ROMANCING THE MOB BOSS Read online

  ROMANCING

  THE

  MOB BOSS

  MALLORY MONROE

  c2011

  All rights reserved. Any use of the materials contained in this book without the expressed written consent of the author and/or her affiliates, is strictly prohibited.

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  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

  America’s stomping ground for romantic ebooks

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  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone living or dead are completely accidental. The specific mention of known places or venues are not meant to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished or imagined for the story’s sake.

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  ONE

  “I’m still waiting, Louie,” Trina yelled to the cook as she hurried into the kitchen at Boyzie’s, a busy strip joint, to grab her next orders.

  “You still waiting, she’s still waiting, he’s still waiting.” Louie stood at the grill behind the order pickup counter flipping burgers, tossing spice into his fast-boiling sauce pot, mumbling his complaints with a filthy towel flapped over his broad shoulder. “Everybody’s waiting. Everybody wants it yesterday. I only got two hands here!”

  “For real?” Trina said. “And here I was thinking you couldn’t possibly be a mere mortal. Just send it out, please. I should have been off duty ten minutes ago!”

  “Hey, girl,” Jazz said to Trina as she hurried into the kitchen with her tray in hand, too. “You’re slow tonight, Louie,” she yelled with a grin, knowing he hated to be rushed.

  “I got yo’ slow right over here, Jazz,” Louie said, brandishing the spatula.

  Jazz looked at Trina. “What you still doing here? I thought you was off at ten.”

  “I was. I am.” Then she raised her voice. “I called myself doing a certain person a favor by helping out before I left, but that certain person don’t appreciate it!”

  “Ain’t it slammin’ tonight?” Jazz said. “I love when it’s busy.”

  “I hate it,” Trina said. “The gropers be out in force when it’s crowded like this.”

  “I know. They think everybody working in a strip club gots to be a stripper, too, even the serving staff. That’s why they be looking at my fat black ass like I’m some sister from another planet. They don’t even think about groping me. Which is fine by me,” Jazz added with that familiar, wonderful smile Trina loved. “My man likes what he sees, and that’s all that matters to me.” Then she yelled. “But I’ll take a groping over this waiting any day of the week, dang, Louie!”

  “He’s only got two hands, or so he claims,” Trina said with a smile, and then added, excitedly, “Oh, Jazz, I forgot to tell you. They called me for an interview!”

  “Who? The PaLargio? You lyin’!”

  “They called me, girl. I’m to meet with a Mr. Amos Logan, the general manager, next Monday.”

  “You good, Tree. Gots to give you your props. I don’t even have the nerve to walk up in a bougie place like that, and here you are applying to be a manager there.”

  “I used to be one back home. Why the hell not here?”

  “Managing a club in Dale, Mississippi and managing a club at the PaLargio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, ain’t nothing like the same thing.”

  “True that, but you can’t move up if you don’t aim high enough.”

  “Table four, table seven up,” Louie said as he slung the plates onto the counter, the food bouncing up and then plopping back down.

  “It’s about time,” Trina said as she grabbed the three plates, put them on her tray, and hurried for the dining hall.

  The room was wired with excitement even though the exotic dancers didn’t take the stage for another couple hours, and Trina headed first for table four, the nice guy, before she headed for table seven, the gruesome twosome. Those two idiots had been bugging her ever since they arrived, with all kinds of sexually-charged, juvenile jokes, and although she ignored them the way she ignored all jerks, they were beginning to grate on her nerves.

  But the guy at table four was different. He had some class about him, some style. He’d been coming in for the past few weeks regular-like, in his expensive Armani suits, and one time even Boyzie himself, the club’s owner, sat at his table talking with him. Which automatically made clear that he wasn’t the run-of-the-mill customer they were used to.

  And besides, Trina thought as she arrived at his table, he was what any female would call good looking. Nice height, athletically built, silky brown hair slicked back off of a face with the most intense, the most beautiful sky-blue eyes Trina had ever seen. And he had such a strong jaw line, with just a hint of five o’clock shadow, that made her see why all of the waitresses would jockey to seat him in their stations whenever he entered the club. Tonight, however, was Trina’s lucky night.

  Dominic Gabrini, known far and wide as Reno, felt lucky, too, when the cute waitress with the tight ass made her way to his table. He’d been eyeing her all night, had, in fact, been eyeing her all those other nights he came into the place. She was a looker, with those big, hazel eyes and that velvety smooth dark skin, but she didn’t play it up like the rest of them, didn’t flaunt her beauty, didn’t have that eye-batting, hip-shaking, look at me narcissism he hated in a woman.

  “One royal crown coming up,” Trina said as she sat his plate of steak and potatoes on the tabletop.

  “Royal crown, hun?” Reno said with a grin that made him look even sexier to Trina. And his soft, melodic, straight up romantic voice, have mercy. He could have been an Italian singer, an opera star, with a voice that rich and soft and sweet, she thought.

  “That’s what we like to call it, anyway,” Trina said. “Instead of plain old meat and potatoes. Royal crown, we call it. Give this joint a little class, know what I’m saying?”

  Reno laughed. “I hear ya, sister.”

  “Well, have a good night,” Trina said as she was about to head over to that dreaded table seven.

  “Good night?” Reno asked, stopping her progression. “What, you leaving or something?”

  “My shift been over. I drop these plates at table seven and I’m
outta here. Good night.”

  “But what about your tip?” Reno asked, stopping her from leaving again. For some crazy reason her just leaving like this, without giving him sufficient notice, was disturbing to him. “You aren’t going to wait for your tip?”

  “It’ll go in the general pot. I’ll get my share.” This time she didn’t say good night, but just walked away, determined to get away from him.

  There was no denying the guy had charm, she thought with a smile as she headed for table seven. And talk about that extra something. He had it. Had the kind of sex appeal that made even her, a woman who avoided any illusions about finding Mr. Right in a joint like this, wonder if he was as kind, as considerate, as good in bed, as he appeared to be.

  Her smile and wonderment, however, completely left when she arrived at table seven.

  “The goddess is back,” joked one of the guys, an acne-faced frat boy with an eternal grin on his mug. He was the leader. “What did we ever do to deserve this pleasure?”

  “Burger and fries, cheeseburger and fries coming up,” Trina said as she began placing their plates onto the table.

  “You gon’ strip for us tonight, honey?” the other guy, who seemed more serious, more lust-filled, asked.

  “I’m not a stripper.”

  “Quit lying,” Acne-face said. “You know you work that pole. I seen you the other night flying around it, rubbing all up against it. Worked the living daylights out of it!” This caused acne-face to grin like a hyena.

  Reno, whose table wasn’t ten feet away, watched the gruesome twosome work the waitress over. Both were tall, blonde, surfer-dude types who probably could use a good ass-kicking. But Reno watched.

  “So what you say?” the other guy asked. “Gonna give us a lap dance afterwards.” He looked down the length of her. “Shake that wonderful ass in our faces?’

  “Yeah,” Acne-face said, “you going to shake that ass for us? That apple-shaped ass?” Then he glanced at his friend, pointing toward Trina’s rear. “How about them apples, hun? How about them apples on that apple-shaped ass? How about them apples?” He annoyingly kept repeating this. Then he did something that even his obnoxious friend would not have thought advisable. He squeezed her ass. “How about them apples?” he said as he squeezed.

  Before Trina could take that tray and clobber him, which was absolutely what she planned to do, Reno was by her side, grabbing the glass of beer from the table and tossing it in Acne’s face. Then he grabbed Acne’s blonde hair and slammed his face over and over into the tabletop, violently slamming it down, with blood immediately spewing from Acne’s nose as soon as Reno lifted his head all the way back up.

  “How about them apples?” Reno angrily said to the kid, and then slung the kid’s hair from his grasp as if it was a contaminant. That entire section of the club, not to mention Trina, was stunned.

  Reno, who hated to lose his temper, although he often did, pulled out a handkerchief and began to wipe his manicured hands. He looked at Trina. “You ready?” he said to her. Trina could see the regret in his eyes. “I’ll walk you out.”

  +++

  Outside of Boyzie’s and Trina was still reeling from what she’d just seen. Not just the fact that Reno had come to her defense, she appreciated that part, but that he had come with such ferocity, with such violence. The kid needed to be taught a lesson, it was true, but he didn’t need to be nearly killed.

  She looked at Reno, who was buttoning up his suit coat against the chill of the fall evening. “Where’s your car?” he asked her.

  “My . . . what?”

  Reno looked at her. “Your car. What, you deaf? Your ride, where is it?” He was impatient now. Didn’t mean to be, but he always was after losing his cool.

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Don’t have a car? Whadda you mean you don’t have a car?”

  “I don’t have a car yet.”

  “How you get around? How you get home from work?”

  “I catch the bus if it’s not too late, or catch a ride from a co-worker if it is.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “That’s a problem. Young lady walking around the streets at night all alone, what you some kind of superwoman? Think nobody’s gonna mess with you? They rape you, knock you over the head, put you in the ditch, then where are you?”

  It was almost nonsensical to Trina, but he looked so serious.

  “Hun?” he said. “Then where are you?”

  “Raped, unconscious, and in a ditch?”

  “There ya’ go,” Reno said as if that said it all, and then began walking toward his car. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

  Trina wasn’t the type to accept rides from strangers, especially from customers, but to her own surprise she bent the rule this time. The man did, after all, come to her rescue. He was, after all, annoyed that she would even consider walking home alone. What harm could it do, she wondered, as she walked over to his car, a shiny gray Bentley convertible, and got on in. Of course if they found her raped, unconscious, and in a ditch, it would have done her considerable harm, but she was nobody’s fool. She was keeping her eyes on him.

  His car smelled like him, Trina thought as she sat down, like his expensive cologne mixed up with new leather, and he slung that stick shift and drove like he was a speedster from way back. This was Las Vegas, loaded with red lights, and she wasn’t above jumping out if he turned out to be some kind of maniac.

  “So what’s your name?” he asked as he drove, his eyes glancing down at her bare legs underneath her short skirt.

  “Katrina Marie Hathaway,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Dominic. Dominic Gabrini.”

  “But everybody calls you?”

  “Mr. Gabrini,” he said and then laughed. “Reno. Everybody calls me Reno.”

  “Reno. Why Reno?”

  “I don’t know. Has something to do with my style or something, my flashiness, I don’t know. But I’ve been called that name since I was a kid. Now nobody really knows why, or who started it.”

  “Everybody calls me Trina,” she said. “Or Tree.”

  Reno glanced down at her legs again. “Funny, you don’t look like no tree.”

  “Funny, Boyzie doesn’t seem like your kind of club.”

  “Very perceptive, Tree. It’s not. I was thinking about buying it, but I don’t think so.”

  Trina looked at him. “So that’s it. That’s why you’ve been coming around so much.”

  “Correct.” Then he glanced at her. “You disappointed I’m not buying it?”

  “Me? No way. That ain’t my stop.”

  Reno smiled. “You’re a girl with dreams. With ambitions.”

  She was, but she wasn’t about to get into that with him.

  His car stopped at the curb in front of Trina’s apartment building. To say it was in the heart of the hood would be an understatement. Young men were hanging out on the stoop laying lines on the females passing by, hustlers and crack dealers were selling t-shirts, DVDs, and crack not fifteen feet away, drunks were drinking a quart of liquor straight from the bottles, rap music was blaring, conversations were numerous and muddled, and older men were sitting around gambling and telling stale jokes. It was too festive for a dwelling place, a kind of ghetto hang-out corner, to Reno.

  He stared at the Dodge-like surroundings and then looked at Trina. “You joking right? You live here?”

  Trina’s heart dropped. She knew she was poor and lived in poor circumstances, but it always hurt a little when somebody else knew it too. “Yes, this is my home.”