Free Gian (Trassato Crime Family Book 1) by Lisa Cardiff Page B

the revving of cars on the busy Brooklyn street outside the window.
    He flexed his hands, the lone tell in his otherwise calm demeanor. “Don’t test me, Evie. I’m not in the mood. I will ground your ass, and you can kiss your physical therapy and training goodbye. You won’t be able to leave my house for any reason until this is over.”
    I plucked my jeans off the arm of an electric blue club chair and shoved my legs into them. “Fine. You don’t have to threaten me. I get it.” My voice was a vacant, unattractive rasp that mirrored how I felt inside.
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWELVE
     
     
    Gian
     
    “Fuck my life.” I disconnected the phone and tossed it on the desk in my home office.
    In the last twenty-four hours, Evie and I had managed to establish a fragile truce of sorts. We stopped avoiding each other. We weren’t fighting. I convinced myself the kiss in the hotel room was an error in judgment, and I successfully ignored every last urge to push the relationship into something we’d both regret.
    Now my mom and Carmela had come up with some half-assed plan to convert the family Sunday dinner into a fucking engagement party. I tried to talk my mom out of it. I told her I had to work. I told her Evie had a cold. I told her the timing wasn’t right, and Evie and I wanted to wait a couple of months prior to making any sort of formal announcement. I told her Evie would want to invite her out-of-town family. None of my excuses mattered the minute she pulled the trump card. She said she wanted to have the engagement party while my dad was still healthy enough to enjoy it.
    I couldn’t blame her. If our engagement were real, I’d be insisting my mom threw an engagement party. Hell, I’d fast-track everything. The engagement party, the bridal shower, the wedding. It’d be a done deal in thirty days, maybe less. However, nothing about our relationship was real, except the chemistry between us that I couldn’t smother regardless of how hard I tried.
    I opened the door to the office and spied Evie resting on the sofa with her legs curled into her chest. Aiming the remote at the television, she clicked through channel after channel, never stopping long enough to hear more than a word or two.
    “Hey.” I crossed the room and leaned my hip into the arm of the sofa. “Are you busy? Can we talk?”
    She raised her eyebrows, keeping her gaze glued to the flickering flat screen. “Go ahead.”
    “My mom has a family dinner at her house every other Sunday.”
    Her thumb paused mid-click. “Uh-huh.”
    “Tomorrow is one of those Sundays.”
    “That’s fine.” She shrugged, and her white shirt slid down, revealing the top of her creamy shoulder. “I’m okay hanging out here by myself. I won’t run off anywhere if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    I stretched out my legs and crossed my ankles. She wasn’t going to like this. “Actually, my mom invited you. She decided to make Sunday dinner an engagement party for us.”
    Her head whipped toward me, and she muted the volume of the T.V., blanketing us in silence. “What?” she finally said, her voice hardly a whisper. “Are you serious?”
    “Yeah.” I nodded, avoiding making eye contact like a damn pussy. I hadn’t felt this pathetic this since I was a kid and my mom yanked me into the house by ear for peeling the bark off the neighbor’s tree. “It won’t be that big of a deal. Carmela will be there, and she invited a few other family members.”
    My mom claimed she had only invited a few people, but a few people to my mom might mean anywhere from ten to thirty. This was bad on so many levels. I didn’t know where to start. Pulling Evie further into my life made it harder to extract her when the time came. She’d hear things she shouldn’t, see things that couldn’t be unseen. From there, she could infer a whole lot of stuff better left in the shadows. When the idea flashed through my mind and I claimed we were