Desperate Measures

by Linda Cajio

  “Mostly to Ocean City.”

  It figured, he thought. Ocean City was the premier shore point on the Jersey coast.

  Suddenly she chuckled. “You said ‘down the shore.’ That’s a local term. Everywhere else people say, ‘We’re going to the beach or to the shore,’ but not ‘down the shore.’ ”

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “I studied modern language at college.” She shook her head and laughed. “There’s a real call for that with the job recruiters. I also have an appreciation for things Philadelphian.”

  He nodded, while thinking that her appreciation certainly hadn’t included Philadelphian men. Nope, she had had to marry a prince from northern Italy, when there were plenty of Italians right here at home. Philadelphian Italians.

  “I asked around about you,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “It all depends on what was said,” he answered, giving her a smile.

  She smiled back. “That Carlini Foods was smart to make you CEO.”

  “Too bad they can’t see me now,” he quipped.

  She laughed. “Does anyone know about your penchant for playing I Spy?”

  “No, I’m happy to say. So who do you want to be? Alexander Scott or Kelly Robinson?”

  “Scotty.”

  “Very smart. He had all the great lines, and he went on to be Bill Cosby. That leaves me as Kelly.” He paused for a minute. “I wouldn’t have thought you knew about that show.”

  “Even the Kitteridges have been known to watch TV upon occasion,” she said dryly. “Anyway, it’s still an extremely popular show in Europe. And very American. I was desperate for things American.”

  “Each country has a different mind-set,” Joe said, thinking of his own experiences traveling in Europe. When she didn’t say anything more, he decided to prod her. “Was it that tough being a princess?”

  She shrugged. “I was supposed to be the next Grace Kelly. You know, the little Philadelphia girl who married the prince of her dreams. Well, after I met Florian, my … husband, I discovered I literally couldn’t breathe without making all the tabloids. And Florian had the idea that he was the playboy prince of Lombardy. The problem was, he forgot to tell me that before the wedding. He also forgot to tell me that he needed my money for his crumbling estates in northern Italy. He was too busy skiing to run them properly.”

  “One of those, eh?” Although he felt bad for her, Joe had to admit to himself a certain satisfaction knowing that the prince was a bastard underneath.

  She nodded. “One of those. And the family mansion outside Parma was falling down faster than it could be fixed. Truthfully, I’m to blame, too, since I didn’t want to notice. Not really. Anyway, he liked to flaunt conventions, to put it mildly, and his countrymen loved him for it. I wound up taking over a lot of his responsibilities. Of course, Florian’s mother and aunts couldn’t handle all the duties. I was kind of like the booby prize. And then …”

  Her voice trailed away. Joe glanced at her. Her jaw was set, so he finished the sentence for her, to get it out in the open. “And then your son died.”

  “Drowned,” she said, with a poignant catch in her voice. She stared down at her hands. “Paulo fell into the canal when only I was with him. He was pulled under some docked boats by the strong current. He couldn’t surface, and I dived … I couldn’t find him.” She paused for a long moment. “He was four.”

  “I admire you,” he said quietly, knowing her husband had blamed her in every newspaper he could for the accident. He reached over to cover the too-tightly clenched hands in her lap with his own. She started, gazing at him suddenly with wide eyes, and he added, “Despite the tremendous unfairness, you never once gave a show for the public.”

  He had taken her hands only to give her support, yet suddenly and uncontrollably the support changed to something more primitive at the contact of skin to skin. He felt the blood curling thickly through him, and he could feel the same in her. His breath was rasping in his throat. Where her fingers had been cold at first, they now were warm—almost hot. And her thighs brushed restlessly, enticingly, against his hand.

  She turned, unclasping her hands in such a way that his slid naturally off her lap. He took the wheel again, without comment. Her breathing was audible, but her attempt at a nonchalant shrug wasn’t far off the mark as she picked up the conversation again. “Now all I want is a little peace and quiet. And privacy.”

  “For roller skating.”

  She made a face at him, and he smiled. But he had heard a fierce determination in her voice when she had spoken of peace and privacy. It bothered him, as if she were shutting out the world quietly but surely. She was beautiful, he thought, poised and serene. And very vulnerable; she always would be. And she had a dry sense of humor. He hadn’t expected that. He couldn’t allow someone like her to lock herself away.

  “Now that I’ve told my dismal tale of woe that everybody already knows,” she said, “what about yours?”

  He shrugged. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Joe, I don’t even know where you live or whether you’re married.”

  “What!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t get that in your report?”

  “Nope, except that you seem married to Carlini Foods.”

  “Sometimes I think that’s too true.” He glanced at her. She was looking at him expectantly. “Okay. We live in Wynnewood—”

  “You really are married!”

  He grinned. “Scared ya, didn’t I? Actually, I have apartments at the family home. Now that my dad is retired, my parents spend about ten months out of the year traveling. It was convenient to be close to my father when I was learning the business. Then I never seemed to find the time to move, and now I’m there by myself for most of the year.”

  Ellen shrugged. “Where I come from, people don’t buy their estates, they inherit them. So you’re not married.”

  “Not to a woman, anyway,” he said, tacitly acknowledging her comment about his job. “Was once.”

  “Divorce?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said sincerely.

  He cleared his throat. “To tell you the truth, I always feel a little guilty when someone says that. I married young, at twenty, against everybody’s advice. Gina was helpless and clinging … innocent, I guess. At first I was flattered that she needed me so much, and then I felt smothered by it. She died in a car accident nearly a year later. Being older and wiser now, I realize that I got married more out of a need for rebellion than for love. I—I was glad I didn’t have to hurt her. Hell of a thing to say, isn’t it?”

  Ellen frowned. “No … not really. You’ve just recognized that the marriage wouldn’t have worked out. You shouldn’t feel guilty about that.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said. Still, he never had been able to shake a vague feeling of guilt. Nor had he ever told anyone about it. He’d never had the urge to, before now. Probably not a wise urge, he thought. He’d been having quite a few unwise urges around Ellen. It was a relief to know that she understood.

  He couldn’t imagine her clinging and dependent. She stood alone. A little too alone to suit him.

  They passed a huge, glittering billboard that advertised the Palace Casino. The shaft of the sign’s arrow bore the legend: 10 miles.

  “Not too much longer till your first assignment, Scotty,” Joe said, glancing over at her.

  “As long as it’s my last,” she replied in the sweetest of voices.

  He studied the slender line of her throat, her full breasts, and the faint V of her thighs under her skirt. He shifted his gaze back to the road and smiled to himself.

  It wouldn’t be the last time, if he had something to say about it.

  Ellen was staring at his mouth, feeling again the firmness of his lips against hers, their tongues dueling in a kiss of fire.…

  “See him?” Joe asked.

  Startled from her reverie, she dutifully dragged her gaze away
from his mouth and shook her head. She edged away from him and looked down into the “pit” from their spot at the lobby railing. “No. Still no sign of your cousin.”

  It was futile, she thought. The casino was enormous, with more twists and dead ends than an eighteenth-century garden maze. People milled about continually as the din of voices, the chink of coins, and the bing of slot machines filled the air. She and Joe had been there for six hours and still hadn’t spotted Mario. The man could have met two hundred people by this time, she figured, and they wouldn’t know it.

  Joe muttered a curse of frustration.

  “Sorry,” he apologized.

  She smiled. “Actually, I was thinking the same thing.” Still, the bustle and excitement here was very different from European casinos, and she privately reveled in it. “It’s ten o’clock, Joe. We’ve wandered around and placed ourselves in strategic locations in order to watch the rooms. But there are mobs of people here tonight, and unfortunately my eyes keep wandering to the glitzy chandeliers, gold wallpaper, and floor-length mirrors. This place is more opulent than Versailles. And you and I have lost each other twice so far, so it’s not surprising that we can’t find Mario. Any suggestions?”

  “Other than paging him,” Joe said in disgust, “I’m out of ideas.”

  Ellen looked around the casino again. She wished her commitment to Joe was over. She was finding it all too easy to be around him, and he was much too attractive to suit her. She had decided long ago that if she was ever going to be interested in a man again, he would have to be short and pale. Not tall, not bronzed, and definitely not good-looking. Joe was all three and then some. He could turn her to jelly with the slightest touch. The more she was in his company, the more she was attracted to him. Twice she had been horrified to find herself gazing at his mouth, wondering what it would be like to kiss him again. And she was already telling him things she had never told anybody before. He was dangerous, very dangerous to her barely regained sanity. She didn’t need this now. All she wanted to do was go home. Even a lecture from her grandmother was better than this.

  He leaned forward, his arm brushing hers as he peered at the crowd. Her blood leaped in her veins. She forced herself not to show it and turned her mind back to the problem at hand.

  “I wish we could have looked in the private gambling rooms,” she said, her voice only a little shaky. “But we can’t without him spotting us instantly.”

  Joe shrugged. “I was just thinking that any of the regular hotel rooms upstairs could be used for private games. We could hardly watch them.”

  Ellen straightened as his earlier words came back to her. “Why don’t we page him?”

  “Ell, don’t be facetious—”

  “I’m serious. If he answers, then we know he’s here for sure, and if he doesn’t, then either he didn’t come, or else he’s somewhere where he can’t hear it, like a private room, and we can forget it and go home.” She was panting by the time she finished her rush of words. “Anyway, what have we got to lose?”

  “I must be crazy,” he muttered, gazing around the crowded casino.

  “We already know that.” She took his arm and steered him away from the railing. Why was it, she wondered, that when she was prepared for physical contact, she could handle it? She decided, for the moment, to concentrate on her idea. If it didn’t work, she was afraid they’d be stuck here for the night, and that didn’t bear thinking about. “Come on. There’s a bank of telephones at the far wall. They’re the only ones I’ve seen so far, so if he’s anywhere in the casino, he’s sure to come here.”

  “You like this,” Joe said.

  She grinned. “It beats playing the slots until we’re both out of quarters.”

  “We are out of quarters.”

  “See?”

  When they reached the house telephones, Ellen immediately went to one near the end, away from several people who were talking into others. Clearly the phones were popular tonight.

  “I’ll make the call,” she said, while scanning the instructions for use that were pasted on the booth’s wall. “You find a place where you can watch the phones as discreetly as possible. Oh! I know he’s not a Carlini, but I forget what he is.”

  “Penza.” Joe took her arm and turned her to face him. “You’re having fun,” he said, his gaze steady on hers.

  “Might as well,” she joked lamely, an odd feeling sizzling along her nerve endings at his closeness. “We’re not making any progress in the spy business.”

  “I didn’t expect you to be like this, you know.”

  “How did you expect me to be?” she asked. His cologne was subtle and very masculine, not at all overpowering, and it sent her senses spinning.

  “I don’t know,” he murmured. “But not like this.”

  He lowered his head and touched her mouth briefly with his. It was enough to feel the firm heat of his lips and the way they fit perfectly to hers. The sensations intensified so fast that it scared and enticed her at the same time.

  He lifted his head and stared at her for a long moment. Then he smiled. “Keep kissing me like that, and we’ll both be in trouble. Have fun. I’ll go play Agent Thirteen.”

  Who, Ellen wondered dimly as she watched him go, was Agent Thirteen?

  At last, she turned back to the phone. Following the directions, she asked the operator for the page and waited for results. She had her back toward the other phones in case Mario should recognize her from the rink. But she desperately wanted to turn around …

  “Mario Penza here.”

  She nearly dropped the phone in her astonishment. Son-of-a-gun, she thought, it worked.

  “Ah … yes … Mr. Penza,” she said, talking through her nose to disguise her voice. “This is the hotel manager’s office, and we’re having a small problem with room reservations. Have you taken a room here tonight, sir?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, thank you for your help. Please enjoy the casino tonight, Mr. Penza.”

  She pushed the cutoff button down while still holding the receiver to her ear. Grinning, she sighed with relief and decided that Joe was right. She was having fun.

  He materialized in front of her, whispering, “Hang it up, Ell, and come on!”

  She shoved the receiver back onto its hook, even as Joe took hold of her elbow. She almost had to run to keep up with his long stride.

  “I can’t believe it worked,” he said.

  “People will always answer a page,” she said breathlessly, as they weaved through the crowds of gamblers. Excitement and anxiety waged war inside her. And something more, for she was all too aware of Joe’s touch on her elbow. She went on. “It’s curiosity combined with the concern that it might actually be important. Will you slow down! We’re practically on top of him.”

  “I literally can’t afford to lose him.”

  She was tempted to remind him that Mario might lead them on a wild-goose chase if he noticed them, but she didn’t. She supposed she ought to keep her comments to herself. After all, this was Joe’s problem and her little bit to help him was almost over. One point of the finger was all that was left to be done. Then she’d be back to home and bed—and peace and quiet.

  It sounded dull.

  Ellen set her jaw. She wanted privacy, and if it meant being a little dull, then she could certainly live with that. And she would make sure Joe understood that too. When she had a moment to tell him.

  They rounded the end of a long line of slot machines just in time to see Mario walk into the lounge. He held his head up and his shoulders square. Although Joe’s cousin wasn’t very tall, it would be hard to miss the curly, nearly black, hair cut precisely to the point where it just grazed his shirt collar.

  “Do you suppose he’s been in here all the time?” Joe asked in a low voice.

  “We must have checked here every fifteen minutes!” Ellen said in disbelief. “We couldn’t have missed him.”

  “True.” Joe stopped on the threshold and stare
d into the dimly lit room. “I don’t see him. Do you?”

  She peered inside. Except for the occupants of the first few tables, she could see only shadows and silhouettes. “No. The light’s bad.”

  “We’ll have to go in.”

  “But—”

  That was as far as her protest got. He tightened his grip on her elbow and pulled her into the lounge. When they were finally perched on stools at the bar, she was breathless as much from his touch as from his speed. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the low lighting. Fortunately, the lounge was between floor shows, so she wasn’t distracted by a bright stage. She glanced around again.

  “There,” she said quietly, nodding toward a back booth. Sitting directly under the booth’s yellow light was Mario. He was talking intently to someone else in the booth.

  Joe turned casually, leaning his elbow on the bar. “I see him.”

  The man Mario was talking with leaned forward into the light.…

  “I don’t think it’s the same man,” Ellen said, peering intently. “His profile is too … defined. Unfortunately. It’s not the same person from the rink, Joe.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?” She turned to look at him and was even more surprised to see his features hard with anger. “You know him?”

  He nodded. “All too well. It’s my uncle Thomas.”

  Ellen glanced back at the two men. “Not his father, I take it.”

  Joe smiled grimly at her. “You take it right. Uncle Thomas is the last person I’d expect Mario to be with. I doubt Mario has bothered to say more than hello to Thomas in years. But here they both are, and cozy too. I don’t understand this. I thought he was selling the recipe at the rink.”

  “But what does your uncle have to do with any of that?” Ellen asked.

  “Too much. Remember I told you Mario has, by right of his position, access to a quarter of the recipe?”

  She nodded.

  “Uncle Thomas has one quarter of the recipe. If what’s going on is what I think is going on. Mario is about to have access to two quarters of the recipe. Another cousin and my sister hold the other two. I wonder now if the rink meeting was to arrange things with a buyer before he stole the recipe. Maybe he doesn’t actually have it yet. Dammit! Don’t tell me I have to watch all of them!”