TOMMY GABRINI 2: A PLACE IN HIS HEART Page 9

  A few minutes later and they were on Grace’s sofa. She was seated on his lap and he had one hand on the small of her back. She was no longer crying, and he was watching her as she slowly began to rebound. He had said nothing for several minutes, to give her some time, but now he was talking.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said to her. “She left you with no real choice. I would have been disappointed in you if you would not have made the move you made.”

  “But I hate acting in anger. Trammel needs Jillian’s expertise, I know it does. She’s a bitch, but she knows everything there is to know about Trammel. And I had hoped . . . I had hoped we could work together.”

  “She’ll never see you as her equal, honey. You’ll always be her assistant in her eyes.”

  “Or worse,” Grace said. “And I know it. But I’m more concerned about Trammel right now, not if she respects me or not. Firing Jillian just wasn’t the move I wanted to make right now.”

  “That’s the cost of being boss, my dear,” Tommy said. And he should know. After rising swiftly up the ranks to captain in the Seattle police department, where his father was head of the entire department, he left to start his own business. He’d been in the role of boss most of his adult life. “I’m surprised she left the building at all,” he said. “It’s not Jilly’s style to give in. How did you manage that?”

  “Oh, I had to call Security,” she said.

  Tommy was surprised. “You called Security on Jilly?”

  “I had to. And I made clear that if they didn’t obey that order they would be joining Jilly in the unemployment line.”

  Tommy laughed.

  “Oh, yeah, my name was Miss Bitch all day today,” she said.

  Tommy pulled her closer. “Good for you,” he said. “You’re young so they’re going to try you now. You did the absolute right thing. I would have handled it the same way.”

  Grace looked at Tommy. She respected him in every way, but especially as a successful businessman. “Really?” she asked him.

  “Absolutely,” he said, cuddling her now. “You did it exactly right. And don’t worry, it’ll get easier.”

  “What will?”

  “Firing people,” he said and Grace leaned against his chest. Coming from Tommy, it did make her feel better. And he was right. Firing people would probably get easier for her the more she did it. But just the thought of something that monumental being easy for anybody was a terrible thought to her.

  “I hate to say this,” Tommy said as he stared at her.

  Grace looked back up at him, yet another worried look in her big brown eyes. “What is it? What do you hate to say?”

  “You look so damn sexy when you’re worried.”

  Grace smiled and shook her head. “Reno said you were a sex maniac. He wasn’t playing.”

  Tommy moved his hand inside of her pajama bottoms. “Oh, yeah? That’s what you think of me?”

  Grace grinned as his hand began to massage her folds. He was already beginning to get that hooded look. “Yes,” she said. “That’s precisely what I think of you.”

  “I’m only telling the truth,” Tommy said, as her cunt began to moisten his fingers. “You’re sexy when you look worried.”

  “But I’m not looking worried right now. I’m smiling right now.”

  “Just as I said,” Tommy said, dead serious. “You look sexy when you’re smiling.”

  Grace laughed, but Tommy couldn’t. He began to unbutton and unzip his pants.

  “Don’t you have a plane to catch, Mr. Gabrini?” Grace asked him. She was still half-joking until he pulled his big rod out.

  “After I catch my cock in your pussy,” Tommy said, pulling her pajama pants down to her ankles, “then I’ll catch that plane.”

  Any smiles Grace might have had slowly began to recede as he kept his word and captured her cunt with his cock. Although he eased it in, since he had gotten her partially ready, the pain still came.

  “It’ll feel better,” he whispered to her as he moved his thick dick into her tight space and began to gyrate it. “You know I always make it feel good.”

  “I know,” Grace said as she endured that first burst of pain. But as he eased in and out, and she began to moisten even more, the pain became less intense until it was nonexistent. He turned her around, taking her pajama pants off altogether, as she straddled him and faced him.

  She rode his fully aroused cock with pleasure. Her vagina was hot with the feel of his erection and he held onto her hips as she rode. He pulled her against him, wrapping her in his arms, as her naked bottom rode his naked cock until his cock became so engorged that it was spilling out of her like a boiling pot spilling over. All sides were saturating her, and she kept riding. His body was clenching from the intensity and he was holding her far tighter than he should, but it still felt too good for him to relax. He even lifted her pajama top and began sucking her breasts, as their fucking heightened with his release, instead of ebbing.

  Until Grace came too. Until Grace rode down on his dick one time too many and it hit that tender spot that took her over. His release was already sliding down his dick and her thighs when she came, and her practically naked body fell against his practically cloth body as her pulsations and all of that riding she had done made her cum.

  By the time they both were well spent, Tommy buttoned his pants, lifted her half-naked body, and carried her to the bathroom. He sat her on the Jack and Jill vanity, grabbed a cloth, and began cleaning first her, thoroughly, and then he began cleaning himself. But just looking into her eyes, at the way her hair flapped over her forehead and her shirt was still pulled up revealing the breasts his mouth had sufficiently wet, did him in again.

  He kissed her on the mouth. With a long, circular kiss. When he finally let her up for air, she smiled.

  “Again, don’t you have a plane to catch?” she asked him.

  “Again,” he said, as he trailed kisses down her face, “after I catch your pussy, I’ll catch my plane.” And he was moving downward, toward that pussy, kissing first her breasts and nipples, and then kneeling down, opening her legs wide, and licking her, preparing her, and then sucking her until it felt as if he was determined to suck her dry.

  She kept moving as he sucked and licked her until her back was against the mirror. But that didn’t stop Tommy. He was a man on a mission, where his mission, it seemed to Grace, was to make her remember him vividly when he left her and went out of town. Their earlier lovemaking would have done the trick, she felt, but Tommy didn’t share that feeling. Because, after licking and sucking her so long that she was red with fire, and her folds were wrinkled with drain, he put his dick in her again.

  “You’re my baby, you hear me?” Tommy said almost angrily as he fucked her; as he slid her ass up and down on the vanity, banging her so long and so hard, making loud, slapping noises, that once again after his branding style of lovemaking, she nearly fainted from the euphoria of the sensations.

  “I hear you,” she finally said in a faint voice, as her entire body, sated beyond belief, collapsed into his arms.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As the weeks came and went and life for Grace as head of Trammel became her new normal, life for Jillian Birch took more of a drastic turn than even the day she was fired from what she would forever consider to be her own company. She wanted back in. Not because she had any illusions about working for Grace McKinsey. That wasn’t going to happen. She’d never accept Grace as anything more than the help, the assistant, the head nigger in charge of nothing! But she needed the leverage of being there, of consolidating her power, before she was forced to make her next move.

  That was her plan, anyway, when she asked her son to schedule a meeting with Grace, away from Trammel, in an effort to facilitate Jillian’s return. But the impact of that meeting alone would force Jillian to make her next move.

  Grace only agreed to the meeting, let Jillian tell it, because Grace knew that Tommy’s hostile takeover of Trammel was as wrong as it
could be. Jillian was also convinced, now that Grace was in charge, that Grace now realized just how over her head she really was and how badly she needed Jillian’s expertise. She therefore wasn’t surprised at all when Grace agreed to the meeting.

  Cameron Birch and Grace met at Diamante’s, Tommy’s restaurant. Although Tommy was out of town on business, his brother Sal was at the restaurant that day. Jillian asked her brother Lootie Pressley to also attend the meeting. Not as a guest, but as a spy. He would sit further away and observe. If Cameron lost his cool, Lootie, who spent more time in the penal system than he spent out of it, was the only man Jillian knew who could settle Cam back down. But from what Lootie later told Jillian, there was no need to intervene at all initially. Grace showed up first, and then Cameron showed up, and they both seemed to be discussing Jillian’s return to Trammel in a very civil, calm manner.

  But everything changed, according to Lootie, when Grace apparently refused Jillian’s request. The fact that she would refuse to allow Jillian to return to her own company was, as Lootie later would say, too much for Cam to abide.

  Grace seemed to be gathering her purse to leave, as if she had nothing more to say to Cam. It was then that Cam reached into his pocket and pulled out what Lootie at first thought was going to be his wallet, or maybe even his cell phone. Cam, instead, pulled out a gun. But instead of pointing it at that bitch Grace the way Lootie thought he should have done, Cam pointed the gun beneath his own chin, and fired.

  Tommy’s brother Sal jumped across the bar counter and ran to Grace’s aid while the entire restaurant fell into pandemonium. People were running and knocking over chairs and doing everything in their power to get themselves out of the line of any fire. Lootie had to knock people over himself just to get to his nephew’s side, as the blood poured fiercely, but there was no denying how bad it was. It was bad. Lootie didn’t think Cam would survive the night.

  But he did survive the night. While Tommy was flying back to be by Grace’s side, Jillian was rushing to the hospital to be by her only child’s side. Tommy took Grace away from Seattle to be with his cousin Reno and Reno’s family, until the dust cleared, but he could have taken her to hell for all Jillian cared. Jillian never left her son’s bedside. Day and night she stayed right there, listening to that lonely sound of his respirator. All she wanted was for her child to be okay.

  But he wasn’t okay. Two weeks after Tommy and Grace returned from their getaway trip to Vegas, Cameron Birch was finally pronounced dead. Even life support could not sustain him any longer.

  Jillian found the pain unbearable, even as Lootie held her up.

  “He was a good son, Jilly,” Lootie said as they stood at the bedside of the now deceased young man. “He was a very good son.”

  “He was the best son,” Jillian corrected him, even though Cam had given her nothing but heartache and grief since his childhood. “He didn’t deserve this.”

  “No,” Lootie agreed. “No, he did not. But I knew nothing good would come of an alliance with that Grace McKinsey.”

  Jillian nodded her agreement, wiping tears with a tissue as she stared at her son’s lifeless body. “She hasn’t been to this hospital once. Not once. And she hasn’t bothered to so much as give me a call. After all I did for that girl. Now that she has Tommy Gabrini, she couldn’t care less about my boy.”

  Lootie looked at her. “So what are we going to do about it, Jilly? We know who’s really responsible here. What are we going to do?”

  “She’s ruined us,” Jillian said, still caught up in the cause of the situation rather than the solution to it. “First she took my business away from me. Now she’s taken my son. My precious child.” Then she paused for a long time, as the reality of Cameron’s departure stung her again and the tears began to flow once more.

  Then she went on: “She’s got to pay.”

  Lootie stared at his nephew’s lifeless body. He had so much to live for until he hooked up with that Grace McKinsey. “Yes, she does,” he said. “Oh, yes, she does.”

  The day after Cameron’s death, Grace stepped off the elevator on the top floor at Trammel Transport and began heading for her office. It used to be Jillian’s office, now it was hers. Although the nightmares she used to have just after he put that gun to his chin had subsided, the fact that he died yesterday reignited that feeling of drain. She and Cam had their issues. He broke her heart when they used to date, and then for him to force her to witness what ultimately became his suicide almost made her want to hate him. But he was still a human being, a person she once actually cared for. It wasn’t a happy day.

  And she knew it wasn’t a happy day for the Trammel family either. Cameron was once vice president of Trammel, at least in name only, and she therefore understood that some would grieve his passing. But because he had been meeting with Grace when the shooting happened, and Grace was the person who had fired his mother and took over the top spot, she didn’t want their grief to turn into some kind of battle cry against Trammel.

  She decided to meet with senior management and inform them to make sure that their staffs were focusing on the work at hand and not on any of these side issues, sad though they may be. She therefore wasn’t in her office a full half hour before she came back out and made her way to the reception desk, where Carol, the receptionist, sat.

  “Notify all senior staff that I want to meet with them at three p.m. today,” she said to her receptionist.

  “Today?” Carol asked. “But that’s not enough notice. Most of them have their manifests set already.”

  “I want them in the conference room at three,” Grace reiterated.

  “But I don’t think that’s fair, Grace,” the receptionist said. “You should at least give them twenty-four hour notice. At least that.”

  Grace looked at her receptionist. Even she was questioning her authority. “I’m not suggesting that you contact these people, Carol, I’m telling you to contact these people. I want all senior staff in the conference room today at three. Notify them now.” Grace said this, and then went back into her office.

  Carol looked at Grace as if she was looking at an enemy. “Bitch,” she murmured under her breath, even as she got to work notifying staff.

  Sal sat behind his desk as Tommy, who had dropped into Sal’s office at the Gabrini Corporate building for a chat, sat in front of it. They were talking about their latest acquisitions and the roadblocks they were facing with their Amsterdam project when Shannon, Sal’s assistant, walked in.

  “This better be important,” Sal said as the beautiful woman headed, with paperwork in hand, toward his desk.

  “It always is,” she said as she walked. “Hello, Tommy.”

  “Tommy?” Sal asked, offended. “That’s Mr. Gabrini to you! What’s Tommy? You don’t know him like that.”

  Shannon cut her eyes at Sal. “These need your signature at once,” she said as she sat them on his desk.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I need your signature now.”

  “And when I finish reading them you’ll get my signature. Now get the fuck outta here.”

  Shannon gave Sal a look of disgust, but she left the office. Tommy looked at him.

  “And don’t look at me like that,” Sal said to his older brother. “The relationship is proper. I haven’t fucked her since she started working for me.”

  “She shouldn’t be working for you, that’s the point. It’s never a good idea to mix business with pleasure.”

  “Yeah, right,” Sal said. “Says a man who set his girlfriend up at Trammel.” Tommy smiled. “But I get your point,” Sal added.

  “Cam Birch died yesterday,” Tommy said. That death was weighing heavily on his mind, not because he grieved Cam’s death, but because Cam attempted to hurt Grace by forcing her to witness his death. All because she had dumped him years ago, and because she now refused to kiss his mother’s ass.

  “Damn shame how that went down,” Sal said. “How’s Grace taking it? She should be relieved all
the hell he put her through.”

  “I know. And I agree. But that’s not Grace. She’s upset by it, but she’s working through it. She wanted to reach out to Jillian, to offer her condolences, but I told her that wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Hell no,” Sal agreed. “That bitch probably already blaming her for what Cam did to himself. She’d better leave that bitch alone.”

  “She will. I forbid her to have any contact, whether she felt compelled or not.”

  Sal nodded his agreement. “Damn right,” he said. Then he stared at his brother. “So she’s the one, hun?” he asked for what had to be the hundredth time since the proposal.

  “She’s the one.”

  “So you couldn’t find a cute Italian girl, hun?”

  Tommy laughed. “Didn’t want to find one, either,” he said.

  “But why Grace, is what I’m saying. I mean, she’s sweet as can be. I really like her, don’t get me wrong. But she’s nothing like Shanks was or any of your other women for that matter. When you told me that you were thinking about marrying Shanks that time, I said okay. She’s crazy as a motherfuck, but I get that relationship. Shanks was a hoe, you was a hoe. Y’all whatta you call matched. But Grace? She’s a good girl.”

  Sal hesitated, but then continued talking. “Don’t take this the wrong way, big brother, and I love you more than anybody on the face of this earth, you know I do. But you don’t deserve Grace.”

  That comment touched Tommy to the core. He frowned. “I know that,” he admitted.

  Sal exhaled, seeing his brother’s pain. “We, the Gabrini men, mess things up, Tommy. When it comes to females that’s our stock and trade. Don’t mess it up, all right?”

  Tommy nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  “Are you going to take her to meet Pop?”

  Tommy crossed his legs. Sal could tell it was an uncomfortable question. “I don’t want her tainted by him.”