Gia slicked her tongue along desperately dry lips. She had the feeling he was more caught up with Santo throwing his proposal in his face than he was with her return. Which was her father in a nutshell. She pushed her shoulders back and met the grey fury of his gaze. “I needed some time to find my feet. And you knew why I left, Papà. You knew I was frightened after what happened to Franco. I didn’t feel safe. Leo was not safe. I explained all of it in my note.”
“Your note?” Her father exploded. “Your note, Giovanna? You think it was acceptable to leave a note for your family before you walked out of our lives and disappeared? You thought that a note would prevent your mother’s broken heart. Cristo.” He waved a hand at her. “Were you thinking of nothing but yourself?”
Two years of fury and heartbreak caught fire. She drew herself up to her full height and met him head-on. “I was thinking of anything but myself when I married a man I didn’t love. When I gave up the dreams I had for my life. My future. I did my duty. I have done it my whole life. And then, I watched as my husband was assassinated by some henchmen in front of his casino.” She shook her head. “What if it had been Leo? What if a stray bullet had taken him instead?”
Her father waved a hand at her. “That would never have happened. You were protected.”
“Like my husband was?” The fear she’d felt for herself, for her son, curled her stomach tight. “You were at war with the Bianchis. It was never going to end.”
“It did end.” Her father’s mouth flattened. “Don’t talk about things you can’t hope to understand, Gia.”
“At what cost?” She wrapped her arms around herself and hugged them tight. “At what cost, Papà? I would do the same thing a hundred times over if I had to. Leo will never grow up in that world. He will never take Franco’s place. I have seen what it has done to Tommaso. It will never happen.”
Her father considered her for an extended beat, his grey gaze calculating. “Where were you? Before you came back?”
Her spine stiffened. “You don’t need to know that.” She would never, ever put Delilah or her mother in the crosshairs of her father’s wrath.
“You could not have been with Santo,” he concluded. “His inability to remain faithful to a woman has been well documented. Which means you were with someone else.”
She glued her mouth shut. “And Leo?” he prompted. “Where is he? Clearly the Lombardis will be interested in his whereabouts given they are missing a grandson. It is a critical partnership for me, Gia, in case you have forgotten that particularly pertinent fact.”
She cringed, the contents of her stomach roiling as if they might actually make an appearance. The truth had to come out. She knew it. But getting the words out of her mouth seemed impossible.
“Leo is not Franco’s son,” she finally blurted out. “He is Santo’s.”
* * *
Santo sat at the table as the minutes clicked by and attempted to concentrate on what Gervasio was saying, but failed miserably. His attention was focused instead on the path his wife had taken through the busy restaurant to the courtyard. On what was happening outside. Gia had looked frozen at her father’s appearance. Stefano livid beneath that smooth veneer of his. He didn’t want him anywhere near his ultravulnerable wife.
Nor had the buzz in the restaurant subsided. The most wanted organized-crime figure in the world was in the building. He’d apparently elected to testify in front of congress next week, and Charles Fortier’s elegant establishment was a perfect foil for Stefano Castiglione’s gilded image. His image restoration project. It was sending shock waves through the room.
Gervasio said something that flew right over his head. He set down his wineglass. “My apologies,” he murmured. “I am distracted. Would you excuse me for a moment? I should go check on my wife.”
“Por supuesto.” The Spaniard nodded. “I would do the same.”
He threw his napkin on the table and stood. “Please,” he said, sweeping a hand toward the table as their main courses arrived, “Adelante, por favor. Enjoy.”
He followed the path Gia and her father had taken through the restaurant to the courtyard. Emerged into the warm, sultry night to find them standing under the portico talking in low voices. Gia’s voice, at least, was low. The bite in Stefano Castiglione’s tone sliced through his skin like a knife as he listened to the exchange. Listened to his wife tell her father the truth about Leo.
Maledizione. Why couldn’t she have waited for him to do it?
A slow burn slashed her father’s aristocratic cheekbones in the lamplight. “Clearly none of the morals you were taught were in play that night when you chose to disrespect not only your husband, but me. When you acted like nothing but a common slut.”
A haze of red flared through his head. Gia, however, looked undaunted, squaring her shoulders. “And what about you, Papà? You disrespect Mamma every time you appear with your mistress in public. When you humiliate her and treat her as if she is a second-class citizen.”
“You cannot compare the two,” her father dismissed. “What you did was unforgivable, Giovanna.”
“That’s enough.” Santo enunciated the words quietly as he moved to Gia’s side and slid an arm around her. She was shaking like a leaf.
Stefano shot him a lethal look. “I was having a private conversation with my daughter.”
“Which is over.” Santo met the other man’s wintry gaze. “Given you now know the truth, I will tell you how this is going to work.”
Stefano arched an eyebrow. “How what is going to work?”
“Your relationship with your daughter. Gia has chosen to walk away from her family. She is no longer a Castiglione. You need to respect her wishes.”
“Or what?”
“Or this becomes a public battle you want to avoid.”
Gia blanched. It was the one thing her father couldn’t abide. Negative publicity. It drew unwanted attention to his business practices. Shined a light on the family where it preferred to operate in the shadows. Drew attention to his leadership. Something he had more than enough of at the moment.
Stefano considered Santo with a calculating look. “You are stung because I declared her not good enough for you,” he murmured. “Now you want revenge.”
“Revenge has nothing to do with it,” Santo said evenly. “You put those shadows in her eyes. It ends now.”
A long moment passed, thick and pulsing with tension. It finally ended when Stefano lifted a broad, elegant shoulder. “Have her then,” he said, flicking a cold look at Gia. “She is no longer my daughter after what she’s done.”
He turned and strode inside, leaving a stark silence behind him. Santo surveyed his wife’s white, stricken face. She looked shaken, disassembled. And why wouldn’t she? Her father had just disowned her. Struck her from his life as easily as he did one of his high-priced business deals. He didn’t have to wonder how it felt. He knew how it felt, as his mother’s parting words echoed in his head even now.
It’s too much, Leone. Three boys and now this. I can’t do it. I didn’t sign up for this. As if they had been the dead weight, the complication she clearly didn’t need.
He absorbed the shock reverberating in Gia’s emerald eyes. Smoothed a thumb over her cheek. “Are you okay?”
“It isn’t anything I didn’t expect,” she said huskily. “I knew he would react like that. His honor dictated it. I threw that in his face.”
“That doesn’t negate how it must make you feel,” he said quietly. “Nothing gives him the right to do what he just did, Gia,” he said quietly. “Nothing.”
She blinked as if she was having trouble comprehending it all. Rubbed a palm against her temple. “You shouldn’t have taken him on like that. It wasn’t wise.”
“He needed to know that you and Leo are no longer a part of the Castiglione family,” he said grimly. “Now he does.”
She inhaled a deep breath. “We should go back inside. The Delgados will be wondering where we are.”
Could he ask her to sit through a meal with her father on the other side of the room after what had just happened? After he had taken his wife apart?
Gia read his hesitation. “I’m fine,” she insisted, lifting a trembling hand to smooth her hair. “I will not let him ruin this, Santo.”
She didn’t look fine. But what choice did he have? He could not walk out on this dinner with the Delgados.
He tightened his arm around her waist. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Something inside of him shifted at the look of fierce determination in her eyes. He threaded his fingers through hers and led her back into the restaurant. Felt a dozen sets of eyes on them as they walked back to the table. Stefano and his companion were seated at a table near the window. Gia took them in, then resolutely shifted her gaze away.
Gervasio, quiet and circumspect, surveyed them both as they returned. “Está todo bien?” Everything all right?
Santo nodded. “Mil disculpas.” A thousand apologies. “I hope you both enjoyed your meals.”
The Delgados ensured him they had. Santo ordered another bottle of wine as he attempted to repair an evening gone awry. But the sight of his wife literally melting into her seat beside him, refusing to show how much she hurt, tore a hole in his insides.
And then, there was also the subtle temperature change at the table. Barely perceptible, but it was there. Gervasio was cooler and more distant than before. Back to his elusive self.
The gauntlet they had to maneuver on the way out was the final exclamation mark on an evening that had descended into a disaster. Spilling onto the sidewalk near the valet stand where the restaurant security held them at bay was a contingent of press, cameras at the ready to snap a shot of Stefano and his companion leaving the restaurant. Completing the debacle of a night.
* * *
It wasn’t until they were home in the quiet, muted confines of the penthouse that Gia was able to breathe again. Numb, frozen with the protective coating she had formed around herself, she kicked off her shoes, walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows and stood looking out at the lights of the city.
Santo appeared by her side, a glass of amber-colored liquid in his hand. She shook it off when he handed it to her, sure she did not need to feel any more numb than she already did. He pressed it into her hands. “Drink it. You need it. You’re as white as a ghost.”
She wrapped her fingers around the tumbler and took a reluctant sip. Felt the liquor penetrate her bloodstream, the color slowly returning to her cheeks. But as the shock receded, the nightmare the evening had been illuminated itself in crystal-clear clarity. Her father showing up with his mistress. The scene he had caused. How she had dismantled Santo’s evening with Gervasio.
A burning sensation crawled from her stomach into her throat. She might have been out of it, but she could not have missed the way Gervasio had withdrawn after her father had shown up. The way the conversation at the table had never quite recovered. The taken-aback look on the Spanish retail scion’s face at the media frenzy outside.
The fist clenching her chest tightened. The newspapers would be plastered with the coverage of her father’s testimony. It was going to be a circus. Her mother would be completely unwound. And, she acknowledged, fingers of ice crawling up her spine, her father was going to have a target on his back, because the list of people he could incriminate, take down with him, was a virtual who’s who of the criminal underworld. Of Washington. Hollywood.
No one would be safe.
He might elect to plead the Fifth. But would anyone wait to hear him say it? She was afraid they would attempt to eliminate him first.
She turned to Santo, the grim lines etched into the sides of his eyes and mouth making it clear he had already considered those possibilities. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “about tonight. I’ve ruined everything. This was exactly what I was trying to avoid.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t your fault. It was unfortunate timing. I will smooth things over with Gervasio in the morning.”
She leaned against the window frame, jagged glass lining her throat. Blinked back the hot tears that stung her eyes. She would not cry over him. She had known from the day she’d walked away from her family that her father would never forgive her for what she’d done. It was an eventuality she had long accepted. So why did she feel as if she’d been gutted from end to end?
“I don’t understand,” she breathed, throwing a hand up into the air, “why I even care that he is disappointed in me. Why he still has this power over me when I know what he is. What he is capable of. When I came to terms with that a long time ago.”
“Because he is your father,” Santo said quietly. “Because you can’t separate the two. Because you want him to love you.”
Which was true. She’d always wanted her father’s love. Always craved it. Even when she’d known better. Even when she’d known she was never going to have it. Even when she knew he wasn’t worthy of it.
Santo brushed his knuckles across her cheek. “You are better off without him,” he said huskily. “He is a sociopath, Gia. Sometimes, you need to let go of the expectations. Stop hoping he will love you and start believing that you are better than that.”
The dark glitter of emotion in his eyes caught at her heart. She knew he was talking about his mother. That he learned that lesson the hard way. She also knew he was right. Knew that accepting the facts when it came to her father was a reality that was long past due. But coming to terms with that was another matter entirely.
A tear slid down her cheek. Pooled at the corner of her mouth. Santo closed the distance between them, removed the glass from her hands and gathered her into his arms. “He isn’t worth your tears. He never was. You are worth so much more than that.”
The tears fell harder, dampening her cheeks and soaking his shirt. He picked her up, sat down on the sofa and cradled her against his chest. Put his mouth to the hot, wet tears and kissed each one away. When she was done, he carried her to bed and held her until she slept, too emotionally depleted, too ragged and ripped apart inside to do anything more.
Unable to sleep, his head spinning from the events of the evening, Santo left a sleeping Gia, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to his office to work.
He should call Lazzero, who was three hours behind him on west coast time, and give him an update on dinner. But what, exactly, would he say? That Stefano Castiglione had walked into Charles tonight and blown the whole evening to bits? That instead of tying up the deal with Gervasio, he had walked away with the distinct impression the Spaniard was backing off all over the place? That he’d been more concerned about his wife than he’d been about nailing down the most important retailer in the world?
A knot tied itself down low. He had promised himself he wouldn’t get emotionally involved with his wife. But he was starting to realize that was an impossibility with Gia. That his instinct to protect her, to care for her, had always been his weak spot. His Achilles’ heel. Which was going to be his downfall if he didn’t watch it.
The phone call, he determined, could wait until the morning. He would call Gervasio first thing and smooth things over. Make sure he understood the ties between he and Stefano Castiglione were personal and not business.
But Gervasio was on a plane to Madrid the next morning when he tried to reach him, which meant that conversation would have to wait. Lazzero called at 8:00 a.m. while Santo stood with a cup of coffee in his hand, surveying the city as it came to life.
“Please tell me there is some way you were not sitting in Charles when Stefano Castiglione walked in last night.”
Santo flicked his gaze over the morning papers, which were strewn across his desk. A photo of Stefano Castiglione and his mistress exiting the restaurant w
as emblazoned across the front of them. “You are fast off the mark.”
“It’s all over the internet, Santo. It’s impossible to miss.”
“We were there,” Santo said carefully. “Stefano came over to introduce himself to Gervasio.” As well as to annihilate his wife. Perhaps not in that order.
Lazzero exhaled a deep breath. “How was Gervasio?”
Tense. Standoffish. “I think,” he began, “Gervasio is not a fan of Stefano’s. But,” he assured his brother, “the dinner was good. He loved the ideas we have for the launch. He is clearly hot on the athletes we have. There’s a great deal of synergy between the two brands.”
“So how did you leave it?” A suspicious note infiltrated his brother’s voice. “You closed this thing, right?”
Santo winced. “Not yet.”
“What do you mean, not yet?”
He gave up any attempts at delicacy. “The temperature was a bit off at the end of the night. Gervasio had his poker face on. I’m not sure what he was thinking.”
Lazzero uttered a filthy word. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out, Santo. He’s the most conservative CEO on the face of the goddamn planet—reputation is everything to him. Your wife is the daughter of the most notorious organized-crime figure in America. What do you think he’s thinking? He wants nothing to do with this.”
“He didn’t say that.” Santo’s gut coiled. “That is pure projection. He was cagey from the very beginning. I’m not sure I would have gotten a yes out of him last night either way. He needs time to think about it.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Santo knew what was coming and he headed it off at the pass. “Do not say it,” he murmured. “I will fix this, Laz. I will make it happen. But do not go there.”
His brother took a sip of his coffee, clearly restraining himself, before he moved on with a curt directive to keep him updated. After a brief status report on the Mexican negotiations, which had bled into the weekend, his brother went off to join the next round.
Married for His One-Night Heir Page 14