Page 114 of Effortless

Rebeka was already shoving her mouth full of food again. “Okay, Ma.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Tom’s youngest sister showed off more chewed pasta when she repeated, “Okay, Ma.”

More laughter filled up the table.

Camilla laughed beside him, too. “Sometimes I wish I had younger siblings.”

“To gang up on your brother, or what?”

She winked at him, sexy in a blink. “One reason, sure.”

“Probably the only reason.”

Camilla shrugged. “Probably.”

A firm tug on Tom’s pant leg took his attention away from the conversation he was trying to have with his father, and Tommas’s men. At his side, little Rebeka looked up at him with her big blue eyes, and a worry line creasing her tiny brow.

“I think Camilla is lost, Tommaso.”

He almost laughed at how serious she sounded.

“What makes you think that?” he asked.

“We can’t find her. It’s been ten whole minutes, and Ma says after ten minutes the person hiding wins. We called to her, but she didn’t answer us.”

Oh, Christ.

He left Camilla alone with his sisters and the other women for a few minutes to chat about something important, and look what happened.

“We were playing hide and seek,” Rebeka said.

“Yeah, I figured that out. She doesn’t know how to get around the mansion. Nobody thought to say that was a bad idea, Rebeka?”

The place was a two-wing, three-level monster. He could fucking get lost in it.

Rebeka shrugged her little shoulders. “She said yes.”

Behind him, Tom’s father chuckled as he’d clearly been listening in. “Go find her, Tommaso. We can finish this conversation later.”

He turned to his dad, but shook his head. “No, just consider what I said about Lou, and the crew. It needs to be done, and it’s your best bet to make that crew successful. It’s only running smoothly right now because of him.”

“I’ll consider it, Tommaso. I’ll talk it over more with Theo and Damian, too, and see what they think of it. Maybe a seat could be made for another man seeing as how we don’t have one that needs filled at the moment.”

“All right.”

It was the best he could ask of his father. Tommas was the boss, after all, not him. Only his father could make those choices at the end of the day, as they usually ended up impacting the entire organization as a whole and not just one piece of it.

Things like that couldn’t be done lightly.

Tom understood.

“Did anybody see which direction Camilla went?” he asked.

Rebeka nodded. “The front.”

Great.