Page 26 of Mafia Boss' Surprise Baby

14

KATE

Everything’s happening like I’m watching a video at double speed. One minute I’m wrestling with my inappropriate attraction to my much-older boss. The next minute it seems like I’m having my morning coffee up on his roof deck, watching the bright trails of the kite surfers out on Pleasure Bay.

I always loved Boston, even the noise and the bars and the shouting matches that turned into fistfights out on the sidewalk about half the time. But here, still in Southie but a little removed from the fray, it’s pure luxury. The wind and the water and the fact that Mickey’s place is a whole detached house with plenty of windows and smooth pale wood floors, sleek countertops and everything is open and bright.

“This isn’t what I expected,” I told him the first time I saw it.

“What? You think I was gonna move to fuckin’ Beacon Hill?”

“I can’t imagine you leaving Southie behind, no. I just meant I thought it would be some huge mansion with dark colored walls and tons of woodwork. Imposing and manly and really old-fashioned.”

“My dad’s house was like that. I sold it after he passed away. It was always like being suffocated. It was stale in there, full ofstuff but it never felt like a home where you could relax, know what I mean?”

“Did Fiona the nanny not make it warm and fun?”

“Eh, she tried, but she went home to her own house and her own kids every night. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen growing up. The cook we had for a while was this guy named Jackson. He came from New Orleans, and he liked to talk. I’d hang out down there, help out when he’d teach me what to do, and just have somebody to talk to.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have a cook now,” I say.

“I eat out a lot. Or I cook for myself. I don’t mind it. When I think about it, the people who were kind to me when I was a kid, were people who worked for my dad. I don’t want to surround myself with people that are here just for a paycheck. I’d rather be on my own.”

“Well, I work for you, so I’m not sure if I belong here or not,” I say. Then I just lean my head against his arm because I actually know how good it feels to be here. I wouldn’t mind hearing him say that he wants me here all the time, that I look like I belong here or he wishes I didn’t work for him anymore. Anything, something to let me know that he feels it too. That this grew out of being a fling and became something a lot deeper. The truth is I’m not sure it ever was a fling.

We’re careful. No disappearing together for a long lunch or anything that wasn’t common practice when Benny was on the job. For one thing, if word gets out about our relationship, it looks bad. He’s my boss, way older than me, and that’s before anyone factors in my brother being his closest lieutenant in the organization. I recite this to myself like ten times a day as a reminder why we can’t really be together, not in real life. We can sneak around and have fun, and we can even care for each other more than I want to admit. But anything more than that? Out of the question.

I spend as much time working with Sal and his team as I do with Mickey. It’s his idea when I start spending half my days in an office on the executive floor of the Oyster. That way I’m established in the legitimate business and if Rory comes looking for me, my secretary (Ragucci’s secretary actually) answers the phone there. I don’t like being away from the Pearl because it’s special to me now, but I understand the point of separating my work from the more clandestine operation.

The hardest part isn’t working in a different building from him and seeing him less. The problem I have is going home. It’s not home, not anymore. Not since I was eighteen years old. When I was nine, Rory moved out to live with a girlfriend. Until now, that was the last time he and I lived under the same roof. He moved back into our parents’ house when my dad was sick, gave up having his own place. This isn’t quite like I imagined it to be. When I had to give up in LA, I hoped that we’d be close, have long talks and inside jokes and be like a family. When we were never really like that to start with. It makes me sad that we’re not close, but nothing I’ve tried has bridged the distance.

Sometimes Mickey wakes me up in the morning with a phone call, telling me something he was thinking about while working out. I think about how lonely he must have been all this time. Maybe for his whole life. He wants to talk and listen and show me the movies he likes, play me his favorite music. I’m awash in sides of him I never suspected.

On the roof deck, which is my favorite place, he asks me about LA one night.

“What was so great about it?” he asks it with the flat vowels of a man who loves Boston with his life’s blood.

I curl up beside him on the outdoor couch he has up here, his arm around me. The steady thud of his heartbeat, the rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek is everything right now. I’mobsessed with him and I know it. It’s hard not to tell him that, not to say it out loud every time I think it.

“The weather’s nice,” I say.

“The weather?” he says with disgust.

“Yeah, and I saw Gracie Abrams once when she was doing a show at some club a few years ago before her career really took off. She was amazing.”

“You lived in LA for, what, six years or so?”

“Almost seven. I did my bachelor’s and master’s degree there.”

“And the most unforgettable things you can tell me off the top of your head are the weather’s good and you saw some singer once. You’re gonna go live in some overpriced city where everybody’s had plastic surgery and eats vegan because it doesn’t snow there?”

“That’s not why,” I laugh. “You better talk to my brother about this, because I think he keeps offering to pay for all my CPA stuff and ship me back there at least twice a week. The man wants me out of Southie.”

“You think he’s worried about you being in some kind of danger?”

“Maybe, or maybe he liked me better when I was thousands of miles away,” I say and I mean to say it lightly but the joke doesn’t quite land. He hears the hollowness when I say it and hugs me tighter.

“You still want to go back there?” he asks. For a second, I think he means the house where I live with my brother. I want to stay here with him, want to live in this house and wake up beside him every day. But I choke back the words, clear my throat.

---