Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76065 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
“Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure we don’t got a step stool out there to help you reach the dumpster,” I said, getting a little laugh out of her.
“That’s… fair. But I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be having my boss do my job for me.”
“Pretty sure you should listen to your boss when he tells you to do something,” I shot back as I got to my feet and made my way across the room. “Go home, Kick. It’s late.”
Up close, the blueberry scent was almost overwhelming. I was so distracted by that that I almost missed the way her eyelids went heavier and her lips parted at the sound of her name on my lips.
Fuck.
Yeah, I didn’t need my only female employee having the hots for me. No matter how much I wanted to drag her into my office, shut the door, bend her over the desk, yank down her pants, and…
Damnit.
Nope.
Couldn’t even let my mind go there. It was an HR nightmare.
True, I was HR in this case. But still.
“Alright,” she agreed, giving me a tight nod and scurrying back a few feet, leaving her blueberry scent in her wake as she moved out of the back room, into the shop, and, I assumed, out the front door.
“Eye-fucking the employees, Rico?” a voice asked, making me turn to find one of those female capos I’d been thinking about standing there.
Saff was younger than a lot of us, but had the ambition and balls to make her seem older. You wouldn’t know by looking at her that she went toe-to-toe with some of the nastiest men on the planet and won.
She was short as fuck with these comically small feet, a deceptively delicate-looking heart-shaped face with big light brown eyes, freckles, and a Cupid’s bow mouth. The only things giving all that soft and sweet an edge were her nose ring and the fact that she had electric blue hair. She had it pulled back in fucking bubble braids right then. Likely pulled back so it didn’t get all bloodied like her knuckles and the corner of her shirt.
“Someone catcall you again?” I asked, looking her over.
“Someone didn’t have my money. Again,” she said, rolling her eyes.
We all had issues over the years with fuckers trying to stiff us. But Saff got more than her fair share. Likely because of her aforementioned smallness.
Those guys learned real quick, though, that Saff had an almost psychotic kind of anger. With a goddamn hair trigger.
“Something that needs to be looked into?”
“I can handle my own shit,” Saff said, chin jutting out.
“Know that. But last time there was a trend of people not paying, it turned out it was something serious.”
“It’s not like that. Apparently, he owed his baby mama, like, thousands in back child support. But he’d been working off the books so nothing could get garnished.”
“Real fucking prince.”
“Yeah, I know,” Saff said, shaking her head. “But that woman knew his game, broke into his place, and stole his cash. I may or may not have beat the shit out of him for myself and her. His deadbeat ass can work five jobs for all I care to start paying what he owes her and us. I gave him a week. And a face so ugly that he won’t be knocking anyone else up for a while.”
“Good. So whatcha doing here?”
“Renz said you are starting construction here tonight. Figured you might want a set of eyes around. You know, make sure they’re behaving themselves.”
One of the members of a former rival family, the Costas, had started up a construction business. To wash their money, sure, but also to have a company that could be trusted to do work on all their own homes.
It was always a risk to bring anyone into your home or business. The cops were sneaky as fuck. They brought down some big dons back in the day by posing as cable repairmen, sneaking in, and placing bugs.
And that was back when bugs were bigger and harder to hide and with shitty battery lives.
Now? Those things were damn near invisible and could go on forever.
Hiring anyone on the outside to do anything was taking a big chance. Especially at a place like the meat shop, where we frequently engaged in family business and, even more often, talked about it.
So, when I told Renzo, the boss, that I wanted to spruce the place up, and that I didn’t exactly want to do all the work myself, his wife, Lore—a former Costa herself—had suggested we outsource to the Costas.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly a supporter of Renzo’s plan to use a marriage to a Costa woman to bring an end to the feud that had existed between our families since Lorenzo Costa had taken over for his father a while back.
Sure, I liked Lore. And I was happy our boss was in love with her and shit. But I have to say that the distrust of the Costas did still simmer inside of me a lot of the time.