Reno's Gift (Mob Boss Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

blameless in his son’s attitude.   He wasn’t.   And that was why he needed to talk to him.
    His
cell phone buzzed as soon as he was about to go there, and he pulled it from
his pocket.   He read the text message,
responded to it, and then put his phone away again.   Jimmy waited for his father to tell him what
the message was about, but Reno didn’t say a word.   Which wasn’t surprising since he never
did.   Jimmy even wondered why he would
suddenly think, just because his father for the first time ever invited him on
a business trip with him, that he would tell him everything going on in his
life.   That was pure lunacy.   The way Jimmy saw it Reno didn’t even share
everything with his own wife, a wife he was super-close to, why would he go
there with his son?
    “Nice
breeze,” Jimmy decided to say.   “You came
here as a kid, didn’t you?”
    “I
did.   Used to run up and down that
boardwalk like it was nobody’s business.   This place was pulsating with life then.”
    “Is
that maybe why you keep coming back here?   To see if you can recreate your carefree childhood maybe?”
    “Maybe,”
Reno said, although he knew that wasn’t it at all.   But he needed to end that conversation so
that he could start a far more pressing one.   The one he had been avoiding for far too long.
    He
looked at his handsome son, at his soft curly hair and warm golden skin.   “We haven’t discussed what happened, James,”
he said.
    Jimmy’s
heart began to tighten.   He knew
immediately what his father meant.   “Nothing to discuss.”
    “There’s
plenty to discuss.”   Then Reno’s face
frowned in distress.   “Look at me,” he
said to his son.
    Jimmy
braced himself and looked at his father.   The care and concern in his eyes almost made him want to cry.   His father worried too much when there wasn’t
anything to worry about, and it bothered Jimmy.
    “I had
to make a decision, son,” Reno said.
    “I
know, Pop.   You made---”
    “Hear
me out,” Reno said with a hint of irritation in his voice.   “It was a terrible choice, but I had to
choose.   My enemies saw to that.   But the thing is, son, I don’t want you to
ever think that because I chose you instead of your baby brother or Trina, that
it meant that I loved you less.   It
didn’t mean that at all.”
      “I know that, Pop.”
    Reno
stared at his son.   He only called him
Pop when he was upset with him about something.   And Reno knew it was all about that decision he made.   Jimmy might not know it yet, and he might
have convinced himself that he was cool with the decision his father made, but
Reno knew better. “You have every right to hate me, Jimmy, for what I forced
you to go through.”
    “You
didn’t force me to go through anything,” Jimmy said, irritable himself
now.   “Tony Tufarna had a gun to Ma’s
head, and to little Dommi’s head.   What
were you supposed to do?   You couldn’t
let them kill the baby.   And Ma had to
stay around to take care of the baby.”
    Reno
nodded.   “That was my thinking,
yes.”   Although Reno knew, and perhaps
Jimmy too, that it was far more complicated than that.
    “So
how could I be upset about something you had no control over?” Jimmy
asked.   “Tony Tufarna said either I leave
this earth or they did.   You offered to
die for all of us, but he wouldn’t let you.   He figure killing one of us would be more punishment to you.”   Then he looked at his father.   “You did what you had to do, Pop.”
    Reno
gazed into his son’s eyes.   He expected
to see coldness there, but it wasn’t there.   He saw compassion and concern.   It
actually startled him.   “You don’t hate
me?”
    Jimmy
was genuinely shocked.   “Hate you?   How could I hate you?   Why would you think I would hate you for doing
exactly what I would have done?”
    Reno
didn’t respond to that.   Truth, he knew,
could be unspeakable sometimes.
    Jimmy
could see how unconvinced