Hold Him Like Gravity (Lombardi Family #4)

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Kick

“Hold on, you little jerk,” I called through my apartment door as I stabbed my key in the lock.

Through it, I could hear the long, plaintive wail of a cat who sounded like his tail was caught in a garbage disposal.

“You’re going to wake up the whole building,” I called, slamming and locking my door, tossing my keys into the bowl, then rushing across the apartment with my purse still on my shoulder.

I yanked open the window, letting the cat in off of the fire escape.

He wasn’t mine.

Or, maybe, he was?

Honestly, I had no idea what he did after his shrieking made me stumble out of bed at dawn to open the window and let him back out onto the fire escape.

Maybe he had a home, people who fed and loved on him. That he didn’t scratch to shit each time they tried to touch him.

Or maybe he was a street cat who found a sucker in me, who enjoyed some premium cat food, a saucer of milk, and a warm—or cold—place to hide from the elements for a bit.

I didn’t know.

It didn’t matter.

“Evander,” I said, nodding at the tortie cat as he made his way in, half-bitten off ear and all.

Admittedly, he’d gotten rather tubby since I’d been feeding him. But, hey, winter was upon us. We could all use some extra padding to get through the cold. Or, at least, that was what I’d been telling myself each night I got home to make myself three grilled cheese sandwiches that I may or may not have followed up with ice cream bars in front of my TV.

“Do you need to shriek?” I asked him as he leapt up onto the counter to sit and stare at his empty bowl. “I clearly wasn’t home yet,” I added, walking to put my purse on the hook, reaching inside for the cash tips I’d gotten but hadn’t had a chance to tally at work.

One-ten.

Not bad, considering my job wasn’t exactly the kind that required tips. What can I say? I learned from a young age that if you chatted up the older neighborhood guys, they were happy to slip an extra twenty to you just for being nice to them.

Kind of pathetic, if you ask me, but, hey, it kept the very expensive cat food in Evander’s stomach. While I ate plastic ‘cheese’ on cheap white bread.

“Really?” I asked as I heard something fly off the counter and clatter to the ground. “I’m coming. Jesus.”

I opened up his can of wet cat food that always made me gag a little, then plopped it down into the bowl I’d found myself popping into the pet store for after the third night he’d shown up at my window. Along with a bed. And some toys. He hated the bed. And preferred to entertain himself by shredding the side of my couch with his viciously sharp nails.

“Happy?” I asked as he moved in to start eating. “It’s not like you really need it, you chonk,” I said as I grabbed the milk and poured some into the other side of his bowl.

I’d learned at that same pet store that I really wasn’t supposed to give cats milk. But Evander really didn’t give a single shit what the lady at the pet store had to say about his unhealthy milk habit. So, yeah, he got his damn milk each night.

“What should I have?” I asked as I pulled open my mostly-empty fridge. “I only have enough cheese slices for one sandwich,” I told him, as if he gave a damn about what I ate. He’d probably be totally fine with me starving to death then feasting on me afterward. Cats were heartless little assholes that way. I liked that about them.

With a sigh, I went into the freezer to pull out one of those frozen single serving pizzas, tossing it into the microwave. Nope, not even a toaster oven. I had a gummy crust ahead of me. Real fine dining over in my dingy little apartment.

What can I say?

I’d left the Bronx with almost no money in my pocket and only the shit I could grab in a mad rush to get the fuck out of there.

Starting over never got easy.

It was harder when you left two-thirds of everything you owned behind.

I’d been lucky to nab the job at the meat shop. Honestly, I’d walked in to get an application out of sheer desperation, not thinking they’d actually hire me since everyone who worked there was a guy.

But, thank God, the manager had taken pity on me and given me a job. Despite my not being able to tell you the difference between a cheap skirt steak and a hundred-dollar tenderloin.

It was even good pay. And benefits. So, hey, I was doing alright, considering having to cut and run with no planning or a nest egg to make the transition easier.

My first month working at Lombardi Premium Meats, I’d managed to get myself enough clothes to last a week without washing, some basic self-care items, towels, pillows, a coffee maker, that kind of thing.

The second month, I got to move out of a short-term rental and into an actual apartment.

Which was where Evander found me. On my second night. Waking me out of a restless sleep, heart hammering, no freaking idea what could be making a noise like that.

Having no cat food that night, he ate my last can of tuna, drank my coffee creamer, and took a nap right on my pillow.

Since then, I’d been… working on building my life back up. The microwave was a splurge. A toaster oven was a stupid luxury when I had a full-sized one. I was just too impatient to wait for it to warm up.

I didn’t usually work such long shifts.

But the store was about to be closed for a week for those renovations. That meant I would be getting paid, sure, but not getting any tips for that time. So I wanted to get as much extra as I could and offered to help with the deep cleaning.

I honestly didn’t remember the last time I had a week off from work, save for when I’d been job hunting after leaving the Bronx in the dead of night. I’d been busting my ass since I was fifteen.

What the hell was I supposed to do with my time?

Watch TV?

I had exactly one streaming service and I was pretty sure I’d watched just about everything on it that didn’t require subtitles. And I just wasn’t interested in reading and watching at the same time.

Maybe I could do some cheap sprucing up around the apartment. I wasn’t exactly a craft chick. But poverty could make you pick up all sorts of new talents when you set your mind to it.

You could learn to do anything on YouTube these days.

Or I could actually get to know more about Brooklyn, my new home.

I’d moved because it was as far from the Bronx as I could get while still having somewhat reasonable rent prices. But I hadn’t really known shit about the area. To be real, I still didn’t. I knew the route to work and home, then to the laundromat, pet store, and market.

That was about it.

I didn’t have the money to be going any other places, but I could at least learn where things were for the day when things loosened up a bit.

I was getting there. Another few months and I would even be having some of my paycheck left at the end of the month.

So long as Evander didn’t go out spreading his seed and bringing a baby mama and kittens over to mooch off of me too.

“You hear that, buddy?” I asked as I slipped the soft pizza onto one of those cheap melamine plates I’d picked up for like fifty cents on summer clearance. “No babies. Actually, can you make babies?” I asked, never having really looked at his whole… situation. Actually, I didn’t know for a fact if he was a dude or not.

I just assumed. Given all the dramatics.

Anyone who said women were the more emotional of the sexes had clearly never met a sick man, or one who’d encountered even the mildest inconvenience.

Evander shot me a bored look as he started to groom himself.

“Well, it’s been a good talk,” I said, putting his bowl in the sink, squirting some dish soap into it, then filling it up to soak before grabbing my plate, a knife, and a fork—since this was not the kind of pizza you could pick up—and making my way to the couch. “But I’m gonna re-watch that show about the alien abduction again before I crash. I’d appreciate you not waking me up at the ass-crack of dawn on my first day off.”

To that, Evander flicked his tail and shot me a look that said he didn’t give a single fuck what I wanted before going back to his grooming.

I’d just finished shoveling the last bit of pizza into my mouth when a memory flashed across my mind.

“Go home, Kick. It’s late.”

God, the way his voice had said my name in that deep, raspy little voice of his.

It was shiver-inducing.

I didn’t even think he actually knew my name.

Or, if he did, he knew my government name—Kathleen—from my employment paperwork, not the name I actually went by.

But there he was.

Just a few feet away from me.

Smelling like cigars and woodsmoke—dark, sexy, mysterious. It was the kind of scent I wanted to smell trapped in my hair, all over my clothes when I peeled them off. On my bare skin after he’d run his face…

Nope.

No.

I was not going to be having sexy little fantasies about my boss. My, admittedly, absolutely ridiculously hot boss.

He was the literal definition of ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ with his almost black hair, his dark eyes, his impressive height, and those strong arms I’d maybe eye-banged once or twice when I caught him doing something that made the muscles twitch and twist in a way that had no right to be as sexy as it was.

Fine.

It was probably more like a dozen times.

Still.

I wasn’t going to fantasize about him. Even if I was dying to know how my name would sound coming from that mouth while he was deep inside of me, his body taut, his fingers digging into my flesh as he came.

I mean, I totally fantasized. A lot. While asleep. But there was no controlling that.

I wasn’t going to play into it when I was awake.

No matter how my spine shivered at the way he’d said my name.

I had no qualms about having some good, fun, casual sex with some random hot guy who said my name like a sexy little secret only the two of you shared.

But when that hot guy was your boss?

Qualms.

There were a lot of qualms.

“Damnit,” I added to my inner monologue.

Maybe this week away from him would be just what I needed to get my mind back on straight about him.

Maybe I also needed to invest some of that last hundred bucks in tips I’d gotten into a new, strong, battery-powered boyfriend. With rechargeable batteries. Since, with the way things were going, I’d be killing batteries left and right. And I didn’t have the funds for that.

I didn’t even spend much time with Rico. But the man was still ever-present on my mind for some reason. Especially in those quiet moments in bed just before sleep. When all the other noise fell away and all that was left was that rare moment I saw my boss come out from the back office where he spent most of his time when he was around to go and grab a drink or a premade sandwich out of the case. Or when I overheard him speaking to the manager, always wondering how it would sound if he said my name.

And now, now I knew.

Sighing, I hit the play button on the remote to make the Are you still there? message disappear. Even though I’d already zoned out on the show.

This was not the kind of apartment building where you could go to sleep without something on in the background. It seemed like half of my neighbors were vampires who liked to stay up late screaming at their video games, playing music too loud, having bed-squeaking, headboard-knocking sex, or arguing with their partners. The other half did what I’d learned to do as well. Turn their TVs or white noise machines up just to be able to sleep through the noise.

Reaching back, I dragged down the blanket from the back of the couch and lowered myself down on the cushions.

It was a lumpy magenta sofa that I’d picked up at a thrift store after inspecting it with a fine-tooth comb for bed bugs, then hired two guys to help me lug it all the way back to my new apartment. It was leaps and bounds more comfortable than the mattress I’d bought online that was about the same thickness and softness of a cardboard box that Evander was no doubt occupying now that he’d finished grooming himself.

And maybe, just maybe, if I slept there for the night instead of the bed, I wouldn’t wake up tangled in my sheets, sweating through my clothes, with my heart racing and my body nearly quaking with need for the only man in the city that I really couldn’t put my hands on.

My damn boss.