Chapter One
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Marisol chanted, hitting the icon on her cell to listen to the voicemail once more. Did she hear Mr. Raphonzio correctly?
She’d been a bit distracted the first time she hit play. Her attention was snagged by the hot baker from down the block. She had a habit of covertly watching him like a hawk. She couldn’t help it; she’d been in love with him for years—from afar, of course. Seeing the object of her lustful obsessions bend over had essentially turned her deaf. He’d been loading his work van as she passed the window looking out into the alley, which gave the perfect view of his ass every time he bent to adjust another box of baked goods.
Which she had to watch because…obviously.
The message had played almost halfway by the time she’d drawn her focus away from the fit of Sexy Symon’s jeans, back to the words coming out of her cell phone.
Now, she desperately hoped she’d heard wrong.
“So…um…hey, Marisol. This is Mr. Raphonzio calling. I…um…well…you see what happened was that Gloria got a call from someone wanting to buy the building. You know…the one you were interested in? Well, you see…I know this may sound bad, but Gloria wants to go with this new offer because it’s higher and all…and well…I can’t really say no to her.”
Throat clearing.
“Now listen, I know I told you that you could buy the place for a steal, but with her breathing down my neck and holding the condo in Florida over my head, I don’t know what to do. She told me the only way I can sell it to you is if you meet what this other guy is putting down. But here’s the problem. It’s fifteen grand higher, and I know you don’t got that much, honey. It was one of the reasons I was giving you a good deal in the first place, but that was before this other guy came around offering more.”
Deep sigh.
“I can’t get her to budge on the money, but I can buy you a little bit of time. I’ll tell her we should put off the sale until we get back from visiting her sister in California. We’re going to be gone for an entire month. That’ll buy you a little bit of time to come up with the fifteen thousand…if you can. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the best I can do.” The message went silent for a moment before a final, “I’m sorry.”
What she’d heard felt like a bucket of cold water over the head. Marisol lowered her phone, took a deep breath, and then promptly lost her shit.
Stomping to the haphazardly patched wall of the back room of her family’s restaurant, she kicked at the baseboard in frustration. Her Converse sneaker thudded against the wood to emphasize each word she yelled out. “Are! You! Fucking! Kidding! Me!?” She ended the tirade with what could only be described as a ‘Ms. Piggy scream.’ “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Chiquita?” her mom called, poking her head in to see what she was yelling about. “What’s going on? Is something wrong with the shipment?”
“Uhhh…not exactly,” she said quickly, gathering her hair back up into a bun. Her hair was more than tussled after hate-stomping the wall. She wasn’t ready to explain Mr. Raphonzio’s news. Not until she had time to come up with a plan to fix things. “I mean, no. The shipment was good. I just missed a call and the voicemail they left wasn’t the best of news,” she said, keeping it vague.
“What type of bad news, honey? You okay?” Marisol’s mom wiped her hands on the apron around her waist as she leaned against the doorframe. “Does it have anything to do with your brothers?”
“What?” she asked. The question distracted her from the phone call for a moment as her imagination took off. Her brothers were nothing but walking chaos. “Wait…have the boys done something I should know about?”
“Not that I know of,” her mom answered, waving her off with a flip of her hand. “But you know them. It’s been a while since they got out of hand, and the last time that happened was when they had to deal with Scott .”
Marisol couldn’t hide her smile at the way her mom said her ex-boyfriend’s name. None of her family had liked Scott— ever —and they were never shy about letting him know it, starting with how they pronounced his name. In the early days of their relationship, she’d felt a little bad about the flak her family put Scott through. That had changed quickly though. Marisol hadn’t been surprised when her brothers paid him a visit after they’d broken up. They’d heard the same rumors she had about his cheating. Only, they decided he needed to be taught a lesson. Nobody messed with their baby sister.
When you messed with one Medina, you messed with them all—or at least that was the way it worked in her tightknit family.
“Nah.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t mad. He deserved it for all of the bullshit he’d put me through. I just wish I’d been there to watch his girlfriend’s husband finally arrive and beat the crap out of him.” Even now she was still a little salty about it . “The boys should have called me before they tipped the husband off about Scott’s little afternoon delight while he was at work. By the time I got there, Scott had already peed himself and pledged the rest of his days to the priesthood. I missed most of the good stuff.”
“Luis caught it all on his phone. Have him send you the video, if you want to see Scott crying like the spineless pussy he is. Your father thought it was so funny. He had me save it the cloud so we could watch it again and again,” her mom confided, making Marisol bark out a laugh. “Now come on, Chiquita. The lunch rush is coming up, and the boys are going to try to split service between the counter and the trucks outside while the skies are clear. Hopefully, the rain will hold off until after everyone has spent their money. Did you find out when we can sign the papers on the space next door yet? Your dad asked this morning when he called.”
Marisol blew out a deep breath and shook her head, hoping her poker face was, at the very least, passable. “Not yet,” she fibbed. Technically, she didn’t know when they’d be able to sign the papers, if ever. She wasn’t planning on keeping the news from her mom indefinitely. Just not yet. “I’m still trying to figure all of it out.”
“Well, less figuring back here and more figuring up at the counter. The laptop is under the register so you can work the ledgers until we have our first customer.” With a snap of her fingers, Juanita Medina turned and went back to the cramped kitchen where she worked her magic.
“Yes, Mama.” She trudged up to the small counter space where everyone coming in placed their order. Whether it be for beer, shots, or the amazing tacos her family made from scratch, there was one counter that handled it all, and Marisol was usually the Medina behind it.
That wasn’t her only job. She kept up the bookkeeping, placed orders, and handled most of the general management that went into keeping their family taco shop up and running. With a newly earned associates degree in business, Marisol had big plans for their little family business.
Big plans.
Unfortunately, they were the same plans that were currently falling down around her ears. The message from Mr. Raphonzio was the equivalent of a death knell. Everything she’d worked so hard to put together hinged on buying the building next door. They couldn’t just pick up and move to a larger building. Not only would her parents kick up a fuss about leaving what they considered their second home, they simply couldn’t afford it. The small shop her parents had been serving tacos out of was the same size it had been when she was a little girl. Despite the business growing, the tiny box they served out of was stagnant. With an expanding family to support, her parents couldn’t do much besides slap a couple of coats of paint on the walls over the years. The claustrophobic lobby was often too crowded to accommodate everyone. The additional food trucks operated by her brothers in conjunction with the shop helped them keep up with demand, but it was a struggle. They’d nicknamed the trucks “Flying Taco One” and “Flying Taco Two,” despite the fact that neither one of them really moved, and when they did, it was nowhere close to flying.
The trucks were their first line of defense to handle the overflow from their too-small restaurant. One was kept parked right next to their building for the sake of convenience— it also wasn’t the most reliable vehicle, so that was basically where it had broken down. The second truck sat stationed at the opposite end of the block to catch the shoppers that stayed on that side of the square.
Her brothers manned them rain or shine, never missing a day of work if they could help it, but sometimes it was unavoidable. Crazy Kansas weather meant it was hit or miss on whether someone stuck around for tacos if they had to wait outside. More than once, a tornado warning had ruined an entire day’s worth of sales. Not that she blamed them. There was no way she’d want to be caught between a twister and a taco truck. The entire setup was obviously not ideal, but it worked until Marisol figured out how to upgrade them from a hole-in-the-wall taco shop into a proper taqueria with more than five wobbly tables.
She jotted some numbers down as she tried to figure out a solution to their newest predicament.
When it came down to it, she needed Raphonzio to sell her the building next door for the original agreed upon price. No matter how she looked at it, there was no way the family would be able to scrape together an extra fifteen grand to put into the pot for the empty building. Her brothers were all married with kids, which pretty much tapped them out, and Marisol was budgeted down to the bare minimum to be able to throw in the money she’d already contributed. The only way she could see saving anything additional was if she gave up her apartment and moved back home.
And there was no way in hell she wanted to do that.
It had taken her forever to get out of her family’s overprotective Hispanic house the first time, and even now, her dad still checked to see if she was home at a reasonable hour.
“Hey, Sis!” MJ, her oldest brother, called out as he pushed the front door open, carrying a big box. The bell jangled as he bumped it open with his hip. “Want me to flip the sign?”
“Thanks,” she said without checking her watch. She knew it was still a little early, but considering the current situation, she wasn’t about to turn away an early bird on the hunt for tacos. She doubted they’d be ordering fifteen grand worth, but still, every little bit counted.
MJ stopped and gave her a kiss on the cheek before walking past her to the swinging kitchen door. He didn’t push it open, just peeked through the small window that was eye level. “Is Mama or Ricky back there? I have that extra box of peppers the grocer told her he’d send over, but I don’t know who they’re supposed to go to. Luis has enough on his truck and sent me to Freddie, but Freddie doesn’t think they’re his. Do you know?”
“No clue. I haven’t seen Ricky yet, but Mama is back there,” Marisol let him know, her brain still caught up in the columns of numbers she couldn’t get to work. “You’d have to ask her.”
“Hey,” he said, bringing her eyes back up from where she was swirling her pen on a piece of paper in front of her. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she answered with a sigh that said the opposite. She couldn’t hide what was going on from MJ. Not when she needed her older bro to help her figure shit out. “Actually…no. We need to schedule a family meeting.”
“Something going on with you or the shop?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over her as if looking for some wrong before settling on her stomach.
“I’m not pregnant, you idiot. Jesus, MJ!” Marisol slapped at him with a scowl when she noticed the direction of his gaze. She couldn’t believe he’d even thought it was a possibility, considering her family was sometimes more involved in her love life than she was.
“Hey now,” he yelped, moving the box he was still holding between them when she rammed her knuckle into his side. “I can’t help it if you’re looking a little…fluffier lately.”
“I swear—” Marisol began before cutting herself off with a shake of her head. She didn’t have time to teach him a lesson, no matter how much she wanted to. She had to focus. “If shit wasn’t falling apart right now, I’d kick your ass.” Taking a step away from him so she didn’t murder her older brother, she peeked through the glass window to make sure there were no lurkers near the kitchen door. She wasn’t ready for their parents to find out about the jam they were in until she’d had a chance to figure her way out of it, and although their dad was out of town, their mom had ears like a bat. The last thing Marisol wanted was for her mom to catch wind of things before she had a plan in place.
“What’s going on, Sis?”
“Remember how I was waiting for Raphonzio to let us know when we could go to the bank and sign the papers?” she began, unable to keep the sense of foreboding out of her voice.
MJ immediately stiffened, his expression showing he knew what was coming without going any further. “Yeah?”
“Well…apparently they have another interested party with a bigger pocketbook.” Marisol bit her lip to keep from kicking and cursing— again . “Long story short, Mrs. Raphonzio isn’t going to let him take a lower offer now that they have another bite. We have a month to come up with the difference if we still want the building.”
“How much of a difference are we talking about here?” he asked, setting the box of peppers down.
“Fifteen grand,” she whispered. Her stomach sank as she said the amount out loud for the first time. It was such an astronomical amount that it was almost physically painful for her to get past her lips.
“Fuck!” MJ hissed, his hands immediately going to his head as if he needed to hold it steady on his shoulders. “How—I—what—”
“Exactly.” She nodded, having already gone through the roundhouse kick of emotions that came with the news.
“Have you told them yet?” he asked, tipping his head to the kitchen where their parents normally stayed busy. “What’d Dad say?”
“I haven’t told them yet,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “Dad’s flight last night got canceled so he’s still in Seguin. I didn’t want to tell Mama without him here.”
“Fuck.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth, his worry plain to see.
“We’re fucked, MJ. We’re fucked hard. There’s no way we can come up with that much extra, even if I scrapped my car fund. I’ve looked at the numbers a thousand times and I’m not seeing a way to make it work.”
“Okay,” he said, holding out his hands, signaling for a break. “We need a family meeting.”
“That’s what I said!” Marisol pulled out her phone and texted their three missing brothers. Even though this was supposed to be her responsibility, she needed all Medinas on deck.