Page 24 of Assistant to the Mafia

eight

Comes in Threes

Grace blinked slowly, staring across the table at her boss. He was a man she knew, a man she’d known in some capacity for years and saw nearly every day. She’d never known him for cracking jokes, let alone in the middle of serious conversations, but that had to be what he’d just done. Except he wasn’t grinning, he wasn’t laughing, and he sure as hell wasn’t taking it back. She glanced to the side, hoping for a cue from Romeo, and found him watching her.

Her breath caught in her throat. Holy crap. She dragged her gaze back to Dante. “I’m sorry,” she said, speaking carefully. “Did you say mafia? As in criminal underground or something?”

Dante nodded calmly. “I did.”

Her head spun and Grace looked away as she attempted to process that new and incredibly outrageous information. The mafia… She had been effectively working for some apparently giant mafia group for nearly a decade. Am I an idiot? Am I blind? How had she never suspected anything? And what was she supposed to do with this information?

In the prevailing silence, everyone heard Grace’s phone start buzzing violently in her lap. Probably both men saw her jump before she snatched the device up, fully prepared to dismiss what was surely yet another work call. She hadn’t even gone through all the notifications that had come in while she’d slept.

But it wasn’t a work call, and somehow—unsurprisingly—her sister’s name on the screen only fueled her frustration. “Here’s a thought,” Grace said as she practically smacked her still-buzzing phone onto the table, “maybe one of you big, scary mafia men could convince my self-absorbed sister to respect someone else’s working hours.” She wasn’t at work, granted, but any other Tuesday she would have been and Cait most certainly didn’t know about even a portion of her series of atypical events. Cait could never know.

The words were barely out of Grace’s mouth before Romeo slipped the phone from her fingers and accepted the call. She gaped at him, horrified and thrilled all the same time. She ought to have been furious, or at least humiliated, but she couldn’t work herself into either.

“Caitlin, right? This is Romeo De Salvo.” He paused and the tone of her sister’s voice carried through, a little sharp but satisfyingly delayed. Romeo shifted the phone to his opposite ear and settled his free hand on Grace’s thigh, beneath the bunched-up hem of her shirt. Even through the thicker material of the pants, she could feel the heat of his touch. “Yes, that De Salvo. I’m sure you’re aware, but Grace is a busy woman. You can’t be calling her during work hours unless there’s an emergency.”

Grace bit her lip. It was the second day in a row that her sister had called, which in itself was unusual. If she’d remembered that right away, she might have answered. Cait had sworn there wasn’t an emergency, but what if she was playing some stupid word game?

The professional-friendly tone of his voice slipped into something harder when he spoke again seconds later. “You should listen more carefully when your sister talks.” His fingers pressed a little more firmly into the curve of her thigh. “Or is the truth just that you can’t handle the fact that your younger sister has a better, higher-paying job, and you think if you continuously talk her down you’ll somehow make her less?”

Her jaw dropped at what he suggested. There was no way her always superior, always perfect older sister felt the way he described.

Cait’s voice went up so many octaves Grace was able to pick out some of the words. Not that she needed the confirmation of her sister’s displeasure.

Romeo talked right over her. “If we’ve got that cleared up, I am also busy. I’m going to have to charge you for my time if you insist on keeping me on the phone. Plus business lost, of course, if you make me miss my next—” He pulled the phone from his ear, grinning wickedly. “She hung up.” He set the phone down on the table, technically within her reach, and turned to catch her gaze. All without lifting his hand from her thigh. “Your sister called. Said she just wanted to catch up.”

Grace huffed out an aggravated breath, unintentionally shifting closer to him. “I’m sorry about her. Thank you.” It was awkward, but she also felt grateful in an arguably juvenile way. The hand now mostly between her legs was definitely cheating.

The amusement fled from Romeo’s expression. “Is there a reason your sister seemed to think you work reception?”

She swore she felt a vein throb at her temple. “Did she actually say that?”

“Pretty much.”

“Personal inquiries will have to wait, brother,” Dante said.

Grace returned her attention to him in time to see him dipping his head in the direction of the hall. She frowned, confused and embarrassed with how easily she’d forgotten the bombshell these men had dropped on her before her sister’s phone call. That wasn’t the sort of thing a person should just pitch from their mind.

Romeo pulled his hand out from between her legs and stretched his arm out over the back of her chair, as if her sitting directly beside him at a table with so much available seating wasn’t statement enough. But his attention was outward, she realized, and then another man walked into the room. One she did not know.

He looked to be in his mid-to-late thirties and probably close to her own height of five-nine, with a sturdy but not overtly muscular build. He had short brown hair and deep brown eyes, the latter of which he quickly averted after taking only a single step into the room. “Apologies for the interruption, sirs.”

“What the fuck, Enrico?” Romeo asked sharply.

The newcomer, Enrico apparently, didn’t flinch or lift his gaze from the floor. “I thought you should be made aware of situation that just occurred outside, sir.” He pulled a tablet from behind his back. “A woman we haven’t been able to identify drove up to the gate and…” He cleared his throat as if he were uncomfortable. “She egged the security console, sir.”

If just one thing that morning could stop shocking the crap out of her, Grace might start to feel like she had a grasp on things. But someone just randomly showing up in broad daylight and egging Romeo’s front gate—Romeo who was apparently a big-bad mafia guy—just seemed entirely asinine.

She was only mildly soothed by the briefly shocked silence that overcame the brothers, too.

Romeo dragged in a breath. “Egged? As in some fucking moron just randomly decided to vandalize my home?”

Dante held out his hand. “Tablet.”

Enrico strode forward and set the table into Dante’s palm, then moved back to his previous position at the precipice of the room.

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