Two Hitmen: A Double Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 1) (61 page)

The shop looked wonderful, lit by low, honey colored lamps and with large candles in glass in the evenings. The effect from outside, especially in the evening and at night, of the big dark wooden framed windows, polished and radiant with the golden and amber light, was alluring.

It invited and enticed passers by in just the way that an emporium of special delights should be, and
 
Cara knew it. She felt proud. She felt that she had done her best, and that her best was truly, very good. But would the townspeople appreciate her efforts? Would they come and buy?

Each morning at eight o’clock, she wound out the dark brown shaded awning, rolled up the window blinds and lit the sumptuous windows.
 
Cara wore a simple sliver chain under the perfectly pressed blouse, and a patent black belt with a silver buckle. And she waited.

She waited, poised behind the gleaming counters, polished the night before, ready in her smart black skirt and blouse. Her own flaming red curls were tied up neatly, her stocking seams were straight and her black high-heeled pumps shone to a gleam.

None of
 
Cara’s merchandise was cheap, but most of it was not hugely expensive either. Most folks could, if they wanted to, afford
 
Cara’s specialties, but only as treats, as something special.
 

That way,
 
Cara figured, she had a little something to offer to everyone. All of the town could be her customers and she didn’t have to depend on the good grace of any one particular set.
 

A small town, she knew, was apt to be cliquey and the one thing that a clique is sure to do is to take against things. And people. Sooner or later. What makes a clique a clique is who and what it excludes.

If her business relied too heavily on any one single group, be they merchants, Rotarians, the townswomen’s guild or good, hard working mothers then, one day, they could turn on her for who knew whatever reason, maybe a reason that had nothing to do with her or her emporium, but if it happened then her little venture would surely collapse.

As Sarah had warned her, the townsfolk were slow to take to
 
Cara, and they came along at first in dribs and drabs, in ones and twos. One group of middle-aged women came in regularly to look and to point, all of them a little on the large side, all expensively dressed but none of them with apparent taste of any kind.

 
Cara would bid them greetings and they returned impressive views of their nostrils. She offered them assistance and they gave her sniffs and rolling eyes. But she kept her smile and her pleasant demeanor. And they never once refused her offers of small chocolates to sample.

A little something for everyone, an occasional luxury was what
 
Cara provided and, as she had hoped, the people of the little town grew to appreciate her carefully chosen wares.

As a newcomer,
 
Cara was the perfect subject for whispered speculation. Had she been seen with this man? Was she out late on such and such a night? Was she seen coming out of the woods? All that
 
Cara could do was to keep herself to herself.

Her one concession, to be visible and to be in the open, was that on Friday evenings, she took herself to the town square and she dined alone with a book at a table in the bright window of Phille’s restaurant. Whenever somebody passed by outside,
 
Cara would exchange a small wave and a smile.

Whoever stopped by her table
 
Cara greeted them warmly and pleasantly, exchanged the time of day, so to speak, but her hand rarely left her book and she never did she invite anyone to sit and join her.

At first, when the men came to the shop, it would be one furtive fellow at a time, chin buried in his collar and his eyes fixed firmly on the floor. After enquiries on the prices of cigars or bottles of bourbon, they made sucking noises against their teeth and slipped away again. But they didn’t stop coming.

Soon enough, although it didn’t seem that way to
 
Cara as she watched her carefully saved resources dwindle, soon enough some of the men found cigars that were to their liking, and some began to cultivate a taste for her specialist bluegrass bourbons and Tennessee whiskeys.
 

Soon enough too, the women of the town came around to thinking that
 
Cara’s luscious hand crafted confections were indeed worth paying a little more for than the usual shop-bought candies that they had been accustomed to.

Cara’s little store was always busiest in the evenings, when golden light spilled out between the dark frames of the large, shining windows and onto the dusky street. That was when men stood at the counter tasting sips of the whiskeys or craning their ear at the soft crackle of a cigar, rolling between thumb and forefinger.

Men would swirl the sparkling pools of amber fire around the bottoms of thick, leaded shot glasses. Their necks craned as they leaned to savor the aromas of coronas and presidentes, and the talk would be low and confidential.

The store became quietly, modestly, discretely popular as a haunt in the evenings, and so
 
Cara took to serving strong, dark coffee. It gave the men an opportunity, or perhaps an excuse, to linger for longer over sniffing, tasting and buying their bottles of fine bourbons.
 

Since the men were there, the business of the day or the news of the moment would be examined, passed around, picked apart, commented and finally pronounced upon. It came to be somewhere that men felt at ease, liberated, unrestricted and it had something of the cozy, masculine atmosphere of an exclusive and rarified gentlemen’s club.
 

Low voices purred and chuckled over secrets and schemes, voices that curled and wove through the scents of cigars and bourbon in amber glows of the dark polished wood room.
 
Cara’s emporium, where
 
Cara was the only woman.
 

After a long evening like that, after
 
Cara had closed and bolted the door and shut the light, in the darkness she leaned her spine against the edge of the back door with her head back. She inhaled the fiery aroma of a bluegrass whiskey, itself only a generation or two from mountainside moonshiners. She swung against the door and remembered the afternoon in the woods when she saw the gypsies.

Her mind drifted to wondering how it might be if she were in the woods, with her blouse off her shoulders, her skirt up around her waist, her soft buttocks and thighs apart and a man in a stout pair of corduroys behind her. Her breasts would swell and her heat would rise.

Between her legs she would ache, swollen and wet. Against her thighs, cool and trembling in the evening air, she would imagine the brush of corduroy and behind it a rolling chuckle and the press of hard thighs.

Women of the town were inclined to visit late in the mornings or in the early afternoon. They, too, took to
 
Cara’s coffee as they chose their chocolates and chatted.

Whatever she overheard, about the outrageous behavior of the doctor’s daughter or the rumors that hinted at unusual late-night sessions between the town’s two senior lawyers and their very young secretary,
 
Cara never let slip the tiniest reaction nor offered a comment of any kind.
 

Then a more irregular trade developed, earlier in the mornings and later in the afternoons. Men came alone and quietly to buy chocolates. Not always the kind preferred by their wives or girlfriends.
 

Likewise, some women took to visiting singly, and for these individual customers,
 
Cara was careful not to offer suggestions. She didn’t want Mrs Barstow, for instance, to notice that
 
Cara had noticed that the expensive sour mash that she had chosen was not the brand Mr Barstow preferred.
 

The purveyor of pleasure has something in common with the doctor and the priest, in that their work is most valuable when the utmost confidence, discretion and confidentiality are assured.
 

 
Cara remained always apart behind the counter. She was not aloof, but nor was she familiar. That suited her, and it seemed to suit her customers. Occasionally one of the men would suggest a jaunt, a trip, a walk or a dinner. All of these
 
Cara propositions declined in a way that was both complimentary and appreciative. It was also firm and without hesitation.

One man made a much more frank and straightforward proposition, one of a truly outrageous nature. This
 
Cara did consider, but only for the very briefest of moments. Not for so long that he was left in any doubt. Not even long enough that he ever dared to repeat the offer to her.

It would not have surprised
 
Cara at all if she were to learn how many times the man did consider asking her again. He would have been very surprised though, to know how many times she wondered whether he would.

The gypsies had come to camp one spring day on the edge of town, in the woods and by the stream. There was bustling talk of things going missing, of children catching illnesses and even of spells being cast.
 
Cara overheard it all, and kept her amusement strictly to herself.

Soon enough a swarthy gypsy strode into the shop. Two young women followed behind him in long, full skirts and colorful scarves, their flowing hair the copper and russet of autumn and their faces freckled and fresh as milk.
 

When the man caught sight of
 
Cara he stopped. His dark eyes fixed on her a full minute from under his mop of chestnut curls. He rubbed the side of his chin through his short beard with the tips of his fingers.

Brisk and businesslike,
 
Cara asked him, “Can I help you?”

“That I’m certain you can,” he said peering up with his eyes as a grin spread wide across his face. “I’m Brendan, and I’m very pleased to know you.” The two young women put up their fingers up to their mouths as their giggles sparkled and bounced around the shiny surfaces.

“What can I show you? Cigars? Chocolate? Or perhaps some bourbon.”

“Oh, all of that. We’ll take the lot of it.” He said it with a twinkle in his eye.
 
Cara made no movement, she knew that Brendan had more to say.

“Only the thing of it is,” Brendan went on, “we don’t have any money.” And the girls burst out into open laughter.
 
Cara smiled as she laid out a delicate little sliver tray with three perfect chocolates, two light and one dark. She held the tray out towards the gypsies.

“Then, please enjoy these as my gift.” The girls shyly snatched at the light chocolates and gobbled them. As soon as the chocolate began to melt in their mouths the movements of their mouths slowed and their eyes widened.

The girls looked at each other, their faces perfect pictures of amazement and unexpected depths of pleasure. Brendan looked at
 
Cara over the remaining dark chocolate and said, “Will you be offering samples of the whiskey and cigars as well?”

“Ah, no.”
 
Cara said with the slightest tilt of her head. And it was enough.

The three travelers left graciously, and the shop bell jingled prettily as the door closed behind them.

Talk about the gypsies continued and gradually but surely they came under suspicion for any and all of the communities ills.
 

Temperatures rose when the gypsies’ olive-skinned leader was murmured to have conducted a liaison with the wife of a town alderman.
 
Cara kept her counsel on the matter, even though she knew full well that the plain chocolates with ginger centers for which Mrs Bunbury had a particular weakness had been a regular purchase by the local headmaster.

The gypsies had, by now taken to making irregular visits to
 
Cara’s little store. The girls and women would come in to buy a single, small chocolate, sometimes to share between two or even three.

Brendan came just to enquire about the whiskies and to look at them, tilting his head from side to side to watch the light through the dark amber liquid. He did once buy a Dominican panatela.
 
Cara saw him pass the store with it lit once on each of the next three days.

One day Brendan asked her “Do you not have any of these fine whiskeys in smaller bottles?”

“No, Brendan,”
 
Cara told him, “Just as I didn’t last week, and I’m not likely to have next week, either. But of course, you’re always welcome to ask.”

“Ah, Could I buy a glass of it from you, then?”

 
Cara smiled, “No, Brendan, I don’t sell bourbons by the glass.”

“I’ve seen men drinking your bourbon in here. Why can I not drink some, just like they do?”

 
Cara explained it to him, kindly and patiently, as she always did, “I don’t sell shots. When a customer buys a bottle, I will sometimes offer them a shot from another variety as a sample. It helps them to develop their taste, and to learn and discover more about the range of fine bourbons.”

“To buy more of them, you mean.”

 
Cara wasn’t able to prevent her eye from twinkling, “Let’s say to explore more.”

“Well, why wouldn’t you help me to explore more?”

“Brendan, you can’t explore more of what you haven’t explored at all.”

Another day Brendan came into the store without either of the two girls. He leaned over the counter and said, “I’ve something to tell you,
 
Cara.” Brendan’s dark eyes burned, his lips were red and there was whiskey on his breath.

Not a whiskey of the quality that
 
Cara stocked, though, “You’re a fine looking woman. I’m sure you must have been told that a thousand times over, but it’s true. You are a very fine looking woman.”

 
Cara said, “That’s very kind of you, Brendan.”