La Cosa Nostra, This Thing of Ours

by Amie Nichols

  "What are you saying?" I look down at the old book and back up to her.

  "That we need to do our research, because we are going to Italy," she states it like it's a fact.

  "No, Petal, it's too dangerous. If I go, you won't be going with me." She slams on the brakes, the tail of the truck swaying back and forth, bringing it to a stop on the gravel road. Dust flies around the SUV.

  "Excuse me?" she demands. "Did you not just say two hours ago that we will never not be together?"

  "Yes, but, I'm not going to put you–" She interrupts me putting her hand up.

  "Fuck that! WE are going and WE are going soon. You've spent enough of your life not knowing your mother. Also we aren't going in blind. We are going to do our research," she says. She is staring at me with determination like I have never seen before.

  "Are we together or not?" she demands. For such a tiny petite thing, she can sure get her point across.

  "Yes, forever. I am never letting you go, ever. But ... can we talk about this later? I just found this out two days ago. Let it sink in a little, okay." I tell her, hoping it will make her drop it for now. I will die first before I put her life in danger. I also love the fact that she is in this with me, she is in for life.

  "Okay, fine, we will talk about it later." She takes off down the road again seeming satisfied. I flip open the book on my lap reading the first page. Right away I see that the Esposito family has been in charge for a couple hundred years. I shut the book when we pull up to her house. Time to meet the parents. My palms are sweaty, their approval is very important.

  Harper takes my hand as we walk up the front porch and into the house. "Mom," Harper yells.

  "In the kitchen, honey," her mom yells back. If Harper wasn't standing next to me, I would have sworn it was her that just said that.

  "You ready, baby?" she says to me before we step into the kitchen. I nod to her with a half smile. What I see is Harper in her late forties. I would never guess it by looking at her. I only know how old her parents are because she has told me. She looks just like her with shorter hair, and a little heavier. Not fat at all just not as slim as Harper. She does look older, but never in a million years would I have guessed her to be almost fifty years old.

  "Mom, this is Liam Tarseta. Liam, my mother Laura Troy." Harper introduces us, and I'm not sure what I am supposed to do, shake her hand, bow, nod? I don't have to guess, because Laura comes around the big square island in the middle of the kitchen and embraces me in a hug.

  "It is so nice to meet you, Liam," she exclaims, stepping back to look at me.

  "You also, Mrs. Troy." I smile at her. She is tinier than I first thought. Standing next to me now, she is actually shorter than Harper. How did this little thing give birth to those huge boys? My question is answered in a matter of seconds when a man bigger than Kade walks in the back door.

  "Daddy," Harper says, walking up to her father to give him a hug. His huge arms engulf her in a bear hug.

  "Sweetheart, I'm glad to see you are feeling better." He kisses the top of her head then his attention comes to me. No doubt that his sons have already told him that I was the reason she was so upset.

  "Much better, Daddy. I want you to meet Liam, my boyfriend," she says, putting her tiny hand in his giant paw. She pulls him into the kitchen. "Liam, this is Brad Troy, Daddy, Liam Tarseta," she says, now standing next to me.

  "You were what had my daughter all upset I hear," his voice booming as he glares down at me. I don't know how in the world this giant of a man and his petite little wife work. I am speechless as his eyes bore holes through me.

  "Yes, sir. I am very sorry about that. It killed me to know I caused her so much pain," I answer, and for the first time ever, I am intimidated. I feel like this bear of a man could crush me at any second for hurting his daughter.

  "Next time you won't have to worry about it, because you will be dead if my daughter ever comes home like that again," he booms, now leaning up against the counter.

  "Brad, stop, you're scaring the poor boy," Laura says, coming up to her husband and wrapping her arms around his waist. Her face comes to midway up his torso. Her arms don't even come close to making it around his waist. He puts his arm around her shoulders and it's like she disappears.

  "That's the point, Lori," he chuckles, leaning down to kiss his wife.

  "I swear, Mr. Troy, it will never happen again." Harper puts her arm around my waist sensing that I am tense. It doesn't help me. I get another glare when she does this. I don't make a move to touch his daughter.

  "Make sure that it don't," he warns before excusing himself to take a shower before dinner.

  "Don't let him scare you dear, he is really a big teddy bear." Laura laughs going back around the island to work on dinner. "Liam, the boys are in the living room watching some game, you go join them. Harper, help your mom with supper." She shoos me to leave them alone. I turn to Harper horrified.

  "Okay, Mom, I am just going to show him the way and I will be back." She guides me through a huge dining room with a table that is already set for dinner.

  The living room is just off the dining room. I hear Kade talking about a bad call and the noise from the TV.

  "You'll be okay?" She turns to me putting her arms around my neck before I am left to the wolves.

  "Yeah sure, with your giant family, no problem," I chuckle nervously. She stands on her tiptoes and places a slow kiss on my lips, followed by another.

  "You're doing great," she coos against my lips. I have my hands on her hips kissing her more passionately, when Kade walks in.

  "Hey, lover boy, hands off my sister in this house," he shouts. Harper lets me loose and turns on her heels to face her brother.

  "Don't even, Kade. You've made out with a ton of girls in this house. Don't even think about telling me what to do." She points her finger in his face.

  "Oh relax, just because you are going off to U of I to become a big fancy doctor doesn't mean you are a grown up." He wraps his arm around her neck bringing her to him and patting her head.

  "You're going to U of I?" I play dumb. I didn't know she had found out yet.

  "Don't act like you don't know. The letter said work study program, but this morning they called me and said that I had a very generous donor that had paid for a full ride. They wanted to know if I was accepting, because if I wasn't they were going to contact the donor to see if they could give it to another student." She pushes away from her brother and is now standing with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot staring at me.

  "I don't know anything about it," I shrug my shoulders and lie through my teeth.

  "Hey, Liam, would you like a beer?" Kade holds up his empty bottle heading into the kitchen for another one. I nod yes, before he leaves the room.

  "Liam Tarseta, don't even pretend that you are not the generous donor," Harper shrieks, her voice getting high, like she can't even believe I am denying it.

  I shrug again. Kade walks back through the dining room handing me my beer. "Come on, stud muffin, let's watch the game."

  "Liam, I can handle a lot of things, but I can't handle lies," Harper shouts, walking away from me back to the kitchen. I sit on the sectional couch in the living room, opening my beer and drinking half in one swig.

  "It's you, isn't it?" Kade is sitting on the other side of the couch with one leg up, watching the baseball game that is on the TV. "You better tell her," he says, not waiting for an answer.

  "She might not accept it though." I stare at the screen having no interest in it at all.

  "She already knows it was you. Lying about it will just make her mad," Easton pipes off from across the room, sitting in a recliner. "Besides, money bags, if I had spent two-hundred thousand dollars on a girl, you better believe she would know where it came from." Kade and Easton laugh. Are the stupid meatheads really giving me advice?

  Chapter 28

  "What do you have planned for the summer, dear?" Laura asks when we are all sitting at the dining r
oom table eating. I am sitting next to Harper who hasn't said much to me since before dinner.

  "Liam is taking me to Italy," she bursts out, making me almost choke on the bite of meatloaf I just put in my mouth.

  "We haven't decided that for sure." I turn to Harper who looks very satisfied.

  "Oh really, do you have family there Liam?" Laura asks.

  "Um ... I have an aunt who lives there."

  "What about your parents?" Laura pushes for more information. I am not used to this kind of questioning.

  "My father is in Chicago, my grandparents moved here when he was seventeen."

  "What about your mother, where is she?" All eyes are on me as she grills me for information. I turn to Harper for help. Do I lie? What do I say?

  "Liam just learned a few days ago who is mother is," Harper interjects, seeing my uneasiness.

  "You didn't know who your mother was?" Now Easton is joining the interrogation.

  "It is a long complicated story that we really can't share right now," Harper addresses her family with a firm tone, "so why don't we talk about something else."

  "Why can't you talk about it?" Kade ignores his sister's comment about talking about something else.

  "Because we can't," she says more firmly, having a stare down with her brother.

  "Does it have anything to do with why you came home crying your eyes out?" Brad now has decided to join in.

  "I have recently found out some information about my mother. I can't talk about it right now because she could potentially be in danger," I speak up for myself just as Harper is about to defend me more.

  "I bet it's a scam, someone trying to get money from you. You know the kind where they say you have a family member in danger," Kade says, nodding his head like he has it all figured out.

  "We don't know, that is why we are not talking about it." I nod to Kade, telling him he is probably right, hoping it will put an end to the subject.

  "You poor thing, you never knew your mother," Laura says, cocking her head giving me sympathetic eyes.

  "No." I finish off my fifth bottle of beer. Kade stands and removes my empty and returns with fresh bottles for him and me. Not sure if the beer is helping or not.

  "That still doesn't explain why my little girl had such a broken heart two days ago." Brad, who is sitting at the head of the table, is boring a hole in my head.

  "Daddy, that is our business," Harper spits at her dad. Turning to him, I can tell she is telling him to shut up with her eyes.

  "Anything that has you upset is OUR business," Easton cuts in.

  "So where did you think your mother was all these years?" Laura just won't give up on the subject. She is done eating and has her hands under her chin, staring at me with genuine interest.

  "Mom," Harper says under her breath.

  "It's okay, Petal." I put my hand on hers that is laying on the table.

  "Honestly, Mrs. Troy, I had no idea," I answer her with sincerity. She nods her head slowly, giving me such pity in her expression.

  Kade looks at his mother and then to me. Rolling his eyes, he gets up from the table. "You poor little thing, come with me and E for a second, lover boy." Kade motions me with a nod of the head to join him outside.

  "What are you doing?" Harper stands up with me like she is going to go with us.

  "Don't worry, "Petal", he'll be back in a minute," Kade says with another eye roll. She responds by sitting back down with a flop, looking very unsettled.

  "E and I want to take your fancy sports car for a spin," Kade says as soon as we are on the front porch.

  "It's at the hotel." Without hesitation, I reach in my pocket and throw the keys to the Viper to Kade. I get two very shocked looks.

  "So this is how you treat the things you love, someone wants to take them for a ride and poof, that easy, huh?" Kade says, staring at the keys in his hand.

  "Really?" I chuckle. This is some stupid test. "First, I like my car, I don't love it. Second, there is only one thing in this world that I love and cannot live without, that is your sister. I never plan to go to sleep the rest of my life without her in my arms. So if you want to take my car for a joyride, go for it. As long as I have Harper, I don't care about anything else."

  I used to think women were possessions, and were there for my pleasure. Harper changed me, changed me forever.

  For the first time since I've met either Troy boy, they are speechless. I turn and walk back in the house to find my girl.

  Chapter 29

  That night I do just that. I am sound asleep with my girl in my arms. I am awakened by something and I see the soft glow of a laptop. We are in Harper's room in her parents' house. Laura insisted we stay when Harper said she was going to the hotel with me. Although we had to be quiet, Harper was a wild cat, saying she had always fantasized about having sex in this room.

  It was hard as hell keeping quiet. I sure missed her screams of pleasure. I have bite marks on my shoulders from where she muffled her screams. I didn't care. I like the marks on me. They remind me of her.

  Harper is sitting up with her back against the headboard, laptop on her legs. The light coming from the laptop gives me a nice view of her perfect bare breasts. I lie quietly, watching her for a moment. She has a notepad beside her and is jotting down something. She pinches her bottom lip with her thumb and forefinger as she studies the screen.

  "Petal?" I whisper, propping myself up on one elbow.

  "Did I wake you, baby?" She looks down at me with those beautiful eyes, glowing from the light of the laptop.

  I shake my head and yawn. I see on the alarm clock that it is four in the morning. I was so sound asleep, I feel like I've slept for ten hours when it has only been four. "What are you looking at?"

  "Did you know you have siblings?" She clicks on the mouse, pulling up a picture of a man that looks just like me. "Dante Esposito. He could be your twin."

  "Wow, that is haunting." I stare at the screen sitting up more to get a better look.

  "Here are your twin sisters." She clicks and pulls up two identical women that look like the picture of my mother, only younger. "Meet Gia and Milania Esposito, they are twenty-two. Your brother Dante Esposito is twenty-five."

  "I can't believe how much we look alike. That must be why my father freaked when that picture of me went into that national tabloid." I sit up even more, resting my back against the headboard, Harper's shoulder touching mine.

  "Also, I found this. It's a picture of your mother in 1984. It must have been right after she returned to Italy." The picture is obviously taken from afar. She is standing on a veranda type thing that is attached to what looks like a gigantic house. She has cuts and bruises on her face and a cast on her arm. My heart wrenches seeing this, thinking this might have been part of her punishment for running away.

  "I'm sorry, baby." Harper puts her hand on my sheet covered thigh. "There's an article with it saying, Teresa Esposito returns from sabbatical. It mentions something about a car accident being the cause of the bruises."

  "Yeah, I bet," I snort, chewing on my thumbnail.

  "The interesting part is that I looked up the name of the photographer, thinking that maybe he had some more stories on them. He had disappeared shortly after this article was released. Two weeks later he was found dead, execution style," she reads from her notes.

  "That's not all. It appears anyone who publishes pictures that leave the family in a less than savory light, suffers the same fate."

  "See, all the more reason to not pursue this anymore." I slam the lid of her laptop down, scooting down to lie on my back.

  She places the laptop on the floor and lies down next to me. Turning on her side so she is facing me, she props her head up on her hand. "You said that your father assumed it was Leo, Giovanni's brother, who found your mom."

  "That's what he said," I answer her apprehensively, not sure I want to know where she is going with this.

  "Why did he assume that?" she pushes.

  "Becaus
e he thinks he would be the only one who would have left us alive. Dad was friends with Leo when they were kids."

  "So I was thinking we find him. If he is the compassionate one, he might bring your mother to you."

  "No, Harper," I answer firmly. "This is far too dangerous."

  "We will be careful–"

  "You know, if was just me I wouldn't care, but I would die if anything happened to you." I turn on my side, mirroring her so I can see her eyes. There is just enough light in the room that I can see the shine. "Petal, please…" I beg.

  "Liam, I'm just doing research right now." She leans over placing a soft kiss on my lips. Her lips brush mine so gently it almost tickles. She doesn't move away, but stays just close enough that we are barely touching. "I want to find out all I can about your mother." Her minty breath mixed with the floral scent of her hair fills my senses. I place my hand on her hip, pulling her to me.

  "I love you for that, I love that you want to do this for me." I press her hips against me so she can feel my growing erection. "I just don't think it is a good idea to even be digging into the Esposito family. I don't think you understand how far their reach is." I lean in and brush her lips with mine. I don't pull away, but leave our lips touching.

  "We'll talk about it later," she says against my mouth. I know this is far from over. At least I can take her mind off it for now. I run my hand through her silky hair and cup the back of her head. Pulling her lips hard to mine, her mouth opens, letting my tongue inside. Rolling her so she is on her back, I move on top of her being careful not to put all my weight on her. My knee slips between her legs, pushing them apart. I reach down between us and touch her pussy.

  She is so warm and wet for me, I insert my middle finger making her moan into my mouth. "God, Petal, you are so fucking beautiful. I want to make you come every day for the rest of your life," I groan, bringing my finger up to her sweet little clit, rubbing it gently. Her head goes back into the pillow as she whimpers with pleasure, her hips moving in tempo with my finger. I continue to kiss her deeply and I can tell she is close. Her body is moving faster and she is now clawing at my back. It is taking every ounce of her self-control not to scream.