Page 50 of By Blade, I Love
“Cesare Barsetti.” I stared at it for a moment longer before I turned to look at him.
He kept his eyes on the tree and avoided my gaze for a bit before he finally faced me. There was a little smile on his lips, but it was ghostly and distant, like there was a lot of pain behind his former identity. “Yep…that’s me.”
I stared at the desk with my arms crossed over my chest. Stared at the grain of the wood that was highlighted by the sunshine coming through the window. Some of my father’s things had been moved by Warren, like his favorite flask, his sunglasses, a stress ball that he used to grip when I was little and I drove him up the wall. I put it all back on the desk, so it felt like he was still there with me every day.
“I rounded up the troops, boss.” Wolfe’s voice came from behind me.
I turned around and leaned against the desk just as my father had. I wore black jeans and boots, a brown leather holster hooked over my shoulder with my pistol inside. My jeans were too tight to have a gun sticking out of my ass all the time.
Wolfe walked in first, followed by the others, and he unabashedly dragged his hungry gaze up and down my body before he dropped into the armchair.
Elio, Andre, and Salvatore took their seats.
Leo was the last one to enter, and like a rat that didn’t want to be caught, he quietly walked into the room and took the chair farthest away from me. His hands fell into his lap, and he studied his fingers like he didn’t want to look at me—or bear my angry sight.
I started with a heavy sigh. “This isn’t how I wanted this to go. My father wanted me to run the business, but not today. Someday…somewhere far into the future.” I gave another sigh. “But here we are, and we’ve got a lot of shit to do.”
“We’ve got it, boss,” Andre said. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
It was so weird to hear them address me like my father. To have the obedience of men who should try to usurp me, not follow my orders so easily. “We have a lot of shipments at the docks because we’ve been behind. I called down to our contacts there and told them to hold everything in the meantime, and now they want us to pay interest on top of our late fees.”
Wolfe chuckled. “I’ll handle it, Donna Mancini.”
My eyes immediately turned to him because I’d never been addressed that way, with the term for the female version of a don.
Wolfe grinned widely, as if he intended to call me that all the time.
“We need to grab the guns, get them to the warehouse, and immediately fulfill our orders. I spoke to some of our partners. Despite my father’s death at the hands of Warren, they’re impatient for their product because a deposit has already been paid. The demand for arms is higher now that Icarus is running around everywhere. I offered them a discount because of the hiccup, but we need to get these delivered as quickly as possible.”
“You think they deserve a discount?” Elio asked.
“What do we do when our partners don’t pay their deposits on time?”
They all stared at me.
“Break their noses,” I said. “Set their cars on fire. Shoot out all their windows. If we aren’t very forgiving toward them, then why should they be forgiving to us? I think a one-time discount is a reasonable gesture to those who’ve been ordering from us consistently.”
No one raised a question after that. “We’re also behind on the wine. Production halted, some of the harvest went bad, we’ve had some losses. We’ve got to pick up that timeline. Leo, you can take care of that.”
Leo nodded. “Yes, boss,” he said immediately.
“We also need to get those damn carpenters out here again.” Because this place was fucking destroyed once more. “And we need a new gate.”
“We’re on it, Donna Mancini,” Andre said as he got up.
The rest of the men rose to their feet and walked out of the room.
Wolfe also stood, but he stayed. He moved in front of me and stared at me with the biggest grin on his face.
It was hard to hold that stare when it was full of so much affection and love and lust, the foundation of this beautiful relationship. He loved me at my worst and loved me at my best. He was happy to let me take the lead and didn’t struggle to take orders from a woman. He was so secure in who he was that my power actually turned him on.
There weren’t a lot of men like that.
He continued his stare, indescribable joy in his eyes. I expected him to stare me down with a possessive expression then bend me over the desk and take me right then and there, but that wasn’t his mood.
No, this was something else. “What?”
He took a step closer to me. “This is exactly what he wanted.”
