Page 3 of A Very Rossi Christmas
But you'd be wrong to think that.
Understandable, since you wouldn't be staring at what I was staring at. You wouldn't be looking at the riot of coppery curls surrounding a face that was almost too sweet-looking to be true, covered in the palest of pale skin and a smattering of freckles that made her look a whole lot younger and more innocent than she actually was. You wouldn't be letting your eyes rake down the curves that had always been a little too perfect for comfort, particularly when you'd once thought of the girl as nothing more than a friend, and a friend in the enemy camp at that.
You wouldn't be pulling your eyes back up to that face to see it staring back at you, the eyes covered by over-large sunglasses and the mouth open in a perfect O of absolute shock at seeingyou.
Sloane. Fucking. Brennan.
What the hell wasshedoing here, on this beach in Santa Monica in the middle of December? It was Christmas, for God's sake.
Why wasn't she home with her parents? Why was she in LA in the first place?
I finished tossing out my towel and laid down on my stomach, facing her, my mind churning through every single piece of information I could remember about the girl. Everything I could think of about what she might have been doing of late.
Me? I was here on business. My first order of business on my own, to be frank, and an important order at that. My father, head of the Rossi family in New York and biggest don there was in the whole fucking city, had finally given in to my constant poking at him to let me do something on my own, and this was the result. A trip to LA to take a meeting with a guy—head of another family—that we were looking to do some business with. They were in jewelry and operated mostly out of the West Coast just because it was easier to get things through customs on this side of the nation.
He could get things we couldn't. Things that we wanted. And I was here to make sure that deal happened.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I'd been training my entire fucking life to prepare for it. As the oldest son, it was my right—my responsibility—to do things like this, because one day—far in the future, God willing—I'd be taking over the family and sitting in my father's chair.
It was something I didn't like to think too much about, though, so I tore my thoughts from the idea, ignored the shiver that was running down my spine in spite of the California sunshine, and got back to the matter at hand.
I knew why I was here, and I had a really, really good reason. An important reason that was condoned by my family.
Why the fuck wasSloanehere? Was she here on business, like me? Could it be that her father was using her for some sort of negotiation as well?
Nah. I sent the thought flitting away from me, knowing immediately that it couldn't be that. Irish Brennan's one and only daughter was the brightest mind on our street and always had been, and she would have made a fucking fantastic negotiator for his family. But I'd known her basically since she was born—though I wasn't supposed to admit that to anyone else, seeing as how our families were enemies—and I knew how much her dad loved her.
There was no way he'd get her messed up in anything for the family. He wanted the best for her, and that meant he'd fought to keep her out of the life. Made sure she wasn’t involved in any deals and was as protected as possible from his own actions. He never would have sent her out west for a negotiation, no matter how smart she was.
I tipped my head, then, staring slowly from Sloane—-who was still staring at me—to the girl lying next to her. Yeah, I knew that one, too. Those long, lanky lines and the face that belonged on the runway. Brooks Peterson. Not part of the mafia, directly, except that she'd always been Sloane's best friend. Family adjacent. She was dying her hair an alarming shade of red these days, I saw, but that didn't hide her identity.
Not that she was trying. She was laying in the sun like she was daring every man on the beach to worship her, all stretched out and posed as if she was waiting for a fucking cameraman to come along and shoot some stills.
Typical Brooks. The girl was tough as nails and would shoot you in the nuts if she thought you'd insulted her, but knew exactly how to use her looks to get what she wanted.
She and Sloane in the same space at the same time were danger with a capital D. Always had been.
So what were they doing in LA, laying on the beach like they belonged here?
I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember when I'd last seen either of them... and came up with a blank for the last five years or so. We'd all grown up on the same block, on the same side of town—the side where the mafia ruled—and there was a time when I'd seen both of them on the daily.
There was a time when Sloane and I had managed to see each other a whole lot more than that. Not that anyone from either of our families knew about it.
But lately...
No, I hadn't seen Sloane much for the last five years. And by the time I stopped seeing her around, I'd been so caught up with the business that I hadn't bothered to look for her. She and I had stopped talking when we graduated high school and realized that we had to deal with real life.
Realized that the friendship we'd nurtured in back alleys and basements might actually get us in trouble now that I was being groomed as my father's right-hand man.
That's right, I said it. We'd been friends. Close ever since we'd both nearly been hit by the same ice cream truck when we were six and seven years old and rushing to get to the truck before the driver got away. I'd seen the truck coming and knocked her out of the way, taking her tumbling to the ground and then shielding her with my body during the roll, knowing instinctively that she was smaller and more fragile than I was and that it was therefore my job to protect her.
Afterwards, of course, I'd found out that she was actually part of the Brennan family, daughter to the head of the Irish mob, and therefore my enemy.
But it had been far too late. By the time we found that out, we'd been attached at the hip and sneaking out of our collective houses at all hours to meet up and trade bubblegum cards and secrets.
And from there...
Well, when we'd managed to meet at midnight on the night we graduated from high school, tucked into a corner of our favorite coffee shop and huddled over a table laughing about how stupid it was that we now had to act like adults, I'd looked at her and realized that something had shifted. Something that had once been a friendship, a partnership in crime, had become...
