BIG DADDY SINATRA 2: IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU, Book 2
Read BIG DADDY SINATRA 2: IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU, Book 2 Online
Authors: Mallory Monroe
BIG DADDY SINATRA
2
IF I CAN’T HAVE
YOU
(The Sinatras of
Jericho County
)
BOOK TWO
By
MALLORY MONROE
Copyright©2014
Mallory Monroe
All rights reserved. Any use of the materials contained in this
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This novel is a work of fiction. All characters are
fictitious. Any similarities to anyone living or dead are completely
accidental. The specific mention of known places or venues are not meant
to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished or imagined
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PROLOGUE
2004
The blood-red
Mercedes stopped at the curb across the street and Jenay Sinatra grabbed her
oversized Christian Dior bag.
“I need
to pick up this order,” she said as she opened the door.
“Be right back.”
Tess
Magrid, the twenty-year old live-in nanny, was in the backseat with four-month
old Bonita Sinatra, and she began to unbuckle her from the car seat. “I’ll
change Nita’s diaper,” she said.
Jenay
glanced back there.
“She needs changing
again?”
“Again,”
Tess said.
“Your daughter is a very
eager young lady.”
Jenay
laughed and got out of the car.
She
walked to the back driver side window to take a peep at her little girl.
Her daughter, who had her mother’s brown
coloring but her father’s everything else, looked startled when she first saw
her standing outside the car.
But then
she grinned when she realized it was her mother, and began clapping her fat
little hands.
Jenay laughed again and
waved, and then headed across the street.
She
often wondered how in the world did other working mothers do it without a nanny
by their side.
She had the help, but
still felt as if she needed more.
Between running her husband’s Bed and Breakfast, and participating in
the numerous social functions that she, as the wife of the town’s most
prosperous businessman, had to participate in, her days were filled to
capacity.
Add to that the fact that she
also had to attend to her husband’s needs, the needs of their beautiful baby
girl that only mommy could attend to, and her increasing involvement in the
lives of her husband’s four grown sons, she rarely had a moment to
herself.
Although, she thought with a
wry smile as she walked over to Reuben’s Market, she was loving every minute of
it.
She
married Charles Sinatra less than two years ago, and the locals in their small
town of Jericho, Maine were steadily growing accustomed to her presence.
Instead of treating her as some exotic black
woman in a town that was ninety-five-percent white, she were now treated, at
least by the rank-and-file, as if she was one of them.
She was someone, in their eyes, who worked
hard, played by the rules, and treated everybody, even the poorest of the poor,
with dignity and respect.
Her husband,
because of his unflinchingly tough reputation and the fact that he owned over
half the town, was still the man they loved to hate, but she was getting the
reputation as the woman who just might be able to tame him.
“Hey,
Mrs. Sinatra,” a young woman said happily as she and Jenay walked past each
other.
Jenay
smiled.
“Hello Millie.
I heard you won Homecoming Queen.”
“I
did!
I still can’t believe it.
I thought for sure one of the mean girls
would win.”
“Not
this time.
Congratulations,” Jenay
added, and continued across the street.
Even
the young people in town were growing accustomed to her too, although she knew
many of those young girls were friendly toward her only as a way to get closer
to one of her four strapping stepsons.
But even those girls were far warmer toward her than they used to be.
It wasn’t the young, nor the rank-and-file,
but the old money blue-bloods in town, the so-called elites, that still gave
her fits.
They were the only ones who
continued to try, in all of their arrogance and obnoxiousness, to throw all
kinds of shade at Jenay every chance they could.
It used to bother Jenay to no end.
Now she just threw shade right back at them,
and kept it moving.
“My
favorite customer!” Reuben said cheerfully as she entered his store.
He was a short, husky man with a double chin
and a grand smile.
“So great to see you
again!”
“You
thought I would forget, now didn’t you?” she asked.
“I
was hoping against hope,” he said with a grin as he grabbed two bags of veggies
from behind his counter.
“My wife said,
‘don’t worry.
You worry too much.
She’ll be here.
She always comes.
She comes late, but she always comes.’”
Jenay
smiled.
She was never late, since she
never gave them a time certain when she would be there, but in Jericho
everything was relative.
To the locals,
if you didn’t get up first thing in the morning and hurried over to take possession
of your order, then you were late.
“But
the reason I worry is because I like you to see my veggies when they’re still
fresh and unblemished and absolutely perfect,” Reuben said.
Then he winked at her.
“Like you,” he added.
“Ah,
thanks, Reub.”
That was another thing
she was getting used to: older men flirting with her.
“I’m sure they’re still lovely,” she added,
as she reached inside her bag for her wallet.
Reuben
looked down at her breasts as she looked down at her wallet.
She seemed so down-to-earth to him,
considering that she was married to a scoundrel like Big Daddy Sinatra, that he
wondered if she realized just how attractive she really was.
And she was very attractive, he thought, as
he looked at those big breasts, at her narrow waist, at her flawless dark
skin.
When she looked back up at him
with those big, hauntingly beautiful gray eyes, his breath caught.
He was smitten.
“Here
you are,” Jenay said, paying him.
“But
you must inspect them first,” Reuben said without accepting her money.
“You must see what you’re paying for.”
He
opened the bags and showed her, one by one, just how fresh his vegetables
were.
He seemed so proud of his veggies
that Jenay didn’t have the heart to tell him she was in a hurry.
She inspected each one and commented on each
one.
It was taking far more time than
she really had to give, nearly fifteen minutes more time, but just seeing
Reuben’s face light up with joy with every positive comment she uttered, made it
totally worthwhile.
“Perfect,”
she said.
“Each and every one.”
Reuben
lit up again.
“Same order next week?” he
asked.
“Same
order next week,” she said.
It would be
easier for Jenay to get all of the B & B’s vegetables from just one vendor,
which meant she would be patronizing Reuben every other day rather than once
per week, but she never favored one ma-and-pop business owner over another
one.
She spread her husband’s dollars
around.
They all respected her for that.
“Let
me take these to your car,” Reuben said happily after accepting her payment.
Before she could decline his offer, he had
already grabbed the bags and was ready to go.
“So
how’s the baby?” he asked as they headed out of the store.
“Did you bring her with you this time?”
“She’s
with me,” Jenay said.
“She’s in the car
with Tess.”
“Must
feel wonderful to be a brand new Ma.”
“It
does,” Jenay responded with a gleeful smile.
“I never thought I’d have a child of my own after my first marriage went
south, so now that I have one, it’s beyond wonderful.”
“To have
a daughter from a gorgeous girl like you, I’d bet Big Daddy is over the moon.”
Jenay
inwardly smiled.
Charles hated when the
townspeople referred to him as
Big Daddy
,
especially since most of the people who called him that, like Reuben, were much
older than he was.
But that was his
nickname.
Big Daddy Sinatra.
Not because he was a good guy, or the father
of four grown sons.
But because, in
their eyes, he was a ruthless asshole who never wanted to compromise, or help a
neighbor out, or do anything but hold people to account.
Not that anybody thought accountability was
bad.
None did.
But sometimes a man needed help.
That down-on-his-luck man, as the townspeople
saw it, would get zero help from Big Daddy.
“He’s
thrilled too,” was all Jenay would say to Reuben’s comment as they stepped off
of the curb to walk across the street.
But just as they stepped off, a muscle car driven by some muscle-headed
young man in a t-shirt, suddenly came careening from around the corner.
The car was coming so fast that panic set in
as soon as Jenay saw it.
The car was
coming so fast that it would have sideswiped Reuben had Jenay not grabbed his
arm, and pulled him back onto the curb.
But
Reuben’s fearfulness became feistiness.
“Irresponsible hoodlum!” he yelled and lifted one of the bags he was
carrying at the back of the fast-moving car.
But the car kept going.
The
driver was probably laughing as he went.
But
Reuben and Jenay weren’t laughing.
Their
hearts were pounding.
It had been that
close.
“Are
you okay?” Jenay asked a now flustered-looking Reuben.
He wasn’t an old man, since he was only in
his fifties.
But compared to Jenay, who
was only thirty-five, he was getting up there.
A scene like that, even as quick as that one had unfolded, affected him
enormously.
But
Reuben being Reuben, he wasn’t about to admit it.
“I’m fine,” he said as he gathered
himself.
“Punk like that don’t scare me
none!”
Jenay
smiled.
That was the difference between
a real tough guy, like her husband, and a pretender.
Charles would have never said something like
that.
He would have been too busy
getting the punk’s license plate number.
Later, when the punk least expected it, Charles would then get his revenge.
“Give
me the bags,” Jenay said, hoisting her big purse onto her shoulder.
“I can manage from here.”
But
Reuben dismissed such talk.
“You’re my
best customer.
I will not have my best
customer carrying her own groceries.
Now
put your arm in mine,” he said, as if she was the one spooked, “and we’ll make
this journey.”
She smiled
and complied.
He was harmless, after
all.
And after looking both ways more
attentively this time, they began heading across the street.
“The
young people of today,” he said as they walked, shaking his head, “I don’t
understand them.”
“Me
either, Reub.”
“They
have no home training the way my generation had.
And the way they disrespect their elders is
downright criminal.”
But
just as Reuben finished that sentence, and just when they both felt as if it
was safe to cross the street and they were crossing it without incident this
time, an incident occurred.
Jenay was
just about to respond to him, more for small talk than to agree with him, when
her brand new Mercedes Benz, a gift from her husband, suddenly cradled as it
bent forward and then backwards like a bucking horse, and then exploded with
aerodynamic force that sent it airborne in a terrifying ball of fire.
Jenay
and Reuben both fell back from the impact of the blast alone, and all of those
fresh and unblemished vegetables flew into the air and crash-landed too.
When Jenay quickly looked back up, and saw
her car fall back down to earth from the sky-high lift it had taken, and was
now a fireball of red-hot wreckage, her heart fell through her shoe.
“
Nooo
!” she screamed as she jumped up and
began running toward the fire.
“Not my
child!
Not my baby!
My baby is in that car!
Nooo
!”
The
few townspeople, who had been walking outside or doing business inside, heard
the explosion and were horrified too.
But when they saw what Jenay was trying to do, when they saw that she
was running toward the fire, every single one of them dropped everything and
ran to try and stop her.
They knew Jenay
now.
It felt as if it was their daughter,
their sister, their wife running to that disaster!
And they knew it was nothing short of a
suicide mission.
They had to stop her.