Somehow I never let myself believe I would ever be here alone and running things without him. He was only a year older than me, and now he was dead.
He died of a massive stroke in his sleep. One day he was there holding the reins on most of New York. The next day he wasn’t, and the whole show fell on my shoulders.
I turned at the other side of the windows and came pacing back. “I know that, Peter, but you have to understand the position I’m in. I need at least two hundred guys by tomorrow—no questions asked. Offer them double pay if you have to.”
I whipped around when the office door opened behind me. My stomach dropped into my shoes when Gia strolled in.
Gia had been making my job a thousand times harder in the nicest possible way. She was always such a sweet girl, and I loved her like my own niece, but all of that went right out the window when her father died.
She couldn’t possibly know how hard she made it when she kept touching my arm and leaning on me when I tried to comfort her over her loss. She grew up to be one of the most beautiful women alive, and yet here she was, right in front of me, and totally off limits.
I barely noticed the tinny voice in my ear. I blurted out, “Yeah, okay, Peter. Thanks. I appreciate it,” and hung up.
“Is everything okay?” She inched closer to my desk. “Did you just order in another two hundred guys?”
“Yeah.” I gulped to get my brain working. “We need to boost security around the estate. I can use regular security guards to free up our own men in different parts of the city.”
I crossed to my desk too like I might want to do some work there. I kept the desk between us to protect myself from feeling the urge to grab her and start kissing her right then and there.
“Is the situation getting that bad? I thought you had all our assets covered.”
“I do, but it obviously isn’t enough if the Neccis keep surprising us. Besides, I want to increase security around the estate and that means pulling our guys back from their positions. We just don’t have enough people. We need more.”
She started to come around the desk to my side. She tilted her head sideways to peer down at my open laptop in front of me. “How will that affect our budget? Can we afford so many men after losing the bowling alley?”
“We’ll need to pay more guys anyway if war breaks out between us and the Neccis. I’m not worried about the expense.”
She halted right next to me and gazed up at me with her big, brown eyes. “Do you really think the Neccis would push us into a war?”
I gazed back down into those moist, bottomless pools. Her eyes were still red from crying over her father, my best friend, my boss, the man I served for more than forty years.
I had to get away from her. This was my best friend’s daughter—my don’s daughter. She was a mafia princess destined to be a don’s wife. I was nothing but her consigliere, but I couldn’t force myself to think of her that way no matter how hard I tried.
She was beyond beautiful, impossibly sweet, and the most affectionate, supportive, astute woman I ever met. She understood her father’s business better than most of his accountants.
That was the other problem. She kept showing up in this office to “help” me run the organization. She turned out to be invaluable. She supported me more than I supported her, but that only brought her closer to me. It made her even more touchy-feely, more affectionate, more my confidant, more the woman I wanted more than anything.
Nothing would ever happen between us, though. I would never get Gia Leone. I was more than twenty years older than her, and she couldn’t possibly think of me that way.
As her guardian and her father’s consigliere, it was my job to make sure she married a suitable husband—which I wasn’t. She needed to preserve her father’s legacy. That meant marrying another don—something I would never be.
I struggled to tear my gaze away from her eyes. “I should probably get back to work.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing? When are the new guys showing up? Do we need to organize training for them, or do they come trained? Someone should tell Nicky what’s going on.”
“He just got back from the funeral. He’s out there right now dealing with the men we already have posted around the perimeter. You should give the guy a chance, Princess. You saw the way he acted at the funeral. He’s dedicated to this family. He worshiped the ground your father walked on.”
She shrugged and looked away. “He’s still a clod. Maybe you should assignhimto guard the new warehouse.”
“No way, not after that punk Romeo made such a scene at the funeral. The Neccis are deliberately trying to provoke us. It’s only a matter of time before they take the gloves off.”
“Can we not talk about Nicky again?” She sat down on the edge of the desk and rotated my laptop toward her. “I want to go over the security budget. I heard what you said about paying these new guys double. If we’re going to do that, we should do the same thing with our own people.”
I snorted and tried to wave that away. “Does that include Nicky?”
She ignored my crack. “If someone is going to be rewarded for pulling double duty and running extra risk, our guys come first. If the budget allows anything above and beyond that, these civilian security guards come second.”
I laughed. “Okay, Princess. You’re the boss.”