Kristen Ashley - The Promise

He was crazy for me.

“Benny,” I breathed, and he caught my gaze.

“You gotta feed your man, Frankie.”

I looked into his eyes and decided to let him have that play.

I did it for Benny.

And I did it for me because my cupboards were not bare. They were bursting. I had twelve different kinds of potato chips, and I had a feast planned to make for my man to show him how much I looked forward to him being with me.

When we got to the kitchen and I shared them (steaks, sautéed mushrooms, loaded baked potatoes, steamed asparagus, Pillsbury crescent rolls, and store-bought-but-still-awesome sugar cream pie for dessert), Ben liked my plans for dinner.

But he snacked on BBQ Fritos the whole time I was preparing it, which I told him I found annoying.

I didn’t.

I was in woman-falling-in-love zone.

So I was crazy too.

I grabbed my workout bag from the bench in the locker room of the company gym and hit the Go button on my phone.

I walked out of the locker room and then out of the gym, listening to it ring.

I got voicemail while I was waiting for the elevator.

“You got me. Now tell me why you want me,” my sister Cat’s voicemail greeting I knew all too well said in my ear.

When I got the beep, I spoke.

“I want you ’cause I’ve called you a gazillion times in the last month, and I called you seven gazillion times before that, and I have not heard from you, Cat. Things are happening with this family and Enzo told me he can’t get a hold of you either. Seein’ as somethin’ went down and Dad isn’t talking to me, and I’m not talkin’ to him, I don’t know if you’ve heard from him. There’s stuff you need to know, but you’re not returning my calls, so now I’m worried.” The elevator doors whooshed open and I finished with, “Call your big sister, Cat, please.”

I disconnected, got in the elevator, and hit the button, thinking my sister Cat took middle child syndrome to extremes.

Sure, she had a case for this, even if she brought it up every single time she got her feelings hurt, which was often. Her case being Dad had a favorite: Enzo. Ma also had a favorite: Nat. I was the oldest, so I was about responsibility, spending my time looking after my younger siblings, and not thinking about all the ways I could feel injured that Ma and Dad didn’t dote on me.

Then again, all our grandparents thought I was the shit, likely because they were good, loving people who had no idea where they went wrong with Enzo and Ninette and looked to me as salvation that they eventually had some small hand in creating something that went right.

This was not, of course, the way I felt my whole life. This was what occurred to me since being with Benny and him pointing out I was a Concetti by name, but I was Frankie because I was just me.

That said, my grandfather was the ultimate Concetti. He was awesome. He adored me and it sucked he moved all the way to Arizona (a choice that took him far away from my mother, who was not his favorite person) and that we’d lost Nana Concetti, because she was awesome too.

In the Concetti-offspring-having-it-together scale, Cat was right behind me. She worked for a construction company and had for a long time, meeting her husband, Art, there. Art had even managed to hold down the same job for more than a decade, a feat when it came to anyone involved with a Concetti.

Art was very hot and he was also very hotheaded. With Cat also being the last, this meant they fought like crazy. It didn’t help that they were both just shy of being not-so-healthy big drinkers. The booze came out, Cat and/or Art could get talkative and funny, or irritable and mean, and they took both to extremes. In the end, it actually wasn’t pleasant experiencing either one, because even if they were being talkative and funny, they didn’t shut up so you could get a word in edgewise and that always got annoying.

Cat, like every member of my family, was prone to drama, and it was not unheard of that she could get hurt and hold a silent grudge for ages.

But this was extreme.

And I did not lie on the phone—I was worried.

Both of Enzo Junior’s women had had his children, a boy and a girl, and although this usually was joyous news, it was not going well for my brother. From Enzo’s point of view, they’d both tried to trap him with their pregnancies, and honestly, it sounded like one of them did. The other one I’d met and liked and she’d adored Enzo. I felt for her at the time because she thought she was in it for the long haul, this being because Enzo gave her that impression.

So one was pissed she didn’t get what she wanted, ended up with a kid, and was intent on making him pay. The other one was bitter, and bitter was way worse.

Enzo was fucked.

Though, he’d texted pictures and the babies were adorable.

The elevator doors opened. I headed out and nearly stopped dead when I felt the vibe—a vibe that was buzzing in an unhappy way across the entire floor. I slowly walked into the space, seeing people in huddles, a few directors behind closed doors in an office, nearly all faces shocked.

Something was wrong.

I hit my assistant, Tandy’s desk. When I stopped there, she jumped and looked up at me.

“Frankie,” she greeted.

“What’s up?” I asked quietly.

“Paul Gartner was murdered.”

I stared at her, stunned, even though I had no clue who Paul Gartner was.

So I asked, “Paul Gartner?”

“Dr. Gartner. Scientist. Research and development. He was lead on Tenrix,” she told me.

Tenrix was a new product to treat high blood pressure we were gearing up to launch. Just the week before, Randy had chaired a team meeting, telling us all about it.

Randy had been excited in a way that, for a guy who was not often in a good mood and all other times was a dick, made the meeting weird.

It was weirder because it didn’t seem genuine. After ages of testing, the different phases of trials, the millions and millions of dollars sunk into that, all of which could be flushed down the toilet at any stage if a product didn’t work, excitement that something new, cutting edge, and reportedly very successful in combating high blood pressure didn’t need to be faked.

I had to admit, I didn’t get a good feeling about the meeting, but I hadn’t been at the company during any other product launch so I figured maybe that was always Randy’s way when he had to be in a good mood about something.

That said, all the other directors and managers at the team meeting were giving each other looks after it, which didn’t make me feel better. At the time, I put it down to the fact that, with the way people avoided him, the consensus of the team matched my opinion that Randy was a dick.

But the death of the man behind that new product after that weird prelaunch meeting didn’t sit real great with me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The police are investigating. They came in and talked with Mr. Barrow and Mr. Berger. Mr. Berger kinda scares me, but he came out of the meeting with the police and did the rounds with the vice presidents and directors, looking like someone told him his dog just got run over.”

As he would.

This was not only because I suspected Travis Berger was a decent guy. It also was because, when he got to where he was right now on the company food chain, he’d gone all out, talking our president and CEO, Clancy Barrow, into aggressively headhunting and claiming the top biomedical scientists in the industry. Wyler had paid a fortune in signing bonuses, stock options, and salaries in order to ascertain products currently in testing and new products to be developed would be the best they could be.

One of those scientists biting it meant we’d lost a huge investment.

What also didn’t surprise me was that Berger went out and shared the news. I’d only seen Clancy Barrow in passing on a handful of occasions. He was not hands-on. He let Berger do day-to-day and pretty much everything else. Whereas Berger was visible, aggressive, driven, and hardworking, Barrow, surprisingly for someone in his position, was practically invisible, letting his executive vice president be the face of Wyler on a variety of fronts.

There was, of course, another way to look at this. That being, if something went wrong, it would be Berger who would likely take the fall, even if it wasn’t on him what went wrong.

“Do they know how it happened?” I asked Tandy.

She looked uncomfortable for a second before she said, “Details aren’t making the rounds, but I do know he was shot.”

She also knew I was shot and I remembered what I remembered every day about fifty times a day. This being that I liked Tandy. She was funny. She wore kickass clothes. She was a hard worker and totally on the ball. But also, she was sweet.

“That’s terrible,” I pointed out the obvious.

“Yeah. I didn’t know him, but still, it’s terrible,” she said, her eyes drifting across the office floor. They came back to me and she went on, “Anyway. The Tenrix stuff is on your desk. Chelsea brought the files around while you were working out.”

Something about this coincidence sent a chill sliding up my spine, but I nodded, murmured, “Thanks,” gave her a smile, and went to my office.

I had a million things to do, but after I dumped my workout bag, I reached right for the file on Tenrix. A lot of it I didn’t get because it was about chemistry and biology and we’d been told we’d have someone (though, not Dr. Gartner, obviously) explain it to us in detail.