CHAPTER ONE
PRESENT DAY
“Excuse me, ma’am. Ma’am?”
Didn’t she just tell that waiter she wasn’t ready to order yet? Why was he bothering her again? Katrina “Trina” Gabrini was already frustrated. She was supposed to meet up with Reno over an hour ago. She arrived on time. He still hadn’t arrived. Now some waiter was harassing her?
She looked over the top tip of her stylish reading glasses at the skinny young white boy standing at her table again. Although she was annoyed, she tried not to show it. “Yes?”
“I don’t mean to disturb you, but I have to say it.”
He waited as if he was expecting his customer to ask what it was he wanted to say, but Trina said nothing. And he continued talking. “The thing is,” he said, “you remind me so much of my baby sister that I just had to say something.”
That was a new one. How the hell could she remind him of his baby sister when he was a white boy who looked to be barely twenty-one years old while she was a black woman old enough to be his mother? And this girl she supposedly looked like was his baby sister? “I look like her, hun?”
“Just like her! It’s uncanny the resemblance. I thought you was her for a minute,” he said with a grin. “She got married and moved to Michigan and I miss her so much.”
But what Trina still couldn’t wrap her head around was the fact that he insisted she looked like his baby sister. Not his older sister. His baby sister. Which meant she was even younger than he was. She couldn’t help but smile. Did these silly women fall for lines like that these days?
Even though nobody would mistake Trina Gabrini for a silly woman on any day, she found herself removing her glasses and sitting them on top of her hair, as if she was taking his compliment to heart anyway. “How long has it been since you last saw her?”
“At her wedding a year ago. But Michigan is a long way from Vegas and we haven’t had any opportunities to get together. But it’s uncanny how much y’all look alike. I mean I would have declared it was her if I hadn’t heard your voice.”
Or saw my face, Trina thought to say. “How old is this baby sister of yours?” she said instead.
“She just turned twenty.”
“And you thought I was your twenty-year-old baby sister?”
“Oh yes ma’am, I sure did! You look just like her. She’s just as gorgeous as you are.”
Trina knew he was so full of shit that it had him compacted, but it still felt good.
Being married to a man like Reno she had to grab a compliment wherever she could get one because his slick ass wasn’t giving any out.
But unlike that slick-ass husband of hers, she didn’t believe in leading people on.
“Thanks, kiddo. You might have just made my day,” she said with a smile. “But I’m very much a married lady.”
“Oh I already knew that,” he said with a smile of his own. “It’s hard to miss that big fat juicy diamond boulder on your finger.”
Trina laughed. “This lil’ ol’ thing,” she said as she fluttered her big diamond-clad finger in front of him. They both laughed.
“I stopped wearing it one day just because it’s so damn big, but my husband had a hissy fit to end all hissy fits and that was the end of that little defiance.”
“That’s not cool,” the young man said as Reno entered the fancy restaurant, saw Trina, and began walking to the table. “If you were my woman you wouldn’t have to prove it to the world.”
“Prove what to the world?” Trina asked just before she saw Reno walking up behind the young man.
“You wouldn’t have to prove that you belong to me.
I wouldn’t care what the world thought. Just as long as I had you,” he said as he smiled again.
“But for him to throw a fit like that, he must really love you. Or he’s really insecure.
Or both,” the young man said with a laugh. “I’d put my money on both.”
Reno was offended. And did as he always did: He lashed out. “What money?” he asked. His voice had that hardboiled, stereotypical Jersey-Italian edge to it that startled the young man. He quickly turned around.
When he saw standing before him an average height, very muscular man in an obviously-expensive but badly-wrinkled suit, he immediately recognized him. “Mr. Gabrini?”
“Bingo,” Reno said. “Enjoying flirting with my old lady?”
“Your old lady?” Now the young man was terrified.
He’d heard all his life about how Reno Gabrini’s casino, the largest in Vegas, was a hotbed for mob activity.
And how he broke a man’s neck once just because he cheated his casino out of a few dollars at one of his blackjack tables.
And how he beat down another guy so badly that he nearly died on the casino floor right there in front of everybody.
And how those crooked cops that he also heard were on Reno’s payroll let him get away with it every time.
Him and his cousin Sal Gabrini both. They were ruthless sons-of-bitches, he’d heard, who ruled Vegas like they owned the town.
He knew all about those Gabrini boys. And here he was flirting with one of their wives?
He was mortified. “I had no idea she was yours, sir. I had no idea!”
He spoke about Trina as if she was an object rather than a person. And Trina wasn’t having it. “Now that’s not entirely fair,” she said to the young flirt as she looked him dead in his baby-blues. “I told you in no uncertain terms that I was married. I told you that.”
“But you didn’t tell me you was married to no Reno Gabrini!” He said it so loud that patrons at nearby tables sniggered. “I would have never ever on my mama’s grave said a word to you had I known--”
“Just beat it,” Reno said to the terrified young man. “And stop trying to pick-up every good looking broad that comes in this place. Show some respect next time.”
“Yes sir. I truly apologize, sir.”
“Get out of here,” Reno said dismissively of his nothing apology, and that waiter took off so fast that he didn’t even bother to take Reno’s drink order.
“Watch his ass get somebody else to wait this table,” Reno said with a snide smirk on his face.
“These young white boys think they rule the world. Fucking prick,” he added as he went over to Trina, placed his arm across the back of her chair, and leaned his tanned face down to her deep-toned brown face. They stared into each other’s eyes.
For Reno, that sense of lacking overtook him again as he stared at Trina.
As if he knew she deserved far better than a man like him.
As if he knew he wasn’t doing right by her in any way, shape, or form but whenever he tried to reverse course he always reverted right back to his old ways.
Then he’d get angry for being forced to change at all and lash out with some version of Fuck it, got-dammit!
I am who I am. Take me or leave me! Then he’d beg her not to leave him.
But for Trina, it was a toxic pattern years in the making that was making her out to be the very woman she’d sworn up and down she would never be.
She and her girlfriends used to criticize without fail every single solicitous woman who dimmed her own light in order to please and keep her man.
They weren’t going out like that, they’d declare.
And Trina was the ringleader declaring it.
But as she looked deep into Reno’s stark, sky-blue eyes, who was she kidding?
She left and went back to this joker so many times, year after year after year, that even she had to come to grips with the reality that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Reno was complicated. Reno was difficult.
And Reno was right: You had to take him or leave him.
Love him or hate him. There were no two ways about it.
But Trina loved him too much to take him as he was: He could be better and they both knew it. But she also loved him too much to leave him. Which she knew was a contradiction in and of itself. Which she knew made her a hypocrite.
But she wasn’t the only hypocrite. Reno was so protective of her and so easily jealous that everybody was astounded considering his track record.
Let the rumors have it, he was out there doing everything he was big enough to do, but as soon as a man, any man, showed interest in his wife he was all up in arms as if he was the aggrieved spouse.
It baffled even Tommy Gabrini, Reno’s cousin and closest confidant. It flabbergasted his children.
But as he leaned down to Trina, she knew he was about to allow that glaring contradiction in his personality to rear its ugly head once more. “I’m not telling your ass again,” he said to her. “Leave those boy-toys alone. Your cougar days are over. You feel me?”
Trina was offended. “What cougar?” She was nobody’s cougar and Reno knew it. But then she caught herself because Reno was smiling.
“Boy bye!” she said with a smile of her own as she took her hand and pushed his face away from her face.
But he wouldn’t leave. Because he adored her and seeing her happy always warmed him inside.
But it also reminded him of his own shortcomings.
So much so that his smile turned into a look of regret.
He wanted to tell her so much. He wanted to put it all on the line and let the chips fall where they may.
But he could never go that far. She’d leave him and never look back if he told all the shit he was involved with. There was no way.
He kissed her on her tender lips instead, lingering in his kiss because she tasted so good, and then he forced himself away from her and plopped down in the chair next to her. “What else your ass been getting yourself into when I’m not around?”
Trina, again, was taken aback. “What have I been getting into? I can ask you that same question.”
“Ah come on, Tree, what are you talking? I’m working over here! I’m a hard-working man.”
“Too hard working to attend your own child’s birthday party?”
Reno frowned this time with his hands outstretched and with his palms up. “Why you harping on that again? I gave him a hundred-dollar bill. What are you still blabbing about? What more you want from me?”