A Christmas Surprise (16 page)

When they were growing up, he noticed when she turned sixteen and she began to develop. He was right in line with her brothers when they decided she needed looking after. Jade tended to jump into a situation feet first and then weed through the consequences. Two years ago when he received a call while on duty that she had been attacked by her date, he had seen red. The guy had been lucky to just escape with a broken nose. He had been ready to kill him. Since then, he had quietly looked after her while she tried to regain her life.

The yelling that had been going on around him drew him back to reality, and to the hot red head in front of him.

“You guys need a little taste of reality! I am 27 years old and you cannot keep trying to run my life! Who I date, sleep with, or for that matter, look at, is none of your business!” she screamed.

“Let’s get back to the whole sex thing. Do you need it to be dirty, or can it be vanilla sex?” Zach asked, loving to rile up the Cassidy siblings, but the thought of sex with her had him asking bizarre questions that could get his ass kicked.

“Seriously, dude, I’m gonna kick your ass if you do not stop talking about sex with my sister.” Jared pointed at him. Zach chuckled and leaned back, waiting for Jade to get good and pissed.

“Oh really, you don’t think I can make my own decisions, is that what you are saying? Why can’t I have sex with Zach, he is your best friend surely you can trust him to be with me?” she yelled. “Besides, any kind of sex would be good, even if it is with Zach!”

“Hey,” Zach said, feeling as if he may have been insulted.

“Okay, yes, that’s what I’m saying. Look at the losers you keep going out with. Stop talking about my best friend like you stand a chance of doing him. He is way out of your league.” Jared stood and towered over his pissed off sister.

“Fine,” she said quietly and then looked down. This was never a good sign when Jade decided to be quiet.

Jade quietly walked around the furniture and out the door. Zach groaned and closed his eyes, knowing that this time her brothers may have pushed her too hard.

Jared sat back down in his chair looking like he had won some kind of war. “See guys, I told you, Jade needs to realize we know what’s best for her. We just need to calmly and quietly find a nice guy that will treat her good. Zach, I will kick your ass if you even think about my sister that way!”

Her brother nodded. Zach shook his head and chuckled. He knew that eventually they would not like what was coming down the pike for them. They went back to watching the football game. Zach was going to have to make a move soon or things would really get out of hand. He knew she was going to be his—it was the terms he was worried about.

Jade needed to realize that things were not always going to go her way. He knew about her schemes over the past few years and until now, he laughed about them. She was a spoiled brat and sometimes acted like it. Zach wanted her on his terms. It was a battle of wills that he was determined to win. This game was forever, he needed to make sure Jade was ready for that type of commitment.

Over the past few years, he had hinted to her brothers that he might be interested in Jade. So far, they had blown him off. He thought it was time for them to realize that he was the one for their sister and that was really the only way it was going to go. Now he needed to work up the nerve to talk to his best friend.

Excerpt from Dangerous Trio Part One

Dangerous Series

By Jana Leigh

Chapter One

She needed to get the hell out of here and quick. Bailey was alone for now, but someone could show up anytime, she had been here too long as it was. She looked around the office she had for the last few years to make sure it looked like she hadn’t been in yet. She was depressed when she noticed there were very little personal items she wanted to take with her. She was an accountant for a travel agency in Denver, Colorado. It was supposed to be a boring and steady job to go along with the life she planned, but it dawned on her just how boring her life had become.

Bailey had enough trauma and upheaval when she was young to last her a lifetime. Her parents were killed in a robbery in the store they owned when she was five years old. She was the only witness to the murder of her parents, and had no family to speak of since her parents were both only children and their parents were dead too. They had been unable to find someone to take her after the incident, so she had ended up in the system, scared, alone and traumatized. She found herself on her own when she was fifteen and made her way through college by herself, working waitressing jobs and cleaning houses to survive.

Bailey had been at the top of her college class when she graduated. She planned her life down to the smallest detail, choosing accounting because there was no excitement in that field. Who would have thought a travel agency could be corrupt? She was usually such a good judge of character, the elderly man who hired her seemed so nice, like her own fairy grandfather. She now knew he was the head of the Digrossi family from New York.

When she was doing an audit last week, she found a file on her employer's computer, thinking it was a new venture, so she had downloaded it and took it home to get organized. When she opened it last night, warning bells had gone off when she read the amount of money going from an offshore account to the agency account and back. Bailey thought she was mistaken, and had come in at three this morning to try to see what she had downloaded. What she found was more of the same illegal transactions from one account to another that were not explained.

Bailey remembered when Caesar Digrossi came to her when she was a senior at Colorado State University. She craved a family so bad. When this cute little old man came to the college asking for help with his new business, the professor had directed him to her and she grabbed the opportunity with both hands. She could have had her pick of any job she wanted, but she chose a small job with the old man. She had just completed her exams and was going to start looking for a job when he showed up asking for help establishing a company in Colorado. He seemed so unassuming in baggy clothes and a cane, giving her a lemon drop when she coughed from a dry throat. He was a small statured man and she immediately wanted to help him because he looked like a grandfather should.

So wrapped up in her fantasy, Bailey started out right from graduation helping him get his company off the ground. He told her his family in New York refused to help him because of his age. She disliked them from the start, thinking they ignored the old man unless they wanted something. She was always getting phone calls from them, asking for money, but never asking to talk to Caesar personally. They just wanted the cash and never cared how he was doing. What kind of family would do that? She took it upon herself to make sure the man was taken care of. She arranged for a cook and a cleaner to take care of his house and she attended every birthday, anniversary, and holiday at his house. His family was never in attendance, only she was at every important event.

Bailey was heartbroken last night when she found his real name on a file in his computer. Caesar was his first name but instead of Branner, which she had always thought his last name was, she found his family name was really Digrossi. After looking on the internet for hours, she had read all of the history of the family. It was not hard to find since the family was notoriously known in New York for being one of the cruelest families to have ever been in the mob. They were all investigated regularly for trafficking and arms dealing. The Feds had never been able to make a charge stick because the paper trail always dried up. That was because she had been covering it here in Colorado, not New York. Bailey thought she had done the books for a successful start-up travel agency when she was really cleaning millions of dollars in dirty money daily for a mobster. What a dope she had been. All she wanted was a quiet life, with a family, and she thought she was well on her way to getting that too. Caesar and his company had helped her find that and it was gone in the blink of an eye.

She needed to get all the files she could and get the hell out of the office before Caesar and Bruce came in for the day. Bruce, her boyfriend, wasn’t who she thought either. He was Bruno, another member of the Digrossi family on the run. Bailey shook her head and thought the last five years of her life were a lie. She had no one to blame but herself, because dammit, she wanted to believe they were good people. She finished copying the entire file she could find and then bent down to gather her purse. Thankfully, she was hidden when she heard the outer door slam, because Bailey was no longer alone.

She heard, rather than saw Caesar and Bruno come into the office. She could see their shoes beneath her desk. They came closer to her door, which stood open so she would be able to move freely around and hear if someone came into the office. Unfortunately, she never left her door open at the end of the day, so it was like a red flag waving to the men that she was here.

“Bailey?” She heard the old man call. She squished farther under her desk so unless they came all the way into her office and around the desk, they wouldn’t be able to see her.

“Did you find her?” Caesar called to Bruno.

“No, but she was on all the computers sometime over the night,” Bruno said grimly.

“Are you sure? She may have been just working late, you know the audit was due,” Caesar said softly.

“Caesar, you know she isn’t stupid. I told you last night when we found the file opened and copied on your computer. Bailey knows what’s going on now. We need to deal with it,” the young man said.

“Bailey could come around. You know, I think she would make a great addition to the family. She is just what we need, Bruno. We just have to convince her it would be best if she stayed with us. If she refuses, I guess we have to get rid of her, but you know I have a soft spot for her,” Caesar said.

“I know, Pops, but we have to get her under control now. You know what Junior said, if we don’t have her by the end of the day, they will come here and help.” Bruno grimaced. “Junior will not care if you have a soft spot for her or not, he will take care of the problem.”

“No he will not. I am still head of this family. He will do what I tell him. I want her brought into the fold before she is hurt. Bruno, she was beginning to warm up to you. I thought we were making progress with her.” She was hearing what they were saying, but her brain was refusing to function, she just wanted out.

“I told you that you should have bedded her a long time ago. We could have used that to control her.” Caesar censored.

“Pops, she is a cold fish. Do you know how many times over the last year I took her out on a date then had to go to a hooker after, just to make it through?” Bruno whined.

“You dipshit. We can control those ones. How many times have I told you she would be grateful to have you in her bed? A shy little mouse like her would be happy with a handsome man like you just to look her way. All you had to do was fuck her once a week and she would be happy,” Caesar said and hit the man on the back of the head.

Bailey had heard enough. It wasn’t as if she needed to hear she was a cold fish, she never seemed to get the whole sex thing. What was the big deal? She wasn’t a virgin for god sakes, but her experience was limited to a few very unsatisfying encounters which proved to her that she wasn’t a real sexual person. Her co-workers would often talk about their evenings with their boyfriends, Bailey would never join in the conversation because she couldn’t relate at all. She had never had an orgasm in her life, and she was convinced she never would.

She waited behind her desk for the opportunity to get out of there, blocking out their conversation about her inability to keep Bruno’s interest in bed. She had no idea where she was going to go, she had few friends and no family. Her ears perked up when she heard Bruno and Caesar making plans to leave and find her. She listened to the places she needed to avoid, which unfortunately was every place she had been thinking she could go. Bailey was so predictable, she couldn’t even think of a place to hide that was original.