by Rosa Foxxe
VINNIE
HER ITALIAN BILLIONAIRE
A BWWM Billionaire Romance By..
ROSA FOXXE
Summary
Tyra was just a normal girl who craved some romance and excitement in her life. Little did she know, she was about to get all that and a hell of a lot more...
The moment Tyra met the Billionaire Casino owner Vincent Ambrosiano she was struck by his aura. He was surprisingly young, impossibly good looking and incredibly powerful.
The chemistry was electric. The mystery was intriguing. How did a man of his age get so much power? And how is a man as good looking as him still single?
There were many questions, but not so many answers.
Either way, Tyra was about to get mixed up in Vinnie's world and soon she would discover the truth about the man of her dreams. The big question is, could she really handle the truth?
Copyright Notice
CJ Howard
Vinnie Her Italian Billionaire © 2015, Rosa Foxxe
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
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Contents
Chapter1
Chapter2
Chapter3
Chapter4
Chapter5
Chapter6
Chapter7
Chapter8
Chapter9
Chapter1
Tyra was in a rut. Every day was the same, or so near to being the same that she was having a hard time telling them apart. She'd get up in the morning and head to the gym like she always did, do the same routine on the same machines and treadmills, even use the same shower when she was done. Then she'd go to work and sit in her cubicle processing insurance claims for one of the bigger firms in the nation. After work she'd return home. Tyra had heard that when people went home from work, they did things that were fun and exciting but Tyra didn't do anything like that. It wasn't that she didn't want to it was just that she had a hard time connecting with many of the people around her.
Tyra was very literary, keeping up on all the new poetry coming out while reading the new fiction and creative nonfiction. It was something that she could get lost in for hours, something that made her feel more connected to herself and the rest of the world. But at the same time, it wasn't something that she could easily connect with other people about.
Tyra lived and worked in Des Moines, Iowa. The favorite pastime of most people in Des Moines was drinking. Tyra would tell her out-of-state friends that the reason she didn't go out was that everyone was such a drunk, they didn't get it, and they thought Tyra was being antisocial or something. Tyra wished that they could come out with her for a night and see how it really was.
People in Des Moines put drinking above anything else. The pervasive bar culture turned everyone into barflies, and if you weren't hanging around the bar scene, then, for a lot of people, you weren't around at all. What put Tyra off even more was that when she saw people she would have liked to talk to when out and about, in their real lives during the days, they always heartily agreed that everyone could together and hang out, maybe grill out or something.
But their intentions didn't matter because Tyra knew that they would be back at the dozen or so hip bars that existed in the Des Moines proper area. They'd be back bellied up to a bar talking to whoever would listen to all their life woes, about how they couldn't make ends meet, couldn't find a significant other, couldn't fend off the boredom of living in the Midwest, couldn't get a decent job or a promotion at the job they had, couldn't do a lot of things.
The one thing they wouldn't talk about was how they couldn't stop drinking.
Because Tyra liked to go out and have a few drinks, and she'd never denied that to anyone. But Tyra wasn't an Iowa native, her work had transferred her there from Philadelphia, and she was accustomed to getting all dressed up -- the kind of dressed up that made men’s jaws drop -- and going out for a few cocktails around midnight or so, and Tyra's hourglass physique and caramel colored skin most definitely had that effect on men’s jaws.
Or if she was feeling very social, she might go out for a light meal of sushi around eight or nine, just before closing time. But no one else in Des Moines wanted to have a night out like that. Everyone shuffled to the bar around seven or eight o'clock and started drinking steadily. By the time Tyra was out, those rare times she did, everyone was already sloppy drunk. And not just the kind of drunk where friends tell you, “You probably aren't all right to drive home, maybe you should get a cab instead,” but the kind of drink where a person mutters the same thing over and over to anyone who will listen, or where a person words slur so badly they can barely be understood at all.
Tyra found it all very depressing. And the night life, or lack thereof, coupled with the way that most Iowans seem to only pay lip service to caring about the arts, made it a pretty bleak existence in Des Moines.
It was hard trying to find anyone who wanted to go out for a classy drink or two, much less a guy who caught and held her interest. There was an art center that was pretty good but of course it was always empty because everyone was getting wasted at the bar.
And as this went on, Tyra found herself less and less likely to drink at a bar or even at home. The whole thing was kind of putting her off drinking, and making her regard it as a very real poison, not just something that could make you throw up or get a hangover. She was starting to think of it as a poison for the mind, something that made people slow and stupid. And she didn't like this change in her thinking. Tyra thought back to when she lived in Philly, how she and her friends would go out for drinks and have fun dancing the night away.
What it amounted to was that Des Moines was filled with bitter, washed up drunks; people she and her few friends were going to try to avoid by going to the casino that night. The crowd that hung out there was different from the run of the mill bar crowd in many ways that made the casino a more appealing place.
First of all, if someone was so drunk they couldn't speak they were escorted out by security. Tyra appreciated that because if she didn't see people stumbling around completely hammered; she didn't have to feel sorry for them and their lives. She didn't have to think about how fucked up things were for those people even when they were sober. That wasn't the only thing that was different, though. People at the casino usually had an upbeat attitude; they were hopeful that tonight would be their lucky night. Even when someone had lost all of their money and left dejected at least they didn't linger around the outside of the place like losers did at the bar.
Tyra was excited to hit the casino even more than normal because there would be an entry for a free trip to Vegas. Some casino out there w
as sponsoring the whole thing. She wasn't really sure about any of the details and didn't really care. She just wanted to get out of the Midwest for a few days. The weather outside was turning colder by the hour and the days kept getting shorter and shorter. Sometimes Tyra felt like she was living on the North Pole or some other place where there were incredibly long and dark winters that seemed to wipe out all hope.
Tyra typed out one last work email and got ready to leave. She didn't want to keep any of her friends waiting. On her way out the door, she waved at her boss who smiled and waved back. And with that, she was off for the weekend.
*
The Casino was packed. Tyra and her friends had to carefully navigate the crowd to avoiding bumping into anyone and spilling their drink. It seemed like all of the casino regulars were out and dressed to kill. Women walked by wearing gaudy mink coats, and men wore slick tonic suits that had just a little too much sheen to them under the lights. Tyra always thought of nights when people came out en masse to the casino as cheap imitations of Vegas. That's really where everyone wanted to be but because of jobs or kids or school or just life in general, they couldn’t.
So they came here for a few hours to feel like they were somewhere else entirely. It was really pretty amazing when you considered that the drive from Des Moines to the casino outside of town was the better part of a half an hour. That meant plenty of time for a cop to see you swerve and pull you over to check how much you've had to drink. But the threat of DUI charges didn't seem to be any kind of deterrent for people that frequented the casino. Inside the giant palace of flashing lights and fleeting dreams, everyone felt safe from the outside world.
The main floor proved to be too packed, so everyone headed upstairs to one of the smoking sections with blackjack tables. Tyra wasn't sure how the casino worked out with the state that they would be able to have certain places inside the casino that were smoking friendly, but Tyra appreciated it. She had officially quit smoking years ago, but there was something about puffing on a smoke while playing the odds at the blackjack tables that made her feel like she was going to win a million dollars. She wasn't bad at blackjack but she also wasn't exceptionally lucky at it, either. For Tyra it was more about the experience. If she ended up losing fifty bucks while hanging out with her friends and having fun for a few hours, then it was a price she was willing to pay.
The table Tyra had picked was coming back from being “cooled off” earlier when some college frat boys who didn't know how to play sat down and started betting wildly. It had thrown off the game and scared away most of the players, but eventually the frat boys got tired of throwing money away and moved on to something else.
Now the table was heating back up though, and people all around Tyra were hitting blackjack. Though she kept just barely getting beat by the dealer, she kept playing, and eventually, just when she was about to give up and move on to another table, or maybe just go get a drink and sip it while she smoked and watched other people play, she won on a wild bet that garnered her several hundred dollars.
“You won!” one of her friends cried out, jumping up and down and clapping her hands.
Tyra smiled, she'd forgotten how white-girl girl wasted some of her friends got.
“I won!” Tyra said back, a note of triumph in her voice.
It was good to win every once in a while. Tyra wasn't one of those people who came to the casino to get rich, but that didn't mean that she didn't get a rush when she won a little bit of money. To celebrate the win, Tyra and her friends started drinking with the gusto of those recently graced by luck. Tyra thought that she would only have a few, but they were so cheap at that time of the night that she couldn't help but have a few more than a few. Eventually she blacked out. When she woke up she was back home, on her bed, still in the same cocktail dress.
Tyra got up and got dressed for the gym, noting that the time was already a quarter past noon. Where had the night gone? The last thing she remembered was winning and then having a few drinks to celebrate. She made a conscious effort to remember as she drove to the small 24-hour workout center just down the street from her. She started to remember in snatches, while she ran on her favorite treadmill, how she'd entered the contest she'd been excited about while she'd been drunk.
She hoped that her handwriting was legible and she'd filled everything out correctly. What made her remember was that the contest had been a little strange; after she filled out her submission she was asked to step into a photo booth for a few quick pictures of herself. Now Tyra wondered why they had needed her picture as she put on mile after mile on the treadmill’s odometer.
*
The next week at work started with a more morose feeling than her usual Mondays, and continued to go down from there. The weather outside was getting worse and worse. One thing no one had told Tyra about when she'd transferred to Des Moines was how bad the winter storms got. There were ice storms almost every week when things got bad in the winter, and things were well on their way to being worse than bad. Tyra tried not to think about how long the winters were here, and how much she hated them. She imagined how great it would be to go to Vegas and party instead of spending her weekends trying to walk a fine line between classy fun and getting trashed.
That was something Tyra was having to deal with as well, the realization that she too was turning into one of those people who got drunk when they wanted to have fun. Sure, it was only once a week, or maybe every other weekend right now. But how long until it was “only” two or three days a week, or even four or five days a week? It was a slippery slope Tyra had watched some of her friends slide down. And once you were drinking that much your brain was wired to drink that much and had a hard time if you didn't.
The state of being drunk warped peoples' perception of reality; how else could so many terrible parents go to the bar, get smashed, and then speak fondly of their children? Tyra knew that habitual drunkenness was something that society turned a blind eye to until it was far too late to really right the course of the person’s life. It was like people didn't realize their habits and behaviors had an impact and that they could do the kind of damage in a month that took several years to straighten back out. Or maybe it was just that a lot of people around her had given up.
Well, that wasn't going to be her, Tyra told herself. She wasn't just going to sit around the little town called Des Moines and wait for things to change. She was going to change things for herself. Without hesitation, she pulled up the casino's website and found out who was running the contest. She read all she could about the man. He was Italian and had plenty of gray hair. Tyra had an idea, something bold that normally she wouldn't even think of doing. She was going to track the Italian man down and convince him that she was the girl who needed to win the contest. She wanted to go to Vegas and see the strip, see the lights and hear the sounds. It was something she needed, she told herself. She deserved a vacation after working so hard all the time. Anyone could see that. Even her boss had told her as much the other day, saying that if she won the contest then he'd have no problem signing off on her vacation request.
After work that day, Tyra made her way to the Italian borough on Des Moines' south side. The man's address was hard to find, smack dab in the middle of a thriving Italian open air market, or what would have been if the weather allowed it. Tyra looked around for a while, hoping the address would jump out at her, then finally gave up and looked it up on her phone. It happened to be tucked away in the back corner of the public events space. When Tyra walked in she was struck by how nice everything was. Oftentimes the insides of local businesses were run down due to the hard times the local economy was going through. This place wasn't like that at all, though. There were plush curtains everywhere, hung up by someone who knew what they were doing so that they weren't offset even a little bit from the window pane. Everything about the place came together very nicely and everything was very Italian.
Tyra looked around for a receptionist but couldn't find one. Although there
were several offices only one seemed to be used. Tyra stuck her head in the office and found the man who'd she'd seen on the internet; the man who was running the contest.
“Hello, I'm sorry to bother you.” Tyra started.
“You aren't bothering me.” the man said without looking up from typing on his computer. “Just have a seat in the chair in front of my desk and I'll be right with you in a moment. I'm writing a letter to the mother country and I don't want to accidentally type it in English because I'm talking to you, you know what I mean?”
The man let out a hardy guffaw before going back to typing.
Tyra sat down in front of him and looked around the room. There were pictures of the man with his family, his wife and a few children. There were also pictures of him with men his age in front of a casino in Vegas. The office looked like someone had just moved in and judging from how sparse the furniture was, the man didn't plan on staying for long.
“So,” the man said. “I'm done with that and I'm really sorry to make you wait, but sometimes I have to shoot an email back to Italy in a hurry because, well, that's just how being one of the worker bees goes.”