Dating A Hitman (The Dating Series Book 4)

by Love, B. T.

  Dating A Hitman

  B.T. Love

  Dating A Hitman

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2016 by B.T. Love

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this material or artwork may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table Of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  What Troy Saw

  One

  I almost died when I was four years old. Although I don’t remember much about what happened during that time in my life, I do have a multitude of pictures that my mom took of me to look back on. The saddest one is of me unconscious in a hospital bed with a tube down my throat and a neck brace on. I had been shot three times, once in the chest and twice in the stomach. It was a miracle I had survived.

  I’ve heard the story a million times. My mom hated to re-live it, but she always respected my right to ask questions. And I had asked many over the years.

  She was married to my father Mitch Nicoletti at the time. He was heavily involved in the mafia and played an important role in an international drug ring. My mom said his biggest distribution was heroin, and that he pushed billions of dollars’ worth of the drug.

  My father used to use an old pizza parlor as a disguise to hold private drug meetings with the other men involved. It was owned by his brother, my uncle Ted, who was also a part of the drug dealings.

  One night my mother brought me and my half-brother Eli to eat at the restaurant. My father was having a business meeting in the back with a man named Jimmy Rolofo that had apparently gone sour. Gunshots blazed out from the room and when Jimmy emerged he took one look at me and opened fire. He knew I was Mitch’s daughter, and apparently his biggest revenge on him was to try and kill me. He shot my brother in the arm as well, but my mom said it wasn’t very serious.

  It’s funny, I don’t remember getting hit or feeling the pain. But what I do remember is the face of that man who shot me. He was clean-shaven and had short brown hair. He was dressed in a suit. But what I remember the most were his eyes. They were kind. He wasn’t smiling at all, but when he lifted the gun in my direction and pulled the trigger, his eyes emitted a gentleness about them. It was amazing that a man with such a kind-natured look about him could be so cruel.

  I have a picture of him from a newspaper clipping. His eyes were even kind in the old police booking photo they had used. He was twenty-eight years old at the time which would put him at about forty-five presently. I often wondered about what he was doing in his life now. I wondered that because he was never caught for the crime against me.

  The person who took all the heat was my dad. His drug ring involvement was exposed that night, and he took responsibility for everything, even excluding his brother so he would be left behind to take care of all of us.

  That didn’t happen, though. After I was released from the hospital my mother took me and fled, starting a new life in another state on the other side of the country. She wanted away from all of the violence and dangerousness of her old life. My uncle Ted tried to convince her to stay but she knew what was best for us. And I’m glad she did it, because I was raised as a normal child from that point on. And my mother was no longer afraid of living.

  I was often curious about my old life. I remember my half-brother Eli clearly in my mind. He had always been a good brother; he would play with me a lot. He was my father’s son from a woman he was with before he met my mother, and was six years older than I was. I never tried to contact him. I don’t know why, I just didn’t know how to pick up the pieces of our old life and put them back together again. What would I say to him? Did he even care to have a relationship with me? After all, the phone worked both ways, and he never tried to contact me either.

  But now everything was going to change, because at that very moment I was staring down at a newspaper clipping from three months ago that announced the release of my father from prison. It was big news around the country, because it was a big deal when it all happened seventeen years ago. He was an infamous drug lord. But he served his time and now he was out and back to living where he used to live before. And I wanted to see him.

  My mother begged me to stay. She said I wasn’t the type of young woman to get involved in the way of life my father lived by. I told her I wasn’t going to change the person that I was; I just wanted to meet my dad and my brother. It had been so long since I saw them that now we were complete strangers. I didn’t like that. A big part of my soul felt empty inside, like a gigantic piece of my history was missing.

  I worked hard and saved money for the plane ticket, hotel, and food to last for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure how long I would stay but I knew that a week wouldn’t be long enough. I had too much life to fill my family in on, and too many details to learn about them. I didn’t want to rush the process.

  I tucked the newspaper clipping back in my carryon and prepared for the plane to land. I was a big ball of nerves but the feeling was exhilarating, because I knew I was going to be brought to the man who made up the other half of me.

  * * *

  The house was nice. It was hard to believe that I had lived in it as a child, because I didn’t remember it at all. I could tell right away that money was still floating around somewhere for my dad to partake in, because it looked like it had been recently remodeled. From the type of man he was I was sure he still worked deals from inside the prison. He probably secured a lot of financial stability for himself by the time he got out.

  I walked up the steps, lifting my heavy bag along with me. When I got to the top I sat it down and drew in a deep breath. “Here goes nothing.” I rang the doorbell and waited while a dog barked somewhere inside. After a few moments passed the handle turned and the door opened. My breaths deepened, not from my nerves but from the attractiveness of the man who stood before me. He was solidly built and was strikingly handsome. It was odd; I pictured my brother Eli to look a lot different than he turned out.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  I swallowed my beating heart that was in my throat back down to my chest. “Um, hi. Do you remember me?”

  His eyebrows pulled together as he crossed his arms in front of his chest, revealing the largeness of his muscles. He really did seem like he was trying to place my face. “Should I?”

  “It’s, it’s me, your sister.” I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around him. “I’ve missed you so much, Eli.”

  He lifted his arms above him in an obvious attempt to keep from touching me. “Whoa, lady, you’ve got the wrong man. I’m not Eli.”

  I looked up at his face. “Oh, oh no, I’m so sorry,” I said, dropping my tight embrace from around his solid body. I stood back and crossed my arms nervously in front of me. “I didn’t really think you looked like him.”

  He dropped an arm and placed his other against the open door jam. “Are you Scarlett?” he asked.

  My shoulders pulled back and my face perked up from his re
cognition of me. “Yes, yes, I am. How do you know who I am?”

  “I’m Eli’s best friend. I’ve known about you since I was a teenager; your brother talks about you all the time.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Not at all.” He dropped his arm and stood back for me to enter. “Would you like to come in? He’s not here but he’ll be back within the hour.”

  “Yes,” I smiled. “I would love to.” I bent down for my bag but was stopped by the stranger in front of me.

  “Leave it; I’ll get it,” he said.

  “Oh, okay. Thank you.”

  I walked past him into the living room and looked around. Everything was obviously high-end and expensive, nothing like my house. There was a kitchen past the living room and a few more rooms that sectioned off from the spaces. Off to the side was a large staircase that went up to the top floor, which was most likely where some of the bedrooms were.

  The man shut the door and sat my bag gently off to the side. He crossed his arms once again and shifted his feet apart, the stance making him look like a hired bodyguard. “So, your brother doesn’t know you’re here; he would have told me you were coming.”

  “No, I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “It will be a surprise for sure,” he said as his eyes sparkled, their blue color entrancing me.

  “Yes, I’m sure it will be.” I cleared my throat. “And, and what about my father? Is he here?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “He’s down at the pizza parlor.”

  “My uncle still owns that?”

  “He sure does.”

  “Wow. Well, I guess I’ll have to go pay him a visit as well; I barely remember him.”

  He stayed quiet and made no attempt to hide his eyes from trailing over my body. Yet it wasn’t in a disrespectful way; he just seemed to be sizing me up, taking me in. Apparently this man knew things about me, things about my childhood. I couldn’t help but swoon inside from his attention, mostly because he was so attractive. He stood with strength and composure and was about a foot taller than I was. He appeared to be older than me, maybe around my brother’s age, and had a touch of ruggedness to him from the appearance of stubble that was trimmed tightly to his chiseled jaw. If I wrote the dictionary I would have put his picture next to the definition of a man, because he completely fit the description.

  His eyes settled on mine once again. “You still look the same.”

  My eyebrows lifted. “You’ve seen my picture?”

  He stepped over to a bookcase against the wall and pulled out a photo album. I took the opportunity to explore the prominent veins in his arms as he flipped the book open to the first page and then spun it around for me to see. “Here,” he said, sticking it out in my direction.

  I came forward and stared down at the pictures of me as a child. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said as I took the album from his grasp. “This, this is me!”

  “I know,” he said. “That whole album is of you.”

  Page after page was filled with pictures of me from birth to age four. I flipped through slowly, admiring the memories that I unfortunately couldn’t remember. When I got to a picture of me and Eli I smiled. “Eli was always a good brother,” I said. “He took such good care of me.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “It’s one of the few things I actually do remember.” I flipped another page and landed on a picture of me and my dad. “How is my dad?” I asked, looking up at him.

  He shrugged. “Fine. He works a lot.”

  “Oh,” I said, dropping my head back down to the book. “You mean like the old days?”

  “Nah. He works with your uncle making pizzas.”

  I had the feeling that was just a cover, that he really was still involved in illegal activity. “Really?” I said, looking back up with a smile. “That’s not below him?”

  “When you’ve been in prison for seventeen years, flipping pizza dough is a welcomed form of employment.”

  “I’m sure it is,” I chuckled. I flipped through more pages and landed on the picture of me in the hospital bed with the tube in my throat. “Wow,” I breathed out a sigh as I sat down on the leather couch. “I can’t believe he has this picture.”

  The man sat next to me and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. “Do you remember that day?”

  “Parts of it. I don’t remember the pain or anything like that, but I do remember the guy who shot me.” I traced my finger over the picture of me as the image of my assailant came to mind. “I mean, I saw his mugshot in the paper later, but I remember what he looked like when he pointed the gun at me.”

  He was watching me intently, like he was hanging on every word I was saying. “He has an odd expression about him,” he said.

  I looked up at him, my face serious. “You mean the gentle nature of his eyes?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw the picture of him for the first time. He seemed like someone who would be—as cheesy as it sounds—jolly, or something like that.”

  I sighed and looked back at my picture. “It’s amazing he hasn’t been caught yet.” I closed the book and handed it back to him. “Thank you for showing this to me.”

  “You’re welcome.” He took it from my grasp and opened it to a picture of me wearing a red velvet dress. I was smiling wide and holding a teddy bear in both hands, pointing it out toward the camera. “This picture here, this is where I can see your features. You’ve grown up, obviously, but you still look like that same girl your brother’s talked about all these years.”

  It all seemed so odd. This man, who I had no idea who he was, seemed to know so many things about me. He acted as if we had met before, like we were talking about the good old days or something. He said he was friends with my brother as a teenager, and the shooting happened when Eli was ten years old, so I couldn’t have known him then. Still, I thought I would ask.

  “Did I know you at all when I was a child?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “It was about five years after it all happened that I met Eli.”

  “Oh.” I folded my hands together on my lap. “Well, what’s your name? I don’t think you’ve told it to me yet.”

  He smiled, the action taking his face to another level of handsomeness. “Troy,” he said, taking a hand away from the photo album to offer it to me. “Troy Valenti.”

  I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. “Scarlett Nicoletti.”

  “I know.”

  We both chuckled and then let go of each other’s grasp.

  “It’s a little unfair that you know so much about me yet I don’t know anything about you. So what are you, security detail or something?”

  He chuckled and looked down at the book, closing it in his hands. “No, not quite. I just hang around your family a lot.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I joked.

  My comment made him laugh. “Yeah, me too.” A small-sounding dog barked behind us and made him turn his head. “Oh jeez,” he said. “I better get him or else he won’t stop.” He stood up from the couch and went back toward the source of the noise, slipping the album back on the bookshelf on the way. When he returned he was holding a little Dachshund in his large hands. “This is Machete,” he said, setting him down on the ground in front of us.

  I leaned forward and petted the cute little dog that was insistent on smelling my shoes as his tail wiggled uncontrollably. “Oh he’s so cute!” I squealed. “And Machete . . . What a big name for such a little dog.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “He lives up to it, too.”

  “I bet he does.” I scratched the top of his furry head and he stuck his nose up and licked at my fingers. “Is he my brother’s?” I asked.

  “No, he’s mine, actually.”

  “Yours?” I asked, shooting him a quizzical look.

  “Yep.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?” he s
miled.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’re just such a, you know, manly-looking man and you’ve got this tiny little dog . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” he chuckled while leaning forward and scratching Machete’s back. “We don’t really match.”

  “Well, they say opposites attract.”

  “That’s true,” he agreed. A horn beeped outside as someone locked their car. “That’s probably your brother.”

  “Oh,” I said as I jumped up, the nervous feeling in my gut rising once again. “I, I don’t really know what to do.”

  “Just wait for him to come in.”

  “Okay.” I tried to collect myself by pulling my hair around to one side and straightening my posture. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the moment to once again meet the brother I so lovingly admired as a child.

  Two

  The doorknob turned and the door pushed open. I recognized him right away: His hair was the same color and his eyes were the same green. He was taller, of course, and his boyish features had morphed into those of a man. But he was the same Eli as I remembered.

  His gaze settled right on me as he stood in the doorway. As his eyes squinted his head cocked to the side, his brain obviously working hard to decipher the situation. “Scarlett?” he finally asked.

  My eyes began to water. “Eli.”

  We both moved toward each other with open arms. When we came together we held each other tightly and he placed a hand on the back of my hair. “You’re here,” he said with disbelief in a deep voice I didn’t recognize.

  “I am.”

  He gently pushed me back and held me in front of him to examine me. “You look the same. I knew right when I saw you that it was you.”

  “And I knew it was you when you came in the door. You haven’t changed.”

  He pulled me against him again. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you. I saw in the paper that dad was released from prison a few months ago and I saved up to fly out and see you both.”