A MOB BOSS CHRISTMAS: THE PREGNANCY (MOB BOSS SERIES) Read online

  A MOB BOSS CHRISTMAS

  THE PREGNANCY

  By

  MALLORY MONROE

  Copyright ©2012 Austin Brook Publishing

  All rights reserved. Any use of the materials contained in this book without the expressed written consent of the author and/or her affiliates, including scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book by way of the Internet or any other means, is illegal and could result in prosecution.

  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

  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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  MORE INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  MALLORY MONROE:

  THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND

  SERIES IN ORDER:

  THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND

  THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND 2:

  HIS WOMEN AND HIS WIFE

  DUTCH AND GINA:

  A SCANDAL IS BORN

  DUTCH AND GINA:

  AFTER THE FALL

  DUTCH AND GINA:

  THE POWER OF LOVE

  DUTCH AND GINA:

  THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

  THE MOB BOSS SERIES

  IN ORDER:

  ROMANCING THE MOB BOSS

  MOB BOSS 2:

  THE HEART OF THE MATTER

  MOB BOSS 3:

  LOVE AND RETRIBUTION

  MOB BOSS 4:

  ROMANCING TRINA GABRINI

  ADDITIONAL BESTSELLING

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  BY

  MALLORY MONROE:

  ROMANCING MO RYAN

  ROMANCING HER PROTECTOR

  ROMANCING THE BULLDOG

  IF YOU WANTED THE MOON

  AND

  BESTSELLING

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM

  KATHERINE CACHITORIE:

  LOVERS AND TAKERS

  LOVING HER SOUL MATE

  LOVING THE HEAD MAN

  SOME CAME DESPERATE:

  A LOVE SAGA

  WHEN WE GET MARRIED

  ADDITIONAL BESTSELLING

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE:

  A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  YVONNE THOMAS

  AND

  BACK TO HONOR:

  A REGGIE REYNOLDS

  ROMANTIC MYSTERY

  JT WATSON

  ROMANTIC FICTION

  FROM

  AWARD-WINNING

  AND

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  TERESA MCCLAIN-WATSON:

  DINO AND NIKKI:

  AFTER REDEMPTION

  AND

  AFTER WHAT YOU DID

  COMING SOON FROM

  MALLORY MONROE:

  ROMANCING TOMMY GABRINI

  AND

  DUTCH AND GINA

  BOOK SEVEN

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  PROLOGUE

  Six Weeks Earlier

  “It goes up pretty high,” Reno said as he looked up at the monstrosity they were calling a premier ride. It looked like a roller coaster on steroids, if you asked him.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Trina asked, grinning from ear to ear. They were in Spring Valley, just west of the Las Vegas Strip, at a place called Carnival Park. Reno and Trina walked hand in hand, eliciting wayward looks from a handful of blacks and whites because they were an interracial couple, but they were so accustomed to those looks now that they ignored them completely. Besides, Reno was too busy reeling about being at an amusement park to begin with. He wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead at a place like this. But his son Jimmy Mack, a son he’d only recently found out even existed, wanted to venture here as part of his eighteenth birthday celebration. Most kids his age would ditch the parents and hang out with friends. Not Jimmy. He ditched his friends to hang out with Reno and Tree.

  “Just being here,” Trina continued, snuggling closer against her man, “makes me feel like a kid again.”

  “You are a kid,” Reno said, unable to stop looking up. He couldn’t get over the rides at this place. When he was a kid and would visit Coney Island with his family, those rides seemed like tamed toys compared to the high-flying, high-tech machines they were making nowadays. Especially the one he was eyeing now, the ride they called the Hang-man. It lifted the riders higher and higher still, and then slung them down as if they were being hurled down. The riders would screech in excitement. Reno wasn’t feeling it.

  “That’s pretty high,” he said again. “Why does it have to go up so high?”

  Trina looked at him as they walked across the amusement park. His thick brown hair was gorgeously messy and his bright blue eyes looked wary. He wore jeans that hugged his muscular thighs and a pull-over shirt that outlined his muscular chest. His sunglasses were hanging off of his ears and dropped down around his tanned neck, and his hand held Trina’s so tight that she wondered if he had glued it there. He looked delicious, she thought. But she just couldn’t understand what all of his hesitation was about.

  “What’s with you and all of this concern about how high it goes?” she asked him. “Yes, it goes high. That’s the beauty of it. That’s why everybody rides it, because it goes so high.”

  Reno laughed and looked at her. “That’s why people ride it?”

  “Sure. They like the thrill of it all.”

  Reno snorted. “Some thrill.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He looked sidelong at her. She, too, wore jeans that highlighted her great figure, and a low-cut bright red blouse that highlighted her sparkly hazel eyes and radiant dark brown skin. Her hair was pushed back and dropped along her back with a red band across the front, making her appear youthful and pretty, Reno thought. He was proud that she was his. “What do you know about it, anyway?” he asked her. “You talk like you rode that thing before.”

  “I have,” she said, to Reno’s surprise. “Many times. Me and Jazz and some of the other girls from Boyzie’s used to come here all the time. It’s how we used to let our aggression out when some bad customer was tripping or when they wouldn’t give us decent tips. We’d ride all day sometimes.”

  Reno could never understand the mentality of spending all day doing basically nothing. He worked since he was a kid running numbers for his old man. He worked all of his life. He looked at his son, for support.

  But Jimmy was with Trina. He didn’t know what Reno’s concern was about, either. He was eating cotton candy like a ten-year-old and couldn’t stop grinning at his father’s reluctance as he walked beside him and Tree. He, too, was interracial, the product of an African-American mother who was now deceased, and Reno, a full-fledged Italian. Although he and Reno met for the first time this past summer, Jimmy felt as if he’d known Reno all of his life. They bonded just that quickly.

  “It’s not so bad, Pop,” he said to Reno. “It looks like it’ll be fun to ride.”

  “Tell him, Jimmy,” Trina said. Then she began to walk faster, pulling Reno along. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get this party started!”

  “Now we’re talking,” Jimmy said, dumping his half-eaten cotton candy in one of the numerous receptacles around the park and hurried behind them.

  Only Trina was dragging Reno along. Because he kept looking up. Then he slowed down, which
caused them to slow down, too.

  “What’s the matter now?” she asked him.

  “What if that thing falls?” he asked her.

  “Fall?” Trina responded with incredulity in her voice. “Reno, why would it fall?”

  “Don’t look at me like it never happens. It happens all the time. What are you looking at me like that for? I’ve read about these amusement rides gone nuts. Everything’s fine one minute, then the next thing you know bodies are dropping out of the sky and flying all over the place. One flying body hit a little girl once and killed her.”

  Ah, come on, Pop!” Jimmy said. He couldn’t stop smiling. He was having the time of his life. “It’s not gonna fail. No bodies are gonna drop.”

  “You don’t know that no more than I know or Tree knows. Anything that high can drop. I’m sorry, but it can. Anything that goes that high ain’t natural.”

  “Oh, I see,” Jimmy reasoned. “So that plane you own that you’re always flying around the country in, flying high in, is that unnatural too?”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” Reno warned his son, although he was smiling. “You know what I’m talking about. This ride is what I’m talking about and it flies too high, I’m not taking it back.”

  “Oh, Reno, just come on,” Trina insisted. “Don’t punk out on us.”

  Reno stopped in his tracks when Trina said those words, as she knew he would. She and Jimmy stopped walking, too. Reno looked at his wife as if she’d just grown horns. “Punk out?” he asked her. “You think I’ll punk out over some kiddie ride? You’re out of your gotdamn mind if you think some kiddie ride’s worrying me.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have a problem, what’s your problem? Just bring your ass on,” he said forcefully as he began heading for the ride’s ticket taker, walking swiftly as if he couldn’t get there fast enough. “Don’t punk out she tells me. Me. Punking out. Yeah, I got your punk out right here, Tree,” Reno said, glancing back at his laughing wife. “I got your punk out, punk!”

  Trina and Jimmy Mack couldn’t stop grinning as they hurried behind their big talking leader. They’d never had this much fun at Reno’s expense ever. Trina couldn’t remember when she had more fun.

  And Reno did indeed get on the Hang-man ride. Nobody was going to call him a punk and he not prove them wrong. Trina was seated beside him, and although they were locked into the seat, he still placed his arm across her stomach and braced her in for what he considered was added security. If any bodies fell out of this monstrosity, he thought, it wasn’t going to be hers.

  Jimmy Mack sat in front of them, and he kept looking back and grinning. Reno wanted to put a sack of manure in his mouth.

  “Man up, Pop,” Jimmy said with a grin, causing Trina to giggle, too. “It won’t be so bad.”

  “Talk that shit when we land,” Reno warned his grinning son. “All right, Jimmy Mack. Talk that shit then.”

  Jimmy turned back around laughing. He’d never seen his tough father look so terrified. And over a nothing ride like this. But that was why he loved Reno so completely. Reno was as imperfect as he was.

  Trina couldn’t stop smiling, either. Not because Reno was frightened by an amusement park ride, but because he was fighting the fright. He was trying to pretend that scared was the last thing a man like him could ever be. When he should have known Trina knew him better than that.

  But that was exactly what Reno was doing. He was fighting the fright. Especially when he looked around and saw all of the young people, young girls and children even, eagerly awaiting the start of the ride. They weren’t worried in the least. Trina herself said she’d ridden the darn thing many times before, and loved it! Reno, however, couldn’t see how anybody could love this.

  He looked over to the guy at the controls. Even he was young. Which didn’t ease Reno’s anxiety one bit. The kid looked like some incompetent bozo they grabbed off the street and told him to operate this ride. No experience needed. Just put the lives of all these people in his hands and work the controls. Reno felt sick to his stomach. And the fact that his wife and son were on this contraption with him didn’t help, either. They were at the carnival park, celebrating Jimmy’s eighteenth birthday, and Reno wanted to puke.

  But he didn’t. He manned-up, as Jimmy would jokingly call it, and endured the start of the ride. And at first it wasn’t so bad. Reno even began to wonder if he had overreacted and could actually manage this. But they kept going higher. With each come down, they sailed up higher and higher. And then, instead of easing back down as the ride had been taking them, they suddenly were slung onto tracks that careened them down, causing everybody to scream in excitement. Reno, however, just screamed.

  “Get me the fuck out of here!” he was yelling. “Stop this gotdamn contraption and get me the fuck out of here!”

  Trina couldn’t stop laughing as Reno screamed and screamed. Jimmy couldn’t stop looking back and grinning as his father screamed.

  And then they were down again, and there was the usual lull in the action before they went back up. Reno looked over at the operator and pointed his finger. “Hey, you. Hey, bozo,” he yelled at the operator as other riders laughed. They’d heard Reno’s profanity-laced screams and thought him a hoot. Reno, however, was dead serious.

  “You touch that switch again,” Reno warned the young operator, “and I’ll bury your ass in cement, you hear me, boy? You hear me? Yeah, I’m talking to you, you Napoleon Dynamite-looking motherfucker! Don’t fuck with me now. Don’t try me! Don’t try me!”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said with all sincerity and then hoisted the riders back up to their highest point yet, laughing as he did. Reno was kicking his legs and screaming from the top of his lungs. But the kid couldn’t hear a thing. Just the roar of screams as everybody, except Reno, enjoyed the ride.

  Afterwards, Reno staggered down the platform walking as if he had what Trina could only describe as a sack of shit up his ass, and he gave the operator a steely look. But he didn’t even approach the kid. He didn’t have the energy for any kind of confrontation. He could barely walk as it was. By contrast to Reno, Jimmy and Trina looked rejuvenated. As if that ride was just the beginning of the fun for them.

  And, indeed, a few minutes later they were ready to go up again. This time on an equally scary-looking ride. But Reno didn’t care what names they called him this time. Punk, sissy, Scrooge, he didn’t give a fuck.

  “Y’all go head on,” he said as he headed for the nearest bench. “I need to make some phone calls.”

  Jimmy smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re scared, Pop,” he teased.

  “Yeah, I’m scared, how about that? You just sit beside my wife on that contraption and make sure she’s secure after they buckle her in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmy grinned. “I’ll protect her.”

  Reno managed to smile at that. Kid vying to take his spot in more ways than one? Not on his life, Reno thought as he sat on the bench. Nobody’s supplanting him in Tree’s life, not even that black stallion hunk of a son of his.

  When Reno sat on the bench, he quickly realized that the only other people on those so-called “rest” benches were the elderly and the infirmed. And they were all looking at him as if something had to be wrong with him, too. Reno’s pride started to kick in again and he almost stood up in embarrassment and walked away. But he didn’t have the energy left. He had left it all on the ride.

  “Fuck it,” he said aloud, to the shock of their sensitive ears, and pulled out his cell phone. Think whatever they wanted to think, but Reno was keeping his energy-depleted ass put.

  His energy returned in droves, however, later that night. They had shared a nice celebratory dinner with Jimmy, and while he was asleep in his very own apartment inside the PaLargio that Reno had given to him as a birthday gift, Reno and Trina were back in their penthouse that covered the PaLargio’s entire top floor. And they were in their bed, naked and in each other’s arms, kissing passionately.
>
  Reno kissed her chin and neck, but he kept returning to her mouth. He loved the taste of her. He loved the fact that she was his woman and there was no one else alive he would rather be with. And she was a wonderful kisser, giving him tongue only for short bursts at a time. She knew how to make him crave her.

  And he was craving every inch of her as they stopped kissing to come up for air. Reno rubbed his cheek against her cheek, loving the feel of the smooth blackness of her skin, and then his mouth was moving downward.

  Trina knew where he was headed. First he would make a long stop at her breasts, which he did. And as he squeezed one breast while sucking the life out of the other one, she began to rub her thighs together in anticipation of where he was headed next.

  But first he had to get breast. And they felt so plump and juicy to Reno that his mouth became manic as it moved rapidly from breast to breast, kissing them, fondling them with his hands, sucking them. He couldn’t stop ravaging her breasts. They were turning red from the fire of his passion, and the nipple was so big and hard that Reno squeezed the breasts together and placed both nipples in his mouth at the exact same time.

  And he sucked and kissed and he licked them until every inch of her mounds were wet with his love. And the more he ravaged her, the more her vagina pulsated in anticipation that next he would be ravaging her down there, too.

  But Reno wasn’t a necessarily predictable lover. He did whatever the mood dictated. And this time, after turning her breasts into flaming mounds of joy, he got on his knees, straddled her, and then moved his aroused, thick, pink dick up to her mouth.