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“Watch it,” I say before I can even curb my words. He lifts his hands up. “She works for the family.”
“Got, it, got it.” Sergio has worked for the Carluccios for nearly thirty years, starting as a teen washing trucks and moving to my most trusted employee at this site.
“Sergio, this is Lilah, my assistant,” I say, hating using that word.
Wife.
Partner.
Queen.
All words I would much rather use.
But for now, assistant will have to do.
“Delilah, this is Sergio, the manager of the Ocean View site.” Lilah smiles as we stop in front of the large man, putting out a hand for him to shake. I watch with fascination as she shakes the man’s hand firmly, giving him a business-driven look that reminds me just how fucking well she’s going to do when she’s in charge.
“A pleasure to meet you. Gotta be some kind of woman to deal with his grumpy ass all the time.” I roll my eyes, but Lilah’s head tips back as she laughs out loud, and it echoes in the concrete building.
I want to bottle it up, the sound filling me like champagne, bubbles and celebration, and pure unadulterated joy.
“Come, I’ll take you upstairs to the office. We can talk there,” Sergio says, and then we follow him up the winding metal staircase to the offices, her laugh still ricocheting in the empty warehouse.
* * *
“We just can’t handle the increase, Dante. It’s too much,” Sergio says almost an hour later. We’re sitting at a long table, a stack of papers scattered across the surface as my manager tells me they can’t handle the increase in commercial accounts we’ve recently acquired.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sergio.” Those accounts are vital to the business, adding more work but also higher profit margins.
We need higher profit margins to keep the family satisfied as we begin to back out of the shiftier ways of earning money. My plan for a seamless transition with minimal backlash from the men is to counter that loss with increased profits across the board.
“What if . . . ,” Lilah says, and I look over to where she’s holding the papers Sergio slid to me in front of her. Her head tips up, that sweet brow furrowing before she puts the papers down, turning them Sergio’s way and tapping a red-tipped nail on a line. “Right here.” She moves her finger. “And here. These are residential routes but they’re only running the trucks for three hours. Where are the drivers going after?”
Sergio moves the papers closers and squints at them.
“Those drivers are part-time.”
“Can you make them full-time? Or combine the residential half days and add in a day for a commercial route?”
“Those routes are on complete opposite sides of town,” he says, shaking his head in the negative.
Lilah stands, walking around the table, her heels clicking, and I fight the desire to stare at her ass as it sways past. Then she bends in front of a map scribbled with different colored lines indicating routes on different days, and my patience is tested even further.
“Here. Combine these two—you can loop right here, assuming the truck wouldn’t be at max capacity before you got to Third. And if it is, you could just . . .” A red nail draws an imaginary line to the transfer station and then back. “Then you’d have them take this one.” Her nail trails a purple line. “And when you go to get the other side of Seaside Road, you can turn right onto Brighton.” She looks up and smiles. “That would clear up a day, I think.”
Sergio stares at the map, confused but then slowly, his face clears, and he looks up, smiling at my wife.
“That might just work,” he says.
“I know,” she counters, her perfectly lined brow lifted. The cut she got while fighting Angela is mostly healed and just as I suspected, it looks like it will scar.
She calls it her badge of honor.
“You know the area?” he asks. She looks over at me and I shrug. If they don’t figure it out now, they will eventually
“I grew up here. My sister owns the bakery on the boardwalk,” she says. Her demeanor is confident and casual, but I know she’s nervous for him to connect the dots.
That she’s the dirty mayor’s daughter, that she’s privileged, that she was some tabloid princess—everything she’s trying to forget about her old life. But Sergio is a man and probably can only think of two things: beautiful women and food.
