Since Imani wanted to get into the office early that morning, and Kimberly was only just getting started on the breakfast feast that she usually prepared for the family, Imani planned to make herself a blueberry-almond-quinoa smoothie bowl and get out of there. When she got to the kitchen, the television was turned to the local news.

  “The JSO and Jacksonville Fire and Rescue were called last night to a house in the Norwood area of Jacksonville. Witnesses say that three men threw Molotov cocktails inside the house and then shot the three men that were in the house as they tried to escape the burning structure. One of the deceased has been positively identified as Wilson Laurent, for whom the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had an open warrant on drug charges. We’ll have more information for you as it becomes available,” said the TV reporter.

  Imani shook her head, picked up the remote, and turned off the television just as Brock came into the kitchen. He had been up since six, so he had heard her when she went to work out and had wondered where she was going. When he’d heard her heels clicking against the hardwood floor in the hallway and on the stairs, he’d decided to come downstairs. She took all of him in—his broad shoulders, those muscular arms, and that sexy chest.

  “Good morning, Imani.”

  And then there was that voice, which Imani could feel deep in her core.

  “Morning, Brock,” she said. She started making her smoothie and tried to act nonchalant about the Ermenegildo Zegna two-tone plaid jacket and slacks he was wearing, an outfit she’d bought for him.

  He looks so good in that, Imani thought, and it occurred to her that she was enjoying shopping for Brock more than she had thought she would.

  “How are you doing this morning?” He stood next to her as he poured a cup of coffee.

  “Doing great.” She could feel the heat radiating from him. “About to get outta here and head to the office.”

  “Mr. O said that we were gonna roll by there today, but I don’t think he’s gonna be up anytime soon,” he said, enjoying the view of Imani’s wide hips, round ass, and those long, sexy legs.

  “Must have been quite a night,” she said and turned around. Brock quickly looked away. “What kind of trouble did you boys get into?”

  “No trouble. We went to Red’s Steakhouse for dinner, and then we rolled out to the Westside, did a little barhopping, and then he showed me his place.” Brock chuckled. “We had a few more drinks, talked a lot of shit, you know, about the old days. And then we came back here,” he said, leaving out the part about how, after those few drinks, Stacy and her friend Deirdre came over to their table and Stacy put in work to satisfy his hunger. “It’s the only place I know.”

  “So,” Imani said, somewhat satisfied with his answer but knowing that there was more to it than that, “do you have any plans for the day?”

  “None whatsoever.” He took a step closer to her. “What did you have in mind?” Brock asked, and Imani’s body trembled from the inside out.

  “You can drive me to work,” Imani said.

  She was sitting down to enjoy her smoothie when she heard the doorbell ring. Shortly thereafter, De’Shane Jones and Lucius Cunningham came into the kitchen. While Brock had been in prison, both De’Shane and Lucius had risen to prominence, and now they were Mr. O’s top arms and drug runners in the Southeast region.

  “Hey, Imani,” De’Shane said when he walked into the kitchen.

  He and Imani had a good working relationship, one that he secretly wished with all his heart would turn into something deeper, but Imani wasn’t the least bit interested in him. To her, he was just a moneymaker, and she couldn’t imagine anything deeper than that. It wasn’t that he was a bad-looking man; she just wasn’t interested in him. The way that he saw it, it was just a matter of time before he wore her down.

  “Guess we too early to eat,” Lucius said.

  “And my father isn’t up yet,” Imani told him, and then she introduced Brock. “He’s gonna be driving for me and Daddy for a while, until he decides what he wants to do now that he’s out.”

  While Lucius had never heard of Brock, De’Shane had. “Wait a minute. Your Brock Whitehall?”

  Brock nodded. “I am.”

  De’Shane turned to Lucius. “Mr. O never told you about this nigga right here?”

  “Nope,” Lucius said, staring at Brock. He was mad because he used to drive Imani and Mr. O around sometimes. And as quiet as it was kept, he was into Imani and thought that he had a shot at her too.

  De’Shane went on. “I don’t know how true it is, but I heard he was in Chicago to do a deal with some bangers, and they tried to pay him with dope. When he tells them no deal, they throw down on him.”

  “What happened?” Imani asked, because she had never heard that story, and her father had told her plenty of Brock stories.

  “They say this nigga took their guns and kicked both of their asses. Then he took their cash and left them their guns,” De’Shane said.

  Imani looked at Brock. “True story?” she asked, and Brock nodded.

  “What are you? Some kinda super nigga or some shit?” Lucius asked.

  Brock shrugged. “If that’s what you think.” He turned to Imani. “I’ll be in the car when you’re ready,” he said and walked out of the kitchen.

  Imani watched him as he went. She had always enjoyed the way he walked. That confident swagger always had an effect on her, and after that story, it had her juices flowing. She stood up.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said as she crossed the kitchen on her way to the front door. After taking a dozen steps, she stopped and turned back around. “Lucius. There’s something I need you to do for me.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, coming toward her.

  “I have to run right now, so I need you to stop by the office sometime this afternoon, and I’ll tell you what I need you to do for me,” Imani said and continued walking to the front door.

  Chapter Ten

  When Imani got to the front door, she saw that the keys to her car, which she always left on a side table, were gone. She picked up her tote bag and walked out of the house. Brock had pulled her car around to the front of the house, and he was leaning against it now, with the front passenger door opened. He stood up straight when he saw her coming, hovered as she got in the passenger seat, and then closed the door for her.

  “Where to, boss?” Brock asked when he got in the car.

  “Don’t call me that,” Imani said, but she smiled, because that was what he called her father. “I have some business that I need to take care of at the port before I go to the office.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “You remember how to get back to Butler Boulevard?”

  “The highway?”

  “Yes. That’s where we’re going. I’ll let you know where to go when we get on.”

  Brock started the car and headed toward the highway, on the way to the Jacksonville Port Authority. For a while, the only sound in Imani’s Volvo S90 hybrid was the sound of music. They didn’t really know each other, so Imani and Brock had nothing to talk about. She had already asked him about his plans for the future and about his night. Imani was considering saying something about the difference between the weather in Atlanta as opposed to Jacksonville when he saved her the trouble.

  “So what all do you do?”

  “I do everything,” Imani said proudly. “I handle both sides of the business.” She went on to explain how she had taken the reins of the family business.

  Things had been quiet for a while after Brock went to jail. At his trial, Arturo Vargas had testified that he had bought the M16 rifles for Vance to use in his turf war with Joaquin Herminio. He had been murdered at a popular Boca Raton restaurant a month before Herminio’s trial started. For that reason, Warwick Vance, as well as Mr. O, had been laying low.

  It was during those years that Mr. O had finally arranged and presided over the old-school sit-down with Roberto Petit-Frere and Warwick Vance that he’d been talking up for years. The peace that they made that day had held for years, but by that time, the landscape in Miami had changed and a new, more violent breed had come up behind them.

  And then it happened. And after that, nothing was the same.

  “I was in the office when the phone rang, and my mother answered it. Next thing I know, she is getting in her car, with her gun,” Imani told Brock as he drove.

  It was the Miami-Dade Police who had called. They had informed Imani’s mother that they had a minor in custody, a Hareem Mosley. He had been arrested for simple assault after he got in a fight and for underage drinking. Hareem had told the police that his mother died a month ago and he was still living in their apartment. The police needed the boy’s father, Orpheus Mosley, to come get him, or he would be turned over to child protective services.

  Mr. O had never known that he had a son, but that didn’t stop his wife, Julia, from chasing him around the house, firing shots, as he tried to tell her that he didn’t know anything about a son. But Julia wasn’t trying to hear that shit. She kept shooting until he finally left the house. He went to meet his son for the first time, and Julia filed for divorce that same afternoon. Mr. O never saw her again.

  There was one thing that was certain about Orpheus Mosley: he loved that woman. She was his world. There were other women to be sure, but none of them meant anything to him. “Just someplace to bust a nut in,” was what he was known to say.

  Now his precious Julia was gone, and nothing meant anything to him. He was drinking too much, smoking way too much weed, and drowning himself in an endless sea of meaningless women to bust nuts in. He fell apart on the day he got the divorce papers. Mr. O didn’t even bother to look at them: he told his lawyer to let her have whatever she wanted, and he signed the papers against his lawyer’s advice. That was the day that he disappeared.

  At the time, Imani was working toward her bachelor’s degree in the Technical Management Program at DeVry, with a focus in business intelligence and analytics management. She was also doing a little work with the computer systems for Luxury Private Charters, separating and then transitioning years of information dating back to when her grandfather first started the business. However, with her mother out of the business and her father somewhere in the wind, not to mention the arrival of a new brother, whose mother had recently died, everything fell on Imani.

  “So I had to step up,” she told Brock.

  That meant that there was no more room for the man-hungry party girl she had once been. Her plans to graduate from DeVry, land some high-paying job in LA, and leave Miami ended the day her father received the divorce papers. Her family may have been in disarray, but the charter business had to be run. There were deals in progress, and there was merchandise in the pipeline, and she had to step up and oversee everything.

  As a young girl, Imani had heard the stories that her grandfather and then her father had told her of how the business was run, and as she got older, she had watched from a distance as they smuggled contraband, sold weapons, and dominated the dope game for more than a minute. Now, ready or not, Imani had to step up and handle it all. Her family needed her to do that.

  “I had to learn everything there was to know about the weapon we were selling,” she revealed.

  “Which one was that?” Brock asked, glancing at her for a second, then returning his eyes to the road.

  “The QBZ-95.”

  Brock smiled. “Tell me about it.”

  Imani turned slightly toward Brock as he drove. “The QBZ-95 is an assault rifle developed for the Chinese military. It fires the standard-version Chinese five-point-eight by forty-two millimeter round from a thirty-round magazine. The QBZ-95 is a select-fire rifle with a limited rate of fire of about six hundred fifty rpm. The effective range is four hundred meters, and it can be fitted to fire rifle grenades.”

  “Impressive.”

  “I know my guns.”

  “So did I.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Imani said, because her father had told her that Brock was the best he’d ever seen and that she would do well to emulate him.

  “Know what you’re selling . . .”

  “And the world will be yours,” Imani said, completing the phrase that her father had repeated so many times to both of them.

  Each looked at the other, and their eyes met. Imani felt a connection that went beyond their mutual interest in guns and the similarities between them that had arisen because they had had the same teacher. She felt an intimacy that went well beyond the physical attraction she’d been fantasizing about for years. She wondered if Brock felt it too.

  From the moment he first saw her on the day he got out of prison, Brock had been physically attracted to Imani. His heart skipped a beat each time she spoke to him. He had seen the twinkle in her eye, felt the aura she was giving off, and had wondered if maybe . . . But Brock had quickly discounted the idea. After all, he had just got out of prison, they barely knew one another, and all they’d ever had were surface-level conversations.

  But he felt it too. He felt what she felt. Whether either of them knew it or was ready to admit it, Brock and Imani were connecting on a deeper level—and this was just the start of it.

  Chapter Eleven

  “It’s over there on your left,” Imani said as they got closer to St Marys Seafood & More Express.

  Brock parked the car in front of the restaurant. He looked over at Imani and saw that she was digging around for something in her purse. He got out and went to open her door. Imani held her hand out, and he smiled.

  She’s a lady, he thought.

  Brock liked a woman who expected to be treated like a lady and who appreciated a man who knew how to treat her that way.

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting his hand.

  “Anytime.”

  Brock watched her walk as he closed the car door. As he rushed to catch up with Imani, he wondered if she would stop at the door to the restaurant and wait for him to open it for her.

  “What are we doing here?” Brock asked, and Imani stopped in her tracks. Then she stepped in front of the door and looked in her tote bag.

  “We’re here to meet two inspectors from the port,” she said and discreetly nodded toward two men inside the restaurant who looked as if they had spent the night in their clothes. “That’s them at the table in the far left corner.”

  Brock squinted as he looked in the restaurant’s large front window. “I see them.”

  “One’s name is Reed Allen. He’ll be the one eating corned beef hash and eggs. The other is Miller Ford. He’s having the shrimp and grits with bacon bits.” She glanced at the door, and he opened it. “I’m going to introduce you, but they prefer to be referred to as Mr. Alpha and Mr. Beta. Don’t ask. I’ll explain why later,” Imani said and approached the table. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  “Morning, Ms. Mosley. Please, have a seat,” Allen said.

  “Thank you,” Imani said. Brock pulled out her chair, and she sat down at the table. He waited until she nodded her head slightly before he went and sat across from her. “Gentlemen, this is Brock Whitehall. He’s an old associate of my father’s. Brock, this is Mr. Alpha and Mr. Beta,” Imani said, and then she held out an envelope under the table.

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Whitehall. Mr. O speaks very highly of you,” Ford said and shook his hand. Then he put his hand under the table and felt for the envelope Imani was holding out. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other as time passes.”

  “Y’all stay and have some breakfast with us,” Allen said after Ford had eased the envelope into his pocket.

  “I wish I could,” Imani replied, and Brock stood up. “I have a million things to do today.”

  “Don’t we all,” Ford declared and shoved some shrimp and grits in his mouth. Imani rolled her eyes, because he was disgusting her, and she got up from the table.

  “You gentlemen have a good day,” Imani said and started for the door.

  “Good meeting you, gentlemen,” Brock said hastily and headed toward the door, where Imani was standing, waiting for him to open it.

  She is so fuckin’ fine, he thought on his way to the door.

  Brock opened the door for Imani, and he felt her power as she passed by him. They walked to the car in silence, and he opened the passenger door for her to get in. Imani was excited about the possibilities as she waited for Brock to climb behind the wheel. She had enjoyed the nonverbal communication that she and Brock had shared inside the restaurant. It was a simple matter to know when to do this or not say that, but then again, it wasn’t. Anytime Lucius or De’Shane accompanied her on these outings, they had to be told in advance when and under what circumstances to do certain things, and despite that, they often did something wrong.

  Maybe it was the fact that she was a Brock Whitehall fangirl. But no matter the reason, as he got in the car, Imani was jumping up and down on the inside because seamless nonverbal communication would be an asset to them in their business dealings, and she was hopeful that it would carry over into the personal relationship she planned to build with Brock.

  When Brock got in the car, he looked over at Imani. Everything about her turned him the fuck on. Her style, the way that she carried and wielded her power excited him. He had always had a thing for professional women, and powerful women were an aphrodisiac for him. And Imani is so fuckin’ fine. Brock wanted Imani, and he decided in that second that he would have her.

  “So what’s up with Mr. Alpha and Mr. Beta?”

  Imani giggled. “You remember Manny, don’t you?”

  “Manny Ramirez from the port?”

  “Yes. When we were preparing to make the move, I reached out to Manny to see if he knew anybody here at Jaxport that we could do business with, and he handed us Allen and Ford. Naturally, he told us everything about them, and we checked them out, so we’d know what pressure points they’d respond to before we even made our approach. But when Daddy met with them, they said that they preferred to remain anonymous.”

  “I guess that made sense to them.”

  “Whatever, Brock. It makes no sense at all, but they do good work, so I ain’t saying nothing.”

 

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