I nodded. “Something just wasn’t right.”
“No,” Nina agreed, her voice quavering. “It wasn’t.”
“We don’t have to talk,” I assured her again.
But I didn’t release her hand. And she didn’t take it back.
“Do you know how long it’s been,” she wondered as she watched our fingers slowly, slowly entwined with each other, “since someone held my hand?”
That ache in my chest throbbed again. Her voice was so sad, so fuckin’ tragic. I would have done just about anything to see her smile. I wanted to hear that shy laugh. Just one more time.
But the truth? I realized then that I’d take her tears too. I’d take anything this beautiful woman had to offer me tonight. Anything at all.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” I asked.
I brought her hand to my knee so I could cradled it between both of my palms. Nina emitted a soft sigh, but she didn’t pull it away.
“Go on, doll. I got all the time in the world.”
Four
“It started maybe a year ago,” she began after Jamie brought us another round. “My grandmother became very ill. She had cancer.”
This time, I bought a bottle of the Sangiovese. I appreciated my friend’s free drinks, but I wasn’t going to take advantage of him. Plus, good wine has a way of bringing people together. Opening them up. I didn’t think I had ever met anyone more in need of opening up than Nina, and to my surprise, I was dying to know what she’d have to say.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “That’s terrible. Was it the one who raised you? Were you close?”
Nina sighed. “I—in our way. I wouldn’t say she raised me, really. The nannies did that. But Grandmother took a strong hand when my mother would not.”
I tried not to look intimidated at the casual mention of nannies. Plural. I was right, then. Nina came from serious money. Kids in my neighborhood were jointly raised by grandparents, close neighbors, siblings, and the television. I started babysitting my sisters before I turned ten. I couldn’t imagine a world where we were handed off to strangers. Where anyone could afford such a luxury.
“I always wanted to be close,” Nina admitted. “But Grandmother wasn’t particularly…soft. She cared for me, of course. Not as much as my cousin, who lived with her. But she did. And then they fell out, and I was the one who stayed behind when he ran off. I took care of her and visited when she was ill. And when E—when my cousin returned after years away and got married, Grandmother left him everything. Our family’s entire business. Our properties. All of it.”
“So you’re an heiress,” I said, again trying not to be too impressed. It seemed like a word out of one of my sister’s crappy romance novels, not a real thing.
“That’s just it,” Nina said acerbically. “I’m not an heiress anymore.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said. “Especially if you were the one there, taking care of her. I’d be pissed off too.”
“Yes, well. I wasn’t happy about it at first, it’s true. But it was Grandmother’s choice, and it’s not as thought she left the rest of us particularly destitute. I had my home, my trust. I could have lived with it. Others, thought, especially my—several other people were quite angry. Even my best friend, who tried to ruin the entire wedding.”
“Jesus,” I murmured. “Not much of a friend, was she?”
Nina shook her head sadly. “Caitlyn and I grew up together. She even lived with my mother and me for a time when we were girls, and she had a terrible crush on my cousin. But she wasn’t a good friend. Good friends don’t go behind your back to steal another woman’s fiancé. They don’t embarrass the entire family to get what they want. It was a complete betrayal of all of us.”
I tried to imagine how I’d feel if Jamie did something like that to me. Messed with one of my sisters behind my back. Betrayed a family that took him in. I shook my head. It was fuckin’ inconceivable.
“The thing about my cousin is that he’s not a bad person,” Nina said. “He’s quite wonderful, actually, and so is his wife. When we were children, we were very close. I was happy in the end to have him back, especially once our grandmother passed away…”
“So you lost your fortune, your grandmother, your best friend, and the chance to make up with your cousin,” I finished for her, hoping I had it right. It was definitely a tangled web.
Nina didn’t confirm or deny my version. “All I wanted was for things to be like they were.”
I didn’t pry anymore. There were parts of this story that were clearly missing. Names that were omitted. Links that were broken. If Nina were on the stand, I would have torn up her testimony in about thirty seconds. But in here, I wasn’t a prosecutor. I was just a guy at the bar, trying to get the pretty girl to like him. Wanting her to trust him. Nina—shit, I didn’t even know her last name—had secrets. That was okay. We all had a few. Maybe one day, she’d share hers with me.
“I wonder if, perhaps, seeing him now…he and his wife are so in love…” Nina sighed, as if lost in a daydream. “Have you ever seen anything like that up close?”
I took another long drink of wine, thinking of Jane and Eric. It was like this woman was reading my mind tonight.
“I have,” I admitted. “My grandparents, for one.”
“These are the Italian grandparents?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Nonno passed when I was in college. He was amazing. Totally self-made man. Owned a chauffeur company in Belmont. His hard work bought our house, brought his mother over from Naples, and gave me and my sisters a solid home. He married my grandmother when they were only eighteen, and until he died, he never even looked at another woman.” I chuckled, remembering Nonno’s heavily accented advice, of which there was plenty. “He always told me the secret to a good marriage wasn’t that you never got mad, but that you got mad with each other. And they did. They definitely did. But they always made up, too.”
Nina smiled. “They sound very…lively.”
I shrugged. “My dad was no good, so Nonno was the one to keep me out of trouble. No small feat in this city, I’ll have you know. But he did it. I wouldn’t have gone to college without him. Honestly, I probably would have ended up running for the mob, just like half the other kids in my neighborhood.”
“He sounds like he was your hero.”
“Yeah. He kind of was.”
I shook my head. Time and time again, Nonno had pointed out people whom he’d thought had gone bad, like pieces of fruit on a tree. That Tommy Wagner. Rotten to the core. You stay away from him, Matthew. You gotta be better than the rest.
If it hadn’t been for him, I probably wouldn’t have been better. I’d have been nothing at all.
Nina and I lapsed into a silence, despite the hum of the bar. We were both brooders—that much was obvious. But I found I didn’t mind it while we sipped on our wine and picked at the olives Jamie dropped off. Nina was someone I could talk to, but she was also someone I could not talk to. Sometimes that was just as nice.
“My family was never like yours,” she said a bit later. “My whole life, I was quite used to being alone. I did everything everyone ever asked of me. Things always went as they were supposed to. Except for nannies or later on, the butlers, I was mostly left to my own devices.”
“That sounds fuckin’ awful,” I stated bluntly.
She tipped her head from side to side. “It was all I knew.”
I hated that. I hated that she didn’t really know what love or affection felt like, even if it was from a rabble of people as likely to punch you as hug you. My sisters were a mess of alley cats, but I wouldn’t have traded them for anything.
“But now,” Nina continued, “now I feel like I’ve seen something different. And loneliness doesn’t feel like an exchange for other privileges. It simply feels unbearable.”
She tipped back the rest of her wine, and when she returned the glass to the bar, it was empty. Her eyes shone, but she didn’t cry. I had a feeling that despite earl
ier signs, Nina rarely cried.
I gave us both a moment—for her to calm down, and for me to search for the right words.
“The thing about love,” I said finally, “is that it’s great when you’re a kid. But when you get older, it becomes kind of painful, you know? When others seem to find it, but you can’t have it yourself.”
“Indeed.”
Nina drew a slender finger around the rim of her wineglass, and I watched, transfixed. Her ring finger was conspicuously bare, just as Jamie had pointed out. Her hands were beautiful—slim, long-fingered, elegant. Meant for a diamond, just like my grandmother wore for sixty-eight years. The one she gave me after Nonno died, to give to a woman I would call my wife. I’d scoffed at the time, but kept the ring safe.
It was legitimately scary how easily I could imagine that ring on Nina’s finger.
Slow down, Zola, I told myself. It was the wine talking. I was lonely and hard up. Desperate for company on a strange stormy night. Nothing more to it.
“Do you know what it’s like, Matthew?” Nina broke through my mild panic as she calmly refilled our glasses. “To do everything you can, your entire life, to please someone else? And never be enough?”
I watched her wrestle with her emotions. “What do you mean?”
“My cousin,” she said. “His wife. They’re—they’re in danger now. He’s gone, and she’s—” She shook her head, clearly warring with herself. “I can’t really talk about it, but it’s my fault.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, it’s your fault? Sounds like it was your friend’s fault for almost ruining the wedding, not yours.”
“It’s not just that,” Nina said. “They’ve mostly recovered from that. But other people close to me…they’ve continued to wreak havoc in their lives. And I’ve done nothing to stop it. Because I’m a coward. Just like my father. My mother. Just like everyone else in my godforsaken family.”
Her voice, husky and strong, cracked over the last word like a piece of glass. I reached for her hand again, and this time, she squeezed back, hard.
“Sometimes we can be better than what we come from,” I said.
“Do you really believe that?”
I nodded. “I have to. I’m proof positive, doll.”
She swiped a finger underneath her eye, and I did my best to ignore the pang in my chest. I barely knew Nina, but I had a feeling I’d never be able to handle her crying. Just the hint of it pretty much broke me.
“Tell me,” she said. “I believe I’ve had enough of my sad story. I want to hear a good one.”
I shrugged. “It’s not the most exciting tale. I was just like every other kid in the neighborhood.”
“Belmont, you mean? Like the other ‘Little Italy’?”
“So you are a local. But I think you mean the real Little Italy.”
She nodded with pleasure as she took another sip of wine. A drop lingered on her lip before she licked it off. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted.
“So,” she prodded. “You were saying…”
I didn’t tell her everything. People don’t want to hear that shit—the stuff about cuts and bruises, the mistakes of youth. They don’t want to hear about how when kids grow up being hit, they want to hit back.
But because she’d opened up some with me, I gave her the highlights.
“I was a troublemaker,” I said. “Ran with the wrong crowd young, even before my dad died. Got kicked out of the parish school. Thought very seriously about dropping out of high school, too.”
“Oh, my,” Nina said. “You scoundrel.”
I raised a brow. “Doll, you have no idea.”
Was it my imagination, or did she just shiver? Her cheeks, already pinked from the wine, were as red as roses.
“Anyway,” I said. “After my pops died, my grandfather really started to get on me. Forced me to graduate high school. Go to college. But honestly, I didn’t really snap out of it until he was gone too.”
“Death does make us reflect on things, doesn’t it?” Nina asked dryly.
“Well, in my case, it made me enlist,” I said.
She blinked, clearly surprised.
“What?” I asked. “Don’t I look the military type?”
“Ah, no,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so.”
“Twenty-fifth Marines, yeah.” I smirked. “The last thing my grandfather said to me was ‘Make me proud.’ My whole life, he wanted me to be one of the good guys. Something other than the damn hooligans that ran the neighborhood.” I shrugged. “Three weeks after he passed, 9/11 happened. So I enlisted as a junior officer. Did four years, including two tours to Iraq. When I got out, I used the GI bill to go to law school and became a prosecutor. I started out fighting the bad guys in the Middle East, and now I’m doing it at home.”
“So, you’re a hero.”
Nina’s gaze took on a familiar softness. I knew it well. New York was a city full of con artists, people looking out only for themselves. I had five sisters full of stories about men who had tricked them, hurt them, done them wrong in some way. Nina was looking at me the way most women did when they determined I was harmless. When they heard my story and decided I couldn’t hurt them like the others had.
Mostly, I was content to let them think that. It got me what I wanted, and they had what they needed. For the night, anyway.
But with Nina, I didn’t want to hide anything. I wanted her to know exactly what I was.
“Nina,” I said as I leaned forward. “We should probably get something straight.”
She blinked, but she didn’t look away. “What is that?”
I cocked my head. “I might be one of the good guys, sweetheart, but I’m no angel.”
Again, with that micro-shiver. I was close enough now that I could hear the way her breathing picked up. I could smell the sweet scent of flowers that drifted off her body. Would her skin be as sweet as a petal?
“I’m no angel,” I repeated. “But I think you might be.”
“Oh, Matthew,” she said again in that breathy way that made me wonder what she would look like saying my name just like that right under me. “I’m not perfect either.”
Cautiously, I drew a finger over her wrist and up her slim forearm. I stroked the skin below her elbow, enjoying the silky texture.
“You know, doll,” I said. “I don’t know if I believe that.”
Five
We stared at each other for a long time, the din of the bar fading again, but for a very different reason. The air around us crackled. Good fuckin’ God.
“I think,” Nina said as she cleared her throat, “I’m ready for that small talk now.”
I chuckled. “We are doing things backwards, aren’t we?”
“Perhaps we should have started by jumping into bed together.”
It was just a joke; she couldn’t know that she was tempting the bull with that suggestion. And she really didn’t want to know how many times I’d already imagined it.
Catching my expression, Nina sobered quickly “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so—”
“Fuckin’ adorable?”
She rolled her eyes. “Forward.”
“Ah, I like forward.” I waved my hand, as if to swat the notion away like a fly. “And for the record, if that were a proposition”—I shivered at the thought—“I wouldn’t say no. Any man who would refuse you? Out of his fuckin’ mind.”
“Oh, Matthew,” she demurred into her wineglass. “You’re making me blush.”
“Someone should. It’s a beautiful sight.”
I gazed openly. I could have watched her skin change color like that all night. Nina’s cheeks were the color of ripe peaches, and I wanted to bite one. Instead, I just cleared my throat.
“So, what does your family do?” My voice was a little too loud. “Must be something big if they have a legacy to hand over.”
Her gaze turned steely. “Ah, boats. We own a line of boats.”
“What, like fishing boats?”
> She shrugged. “Yes, probably.”
I frowned. I really couldn’t imagine Nina hauling nets full of fish with a bunch of dirty men. “I mean, I’m sure you could be a fine fisherwoman if you wanted, but…”
She chuckled. “What? Oh. No. We own the boats, we don’t actually run them.”
I frowned. Something about this story was familiar. “Your name isn’t de Vries, is it?”
Eric was a shipping heir too. It would be just my luck, that I’d meet the perfect woman, only for her to be tied to an investigation that made her off-limits.
Nina’s eyes widened. “What?”
“De Vries. Is that your last name?”
Was it my imagination, or did she recoil?
“No,” she said emphatically. “It is not.”
I frowned. “You sure?”
Something as sharp as a knife flashed in her eyes. They might be the color of cooing doves, but they turned hawkish in a second.
“Do you think I don’t know my own name, Mr. Zola?”
Now I was more than suspicious. “How did you know my last name?”
“Because I’ve been calling you Zola all night, you asshole!”
We both swiveled to face Jamie, who was shaking his head as he poured a couple of martinis.
“Get off your high horse, Matthew,” he said pointedly.
I gave him the finger, then turned back to Nina, who had her arms crossed. Shit. She was pissed.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I held up both hands in surrender. “I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted to know because—”
There, I stopped. I certainly couldn’t tell her about the investigation. I liked Nina. I really did. But in my line of work, you never knew who was a PI for the other team. I’d been doing this for too long not to be careful.
But it wasn’t just that. Sometimes I dealt with really dark shit. I spent every day investigating the lives of some of the worst humans in New York. Men who manipulated the city’s veins of power and wealth with no fuckin’ scruples. Prostitution rings. Human trafficking. Drugs. I’d seen it all. And I didn’t want it anywhere near the angel next to me.
The Scarlet Night (Rose Gold Book 0) Page 3