Saved Mafia Bride by Mae Doyle
Clara
Gavin can’t keep his eyes off of me. I feel them lock on me whoever I turn away from him to speak to someone. He’s on edge, like he wants to come over to me and sweep me away but he knows that we need to spend a little bit more time with everyone first. It’s our party, after all.
Our time to celebrate with people who really love him and want him to be happy. The champagne I’m drinking goes down smoothly and I finish my glass, turning to put it on the table before I realize that someone is staring at me.
“Hey,” I say, dropping down into a crouch. Sara was the obvious choice for a flower girl for our wedding and she’s got cake smeared around her mouth as she looks up at me. “Are you and your dad having fun?”
“So much fun.” Her eyes are wide and she leans against my leg. “But I’m tired.”
“Me too, darling,” I say, reaching down to rub her back. “I think I’m about checked out for the night. How was the cake?”
“Good.” She runs her arm across her mouth to get the last little bit off. It blows my mind that no matter how old a kid gets, they still are incredibly messy eaters. It doesn’t matter, though, and I don’t even care when I notice a smear of icing on my dress.
Before I can say anything else to her, Sean appears and scoops her up. Like me, he doesn’t seem to care one bit when icing smears all over his tux. “Welcome to the family, Clara,” he tells me, pulling me in for a hug. “You belong here. You’re perfect with Gavin. Trust me, we’re so glad you’re here.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, but he’s already turning away to carry Sara to the car.
“We gotta get you in bed, little one,” he says, snuggling her close as he walks away.
I feel like my heart is about to burst out of my chest watching the two of them. They look so happy and I’m overwhelmed with baby fever.
Speaking of which...turning, I eyeball my gorgeous husband. He’s laughing at something that the Accardi men have said. I don’t know the three of them very well, but their wives have been nothing but lovely to me since they got here a few days ago to help prepare for the wedding.
“You have baby eyes,” Willa says, coming up to me and looping her arm through mine.
“Baby eyes?” I ask, even though I know exactly what she’s talking about.
“Yep.” She pops the p and I grin, wishing that we were closer. We can be long-distance friends, but it’s not quite the same. “Baby eyes, like you can’t handle the thought of not having a kid right the hell now.”
I laugh and let her pull me in for a hug. “I hate to admit it,” I tell her, “but you’re right. I have baby eyes and, no offense, I think I’d rather be working on that than hanging out with you.”
She grins and shoves me towards Gavin. “Go get it, girl. I want to be invited back for a baby shower.”
I feel self-conscious as I walk over to my husband, but then he catches a glimpse of me and his entire demeanor changes. Leaving the men he was standing with and hurries over to me.
“My wife,” he says, caressing my cheek before kissing me. “Do you know how hard I’ve been this entire time just thinking about what it will be like to fuck you again?”
“I want to talk to you first,” I manage, even though what I really want is his cock in me right now. He pulls me closer and I reach down, rubbing his dick through his tux. The moan that escapes his lips makes me catch my breath.
“Please tell me that you want to talk to me about all of the terribly depraved things that you’re going to do to my dick as soon as we get some privacy.” His voice is thick and throaty.
“I will,” I promise him. “And then you promised me babies, so we need to get on that.”
“I’ll get on it.” He purrs the words into my ear and a shiver runs down my spine. I feel all of the muscles in my core tighten hard and I have to swallow to remind myself that I want to talk to him about something and not let him get me off topic.
“Seriously, Gavin,” I say, twisting away from him just enough that I can breathe and think clearly with my head and not with what’s between my legs. “You know all of the money I have? And the house?”
He nods. “From your parents.”
“Yes. I know what I want to do with it all.”
“I hope it’s not move.” He studies my face for a moment and then smiles. “But I don’t think that you want to do that, do you? Live in your old house?”
“Not a chance.” I shake my head so hard I can feel my updo starting to come undone. “I want to take the money and give the house to someone, I don’t know who, who will make a home for teens who aren’t safe at home, or who ran away. I have no idea how to do all of that, but it’s what I want.”
Gavin doesn’t respond and I feel my heart beat faster. “What? You think it’s a terrible idea, don’t you?”
“Not at all.” His voice has changed. It’s more gentle now, and I lean forward, letting him hold me close to his chest. “I think it’s an incredible idea. An idea born of love. And I’ll do anything to make it get off the ground. We’ll figure out what we have to do and then you’ll give some many teens a safe place to be.”
“Thank you,” I manage. I don’t want to cry, but he loves me in a way that I never thought I deserved. “I love you, Gavin.”
“Clara. I love you.” He tilts my chin up and then kisses me. “You’re everything to me. Don’t forget that.”
I don’t think that I’m going to be able to, not with the way he constantly reminds me.
I have a family. For the first time in my life, I belong. I never thought it would happen, but it did, and I love it.
Thanks so much for reading! Keep the story going with Sean’s book, Nanny Mafia Bride. Read the first chapter here:
It’s the broken air conditioner for me. Not only has it stopped blowing as much cool air as it’s supposed to, but now it’s making this terrible whining noise that sounds like something very important inside the unit has snapped.
Just like my sanity.
“Are you serious right now?” I stand over the unit and lift my long dark hair off the back of my neck, tying it quickly out of the way into a ponytail so that I can try to think straight. It’s hard to do when you’re dripping sweat and on your last nerve, and when the air conditioner gives one more screech, I kick it.
Not hard, mind you. But hard enough that whatever had rattled loose is now rattling even more and my best friends laughs.
“You could help,” I accuse, turning around to face her. Olivia raises her hands in front of her like she’s trying to calm a bull.
“You could call someone,” she offers. “Like your landlord.”
“Larry?” I scoff and go to sit next to her on the sofa. The cushions are way too soft and I sink in until our shoulders bump together. “Larry doesn’t care one bit if I’m hot in here or not if I won’t go on a date with him. I think he’s punishing me.”
“There are laws against that,” Olivia points out helpfully. “Discrimination laws, I’d bet you. All you have to do is get a lawyer to handle your case and I imagine that you could sue him for all he’s worth.”
I stare at her for a moment, trying to decide if she’s serious or not. Olivia has a great poker face, so it can be tricky to tell if she is, but when she finally bursts out laughing, I do too.
“Right,” I say, pushing myself up and walking into the kitchen to get us both a glass of ice water. “I’m sure that every lawyer in town would be falling all over themselves to take my case pro bono. What I need is a better job than the one that I have. I love kids, Olivia, but you know what doesn’t pay?”
“Teaching preschool?” She takes the glass from me and flicks some of the water at me. “I told you that a long time ago, Maggie. So, what are you going to do? You gonna look for another teaching position?”
Before I answer her, I drain half of my glass then set it down on the coffee table, making sure to use a coaster. My apartment might be crap, but that doesn’t mean that I have to leave water rings all over all of the furniture. “I’m not sure,” I tell her, thinking hard about what else I might want to do. “I love teaching, but it’s not like the money just pours in from the job.”
“Cheers to that.” Olivia leans back on the sofa and props her feet up on the coffee table before letting out a big sigh. “Well, it’s Saturday, and it’s not going to get any cooler this weekend. In fact, I think that we’re coming up on a heat wave.”
I groan. The entire summer has felt like one big heat wave. Sure, I could ask Larry one more time to fix my air conditioner, but I have a pretty good feeling that his response will be the same as it has been every other time that I’ve asked. He’ll tell me to go on a date with him first and I’ll laugh, then he’ll get mad, and I’ll retreat to my cave.
Only, my apartment is not a cave. Caves are cool and dark and it feels like I’m living on the sun.
The problem is that I really like this place. I live right downtown, which means that I have great views of all of the comings and goings on Main Street. Of course, I pay out the nose for the pleasure of getting to watch people stumbling from bar to bar on the weekends, but I don’t mind.
When it’s nice and cool out, I sit on the balcony and listen to live music from the restaurant across the street. When it snows and the entire city shuts down then I feel like I live in a snow globe or in some Hallmark movie. Cheesy, I know, but I really do like it here.
It’s just that I’m melting into the sofa and Olivia is going to have to peel me off of it if I’m going to survive this heat.
“Okay.” She smacks her hands on her thighs and stands up with a groan. “I can’t stay here any longer, Mags. I love you, I really do, but if you want to steam to death up here, you’re going to have to do it on your own. Come on, let’s go somewhere.”
“Where?” I eyeball my best friend but don’t move.
“Does it matter? Someplace with AC?”
“I need to shower first.” I don’t even want to think about what I look like. Or smell like. All I know is that there isn’t any way that I’d subject another person to me right now, not in my current state. “How do you not look like you just ran a marathon in the desert?”
“Good genes. You know I don’t sweat.” She shrugs and grabs my hand, pulling me up to a stand. “Shower. Get changed. I need to get out of here and you have ten minutes.”
“Ten?” I protest even as I walk towards my bedroom. “I’ll still have wet hair.”
“Don’t care,” she calls after me. “You’re the best, Maggie, but if you’re going to let me save you from your sauna of an apartment then you need to at least shower. Come on, we’ll go to the ice cream place a few blocks away and then we can check online for any job openings.”
“No customer service,” I say, leaning back out from the bedroom to look at her. “I mean it. I hate waiting tables. And no working in a bank or something like that. I don’t want to lose my soul,” I say with a shudder.
“You got it.” She flaps her hands at me like she’s shooing away a squirrel that’s gotten a little too friendly on a picnic. “I’m sure that we can find you something, but I can’t sit in here and look on my phone. Go. Get. It’s time for you turn over a new leaf and find a better job so you can live somewhere that doesn’t require you to sleep with the landlord in order to have functioning AC.”
Stepping back into my bedroom, I can’t help the grin that crosses my face. Olivia is right, as always. The longer I sit up here in my apartment and feel bad for my situation, the worse it’s going to get. No, as much as I’d like to march myself down to Larry’s unit and demand that he fix my air conditioner without the promise of a date, she’s right.
It’s best for me to get out of here. It was one thing when he was just demanding dates from me. Last week I’m pretty sure that I caught him skulking around my door when I left for work, but he didn’t have a good reason for being there. I went ahead and installed a chain on the inside of my door at Olivia’s insistence.
It’s probably nothing, but he does have a key to my place, and the way he watches me when he thinks that I’m not looking makes me shiver.
Creepy guy. I love my apartment, but sometimes you can’t have it all, and if getting a new job and moving means that I’m going to not only have working AC all summer long but also be able to avoid Larry in the elevator every time I come and go, then it’ll be worth it.
As long as I can find a job I like, that is. There has to be something out there for someone like me, someplace where I can fit in.
Anything is better than here.
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