The Promise (The 'Burg #5)(25)

Her smile got bigger. She waved and, again, started bustling away.

Benny moved to his house.

Frankie was not in the kitchen and he didn’t bother searching downstairs. He went upstairs and straight to his bedroom.

When he hit it, though, she wasn’t there. The bathroom door was open and he couldn’t see the whole of it, but he also couldn’t imagine her being in it for any purpose where she didn’t close the door.

He turned and looked down the hall, stopping when he saw the bathroom door open, as usual, one of the bedroom doors closed, as usual, and the other one open, not as usual.

He moved to the room he called his office, but it was just another room where he and members of his family dumped shit.

When he bought the house, it was four bedrooms. All the occupants of the bedrooms, when he filled them up one day, would need to share that hall bath.

This meant the only thing he changed was converting the smallest bedroom, which was the size of a big closet, to a master bath.

He’d liked doing it. It reminded him of working construction, something he also liked doing. Building things. Using his hands, his body, seeing something form from his work. He also liked working days, having nights off to go out and throw back a few, shoot the shit with the guys, watch a game, pick up a woman who had promise, see how that panned out.

Working in the kitchen at the restaurant was hot and it was a pain in the ass dealing with the kids who worked with him. Kids who were more worried if the girl they texted would text back in a way that meant they’d soon get laid than getting the pies out of the oven or not burning the meatballs.

He’d often catch himself in that kitchen and wonder what the f**k he was doing there, working his ass off, killer hours, all of them so busy half the time he was on autopilot to get it done.

Then he’d get a whiff of the sauce his pop taught him how to make, sauce his grandmother taught his father how to make (and so on), and it was f**king crazy, totally insane, but he’d know why he was there. Not only that, he’d know there was no other place for him.

That was where he was meant to be.

These thoughts came to him as he walked down the hall and stopped in the doorway of his office, seeing Frankie sitting in his pop’s huge, old desk chair with its cracked leather. She was staring at the computer on the desk that she’d turned on.

He leaned a shoulder against the jamb and noted, “Not connected to the Internet, babe, so can’t send your SOS that way.”

She jumped at his voice and he tensed when she did, thinking random, jerky movements like that in her state were not good.

But he didn’t see the pain tighten her mouth or her eyes wince. Her head just shot to him. She looked him up and down and ended with his eyes.

“Ben, black screen and green cursor?” she asked.

“Told you it was Carm’s old computer,” he reminded her.

“From when?” she returned. “The second grade?”

He grinned and crossed his arms on his chest, but he didn’t reply. He just stood there, liking watching Francesca Concetti and all her hair, wearing a robe, sitting in his father’s old chair, giving him lip.

When he didn’t speak, she did.

“Is there any reason to keep this?” she asked on a flip of her hand to the computer.

“Nope.”

“Do you use it?” she pushed.

“Nope.”

“Not to play Asteroids or Space Invader?” she kept at him.

He grinned at her sass but repeated, “Nope.”

“So why’re you keepin’ it?”

He had no clue, outside of the fact that he never went into that room so it didn’t matter if it was there or not.

“That’s another ‘why,’ Frankie.”

She ignored that and kept pushing, “Do you have another computer?”

“Nope,” he said again and watched her light brown eyes, with their fans of thick, curling lashes, get wide.

“You don’t?”

“Nope,” he said yet again.

“How do you get email?” she asked.

“Don’t have email.”

Her eyes got wider.

He’d thought a lot of things about Francesca in the past, too many of them wrong—back in the day, most of them wrong for different reasons—but none of them were that she was cute.

But she was sitting right there, all kinds of cute.

“You don’t have email?” she pressed, sounding slightly breathy with disbelief in a way that made him wonder what other ways he could make her sound like that.

“Don’t need it.”

“Even for work?”

“I make pizza, Frankie. Why would I need email to make pizza?”

She swiveled the chair to face him, which was not good. It wasn’t bad because he could see her fantastic, long-ass legs. It was just that he liked what he saw, but he couldn’t do shit about it, which he didn’t like.

“I don’t know,” she started, attitude leaking into her words, the good kind, the kind that was about hot and spicy and Frankie. “To take pizza orders?”

“Folks can come in and give their order.”

“They could also email it in or, say, phone it in.”

“Restaurant never had a number that was listed and we’ve done all right.”