Tommy Gabrini 3: Grace Under Fire (The Gabrini Men Series) Read online

  TOMMY GABRINI 3

  GRACE UNDER FIRE

  By

  MALLORY MONROE

  Copyright©2014 Mallory Monroe

  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 downloading at file sharing and other sites, and distribution of this book by way of the Internet or any other means, is illegal and strictly prohibited.

  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

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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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  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

  DUTCH AND GINA:

  WHAT HE DID FOR LOVE

  FOR THE LOVE OF GINA

  BOOK EIGHT

  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

  A MOB BOSS CHRISTMAS:

  THE PREGNANCY

  (Mob Boss 5)

  MOB BOSS 6:

  THE HEART OF RENO GABRINI

  RENO’S GIFT

  BOOK 7

  RENO GABRINI:

  A MAN IN FULL

  BOOK 8

  RENO AND TRINA:

  GETTING BACK TO LOVE

  BOOK 9

  RENO AND SON:

  DON’T MESS WITH JIM

  BOOK 10

  THE GABRINI MEN SERIES

  IN ORDER:

  ROMANCING TOMMY GABRINI

  ROMANCING SAL GABRINI

  TOMMY GABRINI 2:

  A PLACE IN HIS HEART

  SAL GABRINI 2:

  A WOMAN’S TOUCH

  ADDITIONAL BESTSELLING

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM MALLORY MONROE:

  DANIEL’G GIRL:

  ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN

  ROMANCING MO RYAN

  ROMANCING HER PROTECTOR

  ROMANCING THE BULLDOG

  IF YOU WANTED THE MOON

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  KATHERINE CACHITORIE:

  LOVERS AND TAKERS

  LOVING HER SOUL MATE

  LOVING THE HEAD MAN

  SOME CAME DESPERATE:

  A LOVE SAGA

  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

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  PROLOGUE

  The double doors of the master bedroom flew open and Grace Gabrini hurried in as if she was a woman with nothing left to lose. She was tired of this shit now. She’d had it up to here with these people now. What more did they want from her? How much more of their bullshit did she have to take before they would finally leave her the hell alone?

  Not that she was waiting to find out. She wasn’t. Talk was over now. Now it was time for action. They didn’t understand respect. They didn’t understand civility and human decency and working through problems the way normal people would. So now she didn’t understand it either. She went into her husband’s massive walk-in closet, turned the combination and unlocked the safe, and pulled out the gun. It was locked and loaded. She removed the safety.

  And she was off again. She walked out of the bedroom and hurried back downstairs. They wanted a fight, well now they just got one. And they won’t see it coming. Because their insignificant little Grace - the one woman they thought would never fight back; the one woman they thought was nothing more than a doormat strategically placed for them to stomp all over, was about to kick ass and take names.

  Tommy’s man Henry was standing in the foyer as Grace hurried past him in her beautiful form-fitting white dress. If she didn’t have a pistol at her side she would look as if she was heading for an evening at the Opera. But Henry knew better. He knew where she was headed, and he had the good sense to let her be. He’d never seen Grace in this kind of state before, not in all the time he’d known her, but if he was in her position, if he had to take the shit she had to take, he’d be packing a pistol too.

  She hurried out of the front door, hurried down the circular steps, and then ran down the long, winding driveway that led to the street in front of the house. The car was still parked across the street, with the motor still running, and the woman behind the wheel was looking at her as she came. But she still didn’t take Grace seriously. She was even smiling, as if Grace was some silly young girl who was too unsophisticated to do a damn thing about it. Until Grace lifted that gun as if she aimed to use it. That smile, that woman’s I’m superior bitch of a smile, was gone. And Grace began moving toward the car.

  Tommy Gabrini’s dark red Ferrari drove onto the street just as Grace was walking toward that car. He was stunned to see her in the street like that at all, but when he realized she had a gun in her hand, and had it aimed and ready to fire, his heart nearly stopped. He slammed on brakes, stunned by what he was seeing, as the woman he loved with all of his heart fired not one, but successive shots into that vehicle, firing and firing, as if she was killing the car itself.

  He jumped from his own car, yelling his wife’s name as he ran like a maniac toward her. But she kept firing. She kept moving closer and closer to the vehicle, and wouldn’t stop firing.

  The female behind the wheel attempted to speed away when the bullets first flew, but in her panic she forgot that the car was still in Park. She was spinning her wheels. By the time she threw the gearshift out of Park, it was too late. There were too many bullets. She’d been hit too many times. The car lurched and then rolled, as if the pressure she had tried to apply on the gas petal never materialized, and was no pressure at all. There was a whiplash effect as the driver’s head lobed back and then forward, and then her forehead ca
me to rest against the steering wheel.

  Grace was standing there, the smoking gun now at her side. Tommy was hurrying to her side, his heart pounding against his chest, as he looked back to see if any other cars were turning onto the street. His mansion was the only home on the block, so there would be no eyewitnesses of neighbors peeping through curtains and telling cops what they saw. But his street was sometimes used as a through-street to other blocks. A car could pass through at any moment.

  Grace turned when she finally heard her husband calling her name. He was running, his suit coat was flying wildly, and his blondish-brown hair was tossed around his forehead making him look years younger. But the terror in his eyes belied that youth. Because she knew he was devastated. Because she knew he did all he could to save her from nights like this. He had shielded her and babied her and coddled her their entire life together. But even she knew it couldn’t work. Not when she had signed on to become a Gabrini. Not when she had proudly married a man who was so desirous and good that some women would kill to keep him in their beds, and in their hearts. And Grace, to their shock and underestimation, was not only willing to do what she had to do to keep him too, she did it hard and she did it all the way.

  As Tommy drew closer to his wife, and looked into her big, brown eyes, he knew she still felt justified. She did what she had to do and was making no apologies for it. Her eyes were not filled with regret, but resolve.

  Now Tommy took over. He looked at the woman in the car, a woman he knew well, but she was not his concern. Right now, Grace was the only human being he was concerned about. He pulled her into his arms, removed the gun from her hand, and began hurrying her toward his Ferrari. His man Henry was already running down the driveway, his face twisted with horror too, as if he had no idea it would end this way. He had expected yells and threats, but never an actual shooting.

  Tommy handed him the gun. This wasn’t the first gun Henry had ever had to dispose of, and if he continued to work for Tommy Gabrini he knew it wouldn’t be the last. Henry was already on his cell phone, contacting Tommy’s men, as he hurried back toward the mansion. This was not his first rodeo. He knew what he had to do.

  Tommy held onto Grace’s small body with the protectiveness of a man holding onto life itself. His heart was broken. His worst nightmare had been realized. He thought it was over. He had handled their enemies the way Tommy Gabrini handled all enemies: ruthlessly and without mercy. He thought he had handled them all after word first got around that he was no longer dating, but had married Grace McKinsey. He thought he had kicked every one of those devils right back to hell where they belonged. He had no clue there was another one. He had no clue his wife was wrestling with another one that would lead her to a night like this.

  He sat her in his car, and then got behind the wheel himself. He looked at her. She was emotionally exhausted now, but still resolved. She looked at him, daring him to blame himself. But he did blame himself. How could he not? This was his wife. He was her protector. Something had gone horribly wrong!

  He grabbed hold of her small, trembling brown hand after he backed up, swerved around, and sped away. He was physically removing her from the scene, to continue to protect her, but he knew her emotional connection would always be there. In that place. It always was for him and for anybody driven to nights like this. He would take her to Sal’s place to assess the blowback. He would take her to Sal’s place to keep her together before she fell apart. He would deal with it at Sal’s.

  ONE

  Two Months Earlier

  Tommy Gabrini was happy. Not because he was in Paris, but because he was about to leave Paris a full day earlier than originally planned, and was going home to his wife. They’d been married for almost three months now. He’d never enjoyed life the way he was enjoying it at this moment in time. The mere thought that he was going to see her radiant face, and see it earlier than planned, made him feel like a kid again.

  But he was in Paris. Where he’d bedded more women than he could probably count. And by the time he stepped off of the elevator and entered the hotel lobby, with his top two negotiators by his side, one of those women were waiting for him.

  “Tommy,” she called out in her strong French accent. When he looked beyond his people and saw Alexandria Dawse, he knew he couldn’t ignore her.

  “I’ll catch up,” he said to his negotiators.

  When they, too, saw the woman standing there, and saw that she was extraordinarily beautiful, and saw that she was black, they did not mix words. She was undoubtedly one of Tommy’s ladies. They would wait for him outside.

  Alex was standing across the lobby in front of the settee she had been sitting on. Her heart was filled with grief, and her big, sad eyes followed his every movement as he approached her. She had hoped she could handle this. She had hoped the news would not affect her so adversely. But as soon as he began walking her way, with that devastatingly gorgeous face and that tall, muscular body she knew so well, she knew she had been hoping for far too much.

  “Hello, Alex,” he said as he unbuttoned his Armani suit coat. He motioned for her to sit down, and he sat down beside her. “How have you been?”

  She stared at him with that bright-eyed, innocent stare that made her one of the most sought-after models in Europe. The fact that she was of mixed race, and had the most appealing hazel eyes he’d ever seen, helped her success, and he once wanted her because of her looks alone. She wore no makeup, none at all, but with her natural beauty she still put most women to shame. She was for Tommy, at one time, irresistible.

  He crossed his legs. His plane was waiting, and he still had last-minute details to work out with his team. He didn’t have time for this. But his guilt, about roping her in to begin with, kept him from dismissing her outright.

  So he asked her again. “How have you been?”

  Again, she said nothing.

  “I thought Milan was your home now. Have you moved back, or are you working here now?”

  “You married her.” Those were Alex’s first words and they were harsh. She spoke them as if she was stating a fact she could never accept.

  Tommy saw her dismay. He already knew she was a fragile young lady, one of the youngest he’d ever bedded, and he knew he had to handle her with care.

  “Is it true?” she asked again. “Did you marry her?”

  “Alex, I told you some time ago that I was engaged and was going to be married.”

  “But is it true? Did you do it?” That was all she wanted to know. A fiancée didn’t mean shit to a woman like her. There were engaged women all over Europe who never got married. She was once one of them. But if he had gone through with it; if he had turned that plain Jane Grace McKinsey into Mrs. Tommy Gabrini, as her friends and every news account she read made clear, then that would be another matter altogether. That would change everything.

  “Yes, I married Grace,” Tommy said easily. “It’s true.”

  But instead of looking resigned to that reality, Alex scrunched up her face in such a way that she looked almost as bratty as she looked perplexed. “But how could you marry somebody like her? She’s not as pretty as I am. She’s not as successful as I am. She has no background and breeding whatsoever, Tommy! Why would you pick her over me?”

  It was a ludicrous comparison to be sure. Tommy wondered if Alex even realized how nonsensical she sounded. She was going on as if she was in some hot and heavy romance with him when he hadn’t seen her in months and hadn’t bedded her since he met Grace. They were once together, in an open, non-committed relationship that lasted nearly five years, and she used to joke that she grew up on Tommy’s dick. She was young, barely twenty when he first had her, and he went out of his way, at the very beginning, to make it perfectly clear that the relationship was going no-where and she was not, by a longshot, the only woman in his life. For her to sit up here now and behave as if they had always been in some monogamous, committed relationship was ridiculous on its face.

  “What’s the deal
, Al?” he asked her.

  Again, she scrunched up her face. “The deal?”

  “What game are you playing at, you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, so I have to be playing a game to ask you a simple question?”

  “It didn’t work out with the actor, so you figure you can ease your way back into my bed? Is that how this goes?”

  Alex frowned. “What are you talking about? Ease my way back to you? What is that supposed to mean?”

  Tommy didn’t bother to answer. Because she knew exactly what it meant. She was the one who left him when she fell hard for Beau Brantley, some heartthrob movie star young ladies were going nuts over. But of all those young ladies, the kid picked Alex. He even put a ring on her finger. It was a relief for Tommy at the time, because he was growing increasingly addicted to her sugar, and it would have required more than his own will power to completely give her up. But that Hollywood dream life Alex thought was going to last forever crashed and burned in less than two years. She was engaged to the sexy Beau, but in one chaotic weekend a couple weeks ago, he stunned her and married someone else. Now she was sitting in this hotel lobby with Tommy, behaving as if she never left him and that he, by marrying Grace, just did to her what that actor had done to her.

  “Stop psychoanalyzing me and answer my question,” she said. “Why did you pick her over me?”