Nico (Ruin & Revenge #1)(34)
“Good.”
“Good? As in it was a big party? People had a great time singing and dancing and boozing it up in church? Aunt May got it on with the priest? Little Johnny drank the Holy Water? Someone pissed on the altar? Or are you just not listening to me?”
Mia dragged her gaze to her irritated friend and laughed. Jules always poured the sarcasm on thick when she was annoyed. “I’m listening now.”
“Funeral?” Jules lifted an eyebrow in censure.
“Same as all funerals.” Mia sighed. “Depressing. Although, I was shocked to see mobsters from rival families in church and no bloodshed. I wasn’t sure if the restraint was out of respect for the church, the family of the deceased, or because everything is so unsettled. Although…” Her lips quivered with a smile, and Jules patted the chair beside her.
“Ah. Something interesting. Sit down and give me the goods, and while you’re talking you can help me with this. I can’t figure it out.”
Mia pulled up a chair beside Jules and stared at the code on Jules’ screen, trying to make sense of the only thing that usually made sense in her life.
“I’m guessing you’re distracted for a reason other than that rush job you did over the weekend.” Jules pulled up another screen to show Mia her various attempts to hack into the client’s system. “My weekend was okay. I’d give it a C-plus rating.” She tapped the keyboard and brought up another screen of code. “I went to a fancy country club with the cousin of a friend of mine. Met a British tennis pro. He invited me to his room for a drink. When we got there, he was painstakingly polite to the point I had to strip down and lay on the bed to get the message across.”
“That’s great.” Distracted, Mia stared at the screen, wondering what she would have done if Nico had invited her out for a drink instead of kissing her on the street. Or had she kissed him? She’d definitely initiated that sordid little encounter. Or had he? After all, he was the one who decided to get her car fixed. But she’d accepted the ride …
“I think those cavemen were on to something with the whole grab-the-woman-you-want-and-drag-her-to-your-lair thing,” Jules continued. “It loses something when you have to do all the work.
Nico was definitely the caveman type. He’d kissed her like he wanted to devour her. If Frankie hadn’t interrupted them on the street, she didn’t know what would have happened. Once she had a taste of the power and passion he kept so tightly leashed, she wanted more. He was utterly irresistible. Those dark, brooding good looks, his magnificent body, and when he spoke Italian in his deep, sensual voice … Her knees went weak just thinking about him. She’d taken a big risk kissing him on the cheek like that, but when he pulled her into his arms and sealed his mouth over hers, it felt so right.
She didn’t know why she’d run away when he clearly wanted her to stay, only that she’d suddenly felt exposed, open in a way that she’d never been before. He’d breached her walls and she needed to shut them down.
Jules gave her a nudge. “See if I missed anything when I was writing those lines of code to turn our website into an international porn hub and telling the FBI to go fuck themselves.”
Mia startled, and her cheeks heated. “I wasn’t listening again. I’m sorry. I was so busy this weekend, and Sunday after the funeral, I bumped into Nico…” She trailed off, not wanting to say more. But it was already too late.
“Nico? The mob boss dude who caught you in the pen test?”
“Yeah.” She tapped on the keyboard, corrected Jules’ mistakes. “He helped me work on my car when it didn’t start, gave me a ride to my coding class, and then got someone to fix my car while I was teaching and had it ready for me when I came out.”
Silence.
“Jules?”
“Isn’t that the same guy who kidnapped you and tied you up, and you had to escape out a bathroom window? The one you described as the most dangerous and powerful capo in the city and a mortal enemy of your family?”
Mia shrugged, suddenly regretting that she’d finally decided to share the story with Jules. “He was sorry.”
“I’m sure he was,” Jules muttered. “Sorry you got away.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Did he say the words?” Jules lifted a quizzical eyebrow? “Did he get down on his knees and beg your forgiveness? Did he say, ‘Mia, I am so terribly sorry I kidnapped you, threatened to kill you, tied you to a chair and forced you to escape out a window and flee for your life. It was horribly wrong of me. I will never do it again. Please, please forgive me’?”
“No. But he kissed me. Outside the community center. I’ve never been kissed that like that in my life. I didn’t even know a kiss—”
“You kissed an enemy mob boss in the middle of the street?” Jules ran her fingers through the pink streak in her hair, her telltale sign of agitation.
“Technically, he’s a captain, not the boss. I don’t know who their boss is going to be. Probably his cousin, Tony, because he was the underboss and usually the underboss becomes boss. And we were on the sidewalk, not the middle of the street. His bodyguard was standing right there. And yes, he’s a Toscani. It was a bit of a risk—”
“A bit of a risk?” Jules voice rose in pitch. “Not that I understand Mafia politics, but I’ve seen West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet. They don’t end well. And the Godfather movies? Even worse. There are no happily ever afters. No running through a field of flowers or riding off into the sunset together. No saying ‘I do’ and nine months later out pops a baby mobster and all the Mafiosos drink champagne together and dance the Macarena at the christening. It’s all bullets and cement shoes and fish in newspapers and horses’ heads in the bed and people killing themselves because their true love is dead.”