Dad's Italian Mafia Friend (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 109) Read online

  “Other daughter?” I say my voice an octave below its already deep pitch, as I turn from the shoulders to look at him, all that anger coming right back to me.

  “From my first marriage. I mean, we never technically got married, but—“

  I raise my palm to shut him up and his mouth stops running. Finally, he does something right, unlike being with two women in his life that he saw fit to have children with, but that he never had the balls to formally marry and make honest women out of.

  But apparently it’s not the only time he’s done something right, because somehow this man created this incredible young woman.

  I turn my attention back to her, feeling my muscles flex underneath my white wife-beater, although I hate that term for a tank top. I’d never lay a finger on a woman, but oh would I ever like to lay her down beneath me and claim her as my own.

  Mine.

  I move my fingers across my palms, trying to remove the sweat, but it’s no use. My hands clench tightly then release.

  I want to ask her so many questions, but I don’t know where to start and I’m feeling anything but articulate right now.

  I came to this country as a Guido, no doubt, but I speak English perfectly now. I’ve never had a problem expressing myself, albeit in the underworld.

  Now? I just feel like a princess like this needs to be spoken to, with, in a different kind of way. I’m not even sure what it is, because I’ve never had a woman so beautiful in my presence before so I don’t even know where to start.

  My chest releases, alerting me that I was holding my breath. I stick out my chest like a proud peacock, letting her see the full scope of my size, and my ink. If humans are animals then this is my mating dance, and do I ever want to mate, to breed...with her.

  Everything inside me is warm, hot, and I feel like there’s too much saliva in my mouth.

  The hair on the back of my neck and arms stands at attention and I feel light-headed.

  Damn, I want to touch her…to be with her. To run my scarred, bruised, and battered hands across her tiny frame.

  I want to pull her little body into mine, letting her feel my masculinity and my need for her, which is tenting the fuck out of my Adidas track pants.

  Hell, right now I don’t even care about her fuck-up of a dad. Yeah, we’re going to have to work this out, and Sicily is going to be beyond pissed about this…but that can wait.

  What can’t wait is her, and making her mine.

  “We’ll talk about your little problem later…Stephen,” I say, without taking my eyes off her. “I’m not about to talk business in front of your beautiful young daughter.”

  “She’s only eighteen, Stefano. Just a kid.”

  My dick twitches. Eighteen is legal in this country, but an age I’d never be attracted to…until now.

  Something about her youth, the innocence in the way she just stands there. That sparkle in her eye like she still believes in the purity of this world, which is exactly what I want to put on a silver platter for her and give her every damn day for the rest of our lives together.

  “But we can talk now if you want.”

  I want to punch her dad so damn bad right now. First he tries to use her as a scapegoat and then he passively aggressively acts like he’s not.

  Lucky for him one of the men in this room knows how to do things the right way.

  “I never discuss business in front of women and children.”

  “And she’s practically both. How ‘bout that?” Stefano laughs nervously.

  I want to rip his balls off and shove them down his throat, officially ending any ties he has left to whatever shred of manhood this doofus currently carries.

  But it’s that manhood, or lack there off, that made this perfectly feminine creature.

  “Later,” I say, not taking my eyes off her as I move toward the door, showing myself out as I step backwards over the threshold, not wanting to miss one second of the opportunity I have right now to drink in the sight of her.

  But there will be more, she, and Stephen can count on that.

  Because neither of them know it yet, but she’s mine.

  Mine and only mine.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sloane

  I pace in my room as I rub the back of my neck.

  Stopping momentarily, I unfasten the top button on my shirt and scrape my other hand through my hair while I tap my foot.

  My dad’s not in a good situation.

  I tried to ask him about it downstairs after Stefano left, but he didn’t really want to talk about it. Instead, I helped him put some hydrogen peroxide on the cuts he received from his supposed friend, and then my dad just wanted to lie down.

  I’m the complete opposite. I feel a tingling in my fingers and toes and a bounce in my step. I can’t lie down. I’m fidgety and nervous and I have to keep moving.

  I have to solve this problem, because it’s a problem not only for my dad, but for me.

  Stefano apparently doesn’t know it yet, but that fifty thousand dollars my dad wagered on a soccer game, or football as Stefano called it being that he’s Italian, was my college money.

  And it wasn’t on a credit card. It was on my mom’s debit card.

  If that charge doesn’t get reversed then I’m royally screwed this fall when it’s time to go to college. That’s the whole reason I moved in with my dad in the first place. Luckily he lives close to the college where I wanted to study so it made perfect sense. My mom was totally up for it too because she was just waiting for me to become an adult so she could run off with that Australian ‘friend’ of hers after all these years. She’s already got the house up for sale. I only wonder how long it’s going to take her to find out that dad totally blew my college money that she’d been putting away for eighteen years.

  She was so thrilled to be getting on that plane and going to Sydney that she literally handed over her debit card that had access to my college account. She wasn’t going to need it anyways. The guy she’s going there to be with is loaded.

  I pull up her account online and look at all those monthly deposits for $231.49. She did it literally on the first of every month for eighteen years, and that’s how she got to fifty thousand…which is now gone.

  But I’ve got something to say about that, regardless of what Visa decides.

  I need to get that money back, not only for me, but for my dad. Without it, he can’t afford for me to live here, definitely can’t afford for me to go to college, and he might be tempted to gamble even more to ‘just get it back real quick’. Unfortunately I know how gamblers think…my mom explained it to me as soon as I could understand, and more importantly listen.

  She warned me of the dangers, and now I see why she left dad.

  But what I didn’t see coming, at all, was Stefano.

  I knew my dad had some wiseguy Italian friend, but being that my mom pulled me out of that situation shortly after I was born, I never really got to know my dad that well, and definitely not Stefano.

  The crazy thing is that even though I was in complete shock as Stefano was throwing my dad around my own house I was kind of…turned on.

  Okay, more than kind of.

  It was like this was the wake-up call my dad needed his entire life, and Stefano was big enough, and man enough, to finally give it to him.

  Better late than never I guess, and that goes for me too.

  Apparently I’m late, as in the last of all my friends to be with a guy. They encouraged me to ‘just do it’ before I went off to college, but I completely refused. As corny as it sounds, especially in this day and age of Tinder where you can literally order up penis like it’s a pizza, I’m saving myself for the one.

  I may only be eighteen, but I’m a voracious reader. Heck, when I find an author I like I tear through their entire back catalog like a swarm of locusts destroying vast swaths of crops.

  I know my way around Kindle’s various romance genres and I know what a happily ever after looks like…and I never saw that
happening with a boy my age. The problem is baked right into the term…boy. I need a man, a real man. A man who can stand up to other men, and Stefano showed me he is absolutely capable of that.

  My dad works out, and is in decent shape, but Stefano? He’s next level. He looks like he eats plates for breakfast. And I’m not talking about plates of food, but the weight plates that you find in the gym…the ones you stack onto the bar.

  It’s like his body is made of iron, or steel, or some kind of hard metal. It’s like he was sculpted from marble and his voice is like honey dripped over hot coals.

  The man oozes masculinity, dominance, and confidence…and I’m confident I’m going to find a way to see him again, no matter what it takes.

  And did he ever take my breath away as I watched him teach my dad a lesson.

  What’s wrong with me?

  I know I should have run down there and tried to help my dad when Stefano was tossing him around earlier, but I just couldn’t. I think it’s like one of those National Geographic or Animal Planet videos. When you know the lion has one of your tribe in-between those jaws of his, you just have to accept reality and save yourself.

  And that’s what I did, although saving myself meant something more like saving myself the embarrassment of going downstairs and this huge man seeing my nipples cutting through both my bra and top. And heaven forbid if the wetness that was forming between my legs would have been visible.

  I’ve never read cuckold books, and this is my dad, not my husband or something like that…what a gross thought…but still, there was just something about the power and dominance of a man entering the home of another man and just taking it over like he owns it.

  Damn was it ever sexy.

  What’s not sexy is thinking about how dad’s going to come up with enough money to pay that back into my college fund, or what Stefano might do to him if Visa does reverse the charge.

  Would he…kill his friend?

  I’ve watched Sopranos enough times to know the Italian mafia doesn’t play, but still…is my dad’s life worth fifty large to him?

  Fifty large…jeez, I’m sounding like a mafioso myself now.

  I logout of my mom’s account and login to mine.

  Four hundred and thirty six dollars and twelve cents.

  Yeah, that’s gonna make a dent, I think to myself sarcastically.

  Maybe if I plead with Stefano it would help, although all that would do is just prolong the anguish as my dad waits for his future to be decided. Stefano won’t do anything to him when I’m around, but he’ll find a way to isolate him and do whatever he needs to do.

  Maybe I can seduce him?

  I laugh so hard I snort.

  Yeah, right. Some little eighteen-year-old virgin going over there and offering herself up on a silver platter to him. That only works in those sheik romances or the ones where mafia bosses buy girls at auctions. And I’m far from the kind of girl anyone would bid that kind of money on.

  But now isn’t the time to be feeling sorry for myself. Now is the time for coming up with a solution, no matter how far off that sounds.

  And there’s only one thing I know. No matter how much of a f-up my dad is, he’s still my dad…and I’ve got to figure out a way to help him out of this mess.

  Fast.

  CHAPTER 4

  Stefano

  The next morning

  “So let me get this straight,” I say as I lean back in my chair and cross my arms. “You didn’t know he had a daughter from another marriage?”

  “Boss,” Rocco pleads.

  I raise my palm, stopping him right there. “I’m not looking for excuses. I’m looking for answers.” I rotate my wrist and my last three fingers curl as my index finger points right at my right-hand man, letting him know I’m ready to hear what he’s got to say now.

  I can literally see a lump forming in Rocco’s throat in real time as he slants his body away from me. He may be standing between my desk and the door, but that door’s not opening until I have an answer.

  Heat rises behind my eyelids as I shoot flames in his directions. “I’m not getting any younger.”

  Rocco strokes his sleeve and I cock an eyebrow as a countermeasure.

  “I don’t have an answer, boss. Just that he’s your buddy so I thought you knew everything about him.”

  “You can never know everything about anyone, Rocco. You know that. Always, and I repeat, you must always continue to update your files…on everyone. You, of all people, know this.” I purse my lips and shake my head.

  “I sent a guy over a couple days before, but we didn’t know about the girl.”

  “You sent a guy,” I say doing something I never do, putting the first two fingers of each hand in the air forming air quotes. “So your source is ‘a guy’.”

  Rocco’s brain is obviously scrambling to find a logical excuse. And my brain is still scrambled because of her.

  “I’ll put a file together on her.”

  “I’m already on it. I don’t want you, or anyone, to have anything to do with her again.” I pause. “Do I make myself clear?”

  He nods.

  “Good, then we’re done here.”

  Rocco turns and leaves, and none too soon.

  I’m pissed that I was shaking down Stephan in front of one of his children, but what I’m really angry about is that I didn’t even know he had two children, and not one.

  And apparently he also has two entrances to his home as well. All these years and I never knew he had a back gate. Then again it’s not like I spend a ton of time at his house. Usually when we meet up it’s just at the basketball court, or my goddaughter’s football games or their after-parties, birthday parties…stuff like that.

  I pull up his place on Google maps and I see it right away. There’s a white picket fence running along the back of his property with a gate to the alley. The American dream, right? That’s what I am, because if you can make it in America, you can make it anywhere.

  But what I want to make, is the dream life with her and that starts by finding out more about her, by whatever means necessary.

  “Boss, somebody here to see you,” comes over the Walkie-Talkie on my desk.

  I close my eyes and shake my head. Hasn’t Rocco fucked up enough already this morning? The guy is either stupid, or has the biggest balls in the world, for buzzing me on our two-way right after I ripped him a new one.

  “Send them away.”

  “But, boss.”

  “Send. Them. Away.” I yell into the two-way before slamming it down on my desk.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Smith. He’s not accepting visitors right now.”

  Miss Smith?

  I hit the key on my computer which pulls up all my outside surveillance, and immediately my finger goes to the screen, touching it right where her image is.

  I grip the Walkie-Talkie so damn hard I almost crush it, everything about me tenses as I lean forward in my chair, my mind and body completely alert.

  I breathe in deep before nodding and smiling as I watch her speaking with Rocco.

  I lick my lips and skim my finger along my jawline.

  Bringing the Walkie-Talkie to my mouth before clearing my throat. Slowly I depress the talk button. “Send her in.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Sloane

  I can guess how these mafia guys work. He probably already knows everything about my dad and his weak spots, but apparently he overlooked one.

  Me.

  At least I hope my dad values me, despite the fact that we haven’t spent that much time together over the years, which explains why Stefano didn’t know about my existence until last night when he came over to our house.

  He’s surely out to get as much intel on me as he can right now. Well, I’m going to get in front of this and try to guide the conversation as best I can, which I doubt will be very much, but I have to do anything I can to help my dad avoid another beat down like he got last night.

  The big guy from the front gu
ardhouse guides me up the driveway and into Stefano’s mansion.

  The front doors are bigger than any I’ve ever seen, and the chandelier hanging in the entryway, or whatever they’re called in these fancy places, is the first I’ve ever seen outside my own imagination.

  This guy, with all this money, came over to rough up my dad for fifty thousand dollars? His driveway surely cost more than that alone.