Reno's Gift (Mob Boss Series) by Mallory Monroe

Jimmy loved Reno.   She understood exactly what he meant.   “I have no idea,” she replied honestly.
    “You
have no idea what he does with his time all day, but yet he has to know where
you are every minute of the day.”   Jimmy
looked at her.   “Don’t you find that
strange?”
    “Don’t
you find that strange?” Dominic, Junior said, parroting his older brother,
although his attention remained solely on lifting the Hulk’s muscular legs and
twirling around his muscular arms and flipping him upside down.
    “That’s
your father,” Trina said to Jimmy.   “And
yours too,” she added to Dommi as she nudged him with her shoulder.   Then she continued to turn pages in the
catalogue.   “I knew what I was getting
into when I married him.   He told me all
along that if I wanted some nine-to-five Mister Normal, then I shouldn’t hook
up with him.   I would be the fool of
fools, he used to tell me, to hook up with him if normal was what I was
after.   So no, Jimmy Mack, I don’t find
it strange at all,” she said, looking up at him.   “My eyes were wide open when I became Reno
Gabrini’s woman.”
    Jimmy
smiled a kind of relieved smile.
    “I
mean think about it, Jimmy,” Trina went on.   “On our wedding day, on the very day that we got married, a mob war was
breaking out and Reno was at the heart of it.   If I didn’t know what I was getting into after that, then shame on me
because I should have known.   That’s what
love is.   You have to trust the person
you love.”
    Jimmy
gave a snort that was laced with bitterness.   “No thanks,” he said.   “I’ll never
fall in love again.”
    “Oh,
Jimmy,” Trina said regrettably as she stared at her handsome stepson.   Four months ago he was severely wounded by
one of his father’s enemies.   Except for
the occasional migraines that he would have to endure for the rest of his life,
he was physically fine again.   His
recovery, by all accounts, had gone remarkably well.   He believed he was completely back to normal,
and Trina agreed that he was physically back.   But not emotionally.   That ordeal
had taken quite an emotional toll on Jimmy.   He was still the same kind, funny, considerate Jimmy, but that trusting
spirit she used to love about him was gone.   Completely.   She wanted him to
know, however, that it didn’t have to stay away.  
    “Don’t
say that,” she said to him.   “You’re much
too young to be thinking like that.”
    “But I
couldn’t take another heartbreak, Ma,” Jimmy said honestly.   Trina was the person he often confided
in.   “I can’t trust people like that
anymore.   I mean look at you.   You and Dad have a wonderful relationship but
even you don’t know what he’s up to all day.   He could have another family somewhere for all you know.”
    “Oh,
Jimmy!” Trina said with a smile.   He was
her stepson, a young man Reno fathered years before she ever met him.   But because his now-deceased mother was also
African-American, which made him a biracial young man, he was always mistook as
Trina’s biological child.   She nor Jimmy,
and especially not Reno, ever bothered to correct that assumption.   “My husband does not have another family
somewhere, okay?” she said to him.
    “But
you can’t be certain, Ma.”
    “Oh
yes I can,” Trina replied firmly, although she was unable to suppress a
smile.   She found Jimmy’s concerns more
humorous than bothersome.   “I am
absolutely certain that my husband doesn’t have another family, another wife
and child, tucked away somewhere.   Not
Reno.”
    “Okay,
okay, I agree with you,” Jimmy said with a smile of his own.   “Maybe that’s taking it too far.”
    “You
think?”
    “Not
another family,” Jimmy conceded.   “He
doesn’t have another family.   But he can
have another woman somewhere that takes up a lot of his time.   That’s possible.   Especially if you listen to what they keep
saying all the