CLASS ACT (A BRITISH ROCKSTAR BAD BOY ROMANCE)

by Julia Gardener

  I took him in for a deep kiss. “Thank you.”

  A boyish grin appeared on his lips. “Maybe there’s another way we can show each other thanks, Mrs. Lawrence.”

  “In that case, I have a special assignment for you, Mr. Lawrence,” I whispered to the man I loved. “See me after class.”

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  One shot.

  One kill.

  That was my creed back when I was with the marines.

  I watched as the target exited the car. He was short and rotund. That’s my least favorite type of target. It’s easily to misjudge a vital point and lodge a bullet in some useless piece of flab. This needed to be a headshot.

  I loved a good challenge.

  As a marine, I got medals for dusting the bad guys. They even called me hero for killing people half a mile away in the middle of a goddamn desert. At least with the mafia, you can kill people from an air-conditioned room.

  The target was now a hundred paces from me.

  The mafia doesn’t give you medals for killing people. I get cold hard cash and a pat on the head for my work. At the end of the day, they’re just the same as the military. They need someone to do their wet work for them and they’re willing to pay top dollar for it.

  It’s funny how the more things change, the more things stay the same.

  Eighty paces now.

  I thought I’d leave the killing behind when I returned home from the war. I guess the killing itself wouldn’t leave me. No matter how much I tried to run, the killing always caught up to me. My time in the marines had made me good at killing people, breaking things, and nothing else.

  It’s hard finding honest work as a civilian. The military is good at training you and pointing you in the direction of their enemies. They’re bad at making you a model citizen who can hold a regular nine-to-five job.

  Seventy paces.

  The mafia gave me direction that I needed. More importantly, they pay me for being a killer. It doesn’t hurt that I’m mafia royalty.

  My father was a stone cold assassin. Vito ‘the knife’ Baccalieri had been killing people for the mob since he was a teenager. Unfortunately, there was a ceiling to how high he could have risen due to his mixed Italian-German heritage. You needed to be a full-blooded Italian to be a made-man.

  You’d think a hitman like my father would eventually get his comeuppance. Someone would surely whack him and throw him off the harbor for all the things he had done. However, lung cancer did him in when he was in his late forties.

  The only other man in my life was my maternal grandfather, the Don of the Pastore family himself. You never would have guessed that Joseph Pastore would become a feared mafia boss. The man started honest work as a dockworker in Sicily before the lure of wealth brought him to the mafia.

  He took a liking to the work and had a meteoric rise. He was a ‘made man’ when he was just twenty. Soon, he immigrated with his family to America for a better life. However, his definition of the American dream was to start his own crime family. Over the years, the Pastore family became the most feared mafia family in America.

  If my father started my education as a hitman, then my grandfather finished it. He taught me how to use a rifle when most teenagers were worrying about the prom and acne. He molded his own flesh and blood into a deadly weapon to be aimed at his enemies.

  I hated the man for what he made me into.

  Sixty paces.

  My mother was something else entirely. Bianca Pastore was the cherished daughter of Don Pastore but the apple couldn’t have landed further away from the tree. She was this soft yet fiery spirted woman whose Italian heritage descended from the most dangerous Don in the country. Yet, she was kind and generous. She was the only person in the world who gave a damn about me.

  Bianca Pastore was the daughter of a powerful Don. My mother could’ve lived like a queen. Yet, she left her family and tried to live an honest life. The only ties she had with the mafia was the love she had for my father. I never knew what she saw in that professional killer but it led to my birth.

  I never know how a fucked up killer like me could ever come from such a sweet, kind-hearted woman like her. Maybe it was in my blood. My father was a hitman after all.

  My mother tried to shield me from the mafia lifestyle. Too many kids get groomed to be the ‘soldato’ of the next generation. She wanted me to live a good honest life that was far away from the violence surrounding her father. We would’ve been poor as squirrels but we’d have each other.

  Then, someone from the Irish mob killed her for merely being the estranged daughter of Don Pastore. I was barely old enough to shave but I tracked down her killers. I killed those sons of a bitches with my bare hands.

  Funny thing was that I liked it. It was like scratching a good itch. The only problem is that the itch is going to come back with a vengeance.

  The Irish may have pulled the trigger but another hand moved them to it. It took a lot of years before I learned the truth. I got plenty good at beating people but I eventually found out that a Russian gangster set them up for it.

  It was an ex-Soviet officer named Sergei Petrov. The man had lost an eye in a bar fight which had led to his dishonorable discharge from the Soviet Army. After getting kicked out for gross misconduct, the man turned his talents to crime. Eventually, he locked horns with the Pastore family. Unfortunately, my mother got caught in the crossfire.

  One of these days I was going to find him and make him pay.

  Fifty paces.

  It was time to earn my pay. I took aim at the target’s head. After years of fighting against trained combatants, this was child’s play.

  I thought serving as a soldier would quench my thirst for vengeance.

  Instead, it just made me hungry for more. This killer instinct in me was never satisfied. I didn’t even know if killing Petrov would stop it.

  That man in my crosshairs had never done me personal harm. Then again, neither had the people I’d killed during the war. It was just business.

  I locked onto him with my rifle’s sights. “Forgive me, mother.”

  I pulled the trigger.

  Someone just shoot me already.

  Life was boring.

  I guess it’s a matter of perspective. I had just come back from college for my Summer Break. It had been my first taste of real freedom in years.

  I didn’t have a curfew. I didn’t need to have all of my friends vetted for any prior felonies. I didn’t need to be chaperoned to the local grocery store. I could actually be an independent adult.

  You see, my dad is very protective of me. I guess that’s what you get for being the daughter of a security guard. He’s on duty even when he’s home with me.

  Technically, he’s the head of security for a Fortune 500 company called the Atlantic Corporation. Daddy handles their security systems. It’s a full-time job so he tends to bring a bit of his work home. The man was a workaholic which made me feel like just another employee.

  Yet, I couldn’t blame him. My mother died of cancer when I was ten. It was all so sudden. It’s why I decided to become a pre-med student.

  After her death, daddy sold our house and moved to an apartment. It wasn’t as if the new apartment was bad. It was just part of the grieving process to him.

  I sensed that daddy couldn’t live in our old home anymore.

  At our new apartment, he became very protective of me. Any boy that wished to court me was shown daddy’s service gun and his old police baton. It took a long of reasoning, if not outright yelling, to convince him to let me attend an out of state college. Even when I was a hundreds of miles away from him, he still called to make sure I was
okay.

  The oven timer went off and broke me out of my thoughts. Dinner was ready. I pulled the roast chicken out of the oven. It was a heavy bird and I cursed daddy for buying such a large chicken for just two people. We’d have plenty of leftovers.

  With mom gone, I was the newly appointed cook of the house. Dad could barely boil water without making a mess. He lived off television dinners and takeout when I was in college.

  I missed my mom.

  Her death occurred years in the past but I still felt it like an old wound. It wasn’t as if I hated my dad. Just the opposite. It’s just that I couldn’t easily talk to him about stuff like dating. He was more likely to do a body search on any boy who wanted to see me rather than let him inside our home.

  We had different ways of dealing with her death. Daddy buried himself in his work and became overly protective of me. I wanted to leave our home and experience the world.

  My dating life in college wasn’t the experience I had expected. College boys weren’t all that much more mature than the ones I had known in high school. I wondered if I’d ever find ‘Mr. Right’ or end up as spinster who still made breakfast for her father.

  Daddy entered the kitchen. He must have come from work early. That was fairly unusual on its own. “Whatever you’re cooking sure smells good, Kelly.”

  I rolled my eyes and started carving up the roast chicken. “You say that for everything I cook.”

  “Well, it’s good to come home to someone who gets work done,” he sighed. I could tell something had gone wrong at work. “I tell you, this job is going to be the end of me.”

  I stopped carving. “Did something happen at work, daddy?”

  “Some guys in suits came up to talk to me,” he chuckled, taking a seat at the table. “They wanted to poach me from my current job. They had a very interested job offer.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “The kind that gives them the keys to the vault,” he continued. Daddy served as the head of security for the Atlantic Corporation. The company was some mega-conglomerate that sold basically everything. The job paid well enough but it made him work long hours. It also had its fair share of headaches. “These guys appreciated my… intimate knowledge of the company I was currently providing security for. They were willing to pay me to leave the company I’m working for… along with my knowledge of their security systems.”

  I returned to carving the chicken. “They were trying to bribe you?”

  He chuckled again. “I’m making them sound more subtle than they actually were. It was practically a shakedown! I don’t know why Harold lets these types in.”

  Harold was one of dad’s employees in the security division. “What did you do?”

  “I told them to get lost before I called security,” he sighed. He reached over to take a small of the chicken I had just finished slicing off. I glared at his lack of table manners. “The things I have to deal with…”

  I giggled and put out some fresh vegetables on the side of the plate before handing it to my father. “I thought you were security. Are you worried they’ll come back?”

  He didn’t eat just yet. “I’m more worried about you, Kelly.”

  I sighed. “Oh, daddy. I’m a grown woman now. You can’t keep treating me like a child.”

  “Forgive your father for feeling like this,” he said, mirroring my sigh. “You’re the only woman in my life.”

  I dug into the chicken. It had come out pretty well. “You don’t have to act like the head of security when you’re back home.”

  “I do have to with the new occupants this apartment is getting,” he said. “We’ve gotten some shady characters here since you went to college. Management let’s anyone rent an apartment these days.”

  “New occupants?”

  “Just be careful around that man down a few doors from us,” he said sternly, wagging a finger at me. That voice stopped having an effect on me once I became thirteen. Nevertheless, I knew he was serious. “Something’s not right with him.”

  “What man?”

  “Jackie Baccalieri,” he answered. The name sounded Italian. There was a pretty big Italian community where we lived. “He’s some young guy who came in a few weeks ago. Keeps to himself but I know his type.”

  Now this was interesting. Most of the people here tended to come as families or elderly couples. “Well, what’s so odd about him?”

  “That man is trouble,” Daddy said with a frown. “He’s got the swagger of a dangerous man.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You say that about every guy who’s around my age, daddy.”

  “No, I’m serious,” he continued, finally digging into his food. “He looks like the mafia type.”

  I put my fork down. “Just because he’s Italian doesn’t mean he’s some mobster. That’s an awful stereotype.”

  “Well, he certainly looks dangerous.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked with a laugh. Daddy thought the hundred pound boy I dated in tenth grade looked like a troublemaker. “Is your sixth sense going off when it isn’t work hours?”

  “He’s ex-military,” Daddy continued. “I saw him wearing dog tags. Those guys can carry a lot of baggage when they come back home. You keep your distance from him.”

  “And here I thought we were supposed to respect our veterans,” I replied, eating my vegetables like a good girl. “What’s he look like, daddy?”

  He glared at me. “Why are you asking?”

  “So I can know which person you’re putting a restraining order on to keep him from meeting him. Or me from meeting him.”

  “Tall, dark and handsome,” he chuckled, stuffing a fork full of chicken into his mouth. “He’s everything a girl like you’d want in a man. That’s what makes him dangerous. Just keep your distance.”

  It was my turn to glare at him. “I can handle myself. I don’t go crazy over just any guy I meet.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll find him cute,” he teased. “And I know how girls your age follow their hormones rather than their heads!”

  “Is this your way of saying I should stay away from every man my age and die as an unmarried spinster?”

  He gave me a serious look. “No, it’s my way of protecting the only woman in my life.”

  We were both pretty silent after that.

  After we finished dinner, I went to clean up. Thank God I had finally convinced in my father to invest in a dishwasher. It was idiot-proof for a man like him and cut down the time I spent cleaning dishes.

  After checking the fridge, I began to get dressed. It got my father’s attention. “Kelly, are you heading outside?”

  “We’re out of milk,” I answered. “I can’t have cookies at night without milk.”

  Old habits die hard. Besides, who doesn’t love cookies and milk at night?

  He nodded. “Just be back home before it gets too dark.”

  “Okay, Mr. Head of Security,” I joked. He didn’t find it very amusing. “And I’ll be sure to brush my teeth after my late-night snack.”

  “Do you need money?”

  I was already ready out of the door and into the hallway. “I have a twenty! Bye daddy!”