes. But, yes, my uncle passed away.”

“And you inherited the garage?” I asked, waving a hand out.

“The garage, the house, a storage unit I’m starting to fear may be filled with more old files and keys that don’t appear to actually open anything.” Reaching into the desk drawer, she produced a ring of keys that would make any janitor jealous. “I mean… what is this? This is the third ring I have found just like this.”

“He was a bit of a packrat, huh?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know what I found he had a collection of under his bed,” she said, nose wrinkling up. “Anyway, sorry,” she said, exhaling hard.

“No need to apologize.”

“What are we supposed to be having a meeting about, Mr.…”

“Grassi,” I supplied, watching to see if the name meant anything to her. “Santo Grassi.”

“Mr. Grassi,” she repeated.

“Santo,” I corrected, but only because I wanted to hear her sweet voice say my name. And not because it would help me imagine her moaning it while I was balls-deep ins—

Jesus Christ.

What was wrong with me?

“Santo,” she repeated. “I’m Dasha,” she said, holding her hand out for me to shake.

I didn’t need to know she smelled like fucking honeysuckle. Or that she had the softest skin I’d ever felt as I slid my hand into hers.

More fodder for those sexual fantasies, no doubt.

“Dasha, nice to meet you,” I said. “You know what? I am going to go ahead and let you settle in, figure out… all that,” I told her, gesturing toward the desk. “Then we can have a meeting.”

I was absolutely not making that offer just because I wanted an excuse to meet with her again. Because that would be fucked.

“Are you sure?” she asked, though her shoulders sagged in relief. She was clearly overwhelmed by everything.

And it wasn’t like their protection money would make or break the Family anyway.

“Yeah. How about I come back next week?”

“Sure. That would be great. I promise I’ll be less of a mess then. Or, at least, I will know your name,” she said with another big smile.

“I can settle for that.”

And maybe a nice, slow fuck on top of her desk.

Christ.

I had to get out of there.

“I’ll see you next week then.”