Perfectly Damaged: Luka : A bad boy mafia romance

by Alice May Ball

  He told her she could learn and gain some experience of life, travel some, then come back if she wanted to. As far as Princess was concerned, there was more than enough education and experience to be had in the nightlife right here. The streets and neighborhoods of the financial district were all the travel that she craved, save for an occasional journey to Coney Island or up the Long Island Expressway.

  To encourage her out, Daddy stopped paying her a while back, but since she lived rent-free upstairs and did well enough on tips not to mind, it was a pretty minor inconvenience.

  When he told her there was no point waiting for a handsome prince to come and take her away, she said that he was her handsome prince and she didn’t want to be taken. If she had to have a handsome prince, she’d rather wait for one who would come and help out behind the bar.

  Anyway, it wasn’t long before Daddy started to give her an allowance, and that happened to be about the same as she would have been earning.

  Daddy worried about the male company that Princess was surrounded by. Since she was little, Daddy had told her not to trust the kind of men that visited Hotsteppa’s, or any of the men that he did business with, but she grew up accustomed to men looking at her and approaching her in the club.

  Most of them thought of themselves as Wall Street bulls. That’s the term one of them used. He’d cornered her in a small booth. Her blouse was a little open and her lips were ready to part. The big, swaggering banker with dark eyes and smoky breath, dressed in an expensively tailored suit, said, “The whole country, the whole world, has to do what the Wall Street bull says.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Princess was ready for a man to tell her what to do. To make her do it. She tested him, saying, “No man has the balls to make me do anything I don’t want to.” In that instant, he looked angry like a spoiled kid. Any authority that he might have had with her had evaporated between them, right there.

  It wasn’t uncommon for a patron to proposition her or make a pass. They’d whisper low, whiskey and cigar breath in her ear and on her neck, suggesting something in a secluded corner or even away in a hotel room. Musicians and DJs, too, but less often. They were “club natives” and had better club manners, as Daddy said.

  Princess was more club native than most and she had little difficulty fending off unwanted attention. Getting the more wanted kind of attention, finding the kind of a man she’d want to sneak off into the shadows with—that hadn’t really been happening so far.

  But Hotsteppa’s was her world. It was where she grew up, and she loved it.

  One electric night, Pierce Agostini’s thousand-dollar Italian heels clacked down the ironwork spiral stairway into the club and everything changed.

  Princess was setting out drinks from a silver tray. The moment he stepped into the room, the tone in the club shifted. The suits in the alcove huddled and whispered about Agostini. The sharp intensity of their attention made Princess turn to see what kind of a man they could be talking about.

  Tall, broad, and dark, he descended the stairs and entered like the owner of all he surveyed. An animal of muscle and restrained aggression, poured into a thousand-dollar suit.

  He moved like a panther, a predator, slow and easy in the immaculately tailored suit, and he wore it like it was a t-shirt and jeans. His searing blue eyes scanned every nook and alcove like laser sights.

  Rumor had it he grew up in a tough Sicilian neighborhood in Staten Island. It was said that he had brought the Mafia to Wall Street. The word was that he operated boiler rooms of unscrupulous traders, pumping worthless—or even non-existent—stocks to pensioners and workers reeling from the shock of recent redundancy checks.

  Everyone knew who Pierce Agostini was. At the same time, nobody knew one sure thing about him. He had money was about all, but no one could say whether any of it was his own. Agostini had been accused of everything from running investment schemes that were thinly disguised confidence tricks to loan sharking with a gang of enforcers who wielded baseball bats.

  The woman who clopped down into the club behind him was falling out of a wrinkled, silky dress in a pale blueish-gray. She had obviously made hasty wardrobe adjustments and very recently. Without the aid of a mirror, Princess guessed. The woman kept her face down, but Princess thought that she recognized her.

  Two heavy-set black men with close-cropped hair and black shades followed her down the steps. They moved slowly and were almost identical in tailored black suits, like a gangster’s idea of formal menswear. Shiny, buttoned tight over their bulging frames, they showed extravagant French cuffs. They were easily a head taller than Agostini.

  The crowd parted into two waves to let Agostini pass through. Women fluttered their eyelashes or pouted their lips. Men straightened to stand taller. Made their faces serious. Nobody even pretended to ignore him or to not notice.

  Agostini’s eyes swept the room as he made straight for the bar. The woman was a long, willowy model type with sunken, hurt eyes. Princess was sure that she recognized her, but she couldn’t place her, maybe because she was distracted by the woman’s smeared makeup and the twisted and stained dress.

  The two black men stopped by the stairs and clasped their huge hands in front of them. Rings set with massive stones bulged on their fingers.

  Princess craned to watch Agostini lean across the bar and beckon her father. He had a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed when he swallowed. From the booth where Princess was standing, she saw the crease in Daddy’s forehead and the tremor in his hand as he turned the brass handle to show Pierce in through the black door and lead him into the little back office.

  When they came out about ten minutes later, Daddy’s face was gray and he looked like he’d aged about a decade. As Pierce swept back through the crowd and back to the iron steps, the beams of his eyes swung to fix on Princess and he stopped.

  Her pulse pounded. Her throat thickened and her breath caught. Slowly, he looked her up and down. The glasses rattled on the tray she was holding. Unexpected tingles trickled fast from her core, all through her body and limbs. Her mouth dried.

  As his eyes traced her body, inch by inch, she buzzed inside and her knees shook. Her breath thickened and filled her chest.

  The twinkle in his eye was predatory, like he would devour her. But more, there was a recognition. A look that said, I know you. And she felt, despite her trembling knees and the cavernous flutter in her stomach, that she knew him, too.

  Then she saw that his eyes had shifted. His focus was on something behind her. Now she felt awkward, like someone had cut her string. Now she wasn’t sure he had really been looking at her at all.

  Her chest was tight and her blood was hot. From behind her, she heard movement, and a little round man with little round glasses on the front of his bald, round head bustled past her to beam his nervous grin at the imperious Pierce Agostini by the foot of the stairs.

  “Mr. Agostini,” he sputtered, pressing forward as he reached into his suit coat, “I’m Barney.” Agostini raised a dark eyebrow as he looked down at the card the man thrust at him. “Barney of Blair Barney. Here, please, take my card.”

  Agostini snatched the card and gave Barney the briefest nod. When his eyes lifted back to Princess, her stomach fell through the floor. Then he was up the steps and gone.

  Next afternoon, Agostini stepped again onto the spiral steps and down into the enfolding darkness of Hotsteppa’s. He wondered whether old man Grace had told his daughter and the staff the news. Did any of them know about the change in all their circumstances? He doubted it.

  The old boy was said to have been something of a tough guy in the past. Quite an operator. All of the edges were blunted and smoothed off the man Agostini had met with the night before.

  Callaghan and Calhoun followed him down and he was surprised to see Grace’s daughter waiting, watching the bottom of the stairs as he came into the club.

  She looked at him like she was waiting for him to say something, although he didn’t have an
ything to say to her. Maybe her father really had told her about the deal, though Agostini still doubted it.

  Whatever Tobin Grace had been in the past, Pierce judged that now he would rather hide from a problem behind a hand of cards or at the bottom of a glass than confront it.

  He looked again at the girl. The artsy waif look suited her, with her dark hair up, black leather jacket, a floral print dress and a pair of work boots. Strangely, it was even more attractive to him than the sexy, all-black Maitresse style that she wore to work the night before.

  Calling a child “Princess” wouldn’t do them any favors. Her pinkish moon face was like a map of the reasons—puffy, immature and resentful, defensive without cause, and her defiant stare bordered on entitled. Beautiful, like a teenage heiress from an Italian Renaissance painting. She continued to stare at him, but he paid her no further attention.

  Calhoun and Callaghan waited at the bottom of the steps. Pierce planted himself in the middle of the club and cast a salesman’s eye over the furniture and the fittings. What he needed was clear in his mind, but he wanted to achieve it as efficiently as possible.

  Spending money to remodel the place wouldn’t be a problem. He stood to make enough on the deal, but he didn’t have time to waste, so the work and effort would have to be planned carefully. He had only a little over a week to get this place to how he needed it. Whatever he set out to do, it would best be done with minimum work and expense.

  He strode around the showroom, knocked his heavy knuckles on walls to find where they were solid and where they were just stud partition. He peered and squinted, tapped and poked around. He looked under all of the tables. He thought hard about whether he could stand to leave the bar where it was when it took space that he wanted for the VIP area.

  The girl stood by the bar and watched him. He looked her slowly up and down. He’d remembered her from the night before, and she was definitely one of the club’s assets. Wall Street bankers were difficult to deal with at the best of times, and were even more challenging for a young woman.

  Wall Street wasn’t somewhere women were treated as equal to men. On that score, it was still about halfway through the nineteenth century. Considering how high-powered and senior most of the club’s customers were, Agostini had been impressed with the way she dealt with them.

  That, he told himself, was the reason his thoughts kept turning over the picture of her looking back at him with her full lips about to part.

  She fidgeted as he looked at her. He must have been staring, the way that he had been at the rest of the fixtures and fittings.

  Tobin Grace shuffled out from his little office, his inner sanctum, scratching his head and rubbing his eyes. He stopped short when he saw Agostini. Stared like he might still be dreaming. Agostini thought that the old guy was losing it.

  He looked at Agostini again, then at Princess. He started talking in a rush. “Princess, did you meet Mr. Agostini? He was here last night. I don’t know whether you saw him or not. Look, sweetheart, here’s the thing: Mr. Agostini and I have come to an arrangement. That is, Mr. Agostini has kindly…”

  Agostini couldn’t stand much more of that. He cut across the old man and told Princess, “I’ve taken over the club. It’s mine now, all of it. The staff all work for me now, so that will include you.”

  Almost like a reflex she said, “I’m not working for you.”

  Evenly, Agostini told her, “As of last night, Ms. Grace, all of the staff work for me.”

  “But I don’t get paid.” She stuck out her chin. And her chest. He got a rise out of that.

  “Then may I tell you without reservation that, whatever may come to light in your performance reviews, your contribution is very cost-effective and your work represents great value for money. I only wish that Hotsteppa’s had more employees like you.”

  “No.” She almost stamped her foot. With a little color in her cheeks and a spark in her eye, she was suddenly way more attractive. “I am not going to work for you. Not at any price, and certainly not for free.”

  “You would if your daddy said you had to, though, right?”

  “Well…” Her brow wrinkled while her eyes narrowed and danced uncertainly from Agostini to Grace and back again.

  “So,” Agostini snapped at Tobin, “tell her.”

  He began to mumble, “Princess, sweetheart, it’s just the way forward—at least for now. We’ll need to work with Mr. Agostini…”

  Agostini cut him off again. “Okay, Princess? You got it?”

  “No. Daddy, tell him.”

  Agostini had had enough. He said, “Yes, Daddy, tell the nasty man that even though you owe money all over town and you’re so far underwater the bubbles have stopped, that you’ve got some magic beans concealed about your person that are just going to turn all of your creditors into happy cherubs and butterflies.”

  He waited. “No? Okay, then. Listen up, both of you.” He looked hard from the girl to her father and back. “I’m your knight in shining armor. All the games and syndicates and the suppliers that the club owes, and that you personally owe money to, are all going to be happy and quiet and keep on supplying you, and they aren’t even going to break your head, not even a little bit, and all that you have to do is to let someone who understands business take charge—namely me—and give up on the illusion that this club belongs to you, when for the past year at least, it has been wholly owned by Affiliated Catering Supplies, Liq-R 2 Go, the landlord, and, most of all, Fat Tony.”

  Princess clenched her teeth and her pulse rose as she listened. She didn’t care who this big-shot Wall Street Mafioso was, nor how desperately hot he made her by being near. He couldn’t just walk in and take Hosteppa’s away from Daddy and her.

  The fire that his presence lit in the core of her was a maddening distraction, but she ignored it as much as she could. The hard line of his jaw and the strong hint of a powerful muscular frame under the tailored suit weren’t reasons to give in to his ridiculous demands. She glared at him as hard as she could.

  He said, “Shouldn’t be so much of a surprise, Princess. Your daddy’s been gambling like a fool. Hanging paper all over town. Haven’t you, Mr. Grace?”

  Her father’s face sagged.

  “It’s going to be hard for him at first, getting used to doing what he’s told.” Agostini’s teeth flashed as he grinned. “That’s where you’re going to help, Princess.”

  Princess narrowed her eyes at him. The trouble was, whenever his eyes flashed at her, watery tremors ran down the insides of her thighs and her knees weakened. He said, “You two are going to work with me, and you’ll do it with energy and enthusiasm.”

  Her jaw tightened and jutted. She looked hard, right into the light of his hard blue eyes. “You can’t make us do any of that, Mr. Agostini, and I’m sure you know it.”

  His voice was soft and low as he said, “I wouldn’t have said it if I couldn’t. You don’t want me to show you how I can do that.”

  “You can’t just come in here and take this club away from my daddy, the man who built it out of nothing.”

  He took a step toward her and all her breath left her. A dull shock pounded through her as his eyes locked with hers and he said, “I can take what I want. I can and I do.”

  Her father’s eyebrows pointed as he said, “Let’s work with him, Princess.”

  She looked from one man to the other. Why her father wouldn’t stand up to Pierce Agostini she couldn’t understand, but if he wouldn’t do it, then she would. Firmly she said, “No.”

  Agostini turned his head to her. “Final answer?”

  Her body shook. “Final answer.”

  “Not the choice I would have made for you, but okay. Here’s how it will be. Mr. Grace,” Agostini reached out and took Princess’ arm, “I’ll take Princess. I won’t hurt her while you do what I need in the club, and I won’t hurt you as long as she behaves herself in my custody.”