“Bindi, my daughters would never say that their father and I don’t love them. We don’t always exist on the same page, but my daughters are very much loved. If they weren’t they’d be harder, angrier—more like you.”
“I’m loved.” She wasn’t but if she didn’t lie, she’d cry. “Have a good night, Temperance.”
Bindi collected her stuff, unlocked the door and walked calmly from the restaurant. And in light of Martha Blue’s prenatal vitamins oops and Toya Messa’s face-to-palm divorce paperwork, she decided to rethink her handbags, because if she was going to ever carry her secrets with her, she was going to carry them in a purse that zipped.
*
Ten days after Toya’s daylong disappearance, she was gone again. This time to Iowa, with her baby, and Bindi had seen them off in the airport. Afterward, she’d grudgingly acquiesced to a face-to-face meeting with Drew Ross, who’d applied the pressure for an update. Until the day before, she’d had nothing to report to him about Alessandro Franco or Gian DiGorgio.
Standing at the counter of a downtown coffee shop, Bindi had told Drew that Al still hadn’t shown signs of resurfacing. She thought it was far past jacked up that the man who cared so deeply about bloodlines and lineage was missing out on his sons’ lives. He wouldn’t see Nate’s wedding day. What if his heir apparent, Santino, tied the knot?
She’d stemmed the thought, because as much as she felt a private shiver of thrill to imagine him in a tux, ready to make someone his, she couldn’t maturely cope with the reality that she wouldn’t be his bride in white.
Men didn’t love, honor or cherish her. She’d be setting herself up for a well of hurt if she stuck her scratched-up hopes on Santino Franco breaking the mold when he was suspicious enough to have her followed out to the Indian Ocean.
Pushed and cornered, Bindi had passed along what Santino had told her about his father’s expensive legal-god attorneys resigning as his counsel. It was all she had to give, and relinquishing even that seemed inexcusably wrong. Seeing Drew Ross absorb that information and give her a self-gratifying leer left her cold as she swept out of the coffee shop and into the cloudy afternoon.
She really wanted to cut, shape and create something. An unkempt hedge and a pair of shears would soothe her. Yet even if she did have access to shrubbery to tame and the topiary tools she’d put in a storage locker upon moving to her cozy, code for cramped, apartment, the approaching rain posed a threat. She needed something that’d stimulate and exhaust her.
She needed to make a call.
Holding off until she’d made it inside the quiet confines of her apartment, Bindi had given herself ample time to backpedal. So when she dialed a familiar number, she was couldn’t say she was uncertain.
“Where are you?” she asked Santino, setting her phone on speaker and putting it on the mantel to free her hands.
“Working out.”
Bindi paused midway, with her rain-touched shirt tugged halfway up her torso. So he was sweaty and his adrenaline was surging? She got rid of the shirt and licked her lips, but before she could inappropriately stroke her phone, she distracted her hands with tidying the coffee table. “How soon can you get showered and meet me for that dinner you impulsively suggested at Target?”
She pulled off her jeans, let them join the discarded shirt and waited.
“You booty-calling me, Paxton?”
“No. This is a dinner call.” The bra hit the floor. It was so a booty call. An anything-he-could-give-her call. “Am I going to eat alone, or will you join me?”
“Where are your apartment buddies?”
“Toya and her kiddo are on their way to Iowa.”
“Forty minutes. Let’s go to Try Me, that burger place on the Strip.”
That particular burger place was as upscale as they came in this city, and she’d have to break out the diamonds to blend in with the clientele. Funny thing about Try Me—you needed a thick skin or a dark sense of humor to appreciate its quirk, which was the serving staff’s duty to write insulting comments on each patron’s throwaway menu.
After meeting with Drew Ross’s intentional offensive ways, she could handle Try Me’s waitstaff. “Sounds like a d— I mean, sounds like dinner.”
“Oh. I was thinking a date.”
“A date.” She grinned stupidly at her phone. “Yeah, a date. But let’s make it an hour. I need to transform.”
“From beautiful to what?”
Her smile fell at the word beautiful, but she didn’t backtrack and undo the entire conversation. She just moved forward, because she was done going back. “See you in an hour.”
An hour later, a pink strapless dress was hugging her and her dark hair was stylishly piled on top of her head to showcase her diamond raindrop earrings. Santino Franco was escorting her in a very unmistakable “hell, yeah, I’m with her. Got a problem with it?” way into a glittering black building with black-painted artificial trees tracing the perimeter. The interior was a blend of lust and luxury, with rap music swelling, and it reminded her of a password party for the rich and political that she’d attended several years ago.
“People are going to think we’re a…well, a we,” Bindi whispered to him as he banded an arm around her waist and they followed their waitress to a shiny black table. “I’m still Bindi Paxton. You’re still Santino Franco. But keep your arm around me like this. I like it.”
“I think you get a weird thrill out of confusing me.”
“It’s not weird,” she said, smiling because she was weak to the temptation he and this place and her bubbling, excited, not-quite-broken heart presented.
As they sat opposite each other, the waitress eyed each of them, obviously recognizing them. “Complimentary tap beer, coming soon.”
“Complimentary beer, eh? She must really want one of us.” She winked.
Santino’s face turned serious. “Bindi, I’ve been wanting you since I saw you walk past me at that Valentine’s party on the island.”
He’d had her, but clearly he wanted more. So did she. They needed to feed off each other. Whatever was building between them wasn’t whittling away with each day they resisted touching and kissing and taking.
Oh, boy. This was getting out of control really fast.
“Is that really when? You can isolate the exact moment?” Not ready to go there, she attempted to steer the conversation back to light and playful.
Santino wasn’t buying it. “I can isolate the moment I was ready to accept that I wanted you. If you’re ready for more truth than that, tell me.”
Bindi picked up her menu in answer. A new, less arousal-triggering topic was in order—the conversation equivalent of a cold shower. “My mother called me last week. I haven’t called her back.”
The waitress brought two beers, took their orders and sultrily walked off.
“Why did she call?” Santino asked her once privacy revisited them.
“She didn’t say. If it was important, she would’ve sent certified mail or via an email.” Daphne Paxton preferred to convey the tough things in the most impersonal ways possible. “This place should consider offering bowls of candy on each table. Nothing very special, but a few chocolates would be a nice touch.”
Santino pushed aside his beer with a long, large-knuckled finger. “If a guy proposed to you offering a ring, and another proposed offering a two-pound box of chocolate candy, which would you say yes to?”
Bindi sat back against her chair. “I’d take the question seriously if you removed proposals from the scenario. It’s not going to happen.”
“So I should’ve asked which do you like better, rings or chocolate?”
“Rings don’t make me feel euphoric,” she answered honestly. “Chocolate does—has since I was about nine years old.”
“Nine.”
Santino didn’t sound as intrigued as she expected he would. He sounded as though she’d echoed something he’d already known.
Of course. If he’d had her followed, he must’ve come
across a little backstory. Aside from an unstoppable tic at her throat, she gave nothing away. “Nine years old. My parents said they’d teach me sweets moderation, but I think they were too busy being relieved that they’d weaned me off Valium. Do you suppose the burgers will be much longer?”
Santino covered her hands, but after a second she pulled away. To let him reassure or comfort her tonight would feel like surrendering control she wondered if she had to begin with. “Not many people can come out on the other side of hell, Bindi. Do you want to talk about this?”
“No, I’ll save that exciting conversation nugget for the next date.”
“I want that—the next date and the chance to talk about the Valium.”
“Santino, listen, it’s not a drawn-out struggle. I was a problem child. I had issues that my parents had difficulties coping with, and they gave me Valium when I was about seven years old. It was for sleepaway camp, but they figured it worked so effectively, why not let me continue to take the pills as needed. ‘As needed’ turned into a routine, and my mom told me to never, ever forget to take a dose.” Bindi pushed aside her menu as he had his beer. “One morning I couldn’t remember whether I’d take my dose or not and I didn’t want to see her upset, so I took what I needed and didn’t realize until I started to get ill that I’d taken too much. I’d forgotten.”
“Your parents shouldn’t have given Valium to a kid.”
“My mother told me she’s sorry.” Sorry that she’s my mother.
“Bindi.”
She gazed across the table at him. His fingers touched hers tenderly and brought her a little closer to true comfort, something her hard life had told her to stop believing existed for her. “Lots of men wouldn’t want to stick around after hearing that, Santino.”
“I said I’d protect you. That means staying with you through the messed-up shit, whether it’s in the past or waiting around the corner.”
Oh, yes. Bindi was nearly certain her ovaries had said that, instead of her always-on brain. Every particle of her wanted a say-so in what would happen after they left the restaurant.
When they ran through the drizzle of rain to her apartment building some time later, she decided she couldn’t predict what would unfold, but she knew exactly what she wanted out of her time with him.
“Santino,” she said when she shut the door to her apartment, secured all the locks and joined him near the sofa, “I want to know something. And I can’t know it by having you say yes or no.”
“Go,” he encouraged, spreading his arms, and she used that opportunity to rush him. Knocking him back a few steps, she aligned her mouth with his.
“I need you…” Bindi lost her words in their kisses, worked her fingers through the short braid at the nape of his neck. Massaging his scalp, moving her hands across his shoulders to the bottom of his shirt, she got worked up and impatient and breathed a frustrated sigh against his mouth. “Please take off the shirt. Nothing else.”
He lost the shirt, revealing the abstract tattoos that dressed him from shoulders to wrists. Bindi touched the cross on his right biceps, studied the word artistically written inside the intricate pattern. Gloria. He’d had his mother’s name tattooed on his arm.
As Bindi was perilously close to dissolving into tears at the sweetness and sadness of his way of honoring his mother’s memory, she directed her attention to his splendid body. This was beauty—a male body battered through a violent sport but reconditioned and made stronger.
Pointing to the pole, now naked of holiday lights, thanks to her roommate’s insistence that it was ridic to leave them up past New Year’s and her duty to make it right, Bindi said, “Stand in front of that. Line up your spine to it if it’ll help.”
“Why?”
“Because I need you to lock your hands behind your back—” she guided him, taking his wrist in order to bring one solid arm back and use the other hand to wrap around the wrist she held “—and control yourself. That’s what I need to know tonight, that you can control your urges and sacrifice for me. Can you give me control when I need it?”
“I can do that for you, Bindi,” he said in a quiet promise.
“I have to see it,” she said. “So I need you to not touch me until I say it’s okay.”
Bindi moved the coffee table until it was directly in front of him, yet a few safe feet away. She got rid of her earrings as she stepped out of her shoes. “What do you want from me, Santino?”
“Loyalty,” he said automatically. “I want to know you think about me.”
“I do,” she said, and the honesty hurt. She took down her hair, shook it free and turned away from him as she unzipped her dress. It dropped, and she stepped out of it and her panties, then sat on the coffee table. “I have thought about you.”
“When?”
“Before you say you knew you wanted me,” she said, boldly watching his body tense as he registered her erotic confessions. “I thought about you when it was so wrong to do it. I thought things I had no right to think. I dreamed it all, because I wanted to be…faithful.”
“To him?”
Him. Alessandro. Neither could say the name, and that made them both cowards. “You not liking me then made dealing with the dreams easier. I could shut them down.” She leaned back, spread her legs.
“Wider.”
She could give him that, but first— “When did you first want me? I don’t mean when you first accepted it.”
“When he brought you into the house and you were everywhere. Everywhere.”
Could they leave Alessandro in the past and take a hesitant step forward? “What did you want, Santino?”
“To have you naked, just like that. To be man enough for you.”
Bindi opened her legs farther until she heard him groan. She touched herself, cupping her breasts, sucking two fingers into her mouth and gliding them into her already wet center. Watching him, she pleasured herself until she broke in front of him. Then sighing, shuddering, she went to him.
“I want you,” he said over and over as she unfastened his pants and stroked him. “But, Bindi…”
She squeezed and coaxed, but the hardness she’d need to ride him was still dormant. There was too much interference in his head, and it almost broke her heart that she couldn’t be the one to help him with that right now. “It’s okay,” she told him, easing her hands up his chest and kissing his mouth. “It’s all right. This won’t be what ends us.”
Bindi gave him permission to drop his arms, and the first thing he did was bring her down to the sofa to hold her. And later, even though he was the one to console her, he fell asleep in her arms.
He wasn’t the first in the past few weeks to be drawn to her for peace. First a baby drifted asleep in the crook of her arm. Then her friend had concluded her cry-fest by slumping against Bindi’s shoulder. Now Santino Franco, a big, tough brute of a man, had found her safe to literally sleep with.
That made her either boring or comforting. With a little smile, she closed her eyes. She’d be happy with either one.
*
A man could sense when he was no longer welcome on the doorstep of a friend. It came in glimpses or like the puff of a changing wind. At times intuition attacked with a fist. Alessandro wasn’t about to publicly recognize Tonio as a friend. Their fathers’ falling-out had dictated that. Now in their sixties, both men had sons who were old enough to be fathers themselves. Tonio’s son had died mixed up in a drug cartel in Colombia, and now he relied on his daughter to carry on his name and fortune and the consequences of his mistakes. Alessandro’s sons would survive the adversity of having him as their father. Because they were Gloria’s sons, too.
Gloria’s blood ran through their veins, but her spirit stayed with him. It gave him the will to face another long day of hiding in Tonio’s fishing-village market. It also bore down on him to the point that he sometimes had to lie down with his eyes open, staring at the cracked and sagging water-damaged ceiling of his room.
Today she
was disappointed in him. He’d heard her spirit whisper as anyone would hear the determined buzz of a fly. Tonio wanted him gone, Gloria warned. He’d stayed so long that he’d become a liability.
On guard, Alessandro had come downstairs to the kitchenette at dawn to roll out dough, as Tonio had requested yesterday. His chore list came the day before they were expected to be complete. Each day of perfection—and staying out of the way of business—earned him another day in this crumbling safe haven. A card dispute with Tonio and some others, men Alessandro didn’t know and should never have met, had almost found him on the other side of the door and fending for himself without a plan. The wedding band he’d now never see again had bought him dubious forgiveness. Bastardos.
Rolling the dough with the pin and shaping it with his flour-dusted hands, he kept his head down and his focus half on his Gloria, who looked after him. He couldn’t see her dark skin and ready smile, but he could remember how cold her hand was a few years ago when over a hundred people had come to kiss his grandfather’s ring, which he’d then put on her finger so that she could hold on to part of his treasure until they met again.
His sons had cried soundless tears for their mother. He’d howled and prayed, and at the lowest point he’d thrown his rosary away but found it again when he realized his money could do nothing.
Now he was alone. Grunting, moving a circle of dough to a tray, he went back to his task. That was the damn thing. There came a point, toward the end, when you found yourself utterly alone.
The aloneness made him worry about what he’d do next. Gian DiGorgio hadn’t sent word in days, but the man was his friend so he need not worry.
But he did worry, every time Tonio cut his eyes at him or someone who knew trampled through the kitchen and muttered in Italian about strangers and treachery.
The kitchen was hot. He lifted an arm to rub across the sweat sticking to his forehead. How would he get out of this place?
Mine Tonight Page 14