by Alexa Hart
Shana leans over and surprises me with a kiss on the cheek that lasts a beat too long. “Hope you win!” she says.
“Yeah,” I nod. “Sure.”
I leave quickly. Shit, I frown. Now I definitely need to find a new sitter. Preferably an old man or a nun. I start the car and check my phone. Danny’s sent me the address for the guy I need to give a good warning to. I know the name. He’s a real perv who’s even been blocked from a couple of bars for filming women. It will be a pleasure to beat some sense into someone who deserves it tonight.
Chapter 6
Summer
I soak in the hot water of the bathtub in a state of exhausted triumph. In the last few hours I’ve managed to clean up the kitchen and living room, and enough of Rudy’s room for me to sleep in. I won’t go near Angelo’s room or my mom’s old room without full fumigation gear or minimally, a big bottle of wine. Besides, Angelo should be cleaning up too. I’m here to help Rudy, not be Angelo’s maid so he can get a free pass for being such a mess of a stepson. I just want Rudy to be comfortable when he does come home from the hospital and I’d prefer not to catch any weird diseases from the mold that had been growing in the sink. But that was then. Now, I am soaking in a freshly scrubbed bathtub, and feeling really glad I packed some emergency lavender bath bubbles. Nothing relaxes me like a hot bath and the smell of lavender—I like to think I have an old soul, but Becca likes to tease I just act like an old lady. So fine, I like a good bath. With my eyes closed and some music playing from my phone, I can almost pretend this situation is fine. Totally okay. That I am not lonely at all. That when I close my eyes, I don’t see the intense grey eyes of a very strong and sexy man who hates me for treating him like a criminal in front of his daughter, and rightly so. I doubt even helping Maddie bake the world’s best birthday cake for him will ever make up for the way I dismissed him.
I climb out of the bathtub and as I wrap a towel around my body I think I hear something downstairs. A thump maybe? I look at my phone. It’s almost midnight. There’s no way anyone should be down there unless maybe Angelo is finally home. I hurry into Rudy’s room and look through my suitcase. I curse my best friend Becca who has replaced my favorite and very demure long-sleeve pug pajamas with a cute, far too small to be comfortable to sleep in, pink silk and lace camisole and matching lace shorts. She’d bought them for me to bring to London where she wanted me to finally get a little crazy. From downstairs, I hear Angelo shout. I throw on the camisole and shorts and then grab my cardigan and wrap it around myself like a bathrobe. My hair is up in a messy bun and I’ve already taken out my contacts, so I grab my glasses and shove them on my face. I hear another voice, deeper and angrier, and I grab a freshly scrubbed frying pan from the stovetop in one hand and my phone in the other as I hurry down.
As I creep down the stairs, I see Angelo hunched over the cash register. He looks like a mess, roughed up by someone and he is also drunk. He’s slurring his words.
“I’ve got twenthy...twenthy five…” he drunkenly attempts to count the cash in the register.
“Unless you’re talking in thousands you aren’t going to solve your problem in that cash register.” I can’t see the face of the tall, muscular man talking to him, but the way he talks with authority and menace makes the hairs on my skin stand up. He doesn’t seem like a friend. I take in the scene, Angelo beat up and a man ordering him around near the cash register, and I assume he’s robbing the place. I inch forward with the frying pan in my hand.
“I need more time,” Angelo says, he’s crying a little and I can see that his nose is bleeding. “I was winning tonight.”
The man laughs. “If I hadn’t stopped you tonight, you would have been in even bigger shit than you are now. And Vinnie’s team isn’t nearly as polite as we are.”
Angelo hiccups. “What can I do? I could make a trade. You know I know a few girls. I have movies too. Cute girls up with me in my room. I could sell you those?”
I freeze. Did Angelo just offer to sell sex tapes to this man? I suddenly can’t decide who to aim this frying pan at. And I am not the only one angry by the offer. The man threatening Angelo takes his baseball bat and taps it on the counter next to Angelo. Angelo eyes it with total terror in his eyes. Then the man raises the bat and crashes it down on the cash register, smashing the thing and sending loose change and the little cash in it clamoring down to the ground. “Let’s not ever hear you make a suggestion like that again. We don’t want anything to do with that filth, got it?”
“Okay….okay…” Angelo looks around. “But I need more time.”
“We already gave you time, Angelo. Too much time, according to my boss.”
The man takes his bat and swings it against the glass of the display case. It shatters and Angelo starts to cry again. I place my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.
“What do you want then?” Angelo says.
“What you put up as collateral,” the man replies.
Angelo looks up at the man. “You...you want the bakery?” He stutters. “Kane, man, I didn’t think that would interest you…”
The man shrugs. “Sure. We aren’t really in the bakery business,” he says. “But we are in the real estate business.”
“Okay ...but it doesn’t exactly belong to me…yet.”
The man growls, “You mean you lied to us?”
“No...it just, I maybe exaggerated. But if you give me time I know I can get Rudy to hand it over. He’s sick. It will be easy to make it happen. I can get you the bakery.”
“This is not what we want to hear,” the man taps the bat threateningly on another glass case. Angelo looks truly terrified, and I’d feel bad for him if he hadn’t just offered to sell this place to someone by tricking my uncle out of it. I quietly take my phone out of my sweater pocket and start to dial 911. They can both get arrested for all I care, but I don’t want any more damage done to the bakery.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the man’s voice says. It takes me a moment to realize he is talking to me, his eyes meeting mine as he turns away from Angelo to face me. My whole body, so warm and relaxed only a little while ago in the bath, goes rigid with icy fear.
“Get out here,” he orders. His voice drips with cold hostility.
I step very slowly out of the shadow. The man looks me up and down, my lace nightie peeking out from my cardigan with the frying pan in one hand and the phone in the other.
“You?” I gasp. The man staring at me with murder in his eyes, and a baseball bat in his hand is the same man from the bus station. Maddie’s dad.
“Summer?” Angelo stands up, broken glass crunching under his feet and says between sniffles.,“when did you...what are you doing here?”
I walk forward with the frying pan held up over my head. “Leave him alone,” I say in my toughest voice, which I think is definitely still trembling. “Nobody is getting this bakery from Rudy.”
“I think you’re misunderstanding this scene,” Maddie’s dad says. “It isn’t your fight.”
“Like hell it isn’t,” I say.
“I thought you didn’t swear,” he smiles. But the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. In fact, he looked totally unamused. It is clear he is very unhappy that I have barged in on this scene. He turns back to Angelo. “And you told me nobody was here.”
“I….” he stutters.
“He didn’t know,” I say. “I just arrived. But now he does. And you should both know there is no way in hell I will let you get your hands on this bakery. Over my dead body!”
“It’s not your dead body you need to worry about,” the man says. “It’s his. Because he is dead if he doesn’t deliver what he owes. Got it?”
I bite my lip as I nod, and the man, Kane I think is what Angelo called him, he looks like he is ready to take me over his shoulder and ...well, like my body is on his mind, but in a good way. I pull the cardigan closed and he snaps his eyes up to my face. He looks so masculine. So strong. And while I know I shouldn’t feel t
his way, despite the violence I just saw, he makes me feel like he would murder someone to protect me, not the other way around.
He kicks at the glass. “Angelo, clean this up. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He heads toward the door. I regain some backbone and step toward him. “I’m not afraid of you,” I say.
“Don’t move,” he growls. He turns back and stalks toward me. I should be frightened but I am not, even when he picks me up, nearly throwing me over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I ask. He grips me tightly but not in a way that hurts. And God, he smells amazing. He carries me back to the stairs and sets me down on the third step so we are now eye to eye. He looks at me with the most impenetrable and annoyed eyes. He has a fleck of blood on his cheek and without thinking about it, I reach out and rub it away with my thumb.
“The floor is covered in glass,” he says, answering the question I’d forgotten asking.
I look down and realize I’m barefoot and he has taken me to the steps so I won’t cut my feet.
“Thank you,” I say. “But you can’t have this bakery.”
The man chuckles. “You’re either very brave or very stupid.”
I look into his eyes and feel myself wanting to touch his face again, pull it toward me. The man chuckles as he turns and crunches across the broken glass toward the entrance. He unlocks the door and heads out into the darkness, baseball bat in hand.
“Stupid,” I whisper. “Definitely stupid.”
I sit down on the steps as Angelo stumbles over and starts drunkenly apologizing. What the hell just happened? And what the hell am I supposed to do about it?
Chapter 7
Summer
The next morning I go to the hospital to see Rudy before Angelo wakes up. He stayed up late sweeping up the broken glass, but I doubt the bakery will open today. The bigger issue is that if he gets to Rudy first, I know Rudy will agree to sell the bakery to get Angelo out of trouble, and I can’t let that happen. I’ve got a little savings and I’m going to offer to buy the bakery. It isn’t nearly enough to get Angelo out of trouble, but right now, I’m not interested in him.
When I get to Rudy’s hospital room, I find him sitting up in bed eating breakfast from a tray and watching a game show on the television.
“Summer!” he says. “You’re here!”
I go over and give him a kiss on his cheek. He looks small and fragile in the hospital bed. And his famously thick brown hair is grey and thinner. He looks old. I wonder if my parents would have aged like this. The idea pains me, both for their fragility and for the fact that I would trade anything to have them around. The hospital room is missing cards or flowers, and I know without a doubt that Angelo hasn’t been to visit once.
“Uncle Rudy,” I say. I squeeze his hand. “It’s good to see you.”
“Summer, you look beautiful as always!” He smiles. “Did Angelo get in touch? I’ve gotten an infection from the surgery, so they’re keeping me here. But Angelo can show you around the bakery. We should probably think about hiring a temporary baker though ...I don’t think I’ll be back up and running the way I hoped.”
I shake my head. “Actually, that’s what I came here to talk about. Last night ...last night a man came after Angelo.”
Rudy sits up.
“He’s fine. But...he’s in trouble. I guess Angelo owes a lot of money and he’s...the bakery is a mess.”
Rudy shakes his head. “He promised me he was turning things around.”
“Rudy, the people ...they want the bakery. I came here to ask, to beg, for you to sell the bakery to me. I’ll give you everything I have. It might be enough to get Angelo more time and I’ll get a loan from the bank. You just can’t let this bakery go. It’s all that’s left of our family.”
Rudy shakes his head and pats my hand. “Summer, I know Angelo is no good. I know that. And I should have cut him off long ago. But he’s still like a son to me. I can’t turn my back on him. And if he’s involved with bad people…. I know you can’t turn your back on him either.”
I start to cry. I know he’s right. I knew it even before I came here. But letting the bakery go...it feels like losing my parents all over again. Without the bakery, there will be nothing to tie me to them.
“At least promise me if I figure something out, you’ll never let Angelo near the place again.”
Rudy nods. I feel a flash of anger at myself for staying away for so long and an even bigger flash of anger at the man with the baseball bat who has brought us to this moment. I know it’s Angelo’s fault more than his, but at this moment I don’t care. If I ever see that man again, I’ll kill him. No. I have to find him and convince him to give us more time. Murder will have to wait. Persuasion requires baked goods.
Chapter 8
Kane
Maddie is already off to school when I finally manage to drag myself down to the kitchen. She’s gotten good at doing the morning routine solo because, as Maddie says, mornings are not my strong suit. The knock at the front door before I’ve even poured my first cup of coffee is a bad sign. And after the night I had, bad is a fair definition for my entire fucking mood.
I never smash up a debtor with their family around. Never. I grew up with men busting into the house to rough up my mom or me as if it would get my dad to cough up whatever debt he owed. That kind of intimidation never did a damn thing except make my mother cry and send us moving around and in hiding until I got old enough to fight back. They didn’t come around after that and when I got into the business, I told Marino my terms. No women. No children. My sources, and the idiot himself, had assured me that Angelo was alone at the bakery with his stepfather in the hospital, and Angelo isn’t the kind of guy to score a girlfriend. He’s more the type to buy them, or worse, film them. Scum. So what the hell was the prissy, sexy baker doing in lingerie at Angelo’s place? No way she was an escort. She was too shy and, I don’t know how to describe it...too pure. And even if she worked at the bakery, she wasn’t exactly dressed for work. No, even her glasses and her disheveled hair were sexy as hell on her, all innocent. But she was dressed for torment. So much so that I’d been thinking of her all night. The way the silk rubbed against her pink, pale skin and the soft cardigan that didn’t hide anything wrapped around her where a man’s hands ought to have been. For a small woman, she had amazing, lean legs. Hell, all of her was soft and supple and when I’d picked her up because the little fool was about to step barefoot across the store after I’d smashed it up to scare some sense into Angelo, she’d felt amazing in my large hands. And I swear she’d purred a little like a kitten. I’d fucking nearly gotten a hard-on at that moment, a first for me during work hours.
The whole thing pisses me off. Summer had thrown what should have been a slam dunk smash and scare into something else. After all, I was really doing Angelo a service. The guy was in way over his head trying to pay off his debt to Marino by messing with gangs five times as bad as anything Marino had ever done. And Angelo was shit at cards and now moving into selling women. The idiot was going to end up dead, and now Summer was mixed up in it too and that meant she was in danger. The other men who did my job weren’t so ethical when it came to who they roughed up. Selling the bakery was the best way out for all of them, and Marino was always keen to get good real estate. But Summer didn’t look like she was going to let that happen without hell freezing over. That kind of stubbornness in a situation like this meant she was going to get hurt. And what pisses me off is that the idea of her being hurt bothers me. She bothers me. I have a rule to also not care about things that aren’t my business, but ever since she lobbed that cookie tin at me, she seems to have become my business.
The doorbell rings again and I shuffle through the hallway. If it is Trixie I’m in dangerous territory because Summer has put me in a mood I’m not feeling completely in control of. I throw the door open and find a courier. He looks at me and gulps.
“Kane Dagger?” he asks.
“Who wants to kno
w?” I growl.
“Um...The state of Illinois,” he says.
“For what reason?”
“You’ve been served,” he says. He hands me an official-looking envelope and jumps back like I’m going to eat him alive.
“Served?”
I tear open the envelope and read over the top page. “What the fucking hell?” I say, angry enough now to bust up every bakery in Chicago. Julie is suing me for custody of Maddie. The courier backs away slowly and I slam the door. All thoughts of Summer disintegrate in the heat of my rage. The courier is right to be scared of me. I’ve never been so pissed off in my entire life!
Chapter 9
Summer
I arrive at the address Maddie gave me on the bus in my nicest outfit, the one I use for interviews and scholarship awards, a grey silk blouse tucked into a blue lace midi skirt and my kitten heels. I’ve kept my glasses on today in lieu of contacts. I need to look like a no-nonsense businesswoman, though I feel more like little red riding hood about to march right into the wolf’s lair. And I didn’t realize the address would be a boxing gym. I clutch the cookie tin to my chest and take a deep breath. Two burly men with tribal tattoos up their necks come out of the gym and eye me with amusement. I think instead of the cookie tin I should have brought my boxing gloves, but you use the strengths you have, and luckily Maddie let it slip that her dad loves peanut butter cookies, the making of which is a strength of mine.
I push open the door of the gym and step inside. The place smells of testosterone and even from the entrance I can hear the disconcerting thwap of someone hitting a punching bag over and over. A fat, bald man in a brown suit sits next to the punching bag munching on a box of crackerjacks, but whoever is attacking the thing so violently is hidden from my view. I step forward and take a deep breath.