Reno's Gift (Mob Boss Series) (11 page)

But
Grace knew exactly who it was.
 
It was
Cameron Birch, her ex-boyfriend and her ex-boss’s son.
 
And Sal was right.
 
He did look like a surfer dude.
 
But he wasn’t.
 
He could barely swim.

“It’s
good seeing you again, Grace,” he said as he sat across from her.
 
“It’s real good seeing you again.”

Grace
wasn’t about to pretend that it was good seeing him, because it wasn’t.
 
It was painful.
 
And regretful.
 
And filled with the kind of memories she
would just as soon forget.
 
She was here
for Jillian and Jillian alone.
 
And the
only reason she would even consider having Jillian back at all was because it
was her and her late husband who founded Trammel.
 
Financial circumstances caused her to have to
sell most of the shares, but that didn’t erase the fact that if it wasn’t for
Jillian and her husband, there would be no Trammel.

“So,”
she said, to make her seriousness clear, “you said you wanted to talk to me
about your mother’s return.”

 
“We’ll get to that,” he said.
 
“I just want to know how you’re doing.”

“Look,
Cam, I’m not here to act as if we don’t have some crazy-ass history together,
because we do.
 
You said this was about
your mother, that you couldn’t talk about it over the phone, and that she won’t
meet with me because she’s too proud.
 
Which, knowing Jillian like I do, makes perfect sense.
 
But that’s all I want to talk about.
 
Now what is it?”

She
could see that glint of anger in Cam’s big eyes.
 
He was terrible at hiding it.
 
Especially now that she knew what to look
for.
 
And it worked.
 
He got down to business.

“She
wants back in,” he said, “but on her terms.”

Grace
could have taken offense at his reference, but she didn’t. In her mind, too,
Trammel would always be Jillian’s company.
 
“On what terms?” she asked him.

“President
and Chief Financial officer.”

“No,”
Grace said, shaking her head.
 
“I just
hired a CFO and I’m president and CEO.
 
As I said to her before she walked out, the senior VP slot is available.
 
But that’s all that’s available.”

“That’s
not fair, Grace, and you know it!”

“No,
it’s not fair.
 
You’re right about
that.
 
But nobody’s sabotaging me.
 
There are three positions of absolute trust
at Trammel.
 
CEO, CFO, and Chairman of
the Board of Directors.
 
Tommy’s
chairman.
 
I just hired a CFO.
 
I’m CEO.
 
There’s no way I’m putting any of those positions in Jillian’s
hands.
 
No way.
 
Not the way she treated me when she did have
the power.
 
Now she either accept the VP
slot or she doesn’t.
 
But that’s all
she’s getting.”

Cameron
was now shedding all pretense at understanding.
 
“You’re having a field day with us, aren’t you?” he said.
 
“Got yourself some rich sugar daddy and you
figure you don’t need us anymore.
 
Bringing me here,” he said, looking around.
 
“I couldn’t believe it!
 
Bringing me to your sugar daddy’s
restaurant!
 
What, Grace, you’re trying
to rub it in?
  
You’re trying to gloat?
You want me to see how successful you are now and how my own mother has to come
hat-in-hand to the great Grace McKenzie?”

Grace
shook her head.
 
“Yeah, right, it’s
me.
 
I’m the problem.
 
You don’t do shit.
 
It’s all on me.
 
Just like you didn’t put your hands on me in
Vegas.
 
Cameron?
 
Never!
 
And just like Jillian treated me like I was her slave when I worked for
her.
 
But oh no, now I’m trying to show
her up?
 
Please.”
 

Grace
began to gather up her purse, realizing this was a colossal waste of time.
 
“Just tell Jillian the offer hasn’t
changed.
 
She either accept the vice
presidency or she’ll have to move on.
 
And that’s final, Cam.
 
Tell her
it’ll be my only offer.”

Cameron
began to pull out what Grace assumed was a cell phone.
 
But it wasn’t.
 
“Tell her yourself,” he said and then, with
what turned out to be an automatic pistol, he pulled it out and fired.

“
Noooo
!” Grace screamed and jumped up
from the table just as patrons began to scramble and scream at just the sound
of gunfire in their midst.
 
And Sal Luca,
as soon as he saw Cameron pull out that weapon and put it beneath his own chin,
lunged across that bar counter and ran for Grace.
 
He had his own weapon drawn by the time he
grabbed her and slung her behind him.
 
He
pulled her just as Cameron’s head lifted back from the impact of the blast, and
then lobbed to the side.

Grace
had her mouth covered, her heart pounding so loud even Sal could hear it.

Sal stayed
in front of her, keeping her behind him, as he couldn’t stop staring at the man
who decided to blow his brains out in Tommy’s restaurant.
 
And that fact alone, that a nobody kid would
have balls like that, blew Sal’s mind.

“Motherfucker,”
he said lowly, like a whisper, in a voice filled with amazement.

“Pop
just drove up,” Jimmy Mack said as he stared out of the big, bay window of
their five-bedroom home.
 
Reno owned it,
and had for years, but this was the first time the entire family had lived there.
 
It was a far cry from the energy of the
Strip, something Jimmy missed immensely, but until the PaLargio was back in
service they either stayed in somebody else’s hotel, or stayed here.
 
Reno moved them here.

Trina
looked up.
 
She was sitting on the sofa
thumbing through a European catalogue to see what her boutique’s Buyer might be
able to snag for them.
 
Her baby boy,
Dominic Gabrini, Junior, was standing on the sofa beside her, playing with his
all-green, flexible, Incredible Hulk doll.
 
“He just drove up?
 
Good.
 
It would have been better if he could have
shown up for dinner, but I’m glad he’s home.”

“He
never shows up for dinner,” Jimmy replied.

Trina
glanced at him.
 
“He’s a busy man,” she
said.

“Even
with the PaLargio out of commission?”

Trina
ignored that.
 
“I’d better warm up his
food.”

“Don’t
bother,” Jimmy said.
 
“He’s on the car
phone so you know he’ll be a while.
 
He’s
probably yelling at somebody about something.”

Trina
smiled.
 
“That’s your daddy.
 
I don’t think he could function if he didn’t
have somebody to yell at.”

“He’s
a dynamo all right,” Jimmy said and Trina smiled as she continued to flip
through her catalogue.
 
She could detect
a hint of pride in Jimmy’s voice and that pleased her.
 
Reno could be a difficult man to
understand.
 
She was always thrilled when
Jimmy, Reno’s oldest child, understood him.

Jimmy
felt he more than understood his father as he stared at him.
 
He didn’t used to get that hurricane-force
wind everybody called Reno, but now he fully got him.
 
He got him that night he had that monumental
decision to make that would forever change Jimmy’s life. Somebody had to die
that night, and Reno’s enemies made Reno make the call.
 
Jimmy would never forget the sight of his
father dropping to his knees and begging for his enemies to kill him
instead.
 
To spare his family and kill
him instead.
 
Although the decision his
father ultimately made nearly took Jimmy away from this world, he knew it was
the only decision his father could have made.
 
Gut-wrenching as it was, it was the only decision to be made.
 
And Jimmy respected his father completely for
having the guts to make it.

He
stared at that same father as he sat in his Porsche and pointed his finger and
then ran his hand through his messy hair while he talked on his phone.
 
Jimmy’s male friends wanted to be like his
father, and his female friends wanted to fuck his father.
 
Which made Jimmy, given who his father was, a
very popular young man.
 
Even now he knew
of girls trying to get tight with him so that they could get closer to his
father.
 
And even that didn’t bother
Jimmy.
 
Girls like those were a dime a
dozen and he wouldn’t want them anyway.
 
Besides, he surrounded himself with his family more than his friends
these days.
 
His father, and Trina, and
his baby brother Dommi were all he needed nowadays.

He
smiled when his father hit his hand on the car’s dashboard and then pointed it
at the phone, as if the person he was upset with was the phone itself.
 
If his father couldn’t be animated about
something in this life, Jimmy doubted if the man could exist.
 
Most people went from zero to one hundred on
the excitability scale.
 
Reno went from
one hundred to one thousand, in Jimmy’s estimation.
 
It reminded him how much he missed him when
he wasn’t home.
 
The house just wasn’t
the same when Reno wasn’t in it.
 
At
least at the PaLargio Jimmy could always find his father somewhere around that
village-sized establishment, and even when he couldn’t his presence still
overwhelmed the place.
 
But now that they
were in suburbia waiting to move back home, it was different.
 

He
glanced back at Trina.
 
She was spending
most of her time at Champagne’s building her own small business, but he could
tell she missed him too.
 
Maybe not as
much as he and Dommi did, but she missed him.
 
What Jimmy never understood was why she allowed it.

He
left the window, and walked to the chair beside the sofa.
 
“I don’t get it,” he said as he plopped down
in the chair.

“You
don’t get what?” Trina asked, her eyes still trained on the catalogue’s
gorgeous clothes.

“The
PaLargio’s still closed and won’t be open for another three months, but he’s
never home.
 
Sometimes he doesn’t even
come home until late into the night.
 
If
at all.”
 
Then he stared at her,
wondering if she understood how badly these women out there, even women Jimmy’s
own age, wanted to be with her husband.
 
“Where does he be all day and night?” he asked her.

If
that question would have come from anybody else, Trina would have been
defensive.
 
But Jimmy loved Reno.
 
She understood exactly what he meant.
 
“I have no idea,” she replied honestly.

“You
have no idea what he does with his time all day, but yet he has to know where
you are every minute of the day.”
 
Jimmy
looked at her.
 
“Don’t you find that
strange?”

“Don’t
you find that strange?” Dominic, Junior said, parroting his older brother,
although his attention remained solely on lifting the Hulk’s muscular legs and
twirling around his muscular arms and flipping him upside down.

“That’s
your father,” Trina said to Jimmy.
 
“And
yours too,” she added to Dommi as she nudged him with her shoulder.
 
Then she continued to turn pages in the
catalogue.
 
“I knew what I was getting
into when I married him.
 
He told me all
along that if I wanted some nine-to-five Mister Normal, then I shouldn’t hook
up with him.
 
I would be the fool of
fools, he used to tell me, to hook up with him if normal was what I was
after.
 
So no, Jimmy Mack, I don’t find
it strange at all,” she said, looking up at him.
 
“My eyes were wide open when I became Reno
Gabrini’s woman.”

Jimmy
smiled a kind of relieved smile.

“I
mean think about it, Jimmy,” Trina went on.
 
“On our wedding day, on the very day that we got married, a mob war was
breaking out and Reno was at the heart of it.
 
If I didn’t know what I was getting into after that, then shame on me
because I should have known.
 
That’s what
love is.
 
You have to trust the person
you love.”