Page 3 of Entangled Mafia Princess

Casey

“You look like a princess,” my aunt, Chloe, coos as the hairdresser places the tiara on my head.

“Or a Barbie doll,” says my cousin Hannah, who turned twenty-one a few months before me.

I look at myself in the full-length mirror of a dressing room in the luxury hotel where my birthday party is being held. With my wavy blond hair and bright blue eyes, I bear some resemblance to the dolls I used to play with, but I reply, “I don’t have tits big enough to look like Barbie.”

“They’ve made the doll a lot more realistic these days.”

Chloe adjusts the tie of my halter dress. “Either way, Kenton Brady is going to eat you up when he sees you.”

“Totally,” agrees Hannah.

I glance over at my mother, but she seems more interested in her martini. Grace Callaghan, a picture of elegance, has enough natural beauty that one would not guess that she has undergone several Botox injections and collagen treatments. Her low-cut sparkling black dress shows off her breasts, which she had enlarged when she was a teenager.

Turning back to the mirror, I say, “Actually, I’m not looking to impress Kenton."

Grace turns my way. “It’s time you dated nice Irish boys.”

“I don’t know any nice Irish boys. Do you?”

My mother narrows her eyes at me, which I ignore. We both know that my father is hardly a “good Irish boy” unless “good” means being a successful member of the Mafia and a husband who cheats on his wife with women barely older than his daughter.

And Kenton’s hardly a shining example of goodness either. He was a senior at Notre Dame when I was a freshman. He was known for throwing raging parties with his roommates at their off-campus apartment. On two separate occasions, guests had ended up in the hospital from overdrinking.

“I heard Kenton cut short his vacation in Bali just to attend your birthday party," Hannah says.

“I didn’t ask him to do that.”

“Mr. Brady will be here, too, flying out from St. Louis,” Grace adds.

The Brady family head a Mafia in Missouri. This party isn’t so much a birthday celebration as it is a networking event for my father.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I grumble. I’d rather spend my winter break at Tahoe, where I had picked up snowboarding shortly after we had moved to California. I love the sport, but my mother isn’t keen on me getting injured. At least stick to skiing, which has some sophistication, my mother had said.

“Took you women long enough,” my father says when we meet him outside in the backyard where my birthday party is being set up.

Nearing fifty, my father has a dusting of gray above the ears. Though his eyes are set a little close together, he’s otherwise a handsome man and looks sharp in his white sports coat over a black silk shirt.

“Mr. Brady said he and his son will try to be the first guests to arrive,” my father tells me while the other women walk ahead and check on the buffet table, “so you might have Kenton all to yourself before the other girls get to him.”

“That’s okay. I’m not really interested in Kenton,” I respond.

My father stops. “Not interested in one of the hottest and most eligible bachelors this side of the Mississippi?”

I almost laugh at hearing my father describe another man as “hottest.”

“I don’t think he’s relationship material,” I say, recalling the many girls Kenton had been with at Notre Dame.

“Don’t worry, his father will take care of that.”

“How?”

“In fact, I believe Mr. Brady has already impressed upon Kenton the advantages of merging the Callaghans with the Bradys.”

I frown. “Merging? Are we talking about a company?”

“That and more.”

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