Reign A Romance Anthology - Nina Levine Page 0,328

I did, and sleeping with a customer isn’t something I do, but I made an exception this one time. What can I say? He’s pretty in all the good ways. Tall, dark, and handsome with model/movie star chiseled looks. Naturally full lips I would soon be kissing.

We left together, walking upstairs, carrying a quarter bottle of whiskey and two glasses at midnight.

He was drunk enough to want to sleep with me, and I was tipsy enough to leave all my inhibitions downstairs.

Then we banged each other’s brains out.

I only needed a name to cry out when he gave me multiple orgasms. He could walk away with his name and past. I knew I wasn’t in his league, so I took what he offered and had a good time. No regrets.

I flip the dumpster lid open, swinging each arm in practiced moves until I’m simultaneously over-arming each black trash bag from the night’s cleanup into the near-empty belly of the dumpster, with satisfying double thuds.

I turn around and head back to the back door and scoop up another two trash bags, a deep shiver beginning to work its way into my bones.

I should have dressed warmer to do the rubbish runs. Still, I wasn’t looking to spend time selecting fresh warm clothes while standing naked in front of the hot guy. Who notably at the time was tenting the sheet with a delicious growing erection while watching me through long lashes and bedroom eyes, gathering my clothes off the floor I wore earlier to work. His requests going unanswered to come back to bed and enjoy another round of orgasms brought on by erotic sex—in positions I didn’t even know were possible—but hallelujah for an experienced older guy.

I charged out of my bedroom before I could dive back into bed and use his cock as a lollipop, quickly changing back into the: tight, scoop-necked white tank top with QUEENIE’S in bold black lettering on the front and STAFF on the back, and my shrink-wrapped denim shorts. The calf-high black boots complete the uniform.

Exactly how the boss likes the female staff to look, but the guys get to wear jeans. The boss is my stepfather, Lorenzo.

I’m not harboring any animosity toward this skimpy uniform. Much?

I have to obey the rules like all the staff—even if this was my dead biological father’s family business.

Every business is doing what it needs to get patrons through the door after the major collapse in the global economy.

The pandemic of 2020 lasted through most of 2027, claiming my biological father’s life in 2025 at the age of thirty-nine, along with millions of other lives, until an approved vaccine that worked ended the global pandemic.

My great-grandfather bought the 1902 Old Town historical red sandstone brick-walled three-story building in 1952, turning the ground floor into more of a pub with a small menu. Still, he named it Queenie’s Tavern after his beloved wife and my great-grandmother, Queenie Jean, who passed before I was born. The building has been in the family for nearly ninety years. Yet, my blood carries no weight of authority because my stepfather calls the shots.

Mamma was diagnosed with cancer in 2031 and married Lorenzo (my stepfather) in 2033, after knowing him less than a year, and then she passed six days before my eighteenth birthday in 2034.

I’ve long suspected Lorenzo targeted my sick mother. He wasn’t even in the door, working as a bouncer when he was preying on my sweet mother’s fears of her only child being left alone in this world with no known living relatives. I watched Lorenzo play his cards right around her, worming his way into my mother’s heart and bed.

At eleven years her junior, he was the perfect doting boyfriend, telling Mamma what she needed to hear, and then he got a ring on her finger.

Mamma was forty-eight when breast cancer stole her from me, and Lorenzo made my mother very happy while she was terminal, and I couldn’t rock that boat. She died knowing her husband loved her and would look after her daughter.

I was too young to take over the family business even if a nearly century-old tradition dictated otherwise. Queenie’s Tavern got inherited by the eldest son in every generation when the father retired or passed away. The last time I checked, I am not a boy.

In Mamma’s cancer-ridden wisdom, she signed Queenie’s reins over to her new husband, and she believed my biological father would be proud of her for finding a solution to keep