Russian Boss’s Secret Baby by Bella King
Ch 4
SLATE
The mousy, awkward girl approaches our table, suddenly with a newfound bravado that I hadn’t seen before. I can see that under the character she is playing, she is terrified of me, and I like it.
A lot.
“Changed your mind now, did you?” I say, taunting her a bit to make her blush more.
“Um, yes sir,” she replies, almost wincing at the sound of her voice when she said sir, almost like she was being scolded by a teacher.
“Why don’t you come sit with me, huh? I’ll buy you the most expensive drink on the menu, but I’m not going to ask you what it is, because you won’t know it,” I say, leaning into my initial joke just to annoy her. Her cheeks glow with a delightful pink when she’s flustered.
She doesn’t respond.
“Your name is Mia, right? My name is Slate. Slate Rostov,” I say, doing my best to mitigate some of the awkwardness from before.
Mia nods. “Yes, my name is Mia, but I suppose you can call me whatever you like for the night,” she replies.
“Oh, no, no, no. I’m not trying to do that here, I just want to show you a good time, on the other side of the nightclub life,” I say.
She laughs a bit. “Yeah, I’d love to be one of the people who comes here and spends their entire paycheck on five drinks and some fake molly. Sounds amazing,” she says as the small man approaches from the bar to take our orders.
“Mia, what the fuck are you doing? Get back over there and help me with the drinks!” he says, partially joking, partially not.
Here’s my chance. “Hey, don’t talk to her like that, she’s not working for the rest of the night. Why don’t you make her something instead of telling her what the fuck to do?” I say to the man, his eyes growing wider the more I raise my voice.
“Yes, sir,” he says quickly before he takes drink orders from Michael and Eli.
After they’ve spent a good five minutes asking inane questions about ingredients to sound educated, the bartender leaves, and I am free to say whatever I want.
“Mia, my men and I do not worry about paychecks. We don’t suffer for anything, especially not petty little shits like coworkers or managers. We are our own gods. Don’t worry about the cost of anything tonight, okay?” I say.
Mia looks at me with a questioning look in her eye. “What kind of work do you guys do, exactly? No bosses or coworkers?” she asks.
We all glance at each other, that familiar paranoia settling in. The paranoia of being chased and caught. “Let’s just say we work in international trade,” Michael says with a shit eating grin on his face.
Mia’s face is colored by confusion again, and part of me wants to grab Michael from across the table and throw him into the wall. He doesn’t take anything seriously.
“Oh, that’s very interesting,” Mia replies, uncertain of what to make of Michael’s explanation. I can see her eyeing up what she can see of my tattoos, the little of them that is visible on my hands and neck. I wonder if she is scanning them for some kind of gang sign and then comparing them to Michael’s or Eli’s tattoos, as if an organized crime family would brand themselves so easily.
I roll up my sleeves a bit to expose more of my tattoos, just so she can get a better look at them.
She stares at one in particular, the one that says “family” in Russian. “What’s that tattoo mean?” she asks me.
“Oh, it just says ‘family’, pretty standard tattoo for any language, really,” I reply. I can see Mia connecting dots in her head despite my weak efforts to distract her.
When she figures it out, she looks like she’s ready to jump out of her skin and run away. Most people love the idea of the mafia, like it’s some kind of glamorous endeavor from the movies, but when they’re confronted with it in real life, they’re terrified.
“Drinks,” the bartender interjects as he sneaks up with a tray of overly-ornate cocktails. He hands one to Mia. “Enjoy that, sweetie,” he says with a note of bitterness in his tone.
Mia takes the glass nervously and drinks from it, a bit deeper than I was expecting for the first drink of the night.
The bartender distributes the rest of the drinks and quickly leaves, looking over his shoulder at Mia as he walks away.
Mia awkwardly sips on her drink for the next few minutes until it has disappeared. Her body language is anxious and withdrawn until Eli speaks up.
“Hey Mia, have you ever seen what a man’s balls look like when they’re cut in half?” Michael asks as he finishes his drink.
Mia stares at him wordlessly, horrified.
“Mike! What the fuck, man?” I shout, slamming my glass on the table.
“What? I’m trying to tell her that story about, what was his name? We called him Sticky because of the whole situation with the-“
“She doesn’t want to hear that,” I snap, cutting him off.
“Maybe I do,” Mia says, her eyes wide and curious.
Michael and I both sit back a bit and exchange confused glances. It’s one thing to force a woman to endure a story like that, but it’s a whole other story when they ask to hear.
Michael clears his throat, caught off guard by Mia’s lack of response to his attempt at shock value. “Okay, so there was this guy we knew, dumb as rocks, right? So somehow this guy got involved with the inventory aspect of the business and he loses ten thousand dollars-worth of product. So Slate here goes and looks up the black market body part equivalent to ten thousand dollars and decides he’s going to make things even. So… he does. He sends Eli and some other fuckface to go collect what’s his. He took the dude’s whole left ball and didn’t even sell it. It was the principle, yeah?”
Mia’s face is white and panicked now, clearly not anticipating this sort of story. I’ll be honest, though, I’m not sure what she was expecting. I knew it was a terrible idea to let Michael speak about anything.
“I mean, he never lost anything ever again,” I say, attempting to ease the tension growing among us all.
Instead of sprinting out the door or fainting as I imagined, she simply starts to laugh. Nervously at first, but after a few moments she seemed to be genuinely enjoying herself and the absurdity of the story. Maybe she thinks it’s a joke.
While Eli continues on with his half-remembered stories, I get a closer look at Mia’s body while she isn’t paying attention. Her breasts are pale and perky in her black dress, and I can see freckles along the top of them that constellate upward toward into the depth of her collarbones and toward her neck. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that her nipples are a pale pink, perhaps totally neutral against her milky skin. For someone who lives in Miami, she doesn’t appear to get a lot of sun.
Her hair is cut short, just below her jawline. Messy waves frame her face and accentuate her bone structure. She’s a very pretty woman, perhaps not in the standard Miami fashion with bolt-on tits and three-inch-long eyelash extensions, but that was never my preference anyway.
Her arms are slender but not too skinny. Getting a look at her legs is a bit more of a challenge, but the poor girl is so consumed with appearing polite for Eli that I’m eventually afforded the chance.
Taking a quick peek, I find them to be very long, slender and toned. Her knees are brought up and together as she sits with her heels on, and the mental visual of what’s up her dress starts to get me worked up. The reckless alpha energy in me wants to keep looking, to look further and experience her whole body, but I know it is too soon for that.
I’ve pushed my luck far enough already, but I know a way to give me more opportunities to get lucky. I’ve had an unreliable secretary for far too long, and Mia might serve as a totally decent replacement.
Depending on how trustworthy she is, she certainly has the body of someone I would enjoy having around for a bit of playtime when I’m not bogged down by work, but she also lacks the thousand-yard stare of a party girl who has deep fried her serotonin receptors on club drugs.
Mia could be a very intelligent woman who just puts on a show for her customers. If she’s that desperate for money, desperate enough to dumb herself down for the kinds of assholes that frequent this place, then there’s no doubt in my mind that she would be more than willing to come work for me.
I just have to convince her without scaring her off.
That’s easier said than done.
