Nicky the Driver (Underboss Insurrection, #2)

by Cate C. Wells

They want to drag you along their lives like an undertow, and if you drown, they don’t notice—and if they did happen to notice, they sure as shit wouldn’t care.

No, it’s gonna kill Paul DeStefano. One day when Zita doesn’t give a shit about him anymore, I’m going to decapitate him with a hacksaw and punt his head off the Widow’s Bluff overlook into the Luckahannock.

I flip my whiteboard, and for a second, I have no idea what I wrote. I read it upside down. He’s fearless. Strong. He’s in control. He’s very generous.

Maddox abandons his coffee and heads off in the direction of the bathroom. No one seems to have noticed the interaction at the refreshment table. “What did you say to him?” I hiss under my breath. “I told him what I’d do if he disrespected you again.”

A Mercedes drives up on the curb ahead. The driver’s door flies open, and Nicky exits at a dead sprint toward me while the other three doors burst open in unison. Men in suits leap out. Jackets flap as they chase Nicky, leaning forward, arms outstretched, close on his heels. “You don’t fucking touch her!” Nicky shouts as he wrenches the man away from me and flings him into the tree that tripped me.

“You.” He places the grape in his mouth and chews, slowly, much longer than he should need to. “It was our little secret—Nicky and me. He’s not totally fucked in the head. He realizes there’s something wrong with him, but—” Lucca tosses a shoulder. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

When I fucked her out of her head, she treated me like what I am—hers.

Paul looks younger in his sleep—a lot of people do—but not Nicky. Nicky looks like a cyborg put in stasis to recharge.

He fakes a chuckle, but I can read his face like a book. The thought most certainly crossed his mind. I wait—one second, two, three, four—and when I see the flicker in his eye, the realization that even if I’m telling the truth, there’s not a damn thing he has the balls to do about it, I wink. And then, I walk away.

I’m not looking at his face, so I don’t know if he recognizes his own words. In my experience, when men lose their shit, their brains erase everything they do and say as soon as they calm down.