Page 11 of Her Bad Boy

The only thing she couldn't see a use for was the small bag of cheap kitty litter. She and Laura had looked at each other, but, having been born and raised in the South, neither could begin to come up with a use for it.

"This is from him, isn't it?" Laura wasn't a co-worker, and she wasn't a lawyer—she was the CEO of her own small corporation that made handbags. But she had a good idea from how her friend talked about Lucas Bove just how enamored she was of him—and also how much she absolutely did not want to be, and she had more than an inkling that the feeling was mutual, and she wasn't sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. The jury was still out on that, and Laura wouldn't be at all surprised if it came back hung.

"This is inappropriate, isn't it?" she asked when her friend had nodded slowly. "Are you going to give it back to him? And, I guess that begs the further question, are you going to survive giving it back to him, if you do?"

Allie frowned at her friend. "Don't be melodramatic."

"I'm not. You know you're in danger from him—you're trying to put him in prison! I don't even have any experience with them, but every mafia movie I've seen has taught me that the mob takes a pretty hard line against people who try to do that—like the permanent, six feet under kind of hard line."

It wasn't as if Allie didn't know that. She just preferred not to think about that fact, especially in conjunction with one mobster in particular.

"I don't sense a threat from him." She blushed. "Well, not the kind that's going to result in me taking a dirt nap, anyway." No, it was the kind that was going to result in her not being able to sit down comfortably for days on end, apparently.

Laura, who had been on the receiving end of a panicked call the night after he had rescued her, knew exactly to what she was referring and gave her a doubtful look.

"And I don't think I have a choice, anyway. I can't accept gifts from someone I'm trying to prosecute." She blithely discounted the coffee as a one-time thing. "It's not even like he has 'questionable connections'—he's the effing boss of the family!"

"But how are you going to do that? I don't think this was done through FTD—they don't have a 'roadside bouquet'—like you could have them come and take it back or something. I think he did this himself—or had a lackey do it, then had said lackey drop it off."

Allie sighed and slumped back into her chair. "Yup. I wouldn't be at all surprised."

"Too bad he's mobbed up," Laura commented almost wistfully as she gathered the wrapping paper. "He sounds like just what you need."

Normally, Allie would have completely ignored a jibe like that, or pooh poohed it at least, not wanting to give it any credence at all. But instead—due to the booze, she imagined—she asked, "What do you mean?"

Laura made her way into the kitchen and turned on the Keurig, figuring Allie could do with a strong cup of coffee. "Well, I know you have a hard time…bending the rules in any way. And you're very…" she searched for a term her friend wouldn't consider to be derogatory, and even when she spoke, she wasn't sure Allie wouldn't take offense "…pent up about sex in general. He spooked you a bit, because he was so spot on with some of his more sexual comments when you went out that time."

"That's a severe understatement," Allie muttered, but not loud enough for her friend to hear, and refusing to ponder—at the moment—the rest of her friend's depressingly accurate statements about her.

"But jeez, from what you've said about him—aside from, well, all the not good stuff—he's a dream! He's gorgeous and smart and went to really good schools and he's funny and you guys got along well, once you loosened up some around him. And his manners sound phenomenal! If you hadn't wigged out when he mentioned spanking you—which is something you know you definitely want, even if you're not willing to admit to yourself or, Heaven forbid, anyone else beyond me—you two could have been sleeping together by now. You could have been getting you some, which—as you know—is something I think you desperately need."

As much as she loved her, Laura could be a terrible nag. She thought that most of what was wrong with Allie could be cured by a good, hard fuck.

"I mean, the way you reacted, you would think that you were completely averse to the idea—"

Trying for outrage, but not quite managing it, she replied, "I am averse to the idea—with him, at least!"

"Please. You're against the idea of sex in general, so you've never let anyone get anywhere near to spanking you, even though you fantasize about it all the time."

"I am not, and I do not think about it all the time." Allie pouted. "Only about five percent of the time. And I've had sex. Just…not a lot of it."

"And we're back to your original problem—that you need to loosen up some, because you spend the other ninety-five percent of your time obsessing about your work, and I think those percentages should be reversed, or at least brought into a much better balance. You might have had sex, once, a long time ago, but you haven't had good sex even once in your life—I'd be willing to stake my life on it, or I wouldn't have to sit here and try to convince you to have sex."

Allie did the mature thing and stuck her tongue out at her friend.

"And somehow, I don't think you'd walk away from that man unsatisfied," Laura practically purred. "You might be walking funny, but you wouldn't be blue balling it, by any means."

Her fierce glare bounced right off Laura, as did her scintillating response, "Grr."

The next day, Saturday, Allie and her crate full of stuff Ubered their way to what she had somewhat less than affectionately thought of as the Corleone compound but was actually Bove's large, private estate outside of town. It wasn't quite the gang of toughs that had surrounded Vito's place that greeted them when they drove up to the gate, but it was quite well guarded. So much so that the Uber guy was kind of apprehensive about turning in, and she couldn't really say that she blamed him, either.

So, when they pulled up to the speaker and monitor, it was Allie who leaned around him and shouted out the window, "I'm here to return something to Mr. Bove. Lucas Bove?"

She felt the driver stiffen as she said his name.

"And you are, ma'am?"

She ignored the insulting use of 'ma'am' and said, "Allie Barstow."

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