And then all my thoughts came crashing down at once.
Holy shit, Shiloh.
A mobster sitting across from me asked me out on a date after he kidnapped me. There was so nothing normal about my life.
But I still hadn’t determined what kind of bad guy Frankie considered himself. Was he a really, really bad guy? Someone who would shoot me between the eyes if I turned down his request, or was he more of what I considered my cousin? A man caught between two worlds doing whatever to survive and support his family. It was a rose-colored glasses way to look at it, but Westley really tried.
Apparently, I was delusional about a lot of aspects of my life.
It did not, however, take away the most pressing current issue. “I have nothing to wear.”
Frankie openly rolled his eyes at me in a move I would never expect from someone dressed like him, claiming to be from the Zanetti family. It almost made me laugh. It was so… normal. If two men weren’t flanking either side of the front door of the hotel room carrying large guns, it would’ve been almost easy to forget exactly who I sat across from.
His look grew annoyed. “You look exquisite. Now let’s go or else I’ll order a personal shopper and pull a pretty woman.”
He’d already stood, and I started the motion, but I didn’t follow him to the door. Instead, I stopped halfway, my dirty shoes that had been in the pee-filled alley the night before dirtying the white carpet in the hotel room.
“Are you calling me a whore?”
Frankie didn’t even slow his steps. I swore his head shook, but it was so quick that I didn’t call him out on it. He held the door open and turned back to me. “Never, but those jeans are…” He searched for his sentence ending, “a lot of denim.”
“Well excuse me. I was working when you kidnapped me. And you just said I was exquisite.” So not only was he a criminal, and a kidnapper, but he was also a liar. The man had to have a lot of balls to kidnap me and then make a comment about my outfit.
“If your cousin is so fond of you, he should take better care of his family. If you lived with me, you wouldn’t work a day in your life and you wouldn’t be wearing jeans to any job you kept if you wanted to work.”
“How twenty-first-century of you,” I deadpanned, crossing my arms and deciding I wasn’t going anywhere near him. He could take his ice cream and melt it somewhere the sun didn’t shine. “I do fine.”
What was it with men always trying to make sure women met a standard they created in their own heads? Westley offered more than once to take me clothing shopping or give me a monthly budget, but I didn’t need fancy clothes for an MBA college program where half of my classes happened online. And it’s not like I needed to wear a formal dress while working at the bar.
And what exactly did I even care what my kidnapper thought of me wearing jeans?
“It appears I have offended you,” Frankie said, gesturing to the hallway when I didn’t follow. “Let me buy you an ice cream to make up for my farce.” His smile lit up the room and sprouted butterflies in my belly.
The sneaky bastard. He definitely had a way of getting what he wanted. But I really wanted ice cream, and maybe it would give me a chance to escape.
“Fine.”
The elevator ride to the parking garage was uneventful and silent. There wasn’t even another passenger on the elevator for me to scream for help. I chose to believed it was a coincidence and not that Frankie was so good at kidnapping that he had the entire thing planned to give us a private elevator.
Three more men with guns met us in the parking lot and slinked behind us as we walked to the car. Frankie held the door open, and for whatever reason, I bristled at his gentlemanly behavior. He was my kidnapper. He didn’t have the right to be nice. At this rate, I wouldn’t even get a good kidnapping story to tell my grandchildren one day. He hadn’t even tried to torture me. When it came to the ‘inciting terror’ in his victims part of being a villain, he failed.
“You always travel with so many fans in your entourage?” I asked after we were in the car and he’d checked to make sure I buckled my seatbelt. See, worst bad guy ever.
Frankie laughed, the first indicator he wasn’t as upset as earlier.
I even caught the driver smiling in the rear-view mirror.
“Only when I’m out of town,” Frankie replied.
“Out of town and kidnapping family members of notorious Chicago criminals?”
I expected another laugh, but he cocked his left eyebrow slightly higher than the right. “Touché. Only when I’m out of town and kidnapping. Back home, I don’t need nearly as many groupies.”
I waited until our car left the underground parking garage and the late afternoon sun touched my cheeks through the car windows even though they’d been tinted dark. “So, Mr. Far-from-home, what’s it like as the Zanetti family cast-out living in Maine?”
At that, Frankie frowned. “I’m not an outcast. The Zanetti family has always had a presence in Pelican Bay. I just made it bigger and better.”
“Shhh,” I said, placing my finger over his lips to silence him. “In my mind, you are the lone family member who was unappreciated by his father and carved out a little-known chunk of his world in northern Maine. Is there a Mrs.? Ten kids?” So far, his story was quite bland. He had to have something more exciting hidden somewhere. A dungeon. Literal skeletons in closets.
