“About?”
“Nothing. The word ‘need,’ Scarlett. You haven’t eaten much today. We’ll eat.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “How do you know what I’ve eaten today…or not?”
He tapped his temple and then his heart. The only answer I’d get. We both knew he had people reporting back to him about what I did. I just hadn’t realized how minute the details could get.
“I bet you pay those Italian men that come to town every so often to keep an eye on me,” I teased. “Must be mundane for them to have to count the calories I consume.”
At the mention of the Italian men, he squeezed me even harder, his arms slipping further down, to my behind. The mention of the Italians in bespoke suits made him tense.
“Or Mick,” I said, attempting to soothe over what I hadn’t intentionally caused. “How much do you pay him, hmm?”
“Fucking Mick,” he said, and the anger in his voice surprised me.
It belatedly dawned on me that he assumed Mick had told me the truth: Brando paid him to watch out for me.
“Youpayhim!” I gasped, attempting to wiggle out of his iron hold. He refused to relent.
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“Why?” My voice went high.
“To keep me sane.”
“There’s not enough money in the world to fix that,” I mumbled, knowing it was useless to even try to argue with him.
He grinned at that.
I sighed, a soft breath that he seemed to breath in. “Your snitches are wrong, Fausti.” Most people in town butchered his last name, but since I had Italian, I pronounced it correctly—Fow-stee. “Violet brought me a salad earlier, compliments of Eunice. Besides. You know what happens tosnitches.”
He gave me a hard look.
“They end up inditches,thosebitches!”
He didn’t laugh. “What are you in the mood for, Ballerina Girl? Food,” he amended when he caught the look on my face. That was a loaded question and he knew it.
“Coffee sounds good. And being with you. Being with you sounds even better. Let me change my shoes, gather my things, close up, and then we go.”
Before he set me down, his hands roved to my behind and he squeezed my cheeks. I had to stand in place for a moment or two before I could move. He walked to the sound system, studying it. “Jimmy Durante,” he murmured. “He’s a bit old for you.”
Suspicion, his, not mine, prickled the hair on my neck. “Err…I like him?”
“You’re nervous.”
“I’m not!”
“You are. You get flustered. You err, or hmm, or huff, and then make a statement sound like a question.”
It was best to ignore him and his truth. I didn’t need him digging and finding out what Maggie Beautiful and I were up to. She had told me, inadvertently, how he had people watching me, so we came up with a system to fool them. She picked me up behind the studio after whoever dropped me off.
She wasn’t supposed to drive, but she did.Of course.Maggie Beautiful could never be put into any shaped box. Her depth was too complex for bars. Violet also assisted us in this scheme.
Mick didn’t care much about me when she came around and drug him in another direction— assuring him that his charge was safe in the dance studio.
