ROMANCING SAL GABRINI Page 19

  “To do what?” Gemma asked Reno.

  It was only then did Sal look at his girlfriend. She looked so distraught to him, so overwhelmed, that she looked unwell. Sometimes he took her strength for granted. This was one of those times.

  “It’s late guys,” Sal said, “and I can’t even think straight right now. Why don’t we take a break, get some rest, and then we can make our next move. We’ve got to think this shit through anyway.”

  “Agreed,” Tommy said, standing and stretching himself. He looked at his watch. “I need to make a phone call anyway.”

  Reno looked at him. “Grace?” he asked.

  Tommy didn’t respond.

  “You need to get your shit together, Tommy.”

  Tommy looked at Reno. “Can we discuss this privately, if you don’t mind?” Tommy asked. Reno smiled and began heading for Tommy’s office. Tommy began heading that way too. But he stopped when he made it beside Sal. He looked at his baby brother, and then hugged him. “Glad to have you back in one piece,” he said.

  Sal smiled. “Glad to be back,” he said.

  Tommy left the room. Sal looked at Gemma. “Come on,” he said as he took her hand and escorted her upstairs.

  Tommy had so many guest rooms in his house that Sal took the first one they came upon. Once inside the room, he didn’t take her to the bed. He took her to the bathroom. After filling the tub with water, and after she sat at the dressing table watching him, he began undressing himself. Then he went up to her and began undressing her.

  Gemma felt as if she was in such uncharted territory that she didn’t even know what questions to ask, let alone how to voice her complaints. She would, in time, she knew she would, but she had to get her bearings first.

  They got into the Jacuzzi tub, with Sal in back and Gemma between his legs in front. He rested his hand on her stomach, and they relaxed. For a good few minutes, they said nothing still.

  Then Sal spoke.

  “It’s necessary, Gem,” he said.

  “It’s murder, Sal,” Gemma said. Sal exhaled. “I’m sorry,” she continued, “but it is. What happened with that man and Patty Pacheco was different. You had no choice but to shoot and defend your friend. But nobody’s pulling a gun on you right now. You’re instigating this.”

  “What the fuck . . .” He calmed himself back down. “What do you mean I’m instigating this? A gotdamn army broke into that motel and tried to take me out. You think I’m gonna let that stand? You heard Reno. They’ll be gunning for you next. If they can’t get me, they’ll be gunning for you. And that won’t happen. Not on my watch it won’t!”

  “But I’m an attorney, Sal. I’m an officer of the court. I can’t be a part of this!”

  “A part of what? You aren’t a part of anything, whatta you talking? I’m handling my business, that’s all that’s going on here. I’m settling a score.”

  “And I understand that,” Gemma started, but Sal would have none of it.

  “No you don’t,” he insisted. “You think you do, but you don’t, sweetheart, you don’t. You can’t take this stuff in a vacuum. You can’t pretend that A isn’t related to B and B isn’t related to C. All this shit related! And if I don’t do something now, it’ll be your ass they’ll be coming after next. And your ass is mine. They ain’t coming after you.”

  Gemma leaned against Sal when he said that, and she allowed him to wrap her tightly in his big, muscular arms. But the reality of it all still terrified her. Not just because of the danger Sal would face, but the fact that she was an officer of the court. She couldn’t pretend that her oath of office existed in a vacuum either.

  And the way Tommy and Reno looked at Sal as if he wasn’t an outsider looking into the mob, but was an insider himself, concerned her. It was no longer supposition and possibilities anymore. It wasn’t crossing some bridge when they got to it anymore. The bridge was here. It was real now. It was about to hit the fan now. And she felt so ill-prepared. What in the world, she wondered, was she getting herself mixed up with?

  But Sal’s embrace calmed her back down. She snuggled closer against him. She knew this man. She loved this man.

  Sal knew it too. He was depending on that love. “You have to trust me, Gem,” he eventually said to her, and he said it as the heaviness of the moment began to catch up with her, and she fell asleep.

  She had been asleep in bed with Sal, but woke up in bed alone. She woke up with a start, and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was almost six a.m.. She knew he had planned to go to New Jersey, and she knew they had planned to strike early. She knew he was probably already gone. And the reality of that knowledge had her heart pounding almost uncontrollably.

  She hurried to the side of the bed, covering her naked body with the bedspread, and immediately phoned Sal’s cell phone. It went straight to Voice Mail. She hurriedly ran to the bathroom, where she put back on the clothes Sal had taken off of her last night, and then she made her way downstairs.

  Henry, Tommy’s butler, met her at the bottom of the stairs. “Good morning, Miss Jones,” he said.

  “They’re gone?” she asked him. She knew that he knew what was going on. She knew he was that kind of assistant.

  “Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “They left around eleven last night, ma’am.”

  Gemma was astonished. They must have left just after she fell asleep. As if he was going to do what he was going to do regardless of how she felt about it. He’d deal with her later, seemed to have been his thinking. The kind of thinking she deplored, because she felt as if he was making her a party to something she had no say about. There was no way, she knew, she could live like that.

  She looked at Henry. “Call me a cab, please, Henry,” she said, and began heading back upstairs.

  “A cab, ma’am?” Henry asked.

  “Yes. A cab.”

  “But,” he said, and Gemma turned back around. “Mr. Gabrini, Mr. Salvatore Gabrini, said I was to watch after you, ma’am. There are guards all around this property.”

  “I don’t care if the United States army was all around this property, I’m getting out. Call me a cab.”

  Henry nodded his head. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Nobody said he had to hold her against her will. And he wasn’t going to do it even if somebody had. “Where am I to tell this cab to take you?” he asked her.

  “The airport,” she said, without turning around again, as she made her way back upstairs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Reno was right. There was nothing in and out or easy about it. They penetrated his initial security easily, thanks to Tommy’s expertise, but then there were gun battle after gun battle they had to endure. Even with those men that agreed to stand down, and some of them did allow them further passage in, there were still more than a few that were willing to defend their boss to the death. And they did. Every last one of them. Reno, Tommy, nor Sal was hit, but all three of them exacted huge casualties on Danny Bronco’s crew. Including, thanks to the tenacity of Sal, Danny Bronco himself.

  Sal didn’t realize that Gemma had left Seattle, however, until he was back on the plane heading home.

  Gemma arrived at the boutique later that afternoon. Trina was already in the boutique, along with one of their young salesladies. They both were helping a customer when Gemma walked in. Trina immediately knew something wrong.

  She moved away from the customer and toward the counter where Gemma was headed. “What are you doing here?” she asked her as she walked. “I thought you were going to spend the weekend in Seattle.”

  “I came back,” Gemma said without even pretending to be upbeat about it. She walked behind the counter and sat her purse underneath it, while Trina remained on the counter’s front side.

  “So what happened?” Trina asked.

  Gemma pulled the inventory logs out of the counter drawer. “Have we decided if we’re going with the Paris Collection yet?”

  “Gem!” Trina said. Gemma looked at her. “Tell me what happened. Is Sal
all right?”

  “I have no idea,” she said defiantly at first, and then a sadness overtook her that could not be overcome. She looked at Trina. Trina was stunned to see tears in her eyes. “I have no idea,” she said again.

  Trina grabbed tissues from a box on the counter and hurried behind the counter. She gave the tissues to Gemma and took her by the arm. “Come on,” she said as she helped Gemma toward the side steps that led to the office upstairs. She glanced at their employee.

  “I’ll take care of everything, Mrs. Gabrini,” the employee, named Sheila, said with a huge smile on her pretty face.

  Trina, satisfied too, escorted Gemma upstairs. Once they made it to the office, they sat on the sofa instead of the chairs. They sat side by side, with Trina holding her hand.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Gem,” she said. “What happened in Seattle?”

  Gemma wiped underneath her eyes with tissue.

  “Sal was in a shootout,” she said and looked at Trina, to see if that sounded as crazy to Trina as it sounded to her.

  Trina now understood the source of her distress. “I see,” she said.

  “You see? That’s all you can say? I tell you my boyfriend was in a shootout, a shootout, and that’s all you can say?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Trina asked. “Yeah, that would be very strange if your boyfriend was Jed or Ted. But he’s not. He’s Sal. Sal Gabrini. He’s a Gabrini, Gem. What did you expect? If you fool around with a Kennedy or a Bush or a Clinton, you can’t be surprised if they start running for public office. If you fool around with a Gabrini, you can’t be surprised if they start---”

  “If they start what?” Gemma asked. “Shooting people?”

  “If they have entanglements,” Trina said. “I warned you when you first told me how you felt about Sal that you wasn’t hooking up with the Huxtables or anybody like that. I told you that, Gem.”

  Gemma frowned and wiped her nose. “I know. And I knew it could get dicey. But a shootout? And then he and Tommy and Reno went to New Jersey and---”

  “And what?” Trina asked.

  Gemma looked at her. “Didn’t Reno tell you?”

  “No. You tell me.”

  “You know he was in Seattle, though, right?”

  “He told me he had to take care of some business there, yeah.”

  “He didn’t tell you what the business was?”

  “He would have if I would have asked.”

  “But you didn’t ask?”

  “I don’t anymore, Gemma.”

  Gemma stared at her. “But you used to?”

  Trina smiled. “And how. Reno couldn’t fart without me asking why was he farting.” Gemma managed to smile. “I was terrible, girl. So clingy. But now? Please. Half the time I forget what city Reno’s in.”

  Gemma couldn’t imagine not knowing what city Sal was in at any given time. “What changed?” she asked Trina.

  “Trust changed. I learned to trust Reno unconditionally. I learned to understand that he wasn’t going to hurt me. But tell me about Jersey. What were you saying about New Jersey?”

  “There’s this man, Danny Bronco, who they said they needed to . . . to, I don’t know, take care of I guess, because he put a contract out on Mikey Pacheco.”

  Trina frowned. “Who’s Mikey Pacheco?”

  “This kid Sal looks out for. You don’t know him?”

  “Never heard of him, but that’s nothing new either. But you said Reno, Sal, and Tommy went themselves to take care of this Danny Bronco guy?”

  “Yeah. They left late last night. I tried to call Sal but I didn’t get any response.”

  Trina’s first instinct was to grab her cell phone and call her husband, to make sure he was all right, but she didn’t get the chance. The office intercom buzzed. She got up, walked to the desk, and pressed the button.

  “Yes, Sheila, what is it?”

  “Mr. Sal is here to see Gemma.”

  Trina, inwardly relieved herself, looked at Gemma. Gemma was extremely pleased to know that Sal was okay, but she was worried too, because this was her life she was dealing with, this was the lifestyle she might have to get accustomed to.

  “Send him up, Sheil,” Trina said, and then pressed off.

  “I don’t want to see him right now,” Gemma said.

  “Yeah, right,” Trina said as she headed for the exit. “And you weren’t crying your eyes out because you were worried sick about him, either. Talk to the man, Gem,” she said, and left.

  Gemma knew she should get up, go to the bathroom and pull herself together, but she didn’t have the energy. She was too caught up in the reality of it all. She didn’t want to lose Sal. It would break her heart if she had to lose him. Everything about him she loved. She even had a quick flashback to last night, when he held her naked body against his in the bathroom in Seattle. She remembered how he sucked her breasts sore when he laid her on the bed, and then opened her legs and sucked her there. She fell asleep as he eventually entered her, and she remembered loving it. But when she woke up, he was gone. She loved everything about that man. Except his “entanglements.” She was reasonably certain that she not only could never love that part of Sal’s life, she couldn’t live with that part of Sal’s life either.

  Now he was walking through the office door. Looking drained, she thought, in his slacks and pullover shirt, his athletic body a testament to the incredible workouts he always ended up getting wherever they were together. But he didn’t look happy, either, as if the fact that she had left Seattle before he got back there, had angered him.

  He walked over to the sofa and sat down beside her. She could smell his familiar cologne, and could see the tiredness in his eyes. She wondered if somebody died in Jersey. She wondered if he had a hand in that death.

  He leaned forward, clasped his hands, and then looked back at her. The pain in her eyes was enough to temper his anger, and he hated with a passion that he was putting her through this. He exhaled.

  “You left,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  He stared at her. He, too, remembered last night, and how she felt in his arms. But what he most remembered was the fear he felt last night. Not any fear of Danny Bronco. He knew he could handle that asshole. But the fear of losing her.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Gem,” he said to her, the strain and anger all over his face. “What do you want me to tell you? Did you think I was a choirboy? Did you think I was gonna sit back and let those fuckers shoot at me and disrespect me and put a contract on a kid they know I’m responsible for? I mean, tell me what was I supposed to do about a situation like that?”

  “It was a tough situation, I understand that, Sal.”

  “No you don’t. Because tough isn’t the word. I can handle tough. It was an impossible situation, Gem, that’s what you don’t understand.”

  “And you couldn’t turn it over to the cops to handle?”

  Sal smiled. “Yeah, sure. They would have handled it just fine. No, Gemma, I couldn’t turn it over to anybody to handle but myself. Me and my partners.”

  Gemma knew she was fighting a battle that couldn’t possibly end well. And she knew she was asking stupid questions, questions she probably should have asked a long time ago. “Are you a member of the mob, Sal?” she asked him.

  “No, I’m not a member of the mob,” Sal said. “Whatever the hell that means.”

  “Then what are you saying, Sal? That you’re not a mobster but you play one whenever you need to?” Gemma knew she had gone too far. “That’s not fair, I apologize,” she said.

  “I do what I have to do, Gemma. That’s all. I don’t know what you want from me!” Then his anger flared. “Fuck!” he said and stood up.

  He walked around with great agitation, and then he stopped and looked at her. “I want you, Gem, and you know I do. But I don’t know what you want from me. I’m a Gabrini. And sometimes I have to do what I have to do.” He exhaled, ran his hand through his hair. “I thought you
loved me,” he said.

  She looked at him. How could he question that? “You know I love you.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “Love isn’t the issue, Sal.”

  “Like hell it isn’t! You love me?”

  “I still say that’s not the issue. Okay, yes, I love you. Satisfied?”

  “The good, bad, and ugly me?”

  “Sal---”

  “Do you love me no matter what?”

  Gemma hesitated. “I love you.”

  “No matter what?”

  Gemma looked at him. Tears were in her eyes.

  “You have got to decide if you want me,” Sal said, “or somebody you want me to be. I can tell you I’ll never get involved in any more of these situations. I can tell you that. But it wouldn’t be true. I’m a Gabrini. We have situations sometimes. You knew that, Gemma.” Then he frowned. “Didn’t you?”

  Sal looked so perplexed that Gemma felt guilty for putting him through such distress. But it wasn’t that simple for her. She looked at him. “I don’t know if I can handle these situations, Sal,” she admitted. “I need time to think about this.”

  But Sal’s anger would not abate. “You act like I went out and created this problem myself. You act like I’m some coldblooded killer who do things for the sport of it. But that’s not true!”

  “I know it’s not true!”

  “Then what is there to think about?”

  He was so overwhelmed that it overwhelmed Gemma. And she could no longer verbalize her concerns. She just knew she had them.

  But her reticence only angered Sal more. “Yeah, you think about it,” he said as he began heading for the exit. “You think about it. Take forever for all I care gotdammit! Think about it until you can’t think about nothing else! You think about it!” He slung open the office door and was about to storm out, but he stopped. And then he just stood there, his anger now a torrent of pain.

  He looked at her again. He loved her so much it hurt him to his core. “Don’t leave me, Gem,” he said, tears now appearing in his own eyes. “Please.”