Sweet and Vicious(Margarelli Brothers 1)

I might miss my mother, but I didn’t need mothering from them.

“I need you to get over to . . . what’s the address?”

Tiny fished around and held out Tim’s wallet. I rattled off the address and told him the wife’s name.

“We have a situation with the husband, but the house should stay with the woman. We need to get what we can before every family in Vegas comes looking for him.”

“Kids?”

“Yeah.”

“Got it,” he said.

“No collateral damage,” I said, though it was unnecessary. He was even more of a bleeding heart than I was. But he also knew we’d have to take something that hurt. The car, probably. Jewelry. But we would leave the roof over their heads and make sure they had food on the table. Most importantly, Tim would not have access to anything the wife owned when Mikey was done with him. Hell, the last time something like this went down, Mikey had hired the woman as his secretary.

She was still working for him to this day.

“Oh, God, you are going to kill me,” Timothy moaned.

“Shut up,” I said, kicking his stomach. “Call me after,” I said before hanging up. Then I looked at the man on the floor. “You will pay us. And then you will run. And you will never fucking come back.”

“My kids—”

“They are better off without you, you piece of shit.”

“What do I do with him for now?”

“Go through his accounts. Get that hacker from the Untouchables to help. Maybe he can find something.”

“Trace?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy.”

“Should I keep breaking things in the meantime?”

“No,” I said as I shook my head. “Put him to work.”

Chapter 2

Evangeline

“What?”

I tugged my earbuds free at my roommate’s wild pantomiming. Sara was dancing around in extremely high heels, trying to get my attention. As usual, I had my nose in a book and soothing music blasting in my ears to drown out the noise of the dorms.

“Come out!”

I stared at her, not sure what she was talking about for a minute. Then I realized. It was Thursday night. Ladies’ night. Almost every night, she tried to drag me to various events, but Thursdays were her very favorite.

Half-priced drinks and drooling men were pretty much Sara’s favorite things in the world.

“I have work to do.”

“Liar,” she said gleefully, pointing at me. “You are halfway through the books for the entire semester!”

Well, she had me there. I was more than halfway through all the assigned reading. In fact, I was already done. I was actually reading a book by one of my professors that wasn’t even on the curriculum. But she didn’t know that for sure. It was just a lucky guess.

I sighed, rolling to my side as she pumped up the latest dance song. Sara was sweet. Despite our differences, we were friends. And she’d been down since we got back from winter break. Her boyfriend back home had broken up with her to ‘explore his options.’ I knew she wanted me to be her wingman. But I was the least ‘wingy’ girl I knew in the whole dorm.

I sucked at small talk. I never flirted. And to be honest, boys made me extremely nervous. I’d been branded a nerd in high school and never did much to break free of that mold. Every once in a while, a guy had asked me out. Some extremely popular guys, even, like the captain of the football team.

But I’d always assumed it was a joke. A dare or something. So I’d said no.

I’d been more than happy to spend time with the guys I really liked. Heathcliff. Romeo. Rhysand from A Court Of Thorns and Roses. The classic, tragic hero.

I highly doubted I was going to meet a guy like that in a college bar.

“You know I don’t drink.”

“You don’t drink yet,” she countered. “What you did in high school doesn’t count.”

“We both have classes tomorrow,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“It’s still early! Besides, all you do is study,” she whined. “We are supposed to be learning other stuff, too. Life skills, babe.”

I was about to tease her about already knowing enough about boys, but I stopped. She really was hurting. Sara might be boy crazy, but I was pretty sure she’d really loved the guy from home. Or at least, she had expected to marry him.

Marriage, I thought with a shudder. What if you ended up with an asshole? Worse yet, what if he didn’t like to read? My mom had taught me early on that a woman could stand on her own, and I planned to do the same.

Life was simpler and a lot less messy that way.

She might be bitter about men, but I’d seen what my dad did to her. I kinda thought she had the right idea. She worked, hung out with friends, worried about me, and did whatever she wanted to with her free time. Reading books, mostly. She was also an amateur renovator with dreams of flipping houses.