But, ah hell, little things stood between them, like her father trying to kill him and the fact she claimed to know Juliet’s dagger. Impossible.
He knew it. Christ, even she knew it.
The knife had never, ever been out of his possession.
So why did he have the sinking feeling she told the truth? He’d looked into her eyes and seen her honesty. Either Jule Casale had lost her mind. Or Rom had. Or…
“What’s your take on reincarnation?” He voiced the thought to Ben before he talked himself out of it.
Ben looked sideways at Rom, his whiskey halfway to his lips. He didn’t even blink. “After what I know about you, pal, I’d say anything’s possible.”
Rom continued to watch the door for lack of anything else to do. Old instincts proved hard to break.
He didn’t like where his thoughts headed. He didn’t believe in reincarnation. He wouldn’t even believe in immortality, if he weren’t living it.
“The rebirth of old souls. Sounds a little too mystic for me,” Rom said smiling, trying to dispel his own bad mood.
“Hey, if I were you, I wouldn’t knock the mystic thing. You might suddenly be turned into a frog or something.”
Rom chuckled. Ben was his oldest friend. At the moment, his only friend. “So tell me what you know about Mascaro and Casale.”
Swiveling on his stool, Ben faced him, all business. “Mascaro’s good. A highly sought after corporate lawyer in the business for twenty-five years, but one that takes few new clients.”
“Why?” Rom asked.
“He doesn’t need to. His established clients keep him busy. But the interesting thing is when he takes new clients.”
Rom thought of Casale standing in his living room. Tired, old and desperate to belong to Mascaro’s club of prestige and wealth.
“When his old clients run out of money,” he finished Ben’s thought.
“You got it,” Ben said, turning back to the soccer game as the U.S. made a kick for the goal. “So the question is, why’s he still representing Casale? He’s broke.”
Rom knew why. “Casale has something Mascaro wants.”
Ben lifted an eyebrow in curiosity, but kept his focus. “Casale was a real estate giant who had the golden touch during much of the last two decades, but overextended himself on too many speculative real estate deals. When the bubble finally burst, he was left with mortgaged properties, no income and no way to leverage them. Now everything Casale touches turns to mud. No one will work with him, his credit is shot, and it’s rumored he’s in league with some very unethical businessmen.”
Rom had bought a warehouse, the one now lying in smoking ruins, from Casale last year. It was one of the dozens of historic structures along the river that developers were converting to loft living and galleries. This particular one however, Rom’s warehouse, Casale and his boys had used in a brownfield cleanup scam, milking local, state, and federal governments for tens of millions of dollars. Money that was long gone, poured into some other immoral and probably illegal deal Casale was hoping would rebuild his fortune.
Rom had uncovered the fraud when he did his own environmental assessment. He didn’t turn Casale over to the Feds—provided the foolish bastard actually did the environmental cleanup he’d committed to.
But he’d underestimated Casale and five people had died for it. The way it played out in the local media, Rom’s warehouse had been burglarized and sabotaged—the perps an unfortunate victim of their own crime.
The front door swung open again. Three men walked in, the two in back pausing as the lead looked around the bar.
He locked eyes with Rom.
With their target identified, the group moved as one to the far end of the bar. Right for Rom.
Reluctantly, he faced them.
The front man slowed, standing a few feet away while the other two flanked his back. He was dressed casually in jeans and a large flannel coat with a stocking cap pulled low over his eyes. His thick arms hung loose at his side, his giant hands curled into fists, emphasizing considerable knuckles.
The two in rear weren’t as large, shorter and leaner than Rom, but they had the same hard edge as the front man.
Shades of another time, another family brawl echoed through his head. Words like fate, reincarnation, and destiny rolled around.
“Which asshole is Montgomery?” the man with the large knuckles snarled, his dark eyes shining like polished glass in the dimly lit bar.
“Who the hell are you?” Ben asked over his shoulder. Always the articulate lawyer.
Knuckles leaned in towards Rom, grabbing the lip of the bar with a skull-crushing grip while he lodged a booted heel on the bottom rail. “Jule Casale is a good girl. Stay away from her.”
“Why?”
The question confused Knuckles. Imagine that.
“You’re bad news and she’s had enough of that lately. So do yourself a favor and stay far away,” he commanded, the two in rear moving in close.
Ah, the divorce. Her ex must have been a bastard.
“I’m bad news?” Rom questioned. “Have you met her family?” The air around the trio crackled with anger. He’d struck a nerve. Make that a vein.
“I’m guessing from your dumb looks, you are family,” Rom purposely crank started tempers.
“Easy, Rom. We can do this somewhere else,” Ben said cautiously.
But why? Rom felt like beating a little sense into these unfortunate messengers. It’d help take the edge off his run in with Mascaro. And besides, he didn’t take well to be warned off.
“What do you know about the Casales?” Knuckles hissed, clearly offended and ready to tear Rom’s head from his shoulders. “Nothing!”
“I know what everyone knows, man. If you do business with that family, you better watch your back and count your money twice.”
Knuckles blew up. He grabbed Rom’s shirtfront and tried to swing him off the barstool. Rom wasn’t moving, not while Ben sat behind him.
With Knuckles off balance and his arms extended, Rom shoved him hard, forcing him back into the arms of his brothers.
“Cool it guys, or Carl will call the police,” Ben shouted from beside Rom. Rom spared a glance for Carl, who was standing as far away from the phone as he could get.
So much for the kindness of strangers.
Knuckles pushed away from the other two, stepping forward into Rom’s personal space again. “Keep your fucking hands off my sister,” he shouted, his face contorted in rage.
So that was it. Casale—correction—Mascaro more likely, had set the brothers on him for being seen with their sister.
“Or what?” Rom retorted.
“We’ll fuck you up.”
“Keep making threats like that. We’ve got plenty of witnesses to testify when your butt ends up before the judge, boy,” Ben used his courtroom voice to cut through the hostility.
Knuckles paused. “Yeah, we can also tell the judge this asshole has been harassing our sister. We have witnesses, too.”
“Who? Mascaro?” Rom asked. “Why don’t you ask him what his interest in Jule is? He seemed pretty intent in keeping her all for himself.”
“You fucker!” Knuckles yelled. He swung a volleyball sized fist at Rom’s head, missing by inches as Rom sidestepped to the right.
As his gaze swept to the side, Rom noticed Ben was gone. Hopefully somewhere out of the way.
Stepping into Knuckles, he grabbed his throat and squeezed the pulse points with enough force to make him to go slack-jawed. Knuckles clawed at his hand, but Rom clutched his groin in the other, incapacitating Jule’s brother.
He shot a warning look to the others. “Back off, or he loses the ability to have children.”
He leaned in close to Jule’s brother, almost feeling sorry for the idiot. He could understand defending family, if it was anyone else’s.
“If you want to do this, we can go out back,” Rom’s voice was quiet and low despite the music playing from the front of the bar.
He felt the muscles in Knuckles’s neck working, but no sound came out. He loosened his grip.
“Fuck you, Montgomery.”
He threw Knuckles backwards. The other two were immediately on him. The first furrowed a punch up under his ribcage while the second lunged in an attempt to topple him.
He remained on his feet, but barely.
“BREAK IT UP!” a voice yelled from across the bar. Rom looked up to see two cops headed in his direction.
He forced the two younger Casales back as the cops made their way to the end of the bar. They withdrew and stood sullen.
After one look at the Casales, the older cop, obviously a veteran, spat. “This is the third time I’ve been called to a scene where you guys are causing trouble. I don’t even want to hear it. I’ve warned you twice and now I’m going to haul your asses in.”
Frowning down at Knuckles, the cop shook his head. “Angelo, you don’t learn, do you? What’s your father gonna say this time?”
Angelo ignored the cop and stared icily at Rom. Two additional cops, apparent backup, joined the huddle and helped pick Angelo up off the floor.
The older cop’s partner disappeared to a hallway beyond the bar.
“You’ve got to stop getting your balls in a bunch over every bad word said about the family,” the gray haired veteran said.
The cop gripped Angelo’s elbow and led him to the front door, but Jule’s brother pulled away before leaving, facing Rom one last time.
“If I hear of you messing with Jule again, I’m going to pay you a visit.”
The cop slapped Angelo upside the head, ringing his ear. Angelo tensed, but kept his hands to himself. “Not tonight you don’t. Now move it.”
Angelo went quietly, his brothers following behind.
Ben emerged from the back hallway, pocketing his phone as the other cop trailed in his wake.
“If you want to press charges we can follow them to the station,” Ben said, gesturing to the last cop leaving the bar.
“I don’t. Let’s drop it.” Since Jule had shown up on his doorstep, his night had gone to hell. Shades of another woman turning his world upside down danced at the edge of his thoughts.
Once the bar cleared of cops and Casales, Ben rejoined Rom at the bar. Rom stared hard at Carl, who busied himself at the other end, cleaning glasses and avoiding any unwanted questions. He looked up for the score on the TV, only to find the game over. Mexico had won, 1-0.
“You want to tell me about this girl? The one with the old soul?” Ben asked for a second time that night, all traces of humor gone with the Casales.
Rom swiped Ben’s unfinished whiskey, downing its contents. Setting it quietly back in front of Ben, he looked over at his friend.
“What can I say? She’s Casale’s daughter.”
Chapter Six
“Jule, you need to get laid,” Natala Casale told her sister. Sitting cross-legged on Jule’s bed, Natala flipped through the pages of a recent issue of Lucky magazine. “What about that dark and dangerous type that was here earlier?” Natala said lustily, stopping to inspect a nail cuticle. She had bumped into Montgomery as Jule escorted him out the front door after an eventful and disturbing evening.
Jule backed out of her walk-in closet to glare at Natala. “Right. Should I just ask him nicely, ‘Excuse me Mr. Montgomery, I haven’t had sex in over a year, my vibrator is broken and I’m really desperate’?”
Natala fell back onto the stack of pink, chintz-covered pillows laughing. “I would pay to hear this conversation!”
Jule threw her flats into the bottom of the closet and dug around for the mate to her house slipper. “Seriously, Natala, he’s shockingly good looking, but way too secretive for my taste. And he’s done business with Pio. That association is enough to throw him into the don’t-touch-with-a-ten-foot-pole category.”
Natala clutched the forgotten magazine to her chest and sat up. “What kind of business?” The youngest of the Casale daughters, Natala harbored strong feelings of dislike for her father’s oldest and dearest associate. Whatever Pio was “cooking in his kitchen” didn’t smell right to Natala. And she should know, she was a chef.
“Real estate,” Jule’s muffled reply drifted from deep inside the closet.
Giving up on the tangle of shoes, belts, and discarded purses, Jule sat back on her heels to see Natala. “I feel like I was conned tonight. At first Montgomery didn’t want to help me and then he couldn’t wait to come over and look at my prints to see if he could provide information.”
“So what did this Rom say?” Natala said.
“Well, now that I think about it, he didn’t say a whole lot. Just brooded. And generally made it clear he thought I was irritating.” Jule spilled her guts at Natala’s look of frustration. “Okay. He’s extremely hot and very intimidating and I was flustered. There. Are you happy?” She crawled back between the open bi-fold doors to shield her discomfort over the truth. Admitting someone—some man—had gotten to her, emotionally and sexually, was a news flash in the Casale household.
“Yes, actually I am. It’s about time you got over your ex and started getting back out there again.” Natala tossed the magazine onto the floor with a sigh and picked up the stack of glossy photos lying on Jule’s bed. She shuffled through the images, pausing here and there for a longer look. “He’s hot. Do you mind if I ask him?”
“What?” Jule crawled out of the closet with the missing slipper, her eyes wide in shock. “Ask if you can sleep with him?” She threw the slipper at her sister. “You’d better not sleep with Rom Montgomery and I mean it.”
“See. I told you. You’re totally into him,” Natala said, choosing a picture from the stack and leaning towards the bedside lamp. Jule recovered the slipper and crammed it on her foot.
“Wow. This is pretty cool. Is this the one you’ve been working on?” Natala held up the eight by ten for Jule to see.
“Yeah.” She plopped down on her bed, sighing at the end of what had been a very long day.
“And was he any help?”
“Somewhat.” Jule thought about their meeting for the one hundredth time since Montgomery had left. Who was she fooling? He’d given her zip.
“Not really. He was all cryptic and secretive. I couldn’t get him to talk.”
“Well, keep after him. And use the opportunity to get to know him. I got a good vibe from him.” Natala and their Mamma shared one thing in common and it wasn’t marinara sauce recipes.
Mamma would be happy to know Natala was predicting Jule had a future with a man who wasn’t her ex, Blake. She might not end up a divorced museum spinster as their poor mother feared.
Natala set the stack of photos aside, but kept the one, examining it up close.
“You know what was really weird?” Jule relaxed into the pillows next to her younger sister, her slippered feet crossed and slowly moving to strains of classical music drifting upstairs from her parent’s sitting room.
“Hmm?”
“He didn’t have a bed in his bedroom.”
“What?” Natala turned to face Jule, surprise raising her ebony brows. “You were in his bedroom, for Christ’s sake? Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
Jule felt a flush creep into her cheeks. “I was looking at his painting. It was completely appropriate.” She suddenly found a pill on her wool skirt fascinating.
“What the hell! You were in his bedroom, but it never occurred to you he wanted to have sex?” Natala threw her hands up in exasperation. “Jesus, Jule. Get with it. Of course he was interested.”
Jule meet her sister’s gaze. “Do you think?”
“Yes. Now if I were you, I’d call this Romeo tomorrow and set up a dinner date.” Natala shook her head and rolled her eyes, her attention drawn back to the photo. “Wait. What do you mean he didn’t have a bed? If there wasn’t a bed, how do you know you were in his bedroom?”
Natala narrowed her eyes at her older sister. “It has been a while,” she stated for
the record.
“God, you make me sound like a nun. I may not know when a guy is coming on to me, but I know what a bedroom looks like.” Jule stared at the ceiling. “We walked through his loft. I saw the living area, the kitchen and a bedroom with a dresser, closet and en-suite bath. I’m not a realtor, but those three things usually indicate a bedroom.”
“Okay.” Natala gave up the argument. “Maybe he slept somewhere else. Or maybe he’s a vampire and sleeps hanging from the rafters. Who knows?” She shrugged her shoulders and returned to the photo, the mystery of Montgomery unsolved.
Jule was so the junior sister when it came to romance and sex. She’d been married to her college sweetheart and had only slept with one other man besides him. Pathetic, but there it was.
Jule drifted, the music and her sister’s even breathing lulling her.
“What’s the deal with this rose? Is it some kind of totem or symbol? It seems so out of place.”
Jule lifted her head to look at the photo, although she knew what Natala was pointing at: the red rose, its first petal flush with dew, opening to the light.
“I don’t know. Ever since I saw Montgomery’s painting tonight with a similar rose—same place, same color, only more petals and wilted, I’ve wondered the same thing.”
“Weird.” Natala’s breath fogged the glossy print as she held it inches from her eyes. “If you’re into conspiracies like me,” she said, her eyes narrowed in amusement above the top of the photo, “you might say that the fold on this rose petal looks like the Roman numeral one.”
“Let me see,” Jule said, trying not to hurt her sister’s feelings over such an amateur theory. Ever since the Da Vinci Code, people claimed to see hidden clues in art.
Natala handed the photo over, moving on to another in the stack with a shrug of her shoulders to say, “whatever. You’re the expert.”
The rose looked no different than it had an hour ago when Montgomery stood staring at the same image. Jule tilted the photo slightly down and forward where the lamp light hit it dead on.
The shadow in the velvety dip of the petal indeed resembled a number: one.
“See, I’m not such an idiot,” Natala declared, making Jule crinkle the photo in surprise.
Forbidden Kiss Page 4