The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 9

Nobody had thought that what he was doing was right.  Nobody had ever thought that what he was doing was right, no matter which kind of decision he made.  There goes Tyler, thug, no good bum, there goes Tyler, doing something stupid again.  But he had shown them, hadn’t he?  He had shown everybody, even Caleb, who always made the right decision.  Caleb was the calm one, the thoughtful one.  Caleb was the one people trusted to keep his head in a bad situation. 

But the thing about a level headed person such as brother Caleb was that he wasn’t willing to make the hard decisions, the decisions that sometimes seemed just a little bit too crazy to actually do.  That wasn’t so with Tyler.  Tyler wasn’t afraid of anything, not one damned thing, and he would always do the thing that had to be done.  If it was taking care of people who wouldn’t toe the line, Geno knew he was the perfect man for the job. 

It was just that nobody thought that he might need something outside of his gangster life.  Nobody thought he would even want a girl to call his own so when he took matters into his own hands he was ridiculed and told again and again that what he did wasn’t right.  He had really started to believe it, too, but that was then and this was now.

And weren’t things better now?  All a person had to do was look at the scene unfolding to know it was so.  And this scene wasn’t a fluke, not even close.  This scene was just how their lives went these days, infinitely better than it had been before (in Tyler’s not so humble opinion.)

“Tyler?  What are you doing over there in the corner like that?  That’s not where you belong.”

“I’m just looking things over, babe, just making sure everything is how it should be.”

“Well, hurry up and make sure!  Come join the rest of us.  No need to be the big brooding man all of the time.”

“Alright, alright.  I’ll be right there.”

See?  Like that.  There hadn’t ever been a woman who cared enough about him to say a thing like that.  It made things better somehow, made living every day feel just a little bit brighter than it had been before.  It wasn’t even that it was this girl, either.  He wasn’t trying to be crude or anything and he knew it wouldn’t be a popular thing for him to say, but Tyler wasn’t particularly attached to Meena. 

It wasn’t because it was her that things were better.  It was because there was someone there at all.  Someone who took care of him.  As far as he was concerned, it could have been a lot of girls, as long as they took their role seriously.  That was why it had worked so well to order her the way he had done (the way that everyone had been so disgusted by and up in arms over); just like he had predicted, Meena was so grateful to have a home other than her dank little brothel that she felt like where she was now was considered to be a vast improvement.

“Something else to drink, Mr. Tyler?  Another bourbon perhaps?  Maybe a glass of wine?”

“A glass of wine?  Are you kidding me with that, Veto?  No, never a glass of wine.  Always bourbon, OK?  Always bourbon, you don’t even gotta ask.”

“Yes, sir, right away, sir.”

Tyler opened his mouth to say something sarcastic but caught Meena looking at him from across the room and promptly shut it again.  That was another thing she had done.  She had made it clear from pretty early on that she found the treatment of the staff in their Italian joint to be disgusting and she had lobbied for better treatment. 

Tyler had thought it was so funny that he might as well comply and Caleb had never been one to abuse the poor staff to begin with.  But it was more than the two of them she was intent on changing, even after Caleb made it clear that Geno didn’t take orders from anyone, after he implored her to just let things lie.

She wouldn’t do it, marched right up to the Don himself and made her case.  That was extraordinary enough but what was even more extraordinary was that he listened.  Geno, the big boss who didn’t listen to anyone around him, listened when Meena told him to treat the staff better.  It seemed like a miracle to Geno’s men and it definitely gave them all a level of respect for Meena that they would not otherwise have had. 

Caleb had been so proud of her for standing up for the humanity in another human being and Tyler was proud of her as well, but not for the same reason.  He was proud because she was a fighter and he liked that in a person.  It might have been the only attribute he truly admired in a person, and she had it in spades, despite her odd, sometimes overly quiet, demeanor. 

She wasn’t all quiet and withdrawn at the moment, however, that was for sure.  She was sitting next to Caleb with five of Geno’s roughest men and she was dominating a rowdy game of poker.  Amidst all of their drinking and the thick veil of cigarette smoke hovering over their table, she still looked beautiful and unsullied by her environment.  A tougher woman than her five foot frame would have a man think, that she was.  Made from a different mettle than most. 

He was about to go and join them in their game when he caught a whiff of a perfume he recognized and had no desire to smell again.  A brief look at the expression on Caleb’s face told him that what he feared was what was happening.  Sweet Christ, he wasn’t in the mood for this.  He had thought this problem had moved far, far away.  What a sh*tty time for it to resurface.

“Ty!  I was hoping to see you here.”

“Hey, Bella.  Where else would I be?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said in a sugary sweet voice she was clearly using in an attempt to flirt, “who can tell?  Men move on, don’t they?  I guess I couldn’t very well assume you would stay in my father’s employ forever, now could I?”

“What else was I going to do?”

“I don’t know that either.  You could’ve accumulated muscle of your very own, struck out in your own organization.  You could’ve gotten out of the business, settled down to a normal life in the burbs.  Shoot, you could’ve gotten yourself killed, now couldn’t you?”