Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (9 page)

As she’d spoken, Joey’s expression had evolved from curious to furious, and his hand, still on her leg, had tightened. She liked that. His limitations might not make him the strongest man she’d ever dated, but she liked his urge to protect and to be angered that she’d needed it.

She smiled and laid her hand over his. “So…I like that we’re going slow. I like taking our time and being gentle. I like that you’re kind. I feel like we connect in a good place. This weekend…it’s been amazing. Please don’t apologize for giving me something so great.”

Joey stared for several seconds, and Tina tried to read in his eyes the words he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Then he nodded, slowly, and got out of the car.

He walked her to her front door and kissed her again before she went in. When he told her he’d text her, she believed it. She watched him walk back to his car and get in, and then, from the driver’s side, she saw him smile and wave his hand back and forth—he wanted her to go inside before he backed out. He wanted her safe.

She blew him a kiss and went in.

Her father was sleeping in his recliner in the living room, a book about Abraham Lincoln open on his chest and his glasses askew on his face.

Crossing the room, she picked up his book, folding the flap over to hold his place before she closed it and set it on the end table. Then she kissed his cheek. He grunted sleepily and opened his eyes.

“Daddy, I’m home. Go to bed. I’ll check on Mamma before I go up.”

“What time is it?”

Tina had no idea, so she checked the mantel clock. “Eleven twenty-five.” Not even midnight.

Her father took off his reading glasses and frowned at her as he set his recliner up. “It’s early. You have an okay time?”

“I had the
best
time.”

~ 7 ~

If you don’t stop texting, neither of us will get work done.

Well, stop replying to my texts, then.

Okay. I’ll see you later. Write hard.

Schedule harder.

LOL.

STOP REPLYING TO MY TEXTS!

STOP TEXTING!

YOU FIRST.

That’s it. This is really high school now. Mrs. O’Hare is going to confiscate our phones any second.

OMG. You had Scary O’Hairy too? I wonder if she’s still there. Maybe she’s a vampire. I’d believe it.

TINA. GO WRITE.

Okay, okay. See you later.

Before he succumbed to the temptation to text back, Joey set his phone down on his desk, screen down.

Across from him, his nephew Trey, Carlo’s oldest son, was watching him. He was fourteen, winding up ninth grade, and spending his spring break working at Pagano & Sons with Joey, John, and Luca. That had been a hard struggle with Carlo, who wanted Trey to focus on his studies and go to college. Carlo kept talking about Trey ‘making something of himself,’ seeming to forget that none of his three brothers, nor his father, had gone to college, and every time he talked about college like it was the only path to success, he was slamming an entire family business and the family who ran it. Not to mention to father who’d built it.

Trey wanted to work with his uncles, and he’d been pushing for months. He and his father had been butting heads for at least that long. Joey thought Carlo was a smug bastard at least eighty percent of the time, and he believed he should be in charge of just about everything, so it didn’t surprise Joey much that his brother couldn’t manage to see anything for his son but what he himself wanted for him.

Yet, somehow, Carlo had conceded to let Trey spend break working at the family business—the legit family business, on their side of the pews.

Joey suspected that Sabina, Carlo’s wife, had a lot to do with it. She was a hell of a woman. She had this way of seeing everything that was going on, even things nobody else noticed, like she was observing the whole scene from the outside, and yet she was dead center of everything going on in the family. Joey didn’t know how she did it, but if there was anybody who could be called the matriarch of the family, it wasn’t Adele, their stepmom, or Carmen, who’d mostly raised Joey and Rosa after their mother died. It was Sabina.

And she knew how to control her husband when he got…there was a word…Theo, Carmen’s husband, had used it once about someone else, and Trey had asked him what it meant. It had stuck for Joey at the time because he’d thought it described Carlo pretty well.
Supercilious
. Like he was better than everybody else. Sabina kept that part of Carlo reined in. She was about the only person who could.

So Trey was learning a bit about the family business, and on this day, he was in the office with Joey.

“You done?” Feeling like Trey had been eavesdropping on his texts with Tina, Joey might have been more sharp in his tone than necessary.

“Yeah, I think so.” He pushed the paper across the desk. “How’d I do?”

Joey had tasked him with working out the referents for all of their abbreviations and organizing them according to category—equipment, job, site, vendor, etc. Trey hadn’t been exactly thrilled at the assignment.

Honestly, what Joey did was important but not particularly exciting. He got his excitement from being decent at it. Ironically, it required a lot of memory, and he had no trouble at all accessing the terms and acronyms he needed to do his work. In his head, right on top, always at the ready, was a vast, three-dimensional map of all the workings of Pagano & Sons. Whenever asked what was going on where and when, he knew the answer immediately. He might not be able to
speak
the answer so easily, but it was always there. Those words never ran off on him, even if their sounds sometimes did.

He checked over the table Trey had filled out and marked where he’d been wrong. Then he spun the paper back to face Trey.

“That’s…equipment, not…vendor. And that’s a site…not a job. But good.”

Trey made the changes. “Uncle Joey, can I ask you something?”

Joey nodded.

When Trey blushed and looked down, beginning to doodle on the paper, Joey leaned in. “You can…ask.”

“What—what was it like working for Uncle Nick?”

Joey sat back hard enough to make his desk chair rock. “Why?”

“I… I want to be a Pagano.”

“You are.” Christ, the kid’s name was Carlo Francesco Pagano III. But Joey knew what he meant. The Pagano name meant something, in Quiet Cove and in all of New England. It meant a lot of things, actually, good and bad, depending on perspective. But whenever a Pagano said his name, throughout New England, the people who heard it knew something about him. Or thought they did, which came to the same thing. There were expectations. Joey had struggled with that all his life. He still struggled with it.

And he, at least, looked the part. He was on the fair side in his family, but he was full-blooded and looked his heritage. Trey looked like his biological mother, who’d been pale and blonde, Irish or something like that. Trey had her blond hair and green eyes. He was tall like his father, and he had the Pagano nose, but he did not look Italian, his name notwithstanding.

Joey had no way of answering a question like the one Trey had asked. It was much bigger than the words he could trust—and he wasn’t sure he had any right to answer it. He wasn’t Trey’s father, and Carlo would tear Joey’s head off and piss in his skull for saying anything that might feed whatever idea was in his kid’s head.

Besides, it wasn’t even a viable path for Trey. Only made men had any respect in the organization or around it. Those who weren’t made were grunts and gophers, as Joey had been. But he simply hadn’t been in long enough to climb in the ranks before he’d been shot. He’d had a clear path upward if he’d stayed. Trey did not. Only full-blooded Italian men could be made, no matter what their last name was. That wasn’t a Pagano Brothers rule, it was a
Cosa Nostra
rule, and it had stood for decades, maybe centuries. Since the inception of the Mafia itself.

Nick, however, was a different kind of don. Joey had been paying attention in ways maybe his siblings had not, and in the years Nick had run the organization, he’d amassed twice the power and influence the Uncles had ever had. He’d totally taken over one of the other New England Families, the Saccos, and made the others into little more than agents of the Pagano Brothers. He was king.

He had married a woman without a drop of Italian blood in her veins; none of his children were full-blooded. And now he had a son of his own: Lorenzo Beniamino Nicolo Pagano, named for every leader the Pagano Brothers had ever had. Joey found it hard to imagine that Don Nicolo Pagano would let his legacy go to someone other than his own son.

Could Nick change the blood rule? To do so would ripple all the way back to Italy. Would he dare?

Yeah, he would. Nick Pagano did whatever the fuck he wanted. And if he wanted to change the blood rule, changing it for Trey, while his own son was still small, would be a good test.

All that stress locked Joey’s mouth down hard, and he could only stare. His chest began to ache a little, too, and, by reflex, he checked to make sure his tank was where it belonged. He hadn’t needed it nearly as much; every day seemed better than the one before it—except where being intimate with Tina was concerned.

Trey had grown up with Joey like he was, so into the silence, he asked another, more focused question. “Why did
you
join?”

Because they were there, and because they were accurate, Joey threw Trey’s words back to him. “Wanted…to be…a Pagano.” He leaned forward again. “Trey…it’s not the way. Didn’t…help me. And you…can’t be made.” It was true now, at least.

“Because of my mother. I’m not Italian enough.”

“You are…a Pagano. No matter what. Be…who you are.”

Trey was clearly dissatisfied, but he let the matter drop.

Remembering how his own interest in joining the Uncles had begun, Joey wondered if he should say something to someone.

And then Trey said, “Please don’t tell my dad.”

So Joey had his answer.

~oOo~

Normally, Joey didn’t do much to celebrate his birthday. Adele or Sabina would make a dinner he liked and bake a cake, and there’d be a couple of presents. Sometimes his siblings and their families would come over, but not always. No big deal. It was the same with his siblings, too—they were adults. Except for years ending in ‘0,’ they kept the big birthday bashes for the kids.

But this year, for his thirty-sixth, with Pop so ill and a death sentence looming over his head, every holiday, every milestone that he was still with them got the full-court press. For Joey’s birthday, Rosa, Eli, and their kids came up from D.C., marking their second visit already this year, and it was only March. Normally, they came up three or four times total in a year.

Pop’s bad health and Joey’s limits meant that the event might be more special than usual, but it wouldn’t be more exciting than usual. Adele and Sabina made a big spread, worthy of a holiday, the cake was more elaborate, the pile of gifts was bigger, and the whole family was there, but otherwise, it was still dinner, cake, and presents.

With one big addition: Joey had invited Tina, and he hadn’t told anyone he had. With the partial exception of John—and, okay, whomever he’d told—nobody knew about Tina. Moreover, he hadn’t told her that his family didn’t know about them. They’d been seeing each other for a few weeks now, and he’d been keeping her tucked close, away from his nosy, prying, blabbing family. She was special, and he liked having her just for himself. Once his family got wind of it, they’d all have opinions and snarky shit to say. It was their way.

When the doorbell rang, just as Sabina was herding everyone to the kitchen, where dinner was laid out on the island like a buffet, Joey hurried to get there first.

Fuck, she was so damn beautiful. She was wearing a short little black skirt with a pattern—dots or little flowers or something, a dark red sweater, a pair of short boots that she favored, and a black hat, like a bowler or something, over her dark hair. And that motorcycle jacket she always wore. Dark red lips and black-rimmed eyes. In her hand, she held a small cube, wrapped in gold and black paper, with a black stick-on bow on top.

She was like a little emo doll. As she stepped into the front hall, he hugged her, wrapping her up before she could get her arms around him, too.

“Hey—you’re crushing your present.” Her voice was muffled by his shirt.

“You’re my present.”

She giggled a little. “Cool. But as I said: crushing.”

“Sorry.” He let her go and kissed her lightly, then took her hand. “Don’t…hate me.”

“Not possible.”

Leading her into the kitchen, Joey prepared for the possibility anyway.

His whole family was packed in there, kids and all, and at least a dozen different conversations were happening. Typical family gathering. But while Joey and Tina stood at the hallway entrance, the conversation faded out, first slowly, then abruptly, as they noticed him standing there, holding hands with Tina.

He had not brought a woman to his family since before he’d been shot. More than ten years ago.

“Poop…nobody knows about us,” Tina muttered.

“Sorry. Wanted us…to be mine.”

She turned and gazed up at him. Her cute little hat shaded her eyes, but he didn’t see anything accusatory in them. “A little notice would have been nice, though.”