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ChapterTen
Jess looked up when she heard the front door to the apartment open. She was home alone, thanks to a small kitchen fire at the diner. It hadn’t been particularly bad, but it had filled the place with enough smoke that Paulie had decided to close up for the rest of the day.
Aunt Berta had gone out earlier to run some errands, telling her she’d time it so she could be at the school to pick up Jasper at the end of his day. Then she’d insisted that Jess “put her feet up and relax.”
Jess was trying, but a large part of her felt guilty, sitting on Tony and Rhys’s couch in the middle of the afternoon, while they were working and Aunt Berta was taking care of her son. She should have insisted on picking Jasper up herself, but Aunt Berta had revealed herself as a force to be reckoned with these past two weeks. When the woman made her mind up about something, she fucking made it up. As such, Jess had yet to win a fight against her, and she’d tried…a lot.
“Hello?” Jess called out when no one revealed themselves.
A blonde head peered around the door to the living room. “Oh. Hey. Who are you?”
Jess was taken aback by the strange woman’s sudden presence. In two weeks, the only other people to visit the apartment had been Tony’s three brothers, Luca, Joey, and Gio, plus Kayden, who’d very sweetly swung by one day to check on her after the attack.
The front door had been locked, which indicated this woman was either a professional at picking locks or she had a key.
“I’m Jess.”
Jess waited, expecting the woman to chime in and offer her name, but no such luck.
“Ooookay,” the blonde said. “So that really didn’t answer my question, but my family is forever giving me shit for asking too many questions. Of course,” the woman looked around, “they’re not here, so could I bother you for some more details?”
Jess couldn’t help but grin. “I’m Jess Monroe. A friend of Tony and Rhys’s. I’m…” She wasn’t sure if she should tell the woman that she was living there. The guys had said neither of them had a girlfriend, but what if they’d fibbed, thinking she wouldn’t move in if they did? She hated the thought that they’d lie.
God. What if they’d deceived her?
But why would they deceive her about something like that?
“You’re what?” the blonde prompted, walking into the living room and plopping down on Tony’s recliner like she owned the place.
The woman was…unique. Jess couldn’t pinpoint her age at all, though if she had to guess, she’d say she was somewhere in her twenties. Jess thought she was pretty, in a quirky way. Her hair was braided double Dutch style, but she’d tied the ends up, creating Princess Leia-style loops that struck Jess as a strange fashion statement. Her face was devoid of makeup, so the smattering of zits on her chin were apparent, and she wore eyeglasses with huge black frames perched on her nose.
Her outfit was equally as…odd. She wore baggy mom jeans, a faded black T-shirt that was way too big on her, with some weird bird spurting flames that said “Good Mythical Morning,” and a thick gray cardigan that was missing several buttons. Her black half boots were scuffed to hell and if Jess had to venture a guess, she’d say the woman had tried to conceal the damage with Sharpie marker.
“I’m staying here for a little while,” Jess finally said, struggling to picture this woman with either Tony or Rhys. For some reason, she’d imagined the women they dated would be elegant, classy women with great jobs, perfect hair, white teeth, and manicured fingernails.
“Really?” the woman said. “Cool.”
“May I ask whoyouare?”
“Oh!” The woman burst into such loud, joyful laughter that Jess couldn’t help joining in. “Damn. I’m such an idiot. I’m Penny. Rhys’s sister.”
Jess would never have guessed that in a million years, though now that Penny had said it, she noticed she and Rhys shared the same bright blue eyes. Of course, the comparisons stopped there. Rhys’s hair was dark brown, Penny’s blonde. Rhys was tall, over six feet, while Penny didn’t appear to be much taller than Jess, who was barely squeaking five-foot-five. Where Rhys was sophisticated, Penny came off as—for lack of a better word—nerdy.
“You look familiar to me,” Penny mused, studying Jess’s face closely.
“I wait tables at Paulie’s diner.”
“Oh. Gotcha. That must be it. I’ve gone in there a couple times on my lunch break. I probably saw you there.”
“You work downtown?”
Penny nodded. “Yeah. I work in IT for Russo Enterprises.”
Jess perked up. “Oh, wow. Small world. I just got offered a job there a few days ago. Nothing like you do, though. I’d be cleaning the offices at night. I just lost”—actually she’d quit—“my second job working at a motel. Matt Russo came into Paulie’s. We got to talking and he said there was a position available.”
What Jessdidn’tsay was that Matt, another regular at the diner, had noticed her bruises. The man was as relentless as Tony when he wanted information—something she was starting to think was an Italian trait—and he hadn’t relented until she’d told him the whole sordid story about the attack at the motel. He’d asked why she’d taken a job there to begin with, and she’d admitted to needing the extra income. That was when he’d offered her the job cleaning the offices.
Jess had been thinking about it nonstop ever since, especially when Matt told her how much she’d be making. Working at Russo Enterprises would help her achieve her goal of moving out a hell of a lot faster. The problem was, she couldn’t drag Jasper along with her. The weekday hours were late, and she couldn’t keep him up until nearly midnight on school nights.
