Page 12 of The Nanny and the Don
“Nothing is inaccessible to you anymore, beautiful. You’re with me now.”
That actually made me feel good. Brendan was arrogant and full of himself, but it felt good that he wanted to show me another life. Lord knows I had lived the life I was living long enough. A smile parted my lips when he reached up and dabbed the corner of my mouth with his napkin. Maybe he wasn’t all that bad after all.
Five
Steel
I lobbed the glass that I had been drinking out of against the wall, shattering it into a thousand irreparable pieces. It was still in better shape than my heart. It had been days since the charity gala the board hosted, and I was still fuming.
I didn’t bother to clean up the glass as I left my office and headed down to the basement to meet my barber, Jacob. I had too much shit going on to worry about some shit I couldn’t control right now. That didn’t make it any better.
I wanted to kill Brendan White when I saw my fucking woman waltzing into that ballroom on his arm. There were no rules when it came to love and war. He and I had been business associates for almost ten years.
We had been friends for even longer than that. One woman had me considering risking it all. Hell, he had! Nothing that we had done over the past twelve years told him that a woman I had blatantly declared was mine was off-limits to him. That should have meant that the gloves were off. If he were anyone else, they would be.
Anything was fair in this game. Still, I felt like a simp for considering ripping his throat out over a woman. Granted I wouldn’t have to be the one to do it. I had at least a hundred men who would make him disappear with one wave of my finger. At the same time, she had made her decision. If the woman wanted to be with him, who the hell was I to stop her?Her man! I was her man.
Never had I ever pursued another man’s woman. Never in history had I ever wanted a woman that I couldn’t have. Most of all, I had never let a woman come between any of my relationships. Women had already taught me a lesson that I would never forget. First when Monique abandoned me in the hospital when my life was already bleak enough. Then when my own sister robbed me to help finance her man’s third-rate drug business. I understood my sister wanting to have a nigga with money. She didn’t need one though. Her brother was the ultimate nigga with money.
Back then everybody moving weight in the city had to go through me. It was my connections that helped them to eat. She let that clown convince her to try to go around me which was impossible in the first place. The twenty kilos of coke he wanted to buy with the money she funneled to him was a drop in the bucket, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to cut his fucking head off for getting my sister involved in his scheme.
I even let them keep the money after I cut her off. Angela made me soft. I knew she was under the powerful spell of the dick. Dickmatized wasn’t just a word people used to describe women who got stupid when it came to the dick. It was a real thing. It cost me the woman who had been by my side for as long as I could remember.
Now on the heels of losing yet another woman I couldn’t get off my mind, I was thinking about letting my sister back in my life. I didn’t even know what her charges were or what she wasup to these days. All I knew was Angela was my sister. If it weren’t for her constant fucked-up choices, she would still be in my life, and I would know my niece and nephew.
Although I was hands-off in the game these days, nothing moved without my say-so. I headed an organization that brokered high-stakes deals right in the middle of charity galas to feed children and build community centers for the youth. The most recent gala I spearheaded was to remodel and upgrade the parks in the inner city, since the local government wasn’t doing shit about them.
My basketball playing days were over, but that didn’t mean I didn’t remember how playing on those courts kept me sane. I would shoot free throws and jump shots all night long when my stomach was growling, and I had no idea how to stop it. It was a bittersweet victory that we had exceeded our goal at the charity gala. I couldn’t celebrate, because what was left of my heart was in shreds and the rest of it was trying to figure out how to care for a pair of toddlers that I had only known for a few days.
Just one week as a guardian gave me a brand-new appreciation for single mothers. I had to find a foundation to give some money to or something because damn. I had a whole staff of people helping me with Evie and King, and I was still ready to pull my eyebrows out.
As cute as Evie was, she never stopped crying, and I could barely get her to eat anything. King was so full of energy that he was jumping off of everything and breaking shit. Every night he woke up screaming. We didn’t even have to get into the fact that both of them had wet the bed every night since they had been here.
My entire life had been flipped upside down. It was a struggle for me so I could only imagine what a couple of little kids who had been ripped away from their mother were going through. I knew they were having a hard time. I just didn’t know how tohelp them. The best thing I could do for them was leave them to Sicily and Miguel to handle until Four found a suitable nanny.
It didn’t matter how much time I spent stowed away in my office, eventually I had to come out and face them. The first night that I brought them home I had Sicily give them a bath while I went out shopping for clothes for them. They only came with the clothes on their backs, so I used them as a guideline for what sizes to get them.
The next morning, I called a chick I used to mess around with who owned a hair salon. Gabriella was so excited to hear my voice. I could hear the disappointment in her tone when I told her I needed her to come over and do my niece’s hair. I didn’t care about her disappointment. I needed something done to Evie’s hair. Neither me nor Sicily knew how to do hair. That’s why King and I were sitting in the barbershop I’d built in my finished basement while my barber, Jacob, cut our hair.
“Uncle Steel, I never got a haircut in a house,” King told me.
“Your uncle is loaded. He can afford house calls,” Jacob joked.
“If I had to sit up under a bunch of musty niggas to get a haircut, I would just dread my shit up.”
“I feel ya,” Jacob said, as I stood and took a second look in the mirror to make sure my line-up was just right.
Jacob always got me right, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to double check. Miguel was making lunch for the kids to not eat while Sicily had pretty much abandoned her housekeeping duties to keep Evie entertained. That mostly meant watching her play with the million toys I’d bought hoping to pacify them to some extent.
I had too much business to take care of to sit around the house trying to figure out what to do with my niece and nephew. It didn’t matter that I was pissed at Brendan for snatching my woman from right under my nose. There was a six-figure errorin the last few accounting reports that I looked over. He was supposed to get back to me on the discrepancy when I returned from Japan.
A discussion we were supposed to follow up on at the gala was sidelined by him having my girl with him. Of course, I didn’t feel like talking or doing shit else after being blindsided with that, but now I was back to business as usual. Except apparently Brendan wasn’t. He had been unreachable on his cell, and according to his secretary, he was out of the office.
Granted she could have been telling a bold-faced lie. I’d known him to have her lie a hundred times, but not to me. There was never a time when I couldn’t get in contact with him. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with him for days.
It was possible that he thought I was holding a grudge about him backdooring me. He was correct in his assumption, but at the end of the day, business is business. As long as we were on the same page about that, I could live with the loss of a woman I hadn’t even gotten the chance to know yet.
I understood that love wasn’t in the cards for everybody. I had given up on my own true love when I woke up and discovered that Monique had left me in the hospital a month before we were supposed to get married. I buried myself in my work and turned a million-dollar drug operation into a multimillion-dollar corporation through investments and buyouts. Multiplying my money became so addictive that I didn’t care about anything else.
