Heart of a Hero

by Marie Ferrarella

Rusty met her scrutiny head-on. “On whether or not you’ll tell me the truth.”

  Dakota took a deep breath, as if to fortify herself for the ordeal ahead, and then abruptly asked, “Have you had dinner yet?”

  Dinner. When had he last really had dinner? Since he’d joined the agency, his meals had consisted mostly of sandwiches or things tucked away in fast-food containers. Even before he’d been officially hired, he’d apprenticed with ChildFinders, giving them whatever free time he had whenever he wasn’t on the U.C. Bedford campus. Mealtimes had fared no better then. Half the time he’d been too busy to stop to eat. As a happy side effect, the baby fat that had stubbornly remained with him through his early teen years had completely disappeared, replaced by lean muscle. He was now something he’d once heard called “fighting trim.”

  He shook his head in answer to her question, thinking it a put-off. “No, but—”

  Neither had she. She’d been too upset, too nervous, too angry to eat. Her last meal had been with Vinny last night. The vague notion that she should be trying to keep her strength up played through her head. “How do you feel about salad?”

  She was already turning toward her kitchen as she asked.

  “Rabbit food,” Chad called it. Rusty tended to agree, although he shrugged indifferently for Dakota’s benefit. “Never harbored any real feelings for salad one way or another. If it’s in front of me, I’ll eat it, but it’s not something I make any effort to get.”

  His answer amused her. “Didn’t mean for you to launch into a philosophical analysis.” She opened the refrigerator. It was empty except for a couple of cans of diet soda, a bottle of water and a huge salad bowl covered with plastic wrap. She was to have gone to the store today, before everything had fallen apart on her. “I keep a big bowl in the refrigerator. That way, I don’t have to stop to prepare anything for me if I don’t feel like it.”

  Meals for Vinny were another matter. For him, she always prepared fresh meals, no leftovers for her boy. What was he eating tonight? She felt a sudden hitch in her throat.

  Rusty could think of a great many things that were more appetizing than salad. “I could take you out to dinner.”

  She was in the process of removing two small bowls from the overhead cupboard. He tried not to notice the way her short sweater crept up on her taut, toned stomach as she reached. It wasn’t easy keeping his thoughts confined.

  “You could,” she allowed, setting the bowls down on the countertop. “If I let you.”

  He picked up on her meaning immediately. She thought he was hitting on her. “It wouldn’t be a date.”

  On second thought, she decided, he was too straightforward for that kind of thing. Dakota took the salad bowl from the refrigerator. Both hands occupied, she hit the door with her hip to close it.

  “No, it’d be an inquisition, right? You have questions.”

  The invitation to dinner had been to put her at ease. With nothing to lose, he was direct with her. “An inquisition implies that you think I’ll grill you, which implies that you’re reluctant to give me answers, which in turn implies that you’re hiding something.”

  He made her smile despite herself. Dakota placed the large bowl in the middle of the small, rectangular table where she and Vinny took their meals.

  The tiny kitchen was a tight fit for a man who was well over six feet and a woman who measured about five-seven if he was any judge. It made moving around without bumping into one another difficult, if not impossible. After two narrow misses, Rusty decided that maybe it would be best for both of them if he just sat. Brushing up against her was making his thought process fuzzy, sending his mind places it had no business being.

  “Let’s start with the million-dollar question first—who do you think took your son and why?”

  Plunking down silverware on top of light blue paper napkins, she looked directly into his eyes. It was now or never. She either had to trust him, or go it alone.

  She made her choice.

  “His grandfather, and for a whole host of reasons.” Her lips curved. “He’s a family kind of guy.”

  There was no humor in her smile, he noted, and none in her eyes. Maybe it was an inside joke. And he was standing on the outside. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t bother him. But it did this time. More than just a little.

  He watched her as she went to get two glasses to set down beside the plates. “What’s this family kind of guy’s name?”

  She paused for a moment, then looked at Rusty over her shoulder. Here came the big payoff. “Vincent Del Greco.” She watched his face to see if the name meant anything to him.

  Rusty blinked. Vincent Del Greco.

  Las Vegas.

  The kingpin of organized crime.

  Things clicked into place. It was starting to make more sense now. “Then his son is—”

  “Was,” she corrected. If Vincent hadn’t been who he was, she wouldn’t be facing this kind of situation. Then again, if he hadn’t been who he was, he wouldn’t have been dead and they would have been married by now, living somewhere else and enjoying life and their son. “Vincent Del Greco Junior.”

  Rusty took the can of soda she offered him, opening it mechanically. She’d referred to the boy as Vinny. “That makes your son Vincent the Third.”

  She took her seat, a smirk on her lips. “We’ll add ‘counting’ to your list of accomplishments.”

  They would have to get a few things ironed out if he was going to keep working on this case. He might as well get to it. “Who gave you that chip on your shoulder?”

  “Life,” she retorted. She’d never liked being criticized, even subtly. And the question was a veiled criticism if ever she’d heard one. “And I earned it because I stayed alive.”

  There was a story there, a story he meant to hear before this case was over. But for now he figured he’d do best to veer back on course. “Why would his grandfather steal Vinny?”

  Maybe Andreini wasn’t as bright as she thought. “To get him away from me.” And maybe he’d been living in a cave these past years and didn’t know who and what he was up against. “Vincent Del Greco Senior is not the kind of man who’s about to go to family court to plead his case. Nobody tells him what he can or can’t do, even if they were brave enough to try. Besides, heads of organized crime syndicates aren’t exactly considered model parents. Even Vincent Senior knows that. He’d never win custody the legal way. But he wants my son more than anything in the world.”

  Her voice had quavered slightly and she bit her lower lip to keep it and herself from breaking. Keeping her eyes on the bowl, she dug the salad tongs into it and commandeered a helping of salad for herself. A helping she couldn’t honestly visualize herself eating, not with this new lump in her throat.

  She tossed the tongs back into the bowl. They clanged as if signaling the end of a round.

  “He wants his grandson, but not his grandson’s mother,” Rusty guessed.

  She raised her eyes to his. And then lifted her chin pugnaciously. Andreini had hit the nail on the head. “No, not me.”

  Given what he had heard about the intertwining family structure within the Del Greco organization, Rusty was somewhat surprised. Family seemed to mean a great deal to the old man. “Why?”

  She’d checked her pride at the door when this had begun. She gave herself no airs now. “Because I’m only the bimbo that his precious son slept with.” Shaking the salad dressing bottle furiously, she poured far more on her salad than she would normally have eaten. Like encroaching orange-and-white lava, the dressing swallowed up everything in its path. “At least, that’s the way Del Greco sees it.”

  Rusty picked up the bottle of dressing and noticed that it was now almost empty. Just as well, he wasn’t a big fan of French anyway. He reached for the salt instead and sprinkled it on the small serving he’d taken. “And how do you see it?”

  Her hand fisted around the fork she’d just picked up, Dakota glared at him. “What are you asking me?”

  He didn
’t rise to the tone she used. Instead he said mildly, “All right, I’ll put it another way. How does a woman who reads Aristotle wind up with the son of Vincent Del Greco?”

  Dakota forced herself to relax, her grip on her fork loosening. “So, you picked up on that, did you?” She was putting him through a lot, she thought. Maybe she owed him a little background information at that. What could it hurt? “I was going to college when Vincent met me.” That made it sound as if they’d met on campus, she realized. “I met him at the club where I worked putting myself through school. One of the rooms at Caesar’s Palace,” she specified in case Andreini still didn’t get the picture. “Needless to say, it wasn’t my mind he was attracted to. At first,” she added with a pleased note.

  She’d been a showgirl, he thought. He could readily see it. The long legs, the long mane of beautiful hair and the world-weary attitude. It all fit together. But anyone taking the trouble to talk to her for more than a few minutes could see that was where the stereotype ended. She wasn’t some bimbo, no matter how Del Greco perceived her.

  The salad he toyed with held no interest for him, but the woman he was sitting across from did. More than a little. “Somebody with your brains should have known not to get mixed up with someone like Vincent Del Greco’s son.”

  Hindsight was wonderful. Too bad it didn’t work in reverse, she thought. Andreini was right, but three years ago, her life had been filled to bursting with activity. And she’d been flattered by Vincent’s attention.

  “Someone with my brains was too busy to know who he was, other than some nice guy who kept coming back, night after night, just to see me.” She smiled, remembering. Things had been nice then, almost perfect. That should have been her first warning. Life was never perfect. “He sat ringside center. The waiters loved him. He tipped well and didn’t throw his weight around. He was kind of sweet, really.”

  Rusty saw a smile he hadn’t seen before slip over Dakota’s lips. A soft smile, prompted by good memories. He found himself mesmerized. “So he lied to you about who he was.”

  Her smile faded around the edges. “You have a way of cutting to the chase, don’t you?” She sighed. “Yes, he lied to me.” It seemed ironic somehow. “The only person I learned how to trust and he lied.” By the time she’d found out who he was, she was in love and pregnant. The news, discovered accidentally, almost devastated her. She would have moved out that very day, if he hadn’t begged her not to. “But he told me that he was afraid I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him if I’d known who he was, or who his father was, actually. Vincent wasn’t about that kind of life. He wanted to get away, break all ties. That was what he told me when he finally broke down and confessed to me who he was. I was angry at first—I had a lot to be angry about. I was pregnant with the grandson of the head of a large crime organization. And I was crazy in love with Vincent.”

  Rusty found himself envying a dead man. “So what happened? Why didn’t he marry you?”

  Dakota straightened, taking umbrage at the question. She could tell what he was probably thinking, that Vincent just wanted a good time, nothing more. But it wasn’t true. They’d meant something to each other.

  “He wanted to. I was the one who held out.” The truth was that she’d been afraid to marry him. Afraid not just of his connections, but of the marriage failing. She didn’t like being confronted with failure. There’d been too much in her life already. “I was trying to make peace with the idea of what I was marrying into. It was Vincent who kept insisting I wouldn’t be marrying into anything, that I wasn’t getting his family when I said my vows, only him. And that he was serious about breaking all ties. He applied for a job at a private two-year college back east, teaching English, and they accepted him. We were going to get married in Vegas and then fly out to Connecticut to start a whole new life together.”

  It all sounded like some faraway dream now when she talked about it, she thought. A dream that had been someone else’s.

  He waited while she paused, knowing not to prod. She would tell him in her own good time and the night stretched out in front of them.

  This was hard, she thought. Talking about it was hard. Just as hard now as it had been then.

  “I had just finished paying for the wedding dress I’d picked out when I heard the news over the radio. The son of Vincent Del Greco was gunned down outside one of the restaurants his father owned. Del Capo. It’s known as a popular mob hangout. I don’t know if he was there against his will, or if he’d been lying to me all along.” Over the past two years, she’d asked herself that question countless times. There’d been no answer. “All I knew was that I was a widow before I was a wife. A legal wife,” she added.

  She’d been Vincent’s wife in every other sense of the word, supportive and trusting. And loving. But all that was in her past now.

  And she had to move forward.

  Looking back, she couldn’t believe how huge a fool she’d allowed herself to become because she’d fallen blindly in love.

  He knew it hurt her to remember, but he needed to have everything as clear as possible. “Did Vincent Senior know about the baby when his son was killed?”

  “Oh, he knew all right.” He’d found out that Vincent had given her his mother’s necklace, the same necklace she’d brought to Rusty, and had hit the ceiling. “When I came home from the shop, the news of Vincent’s murder still echoing in my brain, I found two of Del Greco’s goons waiting for me. They were there to ‘escort’ me to the family estate. I went. Not that I had any choice in the matter.” She had no illusions that free will was remotely involved. “They would have carried me off in a gunnysack, kicking and screaming if I’d tried to resist.”

  Rusty had a feeling that she would have put up one hell of a fight before she was taken, he thought. “Then what happened?”

  She remembered how afraid she’d been, sitting in the back seat of the stately black limousine, with one of the men beside her, not saying a single word.

  “Vincent Senior told me that he had a deal for me that he figured I wouldn’t refuse.” Her mouth curved at her own deliberate play on words. “He was really surprised when I did.”

  She’d aroused his curiosity. “What was the deal?”

  It wasn’t a deal, it was an ultimatum. “That I could stay on the family compound until after the baby was born. That I’d be well paid for my ‘trouble.’” She almost choked on the words. “And that after ‘it’ was over, he expected me to leave quietly, content with the money I’d made with so little effort.”

  It didn’t take a trained ear to hear the way she measured out her words or a trained mind to imagine what she thought of the “deal.” “Did you spit in his eye?”

  Dakota laughed, some of the tension leaving her. “Nearly. I wanted to. But I had a baby to think about so I just said thank you, but I wanted to think about it if it was all the same to him.”

  He was surprised that Del Greco had let her get away with that. “And then what?”

  “And then I ran.” Within three hours after she’d been dropped off on her doorstep, she’d had everything packed and was ready to make her escape. “I had a few friends and they took up a collection for me.” She’d made a vow not to touch any of the jewelry that Vincent had given her until it was absolutely necessary. “It got me as far as Laughlin. That was where Vinny was born.” The pain of childbirth had been nothing compared to the pain of possibly losing her baby. “In a very pretty little hospital where the nurses are all nuns. It kind of made me feel protected.” But the feeling had been short-lived.

  There was something almost wistful in her voice. “Why didn’t you stay?” At least until she’d gotten her strength back. He judged that she must have been on the run almost immediately.

  “Because I’d made the mistake of telling one of my friends where I was going.” It had been unavoidable and she didn’t blame Erica. Erica had had no choice but to give her up. Dakota would have loved to have just five minutes alone with the man who ha
d hurt her friend because of her. “She’d driven me to the bus station to buy the ticket. Vinny’s grandfather had his men ‘persuade’ Erica to tell them where I was. I found out she wound up in the hospital needing thirty-seven stitches.” Dakota’s guilt had almost been too much to bear when she’d heard. She’d vowed that as soon as she was able to spare a little money, she’d begin sending it to Erica on a regular basis. She owed her. Big-time. “He made sure she wouldn’t be headlining any more midnight shows on the strip,” she added angrily.

  Rather than allow herself to dwell on any aspect of the past, she shook off the memory and looked at Rusty.

  “So you see the kind of person you’re up against. A man willing to do whatever it takes to get his hands on Vinny and keep him.” She pressed her lips together to keep the tears back. “I know what he wants. He wants to train my son to take over once he isn’t around anymore.” Those had been his plans for Vincent. She looked at Rusty. “I can’t go to the police with this. They wouldn’t exactly be sympathetic about the missing grandson of a crime lord. And even if they did try to get him back, it’s not something they’d go about secretively. They’d have to have warrants and make sure to cover their tails every step of the way. That means there’d be different departments in on it. Departments coordinating with each other.” Andreini knew what that meant as well as she did, Dakota thought. “The more people involved, the greater the chance that someone will tip Del Greco off that the police were out looking for Vinny. There’re so many places that man could go in this country, so many places he could stash my baby. If I went to the police, I’d lose any chance of ever seeing my son again.”

  She looked down at her food. All she’d succeeded in doing was push it around on her plate. It looked inedible now.

  “I don’t need an army, Andreini, I need just one soldier. Preferably one who’s good at getting in and out of places without being noticed.” Although she had to admit that the description didn’t exactly fit Rusty. He was noticeable, if nothing else. There was something about him, about his bearing even beyond his height, that made you stop and look.