Page 3 of A Bossy Affair

At least, part of it burned. Everything from the back door all the way to the front of the bar burned, but it left some of the right-hand side and mostly avoided the structure. There was enough left that it could be rebuilt. For a price—a steep one. One that required Lena and me to find loans to supplement the crappy insurance our parents had for the place, and the fact that they were dragging their feet paying out because of the mysterious circumstances.

The fact was, Dad was popular. Everybody knew him. That meanteverybody. Including goombahs from the Italian mob and every Southie in the Irish groups knew him and liked him. He ran a bar that catered to everybody, and no one ever shot it up or used it for deals. It was a place where people could talk on neutral, or at least safe, ground.

That begged the question as to what caused the fire. The cops were mute on it, but the investigations made it clear. They thought Dad pissed someone off. So, they didn’t want to pay.

I honestly didn’t know how much I bought into any of that. At his funeral, people representing both sides were there, and no one seemed to know anything. And now the pub was in shambles, and whatever money Lena or I made was going to need to go to helping get it running again, or else Mom was going to be homeless and our legacy gone.

I couldn’t let that happen. Especially not for the legacy Dad built.

So, as reluctant as I was, I was home. Walking into the only Italian place worth a damn in South Boston, prepared to dance, drink, and eat my weight in cheese and dough.

There’s no place like home,I guessed.

ChapterTwo

Hunter

“Another one bites the dust,” I said, tossing the stapled papers down on my desk and sitting heavily in my chair, spinning it around to look out of the floor-to-ceiling window.

“Hunter, come on,” Bobby Cleveland said.

Bobby was my mentor and the closest person to my father, and thus, a father figure to me. Though he was sixty, no one would peg him for that but me. I had watched the age grow on his face, but others thought he was in his forties, something he relished. Especially when it came to women.

“Come on, what?” I asked, leaning back in the chair and watching the city below me. I tended to do this when I was deep in thought. I liked looking down at the city, with all those people with all those lives bustling around. People going to work, people going home, people going to the brewery or the pubs, others going to pick up their kids from daycare. All those lives being lived down there.

“You’re too hard on your assistants, Hunter,” Bobby said. “You know it. I know it. This makes, what, five in a year?”

“Six,” I said. “But the second one doesn’t count. She’s still technically employed.”

“Ahh, yes, Mandy, the pregnant lady. You know she’s going to quit the second she’s done with leave, right? She hated you and this job.”

“She was good, though,” I said.

“Because she had to be. She was making money for the kid she was growing in her stomach. And you put that poor girl through the ringer.”

“She was good,” I repeated. “Really good. I never had to worry once that I was going to miss something because my assistant didn’t put it on my calendar. She always had a warm cup of coffee and a cold bottle of water on my desk. She was awesome.”

“And she’s gone,” Bobby said, sighing. “Along with four other people after her. One of which tried to file a lawsuit about being overworked.”

“He took the job when I told him it could be upwards of eighty hours a week. His fault.”

“You can’t work these people upwards of eighty hours a week, Hunter.”

“See that,” I said, turning to him where he was now sitting in one of the leather chairs across from my desk, “is where you are wrong. That’s the kind of mentality my father had, and it’s why this business was in absolute shambles when I took over.”

“I’d hardly say it was in shambles,” Bobby began.

“Was it a multi-billion-dollar enterprise?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Was it even a multi-million-dollar enterprise?”

“Well, yes, we made two million in profit the year before the year you took over.”

“And then lost three million,” I said. “I remember. But I turned it around, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

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