Nonna didn’t fad diet. She didn’t jump on any trend. She was old-school in a lot of ways but managed to surprise me in others.
“Nonna, let me get that,” I said, making a move to take the twenty-four-inch wooden spoon from her.
She eyed the spoon handle and then me as she continued to stir. Her look was all the warning I needed.
Touch the spoon at my own peril.
She was tiny but plucky. Not to mention, I was pretty sure after a genealogy assignment I was handed in junior high that her side of the family had a long-standing history with the Mafia. Of course, if you asked her, she denied it and then would wink. Apparently, full-fledged Mafia members didn’t like discussing it with kids for school projects.
I may have had her by a foot and was fifty years younger, but I was no dummy. I wasn’t going to touch her spoon without permission. There was always the off chance she’d follow through on her threat to tan my hide. And at my age, if I was going to be spanked, I wanted it to be by a hunky guy, not my grandmother.
Putting my hands up to signal surrender, I nodded. “You don’t need my help with dinner. The kitchen is your domain. Message received.”
“Good,” she said, appearing pleased as punch. “Now, back to you and finding a man.”
I groaned. “I thought we were off that topic.”
“You thought wrong,” she said with a grin.
“Can we please talk about something else? Anything else?” I begged as I considered making a move to snatch the wooden spoon from Nonna and run through her apartment, holding it out of her reach, just to get her mind off me and men.
I highly doubted it would work, but it could totally be worth her wrath for the sheer amusement factor alone.
She shrugged. “Fine. But we will revisit this.”
Oh goodie.
Nonna lifted her head slightly. “When you get a chance, will you look at the table thing again?”
By “table thing,” she meant tablet. I’d long ago stopped trying to get her to understand she was saying it wrong. “What’s up with it?”
“The Face-a-book is not working,” she said, her Italian accent shining through. “It won’t let me in. I tried the word-pass you wrote down. It didn’t work.”
She had a habit of keying in the passwords wrong and getting locked out.
“I’ll look at it after dinner,” I said.
She eyed the black dress I was wearing and gave a nod of approval. “That looks good on you. Shows your figure. You went with a support bra. Good. You’re not as blessed in the chest as most women. Your dress could be a little shorter.”
Nothing like being reminded I was a solid B cup. As for my dress, it came to just below my knees when I was standing and when I sat, it rode up slightly. “Nonna, it’s short enough for work.”
“You have such long legs. Show them off,” she said, still employing her cooking genius on the sauce before her. “It would draw attention from your chest. Maybe no one will notice it then.”
“My breasts are just fine, Nonna,” I said, sounding as tired as the conversation made me feel. I was no Marcy in the chest area, but I held my own just fine. That being said, I found myself adjusting my bra, hoping Victoria was able to work her magik.
Nonna merely glanced at my attempt at fluffing “the girls” and then checked her pot of water. It was nearly to a rolling boil.
“I saw on television they have chicken cutlets you can put in your bra to give you more cleavage,” she said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Chicken cutlets?”
“Something that looks like them, yes,” she said, nodding with great enthusiasm. “You should try them.”
“To help me land a man?” I asked.
She shrugged as if that hadn’t been her meaning all along.
“You do realize that all I do is work. Kind of hard to find a man there.”
“Plenty of good boys from the old neighborhood have gotten railroaded through the system. You could pick one of them,” she countered, as if my office made a point of seeking out people from my old neighborhood to prosecute.
We didn’t.
Can I help that the “boys” she was referring to, who were really grown men, were caught up in racketeering and countless other illegal activities? I wasn’t even the prosecutor assigned to their cases. Didn’t matter to Nonna.
I checked my watch, wondering how late Marcy planned on being. She always made for a nice buffer between Nonna and me. Nonna often referred to herself as being a witch. The two of them would get lost in conversations about herbs and oils and whatever else it was they liked so much.
Once they’d stopped everything to make soap poppets—whatever those were. It had kept them entertained and given me time to break out my laptop to get caught up on work emails. It also kept me out of Nonna’s dating crosshairs.
Her push for marriage wasn’t limited to me. She also did it to Marcy, who just so happened to be unwed, but Marcy took her in stride, seeming to enjoy the meddling.
Clearly, Marcy was a stronger woman than me.
Then again, Nonna was gentler with her pushes for Marcy to find a man and settle down. I suspected it had something to do with Marcy’s past. It was one we didn’t bring up.
Nonna began to hum and rock her head back and forth. It was then I noticed her hair, always dyed ink-black, was styled slightly different from her usual way. It suited her.
“I like your hair. It’s styled different but it looks very nice on you,” I said, noticing she had on the red sweater I’d gotten her for her birthday. The one she’d informed me would be saved for a special occasion. “You’re awfully gussied up for dinner with Marcy and me.”
“Am I?” she asked coyly. That meant she was up to something. “You never know who may be stopping by.”
I groaned. “You didn’t fix me up with someone, did you?”
“I would never,” she said.
“Liar,” I returned. “You’ve already tried fixing me up how many times in the past?”
She laughed. “Too many to count. You find something wrong with every one of them. You’re impossible to please. At your age, you should be less picky.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a real confidence booster?” I asked sardonically.
“No,” she said with all honesty. “Never.”
Shocking.
“I wonder what’s keeping Marcy,” I said, checking my watch again, desperate for her arrival to help give my grandmother a new target.
Anyone who knew Marcy and me wondered how it was we were friends at all with as opposite as we were. I was a ball-busting assistant district attorney, and she was whatever the ether told her to be at the moment. At last check, that was a yoga instructor, but a few months back it was a massage therapist; before that it was working for an online psychic service.
The list went on and on.
We’d met my freshman year of college when I’d gone off to Yale. It had been hard for me to leave the island of Manhattan. It had been my everything. All I’d ever known. And I’d been incredibly close with my mother and grandmother. The idea of leaving them both to head off to Yale, of all places, had scared the crap out of me (not that I’d have confessed as much out loud).
I’d arrived on the scene, went to my assigned residential college dorm, found my suite, and met my roommates. The suite was made for four occupants, with two per bedroom and a center shared common area. While there had been four of us to start with, Marcy had managed to scare off the girl sharing her room just one night into the ordeal.
Oddly, the university never filled the slot. So it had been only three of us from then on out.
Perfect.
We’d remained close for twenty years, becoming like sisters to one another.
Poppy lived in California. I lived in New York City. And Marcy lived wherever the wind blew her. Right now, the wind had her in New York. I’d offered my apartment to her as a place to crash but she’d refused, staying with a manfriend of hers.
I wasn’t about to judge her. After all, I’d seen the guy, and I wouldn’t kick him out of my bed for eating crackers.
Marcy had a way of attracting very handsome men but never seeming to notice as much. It was part of her charm.
Her charm had worn a bit in the last several days, as she’d been on a kick for me to learn to channel my anger issues and release them. She seemed to think deep breathing would do the trick. That, and lighting incense that made me cough and choke.
Nonna stirred the sauce, and I caught the scent of basil and garlic—all things that made me think of her and of growing up. “It shouldn’t be that a grandmother has more male suitors than her granddaughter. If you were nicer to men, they might want to ask you out more.”
That made me chuckle. “I’m nice-ish and I date.”
“Is that what you call what you do?” she asked, arching a brow in judgment. “Norma told me all about the walk of shame. How many times have you done this walk?”
“Nonna, why would your friend be talking about walks of shame?” I asked, unsure I wanted to know.
“Because she had one after her night with Chester,” said Nonna matter-of-factly, as if that sort of thing was common behavior for a woman only two years her junior.
It took everything I had to keep from cracking up as I got a mental image of Norma holding her shoes in her hands as she tried to quietly shuffle out of Chester’s room without anyone noticing.
I swear there were some people in the building who camped out near their peepholes, never missing a beat. Very little happened in the building without everyone hearing about it by the next day.
“I thought Chester and Shirley were an item,” I said, having a vested interest in the topic. I visited my grandmother twice a week and always got all the juicy gossip.
Nonna waved a hand in the air dismissively. “No. Shirley was playing stuff the cannoli with George.”
I gasped. “No. After all that time she spent trying to catch Chester’s eye?”
My grandmother nodded. “She was only in it for the chase. After that, the thrill was gone. It was on to the next poor sap. Now George is with Rita.”
“But Rita is married to Lou,” I countered.
Nonna glanced at me. “They’re trying something called an open marriage. Have you ever heard of such a thing? And Lou has an oxygen tank he has to wheel around with him all the time now. He says it gives him more stamina. I just think it means he has to avoid open flames, but what do I know?”
“This place is better than a daytime soap opera,” I said, meaning every word of it.
Though it was kind of sad that my grandmother and her cronies got more action than I did. In my defense, I worked long hours and didn’t put much stock in the whole relationship thing. If I had the urge for sex, I hooked up with a man for a night, maybe two. Nothing more. I made that clear going into it all.
No strings.
No walks of shame.
When I left, it was with my head held high.
I owned my sexuality.
“There is rarely a dull moment around here,” she admitted. “Just wait until I tell you about Betsy’s granddaughter and the man she ran off with.”
“Stop. I’m not sure I can take all of these developments in one sitting,” I said with a smile.
“I’ll save that one for another visit,” she said.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you playing stuff the cannoli with anyone?”
She blushed. “No. But I do have a gentleman caller. He’s newer to the building.”
“Tell me more,” I said, grabbing for the small bowl of shaved mozzarella cheese on the counter. I popped a piece into my mouth.
Mischief filled Nonna’s face. “His name is Peter Beard.”
“How unfortunate for him,” I said, partially under my breath.
She kept stirring, used to my quips.
After my mother’s passing while I was in college, Nonna had decided she wanted to live in a community of people her own age. She’d told me about three places in the city that her friends said were good senior centers, offering independent and assisted-living options, and I went with her to look at each. That had been twenty years ago.
She’d been here ever since.
In the span of two decades, she’d developed a tight-knit group of friends in her building, each looking after the other, on top of a trained staff available at all hours should the need arise.
The only thing I didn’t like about having her in a senior center was that each time I talked to her, it seemed as if someone else had died. Though it never bothered her. At least not that she showed me. Then again, she’d always handled death differently from most.
She went to the small drawer near the stove and pulled out a silver soup spoon. She then gathered some sauce from the pot and held the spoon out for me to have a taste.
Having played the role of faithful sauce sidekick hundreds of times in my life, I knew my job well. At six feet tall in my stocking feet, I had to bend a good deal to be at her level, especially since I was a foot taller than her.
I tasted the sauce and knew better than to lie. She’d know. “Needs salt.”
“Good girl,” she said, as if she’d been testing me. She then placed the soup spoon in the sink and returned to her post at the stockpot.
I groaned. “Nonna, for the billionth time, just because I work around criminals every day doesn’t mean they’re corrupting me. I can be trusted.”
“It’s not the criminals I worry about,” she said, her voice even. “It’s the other attorneys. Lawyers. They’re smooth talkers. Full of empty promises. Silver-tongued devils. The lot of them. You saw what they did to the neighborhood boys.”
I let her continue her one-woman diatribe on all the ways lawyers were the root of all evil. When she finished, I looked down at her. “You do realize I’m a lawyer, right?”
“You don’t count,” she said, adding a touch of salt to the sauce as she stirred.
“Thanks. I think.”
“You didn’t answer me about finding a man and settling down,” said Nonna.
I was hoping she’d forgotten about that.
No such luck.
“We’ve gone over this before,” I said, already tired, and the topic had just started up again. “I don’t have time to date.”
“Make time,” she said as if it were that easy. “You should take a vacation.”
“And go where and do what?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Maybe go to South Carolina.”
“What?” I was honestly shocked she even knew there was a state called South Carolina. The woman had come over from Italy when she was younger, arrived in New York City, and there she had remained. She didn’t travel off the island much, if ever, anymore. To her, everything she needed in the world was in the radius of a few blocks, and the world beyond that was pointless.
I’d tried to take her back to Italy for Christmas one year and you’d have thought I’d threatened to give her secret sauce recipe out on the internet with the way she’d reacted. I’d assumed she’d be thrilled to visit her homeland.
“Why on earth would you suggest South Carolina as a place for me to vacation?” I asked with a slight laugh, picturing myself in the South. I’d stick out like a sore thumb.
She focused on her sauce in a way that said she was up to something. “No reason other than the time has come.”
The time had come? What did she mean by that?
“Nonna, what are you up to?” I asked.
Nonna put pasta in the boiling water and ignored my question.
There was a knock on the door, and I couldn’t have gotten to it faster if I tried. Tossing the door open, I came face-to-face with someone who wasn’t Marcy. Unless Marcy had suddenly turned into a man who looked to be my grandmother’s age.
The man stood there in a suit that was a little loose on him, as if it had been from a day when he had more bulk than he did now. He held a bouquet of flowers in his hands and looked nerv
ous. The top of his head was shiny and totally absent of hair. Most of it seemed to have migrated to the sides of his head and his ears.
“You must be Dana,” he said, squaring his shoulders and standing tall. Well, as tall as his five-foot, five-inch frame would allow.
I stared down at him and realized why it was my grandmother was so gussied up. She’d planned the dinner so that I could meet the new man in her life. “And you must be Peter.”
He gave a curt nod. “I am. It was so nice of Wilma to arrange this dinner. I’ve been asking to meet you for weeks now. I ran into your friend down the street when I was getting flowers. She said to tell you she can’t make it to dinner tonight but to try to remember to work on your breathing exercises.”
I was going to have words with Marcy later for abandoning me in my hour of need.
I held the door open for him. “Come on in, Peter. We can discuss your intentions with my grandmother.”
Three
Jeffrey
The door to the bar opened and in walked a tall man with dark hair. Brett was in full uniform and everything about him screamed law enforcement. It didn’t hurt that his badge and name tag announced as much too. He was the chief of police in Grimm Cove, and just so happened to be Jeffrey’s best friend since basically birth. On top of that, Brett was also pack enforcer. That meant when there was a pack issue, Brett handled Jeffrey’s wishes. He was the muscle behind the rule of law.
Brett’s presence drew the attention of all the slayers at the table, and they stopped laughing and carrying on, choosing instead to watch him carefully. They weren’t as stupid as they looked. They knew Brett was a wild card.
And while Jeffrey was a force to be reckoned with, when Brett was by his side, he was nearly unstoppable.
Brett’s dark gaze landed on the slayers. There it remained for a long, pregnant pause. No one said a word as Brett stared at the slayers and they, in turn, stared right back at him. A few of the slayers looked a little green around the collar at the sight of Brett.
Brett had a look about him that announced he was lethal. It had always been that way. His enforcer side leaked off him as well, putting other supernaturals on blast. As a general rule, enforcers of any shifter pack, be it wolves or whatever, were typically known for having short fuses. Brett’s was longer than most but that wasn’t saying much.
Hexing with a Chance of Tornadoes: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Romance Novel (Grimm Cove Book 2) Page 3