Brash Boss Read online

  ‘But it’s not necessary, I’m not your problem.’

  Her kind eyes, framed by her ridiculously long lashes, found mine and she hurriedly took out all the pins from her mouth.

  ‘You’re right, you aren’t my problem, you’re my family. I promised your aunt when she popped her clogs that I’d always look out for you, you know that. You help me and I help you, that’s how we work.’

  ‘I know.’ I sniffed, trying to dislodge the feeling of helplessness that engulfed me.

  I had been her neighbour ever since my mom had taken too many pills and checked out of her life, and I’d moved in with my aunty. But given our ages I knew I was the one that should be providing for her. I did at times, but right now I was going through another bad patch and without anything being spoken between us, she instinctively seemed to recognise it. For the past couple of months, she had been providing most of my meals, saying they were new recipes she was trying out and she’d cooked too much, or that the flavour wasn’t to her liking. I knew better, but indebted to her I hadn’t questioned her lies. Because ever since my aunty had died ten years ago leaving me her condo, this is what we did for each other. Our relationship was like a seesaw, when she struggled with her depression I was there for her, when I struggled with my gambling addiction she supported me.

  ‘Have you spoken to Brody?’

  ‘No, I can’t. This time I need to sort it out myself. I know you think I should call him, but I can’t.’

  ‘He’d want to help, Bee.’

  ‘He’s far too busy with his own life.’ I didn’t mean to sound so accusing, but even I heard the bitterness in my voice. Our lives couldn’t have been more different now, yet once all we had was each other. We’d been two American kids growing up in England on a USAF base and our family had been falling apart, making us cling to each other. But he had moved on, leaving me behind him and floundering in his wake. He was the lead singer with one of the U.S.’s top rock bands, Default Distraction, and was travelling the world. Whereas I was struggling to hold down a croupier’s job in Vegas with no disposable income, and an addiction to gambling that was threatening to engulf me. Sure, he’d thrown money at me before, paid for rehab and got me out of debt. Then once I was dealt with, he’d pulled himself away from having any real regular contact. Right now, we were back to Christmas cards and the money he would put into my bank account on my birthday. Somehow, I always managed to find myself back in trouble and this time I wasn’t going to be asking him to bail me out.

  Shaking my head, I dislodged my melancholy thoughts.

  I walked the few steps over to where she sat, placed a quick kiss to the top of her soft hair and moved away quickly. I knew that no matter how much she liked the affection she would chastise me afterwards, as her life hadn’t taught her how to willingly accept human contact.

  ‘Get off, you dafty, you need to get to work, your shift is eight p.m. until three a.m. isn’t it?’

  ‘You been checking my diary, Pearl?’

  ‘I just like to know when you’ll be home, that’s all.’

  She stopped pinning the material for a second and looked up at me. At the same time my phone pinged with an incoming text message. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I glanced quickly at the words on my screen.

  Your time is up. I want my money by tomorrow.

  I read the words hurriedly and tried not to show Pearl my reaction to them.

  ‘Yes, that’s my shift. I’ll come straight home, I promise,’ I answered Pearl.

  Then I looked down and typed quickly into my phone.

  I’ll get it.

  I pressed send and hastily dropped the phone back into my pocket as if holding on to it any longer might cause it to brand its cautionary threat into my palm.

  ‘Never make a promise you can’t keep, Barbara. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Pearl called out as I left her condo quickly, fighting the rising panic inside me.

  Chapter Three

  Nico (present day)

  I closed the zip on my brown leather holdall and knowing I was still expected to have dinner with my grandmother before I left to fly home, I left it on the bed. I hated to admit it, but I was enjoying my bi-monthly visits to see her more and more. My property on this beautiful island was nearly ten months old now and I felt more comfortable here every time I came to visit. Crossing the room, I went to look out of the window at the views I knew I’d miss the moment I touched back down into the dry heat of Vegas.

  A tap on my bedroom door caught my attention and I turned around to answer it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mr. Morello, Mrs. Morello wanted me to let you know your friend Carter has arrived.’

  I felt my forehead crease into a frown as I puzzled on the maid’s words.

  Trip was early?

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied and hearing him laugh with my grandmother, I took the stairs two at a time to find out what was going on. I reached the bottom of the stairs, crossed the large tiled hallway and found them both in the kitchen.

  Sure enough, I found Trip resting his long, lean frame over the huge island in the centre of the room, wearing his navy Pilot’s uniform and twirling his white cap over and over on one of his fingers. I could see by the way my grandmother was fawning over him and the phone he was holding out in his other hand for her to look at, that he was showing her updated photos of his four-year-old son, Bruce, and his beautiful wife Kendall.

  ‘There you are, Nico. Come and see the new photos of Carter’s family.’

  Trip looked sideways up at me and grinned. Out of my grandmother’s view, I shook my head and mouthed, ‘Asswipe’ at him.

  ‘Sure.’ I reluctantly walked nearer to them and held out my hand for his phone. I moved the phone to get a better look at the two people I knew I’d find there. The image on the screen that met my eyes showed his beautiful wife, Kendall, holding Bruce, sat on the beach near to where they lived. She was a beautiful woman and their son was apparently as good looking as his dad, or so Trip said. But, it did nothing for me. Maybe I hadn’t been made in the same way everyone else seemed to have been, but I really couldn’t see the attraction of linking up into a monogamous relationship and producing small replicas of yourself. Because, even with all the best care in the world, they could end up inheriting our defective DNA and become yet another bastard in the Morello family lineage.

  It all ends here, because it has to. I shook my head to dislodge my thoughts.

  ‘They’re very nice,’ I offered, trying to make my voice lighten up.

  ‘Honestly, Nico, look at them harder, see the joy there, feel their love for each other,’ my grandmother encouraged. ‘You do see it, don’t you?’ she questioned with a pain threading through her tone which let me know that even at thirty-five years old I still concerned her. She worried that perhaps her grandson was so broken he actually couldn’t feel or see exactly what love was. She was right to worry, because I was convinced it was the one hundred percent truth, although I’d never admit it to her.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered flatly, understanding quickly that my time was now running out. She wasn’t going to let up. I had to find myself a wife for her sake, to take away the pain I knew I was causing her. But also, for me, I had to make good on what I’d sworn on my mamma’s grave.

  She tutted, as though I hadn’t quite managed to convince her and moved back to the oven to check on the lasagne and cannoli that she was making for our last dinner together, and it now appeared one we would be sharing with my traitor of a friend.

  ‘Evening, boss.’ Trip laughed after he spoke.

  ‘Evening,’ I replied. ‘You’re here early.’

  ‘Ahhh, well you see Nonna invited me for dinner with you both. I changed the flight plans and came in early.’

  ‘I bet she did.’ I cast a quick eye over at my grandmother who was busying herself about twenty feet away. I knew exactly why; she saw him as a great example of what she wanted me to be. He’d once been a playboy pilot who travelled the world bedding any
woman who fell at his feet. Then he’d met Kendall and fallen in love. The fact they also had a child together was, as far as my grandmother could see, the icing on the cake. He was everything she wanted to turn me into.

  ‘And don’t tell me… She made it a stipulation in the invite that in order for you to eat dinner with us you had to turn up wearing your full pilot’s uniform?’ I knew Trip had lived in a retirement community for a few years after being left a condo in Boca Raton, Florida and he had learnt from that experience just how to woo a more mature lady.

  ‘I like to give pleasure wherever I go, you know that.’

  ‘You’re an asswipe, I do know that,’ I stated with a smile.

  ‘It’s been said before.’ He grinned back at me.

  I stepped closer to him and we man hugged it out for a few seconds. As I slapped him wholeheartedly on the back I thought, not for the first time, how much I appreciated having him as a friend.

  We’d met a couple of years ago. Captain Carter Clynes, triple C or Trip to his friends, had been an airline pilot for one of the large carriers. But after being left several million dollars from an old guy he’d looked after like a dad in the retirement community, he’d semi-retired and now only picked up the jobs he wanted to do.

  Luckily for me, I was one of those jobs.

  We’d first met when I’d employed him to pilot my plane, after my usual pilot had called in sick. I liked him as soon as we’d met. He’d taken absolutely no notice of the fact that we’d security vetted him down to what make of boxers he wore. He didn’t blink twice at the expensive Italian suit I was wearing, the fact that heavily armed security travelled with me, nor my obvious mafia lineage. The fact that all of that hadn’t seemed to affect him at all, made me respect the man. I hadn’t known it at the time we’d first met, but the detritus I’d been wading through for years was finally beginning to clear and my life was at last going to be able to take a different turn. From then on, he’d become my pilot of choice and surprisingly he took on nearly every job I offered him. I admired him, when normally I admired no one. We’d quickly found out that we both came from catholic backgrounds and apart from that, and the deep clefts on our chins, that was where our similarities ended.

  It was refreshing to spend time with him.

  I’d wanted to learn to fly and he offered to show me how. After many hours sitting together up front as we flew my Gulfstream, he’d encouraged me to talk. He had started to tell me about his life and had urged me to do the same. He had a few strange theories in life and one of them was that you could tell anyone you met everything they really needed to know about you in one minute flat. I remembered laughing at the crazy, carefree guy and in my reluctance to talk about me he’d told me all about himself. I’d held my phone in my hand to use it as a stopwatch and had laughed out loud when I’d seen that surprisingly he was right. Initially, I’d held back, knowing that my background wasn’t something to share, but he’d called me out on my crap. He told me that he knew exactly who I was, and that he took me for the friend he spent time with, nothing more and nothing less.

  Every flight I took, I got to know him a bit better. I’d soon found out that he was astute, upfront and accepted no bullshit from anyone. After a few flights, with him sharing so much of his life willingly with me, I began to tell him about who I was, some of the bullshit my family had been involved in, and how I was trying hard to legalise as much of our business as I could. Once again, he accepted me for myself, and he took his place as the only real friend I’d ever had.

  Trip, I’d quickly found out, was a happy optimist who made every effort to convince me that my life was only going to get better from now onwards. I think he thought of me as a project and like my grandmother I let him believe he could change me for the better, when I knew that down deep inside I was far too damaged and set in my ways to change for anyone and that included him.

  ‘Come and get it while it’s hot,’ my grandmother called out from the other side of the vast kitchen.

  Trip spun around and started towards her. I watched, as wearing her well-worn, stained oven gloves to protect her hands from the searing heat, she placed a large, rectangular dish onto the huge, well-worn table she’d insisted on moving into the otherwise bespoke kitchen. She’d finally succumbed a few months back and moved into my home on Crete, but one of the things she’d insisted on bringing with her was the old table we were about to sit down at. It looked completely out of place, but she’d claimed that the large piece of damaged, disfigured oak was necessary to family life and slowly I’d begun to understand why. The table was as wounded and scarred by life as we all were. The old piece of furniture offered us a place where we could sit and talk. It was a place where absolutely no pretences were suffered and also where no topic was off the table, so to speak. Nonna said the table was so old it had seen and heard it all before and nothing we had to say would shock it, nor the family and friends sat around it.

  ‘Help yourself, Carter. There’s plenty of lasagne. I know it’s not your favourite pizza, but I promise I’ll make that for you next time you come to dinner.’ She encouraged him by handing him the ladle as soon as we both reached the table. ‘There’s also plenty of salad in the glass dish.’

  ‘There won’t be a next time,’ I pushed in quickly, only to be ignored by them both.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Morello,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ve told you before, please call me Nonna. It’s lovely to have you here to share a meal with us, Carter. You’re a welcome breath of fresh air, unlike my grandson who doesn’t know how to relax and enjoy himself.’

  I watched as Trip made himself comfortable by removing his tie and rolling up the sleeves on his crisp, white shirt as he relaxed, and I looked down at myself. Even having had a few days break, I still couldn’t unwind enough to lose the smart dress pants and fitted, long sleeved shirt I always wore.

  ‘Don’t mind me.’ I picked up the ladle next, to dish up a large portion of my grandmother’s famous lasagne and dropped it unceremoniously onto my plate.

  ‘Now tell me more about what Brucey is up to at the moment.’ She used Trip’s nickname for his son, and I knew she was fully focussed on him and her dreams of having her own great grandchildren.

  She didn’t even turn her head at my retort as he started to tell her for the millionth time about his son and how well he was doing, having recently started Kindergarten.

  I reacted by burying myself in her glorious food and remembered occasionally to make an odd comment or listening noise. I forked in my lasagne at a rate that would have scared someone in a pie eating competition. She might give me grief about my lifestyle choices, but her homemade food outweighed everything I had to put up with.

  ‘That’s wonderful. I know you and Kendall are so very proud of him.’ I could tell by the smile that she was now aiming in Trip’s direction, that her plot to invite him here to share our last dinner together was going exactly how she’d planned it all out in her mind. Before she lost me again to Vegas, she wanted to remind me of the promise I’d sworn to her last year. ‘Perhaps you could do me a favour, Carter?’ she asked sweetly as she ladled another helping of lasagne onto his plate.

  ‘Anything, although my washing-up skills are pretty poor.’ He smiled back at her and dug his fork back into the meat layer of his lasagne.

  It was like watching a slow car crash of my own life as between them they went through the well-rehearsed dialogue that we all knew was coming.

  ‘Can you please explain to my grandson that the life you have with Kendall and Bruce far overshadows his way of life?’

  Trip grinned across the table at me when he saw my shoulders slump down, in resignation at the fact she wasn’t going to let me forget my promise to her. I hadn’t realised that the conversation had stuttered for a few seconds until I heard Trip answer her, but direct his reply to me.

  ‘I have tried, Mrs. Morello.’

  ‘Carter. Once again call me Nonna… I insist,’ she reprimanded him li
ghtly.

  ‘Well played… well played both of you.’ I picked up my glass of wine and lifted it up high and toasted them both.

  ‘The fool on the hill, by The Beatles would suit this life changing moment,’ Trip offered, before he burst out laughing.

  I knew he was referring to me as the fool in the song title. It was another one of Trip’s crazy theories, that all life changing moments had a Beatles song already written for them. I hadn’t a clue why a patriotic, Michigan born American, would choose a British group’s music over an American one, but this was one of his crazy theories I’d embraced wholeheartedly and loving Elvis Presley’s music and his connection to the city I’d lived the majority of my life in, I’d decided that his songs suited my life better.

  ‘No… the song would be, Don’t by Elvis Presley.’

  I over emphasised the Don’t and laughter broke free from Trip’s mouth.

  ‘I’m working on it, Nonna.’ I looked back at her and offered her my half-hearted words.

  ‘Then work harder, Nico. Your year is nearly up.’

  She smiled sweetly at me, looking over the table laden with her home-cooked food, giving off her “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” look that she did so damn well, but I knew better. I’d sworn to her to find a wife and she wasn’t about to let me shirk on my promise.

  Chapter Four

  Nico

  ‘Hey, Boss.’

  I lifted up my head to look at Franco who had, without knocking, poked his head around the door to my office at our main casino. Only Franco, my head of security, would take such a liberty, and only because of the amount of years we’d been working together.

  ‘This better be good, Fran,’ I admonished him.

  ‘Well, you did say to let you know if she came in again.’

  I lifted my head up from the keyboard and turning my head sideways, I looked questioningly at Fran who was now stood fully in my office with the door closed firmly behind him.