Page 2 of Entertaining Distraction
Mike Donovan grinned at his employee, Jennifer Mullins. “Not at all, Baby-girl,” he assured her, using the nickname her surrogate uncles had given her when she’d been an infant. The six men who made up the original team at Trident Security had all served with Jenn’s father on SEAL Team Four. When her parents had been murdered a few years ago, she’d come to live with her godfather, Ian Sawyer, one of the two brothers who owned the private security company. “In this business, employees come and go. I always knew you’d be moving on to bigger and better things someday. In fact, I never quite understood why you came to work here in the first place. It’s not like Ian’s hurting for money.”
Jenn was finishing up her third year of college, majoring in Social Work. She had the smarts and personality for a career helping others. “Grandpa Chuck and Grandma Marie always made sure their kids knew how to earn a living, and my parents had the same philosophy.” Chuck and Marie Sawyer were Mike’s brother Jake’s future in-laws, as he was engaged to their youngest son, Nick. Jake also worked for Nick’s brothers, Ian and Devon, after serving in the Navy SEALs with them. Chuck was a self-made, real estate billionaire, while his wife was a skilled plastic surgeon who often traveled to foreign countries with the organization Operation Smile. The couple considered Jenn their granddaughter. “Nothing worth having is handed to you on a silver platter, as Grandpa Chuck always says. I have a trust fund with the money from my parents’ life insurance policies and the sale of the house in Virginia, but that’s for my college tuition and maybe a house someday. And it wouldn’t have felt right sponging off Uncle Ian—he’s already done so much for me. Working here also took my mind off my parents’ deaths when I first moved to Tampa. I love everyone that works at Donovan’s, and it’s going to be hard to say goodbye, but I can’t pass up the social work internship. I’ll actually be in Kayla’s office, so it’ll be fun.”
Kayla London and her wife, Roxy, were friends of the Sawyers and members of The Covenant, a BDSM club the brothers also owned. Jake was a member of the club too, something Mike never quite understood. His younger sibling had gotten into the lifestyle in his teens. At first, Mike had thought it was a gay thing, but now he knew better. However, he still didn’t get it. Gone were his thoughts that it harbored abusive behavior, but he couldn’t figure out why Jake and the others were—wired, he supposed the word was—differently. As long as no one was harmed, he guessed, then to each their own.
Mike leaned back in the desk chair in his small office at the back of the pub and smiled at Jenn as she stood in the doorway. “Well, we loved having you work here and everyone will miss you too, but you better stop in as often as possible. Are you staying for Charlotte’s birthday party after your shift?”
Jenn shook her head. “No, I’ve got a term paper due on Wednesday and another on Friday. Thanks again for everything, Mike. I’ll help train whoever you get to replace me.” She had given him three weeks’ notice, so that was plenty of time to hire and train someone new.
A ding sounded in the kitchen, signaling an order up, and Jenn glanced over her shoulder. “That’s probably mine.”
“Go—I’ve got someone coming in to interview for Mario’s position. Let me know when he gets here.”
“Okay.”
As she hurried toward the kitchen, Mike turned back to the resume in front of him. The night-time sous chef had up and quit without warning, so Mike was scrambling to fill the position before the weekend rolled around again. His daytime sous chef was covering both shifts for the overtime, but he wasn’t going to be able to do that for long. The applicant coming in for the interview had been on a list of ex-felons who’d done their time and were looking for jobs. It was a local program to help them integrate back into society, and Mike had hired two other reformed felons to work in the kitchen in the past. One was still there after three years, while the other hadn’t worked out, but, after batting .500, Mike was willing to give someone else a shot. Jose Perez had apparently been assigned to the prison kitchen and learned a lot about food preparation during his two-year sentence for auto theft. From what the career organizer had told Mike, the guy had a fiancée and kid and had gotten involved with a chop-shop to provide for them. It was an all too common scenario for high school dropouts with no skills for work that was legal—they turned to a life of crime just to have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. It could be a risk hiring an ex-con, but Mike was a firm believer that most people deserved a second chance after they’d screwed up big time. He was a prime example.
Back when he was attending the local community college, his younger brother Jake had been the big man on campus at their high school. The starting quarterback for the football team and straight-A student, Jake had colleges throwing all sorts of incentives at him to get him to sign with them. Meanwhile, Mike had been a B-student with no outstanding skills, who didn’t excel in any sport, so he ended up being second best in his father’s eyes. His destiny had been to eventually take over Donovan’s Pub, the business his father and grandfather before him had owned. But a huge part of him had been extremely jealous of his younger brother back then. A shelf above the bar had been filled with sport trophies Jake had won throughout his junior and senior high school years, in more than just football, and Mike had hated every single one of them. So when he’d accidentally found out seventeen-year-old Jake was gay, he did the worst thing he’d ever done in his life—he told their bigoted father. At first, Sean Donovan had called his eldest son a liar, but then he’d stormed out of the house and headed for the adult video and toy store where Mike had seen Jake kissing another guy before going inside. What Mike hadn’t known at the time was in the basement of the store was an underground BDSM club. When Jake and his boyfriend, Max, had come back out two hours later, Sean followed Max home where he’d beaten the living shit out of the guy, putting him in the hospital. The elder Donovan then returned home and tried to beat the gay out of his son. That night had altered Jake’s future in a way Mike had never expected, and he’d regretted telling the old man from the moment the words had come out of his mouth. After recovering from the assault, Jake graduated two months later, threw his full-ride to Rutgers University in his father’s face, and joined the Navy, all on the same afternoon. The next day, all those trophies disappeared from the shelf in Donovan’s. Mike had found them in a box in the back of the pub’s overcrowded store room years later, after his father had died and he’d taken over the business.
Despite not knowing Mike had been responsible for their father finding out Jake was gay, the younger Donovan had distanced himself from his brother. Occasionally, he’d come home for the holidays, but mainly to see their mother. If he’d spoken more than a dozen words to their father for the rest of the old man’s life, that would be a stretch. When Jake moved back to Tampa with his teammates a few years ago, he and Mike began to see each other almost every week, but there was still a huge gap between them. Mike had finally come clean to his brother when he realized what had happened all those years ago was negatively affecting Jake’s relationship with Nick, thinking Jake would never want to speak to him again after his confession. As it turned out, instead of driving them further apart, it had brought them closer together, a fact Mike would always be grateful for. Shortly after, he pulled out the box of trophies and added them to a display case he’d put near the hostess stand, which was filled with the ones the pub’s softball team had won over the past six years since he’d sponsored them.
A knock on the door had him glancing up to see Jenn standing there again. “Your interview is here. I told him to have a seat in the party room. He seems like a nice guy, just a little nervous.”
Mike stood and grinned. “Thanks, Ms. Social Worker.”
She chuckled. “I like the sound of that.”
