Three Rugged Bosses and a Clueless Girl

Chapter 2

For the first time in her life, Michelle wished she were someone else.

There weren’t going to be other food trucks on her horizon anymore. How could there be any in her future if she had no fingers? She whimpered again.

She didn’t even know if they would end up pickling her entire body eventually if they couldn’t get their money from her.

She never had the opportunity to thrive. After paying for the truck, she needed money to buy supplies because, duh, what was she going to sell? But banks were stingy like that because she had nothing to show for, not enough assets, and insufficient collateral, and they looked at her business plan funny, so she resorted to othermeans.

But that was unimportant in the grand scheme of things at the time, as she envisioned telling her story one day about her humble beginnings and how she became a glamorous bohemian chef, and her message would be to go after your dreams at whatever costs.

Now her message would be, don’t do business with bad people at any cost.

Oh god. What had she done?

Her family only knew that she had lost Fleur. They didn’t know she had resorted to taking money from a mafia-connected loan shark. A loan shark. Frank would have had a heart attack if he knew. And she would die of embarrassment if anyone ever knew what a stupid thing she had done.

So she had gone back to the banks, in worse shape than before, and the bank guy had told her if she had a regular permanent job at least, it would drastically increase her chances of getting approved for a loan.

So she went job hunting and got nothing because she didn’t have any experience, and some of them said they would get back to her in a month or two. She would be dead by then.

If only experience in stupidly taking money from mafia loan sharks had been a prerequisite, she’d have aced that interview.

She had to get out of this mess, and she had to do it by herself, but she was running out of time. She needed a job ASAP, then she had to take a loan from the bank to pay her loan shark, and then she was never going to dream again. Never again.

“Oh, the guys are here,” Stella said, rising from the lounger, pulling her from her thoughts. “You know your brother; he can’t handle being outnumbered by girls, so he invited them over.”

Michelle didn’t need to look behind her to know who Stella was talking about. She would have also correctly guessed who the new guests were based solely on the way the girls in the pool started to act. Suddenly overly bouncy. Suddenly overly flirtatious. And suddenly, overly giggly.

Honestly, for as long as she lived, she would never be able to understand why every other single female who came across her brother’s three best friends, Marc Johnson, Jake Knight, and Evan Saunders, just went a little berserk and wanted to have their babies.

They weren’t even handsome to start with. Too tall, too strong, too rugged, too... jagged. They lived in worn-out jeans that molded the sheer power in their thighs, barely shaved regularly, so there was always a glossy splattering of hair across what others thought were chiseled jawlines, and their hands were so rough, they were littered with callouses. Their dark hair was always a little messy, and yet they always smelled of fresh cologne, which was strange considering they worked in construction.

They were also not fun to be around as the years went by. They just growled or grunted at her now, so whatever, she had her own things going on. And honestly, she was sure if Melissa’s friends bounced any harder, their boobs were going to fall out of their swimsuits right into the laps of her brother’s three friends.

But again, that wasn’t her problem since she had enough problems of her own to dissect the female population’s attraction to her brother’s three friends. Thank goodness she wasn’t inflicted with the same fangirling antics. Maybe she wasn’t affected by them because she wasn’t normal. How could she be normal if she was fighting off an exploding food truck and the Irish mafia? But why couldn’t she just be like the girls in the pool? If being normal meant she had to fall to her knees, infatuated with her brother’s friends, then that’s what she would do. Except that it was too late. Her truck had exploded, and the mafia was after her.

”Think about it, sweetie,” Stella said before she went to greet their new guests. “There’s no need to rush headlong into anything else right now. What you went through was traumatic. Stay here. Think of it as a sabbatical if you want.”

If only her family knew she was heading toward a permanent sabbatical if she didn’t find a job right that minute.

Michelle had already devoured a burger and heaped her plate with Stella”s renowned mac and cheese by the time they settled around the umbrella-covered table. She did so with big blotches of red paint on her cheeks thanks to her little niece, Daisy, who wanted to make her look pretty. Then proceeded to draw her another set of eyebrows above the ones she already had because more was better.

Michelle’s dress was also a little damp after Melissa had come straight from the pool and hugged her just to get her dress wet because it was her birthday, and Michelle didn’t come into the pool with her.

Daisy sat next to her at the table, and Michelle barely paid any attention to what was going on around her.

Didn’t know what they were talking about that warranted such a burst of giggles from the other girls or the way Melissa’s friends seemed to find every opportunity to touch Marc, Jake, and Evan. Of course, Melissa and her friends were literal supermodels, so there’s that.

All Michelle was interested in was getting her next forkful of mac and cheese into her mouth. She was such a horrendous mess, and not even her niece telling her a story about a princess who was a striped zebra-tortoise called Tilly could cheer her up, and it sounded like a good story if she didn’t mind the plot holes.

If Michelle didn’t find a job and get a loan from the bank, she wouldn’t even be able to give life the middle finger because she wouldn’t have any fingers.

Panic swirled around her, and she made those weird whimpering sounds again, which had everyone looking at her this time, including Marc with his stormy sea-green eyes, Jake with his golden orbs, and Evan with his cool blues.

She pretended like nothing happened and that a strange sound hadn’t come from her mouth.

Great.

What was she going to do? She stewed in her thoughts again as the conversation resumed. And then her ears latched onto something.

“I can’t believe Grace just left JKS like that to get married, of all things. What are you going to do without her? She’s irreplaceable, man,” Frank said, shaking his head.

“Grace is getting married?” Stella asked in shock. “How old is she anyway? Seventy?”

“Seventy-five,” Jake offered.

”Well, good for her,” Stella said, raising her glass. “And of course, you’ll find someone else. No one is irreplaceable, Frank, as they say.”

Michelle swallowed the little bit of mac and cheese left in her mouth, her mind doing cartwheels, before she righted herself. Suddenly, she was doing equations like a rocket scientist in her head instead.

A job. A loan from a reputable institute. Her fingers intact. A second chance.

She bit her lip, her gaze vacillating from Marc to Jake to Evan.

This was it. Her universe had handed her the solution. And she had to come to Melissa’s barbecue pool party in a granny dress, with some sort of tribal war paint on her face, courtesy of her niece, to receive it from her brother’s best friends.