See, when it came to Vin's offspring, he was two for three. Anthony was the young, spoiled, arrogant, misguided, violent asshole scumbag from hell.
Giovani, or Gio as he preferred to be called by friends, was the middle one and, as it usually went, he made up for his middle status by being charmingly loud and funny. And while he was genuinely intelligent and had a good business sense, he hid it under a general laziness that was allowed because of the aforementioned charm and humor.
Salvatore was the oldest and did not, in case you were wondering, like being called Salvy or Tory. That was a fact Faith learned the night of her twenty-first birthday when she was legally drunk off her ass in the bar three doors down from Lam and Salvatore just so happened to come in, pay her tab, grab her discarded items, and personally drive her home while she blabbered endlessly and tried about six different pet names for him because she insisted that Salvatore was way too stern sounding.
That being said, Salvatore was stern. He was cool, confident, intelligent, business-minded and very rarely found cause to smile or even become a vague facsimile of amused.
Which might have been why he was her favorite of the brothers.
That and, where Anthony was an outright dickhead and Gio was mostly-absent and hard to get a read on, you always knew where you stood with Salvatore.
He was also, arguably, the most attractive of the brothers. While they all looked a lot like their father, minus a couple decades- tall, wide-shouldered, dark-haired, dark-eyed, fit, with classically handsome facial features, there was just something about Salvatore she found more appealing.
Maybe it was as simple as the soft spot he had for her.
That was a major compliment to be the soft spot in a man who was otherwise all cinderblock and barbed wire.
"Hey, I'm not putting on a happy face for the new guy. He won't last any longer than the others and you know it."
"And I'm sure none of that has to do with you scaring them off," Salvatore agreed, nodding his head when she gestured to the vodka bottle she kept under the bar that was full of water.
They had an agreement- when there was a business meeting, she over-poured for everyone else and made his drinks of the non-alcoholic variety. In turn, he would never tell Vin that in a fit of rage over an argument with him, she had poured his favorite bottle of whiskey down the drain and replaced it with well whiskey and he never even noticed.
There was a lot Vin would forgive of her, but he was not a man who would allow someone to pull one over on him.
And while her and Vin's arrangement had overall been an amicable one, she didn't doubt for a moment that he was capable of back stabbing her.
That was why, even ten years in, she never got completely comfortable there.
"If little ole' me can scare them off, they don't belong here," she said, pushing his drink toward him.
"Kid, if you don't see that you're the most formidable person in this bar at any given time, you really underestimate yourself," he said, toasting her with his drink as he moved back to the table where Max's head turned in her direction and he gave her a sexy little chin incline.
Weird night.
And as she watched the last person walk away from the bar, effectively taking away any chance for her to distract herself from Danny, she exhaled hard and tapped her nails on the bar.
"Okay. I'm going on break," she declared abruptly, going toward the opening in the bar. "Hold down the fort."
She kept her steps calm and deliberate as she walked out and into the kitchen, but all but ran out the back door and into the alley, leaning against the wall, half curled over, closing her eyes and taking deep breaths, reminding herself that she was a badass, strong, experienced woman and that she could not and would not be brought to hysterics over some weird attraction to the new guy at work.
She was better than that.
She had more self-control than that.
She straightened and opened her eyes, stifling a yelp when she found Danny standing right in front of her, somehow sneaking up on her, silent though the door to the kitchen squeaked and slammed due to joints in need of some WD-40 and the sheer heaviness of it.
No one got the drop on her.
But he had done it twice.
What the hell?
"We're outside the doors," he declared and she felt her stomach pitch to her feet in realization just a mere second before one of his hands went to the side of her neck, pulling her forward, his head ducked, and his lips crashed into hers.
Crashed.
She should have expected nothing else.
With the way they clashed, she should have expected that any romantic physical interactions between them would be like a battle.