TOMMY GABRINI 2: A PLACE IN HIS HEART (12 page)

“Nayla?
 
What’s her issue?”

“She
wants a promotion.”

“A
promotion?” Tommy asked.
 
The nerve of
these people!
 
“She’s barely handling
logistics, and now she wants a promotion?”

“She
concluded that she has the friendship card so she might as well play it, that’s
all.
 
But I disabused her of her
conclusions.”

Tommy
exhaled with a distressed release.
 
“I’m
beginning to wonder if I was doing you a favor when I turned that company over
to you.
 
I wonder if it was the right
move.”

“It
was absolutely the right move, Tommy, what are you saying?
 
It’s a dream come true for me!
 
I always wanted to run my own company.
 
Did I think it was going to be a company this
size?
 
No.
 
But it’s a wonderful thing you did for
me.
 
And things will get better.
 
I’ve just got to work harder and earn their
respect, that’s all.
 
And I plan to do
it.
 
I plan to work my butt off to turn
Trammel around.
 
So don’t worry about me,
please.
 
I’m fine.
 
You just go to New York and take care of your
business and return to me in one piece.”

Tommy
smiled.
 
“I think I love you, kid,” he
said.

“You
think
?” Grace asked, and Tommy laughed.

“I
knew that would get a rise out of you,” he said.

But
when they said their final goodbyes and he hung up the phone, he still felt
uneasy.
 
In many ways giving Grace a company
once owned outright by Jillian put Grace in an untenable position.
 
Although she was telling him she was fine, he
now knew better.
 
She had to be stressed
to the max and overwhelmed by the massive responsibility she was now
undertaking.
 
And he was just going to
toss it in her lap and leave her to it?
 
They said he babied her too much and had to let her sink or swim on her
own.
 
But to hell with what they said.
 
He pressed the intercom button.

“Albert,”
he said.

His
driver responded.
 
“Yes, sir, Mr. Gabrini?”

“Turn
this thing around, and take me to Grace.”

Albert
smiled.
 
He loved Grace too.
 
“Yes, sir,” he said, and turned that “thing”
around.

Grace
had showered, put on her pajamas, and was in her home office reading over
stacks of Trammel’s paperwork when knocks were heard on her front door.
 
No-one had buzzed requesting entry, so the
knocking surprised her.
 
What surprised
her more, however, after sitting her reading glasses on her desk and walking
toward the front door, was when the door was unlocked before she made it to it,
and somebody was opening it.

She
was about to run to the kitchen and grab a butcher’s knife when Tommy quickly
revealed himself.
 

“Tommy?”
she asked.
 
Then she placed her hand over
her heart.
 
“But I thought you were on
your way to the airport.”

“I
was,” he said as he closed the door.
 
“But I had to make sure you were okay.
 
I had to see for myself.”

And
what he saw, the strain and anguish, said all that needed to be said.
 
He opened his arms.
 
And Grace ran into them, sobbing as soon as
she felt the warmth of his arms encircling her.

A few
minutes later and they were on Grace’s sofa.
 
She was seated on his lap and he had one hand on the small of her
back.
 
She was no longer crying, and he
was watching her as she slowly began to rebound.
 
He had said nothing for several minutes, to
give her some time, but now he was talking.

“It’s
not your fault,” he said to her.
 
“She
left you with no real choice.
 
I would
have been disappointed in you if you would not have made the move you made.”

“But
I hate acting in anger.
 
Trammel needs
Jillian’s expertise, I know it does.
 
She’s a bitch, but she knows everything there is to know about Trammel.
 
And I had hoped . . . I had hoped we could
work together.”

“She’ll
never see you as her equal, honey.
 
You’ll always be her assistant in her eyes.”

“Or
worse,” Grace said.
 
“And I know it.
 
But I’m more concerned about Trammel right
now, not if she respects me or not.
 
Firing Jillian just wasn’t the move I wanted to make right now.”

“That’s
the cost of being boss, my dear,” Tommy said.
 
And he should know.
 
After rising
swiftly up the ranks to captain in the Seattle police department, where his
father was head of the entire department, he left to start his own business.
 
He’d been in the role of boss most of his
adult life.
 
“I’m surprised she left the
building at all,” he said.
 
“It’s not
Jilly’s style to give in.
 
How did you
manage that?”

“Oh,
I had to call Security,” she said.

Tommy
was surprised.
 
“You called Security on
Jilly?”

“I
had to.
 
And I made clear that if they
didn’t obey that order they would be joining Jilly in the unemployment line.”

Tommy
laughed.

“Oh,
yeah, my name was Miss Bitch all day today,” she said.

Tommy
pulled her closer.
 
“Good for you,” he said.
 
“You’re young so they’re going to try you
now.
 
You did the absolute right
thing.
 
I would have handled it the same
way.”

Grace
looked at Tommy.
 
She respected him in
every way, but especially as a successful businessman.
 
“Really?” she asked him.

“Absolutely,”
he said, cuddling her now.
 
“You did it
exactly right.
 
And don’t worry, it’ll
get easier.”

“What
will?”

“Firing
people,” he said and Grace leaned against his chest.
 
Coming from Tommy, it did make her feel
better.
 
And he was right.
 
Firing people would probably get easier for
her the more she did it.
 
But just the
thought of something that monumental being easy for anybody was a terrible
thought to her.

“I
hate to say this,” Tommy said as he stared at her.

Grace
looked back up at him, yet another worried look in her big brown eyes.
 
“What is it?
 
What do you hate to say?”

“You
look so damn sexy when you’re worried.”

Grace
smiled and shook her head.
  
“Reno said
you were a sex maniac.
 
He wasn’t
playing.”

Tommy
moved his hand inside of her pajama bottoms.
 
“Oh, yeah?
 
That’s what you think
of me?”

Grace
grinned as his hand began to massage her folds.
 
He was already beginning to get that hooded look.
 
“Yes,” she said.
 
“That’s precisely what I think of you.”

“I’m
only telling the truth,” Tommy said, as her cunt began to moisten his
fingers.
 
“You’re sexy when you look
worried.”

“But
I’m not looking worried right now.
 
I’m
smiling right now.”

“Just
as I said,” Tommy said, dead serious.
 
“You look sexy when you’re smiling.”

Grace
laughed, but Tommy couldn’t.
 
He began to
unbutton and unzip his pants.

“Don’t
you have a plane to catch, Mr. Gabrini?” Grace asked him.
 
She was still half-joking until he pulled his
big rod out.

“After
I catch my cock in your pussy,” Tommy said, pulling her pajama pants down to
her ankles, “then I’ll catch that plane.”

Any
smiles Grace might have had slowly began to recede as he kept his word and
captured her cunt with his cock.
 
Although he eased it in, since he had gotten her partially ready, the
pain still came.

“It’ll
feel better,” he whispered to her as he moved his thick dick into her tight
space and began to gyrate it.
 
“You know
I always make it feel good.”

“I
know,” Grace said as she endured that first burst of pain.
 
But as he eased in and out, and she began to
moisten even more, the pain became less intense until it was nonexistent.
 
He turned her around, taking her pajama pants
off altogether, as she straddled him and faced him.

She
rode his fully aroused cock with pleasure.
 
Her vagina was hot with the feel of his erection and he held onto her
hips as she rode.
 
He pulled her against
him, wrapping her in his arms, as her naked bottom rode his naked cock until
his cock became so engorged that it was spilling out of her like a boiling pot
spilling over.
 
All sides were saturating
her, and she kept riding.
 
His body was
clenching from the intensity and he was holding her far tighter than he should,
but it still felt too good for him to relax.
 
He even lifted her pajama top and began sucking her breasts, as their
fucking heightened with his release, instead of ebbing.
 

Until
Grace came too.
 
Until Grace rode down on
his dick one time too many and it hit that tender spot that took her over.
 
His release was already sliding down his dick
and her thighs when she came, and her practically naked body fell against his
practically cloth body as her pulsations and all of that riding she had done
made her cum.
 

By
the time they both were well spent, Tommy buttoned his pants, lifted her
half-naked body, and carried her to the bathroom.
 
He sat her on the Jack and Jill vanity,
grabbed a cloth, and began cleaning first her, thoroughly, and then he began
cleaning himself.
 
But just looking into
her eyes, at the way her hair flapped over her forehead and her shirt was still
pulled up revealing the breasts his mouth had sufficiently wet, did him in
again.
 

He
kissed her on the mouth.
 
With a long,
circular kiss.
 
When he finally let her
up for air, she smiled.
 

“Again,
don’t you have a plane to catch?” she asked him.

“Again,”
he said, as he trailed kisses down her face, “after I catch your pussy, I’ll
catch my plane.”
 
And he was moving
downward, toward that pussy, kissing first her breasts and nipples, and then kneeling
down, opening her legs wide, and licking her, preparing her, and then sucking
her until it felt as if he was determined to suck her dry.

She
kept moving as he sucked and licked her until her back was against the
mirror.
 
But that didn’t stop Tommy.
 
He was a man on a mission, where his mission,
it seemed to Grace, was to make her remember him vividly when he left her and
went out of town.
 
Their earlier
lovemaking would have done the trick, she felt, but Tommy didn’t share that
feeling.
 
Because, after licking and
sucking her so long that she was red with fire, and her folds were wrinkled
with drain, he put his dick in her again.

“You’re
my baby, you hear me?” Tommy said almost angrily as he fucked her; as he slid
her ass up and down on the vanity, banging her so long and so hard, making
loud, slapping noises, that once again after his branding style of lovemaking,
she nearly fainted from the euphoria of the sensations.

“I
hear you,” she finally said in a faint voice, as her entire body, sated beyond belief,
collapsed into his arms.

CHAPTER NINE

As
the weeks came and went and life for Grace as head of Trammel became her new
normal, life for Jillian Birch took more of a drastic turn than even the day
she was fired from what she would forever consider to be her own company.
 
She wanted back in.
 
Not because she had any illusions about
working for Grace McKinsey.
 
That wasn’t
going to happen.
 
She’d never accept
Grace as anything more than the help, the assistant, the head nigger in charge
of nothing!
 
But she needed the leverage
of being there, of consolidating her power, before she was forced to make her
next move.

That
was her plan, anyway, when she asked her son to schedule a meeting with Grace,
away from Trammel, in an effort to facilitate Jillian’s return.
 
But the impact of that meeting alone would
force Jillian to make her next move.

Grace
only agreed to the meeting, let Jillian tell it, because Grace knew that
Tommy’s hostile takeover of Trammel was as wrong as it could be.
 
Jillian was also convinced, now that Grace
was in charge, that Grace now realized just how over her head she really was
and how badly she needed Jillian’s expertise.
 
She therefore wasn’t surprised at all when Grace agreed to the meeting.

Cameron
Birch and Grace met at Diamante’s, Tommy’s restaurant.
 
Although Tommy was out of town on business,
his brother Sal was at the restaurant that day.
 
Jillian asked her brother Lootie Pressley to also attend the
meeting.
 
Not as a guest, but as a
spy.
 
He would sit further away and observe.
 
If Cameron lost his cool, Lootie, who spent
more time in the penal system than he spent out of it, was the only man Jillian
knew who could settle Cam back down.
 
But
from what Lootie later told Jillian, there was no need to intervene at all
initially.
 
Grace showed up first, and
then Cameron showed up, and they both seemed to be discussing Jillian’s return
to Trammel in a very civil, calm manner.
  

But
everything changed, according to Lootie, when Grace apparently refused
Jillian’s request.
 
The fact that she
would refuse to allow Jillian to return to her own company was, as Lootie later
would say, too much for Cam to abide.

Grace
seemed to be gathering her purse to leave, as if she had nothing more to say to
Cam.
 
It was then that Cam reached into his
pocket and pulled out what Lootie at first thought was going to be his wallet,
or maybe even his cell phone.
 
Cam,
instead, pulled out a gun.
 
But instead
of pointing it at that bitch Grace the way Lootie thought he should have done,
Cam pointed the gun beneath his own chin, and fired.

Tommy’s
brother Sal jumped across the bar counter and ran to Grace’s aid while the
entire restaurant fell into pandemonium.
 
People were running and knocking over chairs and doing everything in
their power to get themselves out of the line of any fire.
 
Lootie had to knock people over himself just
to get to his nephew’s side, as the blood poured fiercely, but there was no
denying how bad it was.
 
It was bad.
 
Lootie didn’t think Cam would survive the
night.

But
he did survive the night.
 
While Tommy
was flying back to be by Grace’s side, Jillian was rushing to the hospital to
be by her only child’s side.
 
Tommy took
Grace away from Seattle to be with his cousin Reno and Reno’s family, until the
dust cleared, but he could have taken her to hell for all Jillian cared.
 
Jillian never left her son’s bedside.
 
Day and night she stayed right there,
listening to that lonely sound of his respirator.
 
All she wanted was for her child to be
okay.
 

But
he wasn’t okay.
 
Two weeks after Tommy
and Grace returned from their getaway trip to Vegas, Cameron Birch was finally
pronounced dead.
 
Even life support could
not sustain him any longer.

Jillian
found the pain unbearable, even as Lootie held her up.

“He was
a good son, Jilly,” Lootie said as they stood at the bedside of the now
deceased young man.
 
“He was a very good
son.”
 

“He
was the best son,” Jillian corrected him, even though Cam had given her nothing
but heartache and grief since his childhood.
 
“He didn’t deserve this.”

“No,”
Lootie agreed.
 
“No, he did not.
 
But I knew nothing good would come of an
alliance with that Grace McKinsey.”

Jillian
nodded her agreement, wiping tears with a tissue as she stared at her son’s
lifeless body.
 
“She hasn’t been to this
hospital once.
 
Not once.
 
And she hasn’t bothered to so much as give me
a call.
 
After all I did for that girl.
 
Now that she has Tommy Gabrini, she couldn’t
care less about my boy.”

Lootie
looked at her.
 
“So what are we going to
do about it, Jilly?
 
We know who’s really
responsible here.
 
What are we going to
do?”

“She’s
ruined us,” Jillian said, still caught up in the cause of the situation rather
than the solution to it.
  
“First she
took my business away from me.
  
Now
she’s taken my son.
 
My precious
child.”
 
Then she paused for a long time,
as the reality of Cameron’s departure stung her again and the tears began to
flow once more.
 

Then
she went on: “She’s got to pay.”

Lootie
stared at his nephew’s lifeless body.
 
He
had so much to live for until he hooked up with that Grace McKinsey.
 
“Yes, she does,” he said.
 
“Oh, yes, she does.”

The
day after Cameron’s death, Grace stepped off the elevator on the top floor at
Trammel Transport and began heading for her office.
 
It used to be Jillian’s office, now it was
hers.
 
Although the nightmares she used
to have just after he put that gun to his chin had subsided, the fact that he
died yesterday reignited that feeling of drain.
 
She and Cam had their issues.
 
He
broke her heart when they used to date, and then for him to force her to
witness what ultimately became his suicide almost made her want to hate
him.
 
But he was still a human being, a
person she once actually cared for.
 
It
wasn’t a happy day.

And
she knew it wasn’t a happy day for the Trammel family either.
 
Cameron was once vice president of Trammel,
at least in name only, and she therefore understood that some would grieve his
passing.
 
But because he had been meeting
with Grace when the shooting happened, and Grace was the person who had fired
his mother and took over the top spot, she didn’t want their grief to turn into
some kind of battle cry against Trammel.

She
decided to meet with senior management and inform them to make sure that their
staffs were focusing on the work at hand and not on any of these side issues,
sad though they may be.
 
She therefore
wasn’t in her office a full half hour before she came back out and made her way
to the reception desk, where Carol, the receptionist, sat.

“Notify
all senior staff that I want to meet with them at three p.m. today,” she said
to her receptionist.

“Today?”
Carol asked.
 
“But that’s not enough
notice.
 
Most of them have their
manifests set already.”

“I
want them in the conference room at three,” Grace reiterated.

“But
I don’t think that’s fair, Grace,” the receptionist said.
 
“You should at least give them twenty-four
hour notice.
 
At least that.”

Grace
looked at her receptionist.
 
Even she was
questioning her authority.
 
“I’m not
suggesting that you contact these people, Carol, I’m telling you to contact
these people.
 
I want all senior staff in
the conference room today at three.
 
Notify them now.”
 
Grace said
this, and then went back into her office.

Carol
looked at Grace as if she was looking at an enemy.
 
“Bitch,” she murmured under her breath, even
as she got to work notifying staff.

Sal
sat behind his desk as Tommy, who had dropped into Sal’s office at the Gabrini
Corporate building for a chat, sat in front of it.
 
They were talking about their latest
acquisitions and the roadblocks they were facing with their Amsterdam project
when Shannon, Sal’s assistant, walked in.

“This
better be important,” Sal said as the beautiful woman headed, with paperwork in
hand, toward his desk.

“It
always is,” she said as she walked.
 
“Hello, Tommy.”

“Tommy?”
Sal asked, offended.
 
“That’s Mr. Gabrini
to you!
 
What’s Tommy?
 
You don’t know him like that.”

Shannon
cut her eyes at Sal.
 
“These need your
signature at once,” she said as she sat them on his desk.

“Okay,”
he said.

“I
need your signature now.”

“And
when I finish reading them you’ll get my signature.
 
Now get the fuck outta here.”

Shannon
gave Sal a look of disgust, but she left the office.
 
Tommy looked at him.

“And
don’t look at me like that,” Sal said to his older brother.
 
“The relationship is proper.
 
I haven’t fucked her since she started
working for me.”

“She
shouldn’t be working for you, that’s the point. It’s never a good idea to mix
business with pleasure.”

“Yeah,
right,” Sal said.
 
“Says a man who set
his girlfriend up at Trammel.”
 
Tommy
smiled.
 
“But I get your point,” Sal
added.

“Cam
Birch died yesterday,” Tommy said.
 
That
death was weighing heavily on his mind, not because he grieved Cam’s death, but
because Cam attempted to hurt Grace by forcing her to witness his death.
 
All because she had dumped him years ago, and
because she now refused to kiss his mother’s ass.

“Damn
shame how that went down,” Sal said.
 
“How’s Grace taking it?
 
She
should be relieved all the hell he put her through.”

“I
know.
 
And I agree.
 
But that’s not Grace.
 
She’s upset by it, but she’s working through
it.
 
She wanted to reach out to Jillian,
to offer her condolences, but I told her that wasn’t a good idea.”

“Hell
no,” Sal agreed.
 
“That bitch probably
already blaming her for what Cam did to himself.
 
She’d better leave that bitch alone.”

“She
will.
 
I forbid her to have any contact,
whether she felt compelled or not.”

Sal
nodded his agreement.
 
“Damn right,” he
said.
 
Then he stared at his
brother.
 
“So she’s the one, hun?” he
asked for what had to be the hundredth time since the proposal.

“She’s
the one.”

“So
you couldn’t find a cute Italian girl, hun?”

Tommy
laughed.
 
“Didn’t want to find one,
either,” he said.

“But
why Grace, is what I’m saying.
 
I mean,
she’s sweet as can be.
 
I really like
her, don’t get me wrong.
 
But she’s
nothing like Shanks was or any of your other women for that matter. When you
told me that you were thinking about marrying Shanks that time, I said okay.
 
She’s crazy as a motherfuck, but I get that
relationship.
 
Shanks was a hoe, you was
a hoe.
 
Y’all whatta you call
matched.
 
But Grace?
 
She’s a good girl.”

Sal
hesitated, but then continued talking.
 
“Don’t take this the wrong way, big brother, and I love you more than
anybody on the face of this earth, you know I do.
 
But you don’t deserve Grace.”

That
comment touched Tommy to the core.
 
He
frowned.
 
“I know that,” he admitted.