by Danielle Monsch, Cate Rowan, Jennifer Lewis, Jeannie Lin, Nadia Lee, Dee Carney
“Alone at last.” In an instant, his lips were on hers. The heat of their kiss sucked the breath from her body. Sandy wound her arms around Marco, giving herself over to the sweet sensation of coming together with him.
They were both breathless, eyes shining, when they finally managed to pull apart. Sandy glanced around the room and laughed when she saw it looked like it still housed a teenage boy.
“Your parents never redid your room.”
“Nope. Embarrassing isn’t it? I should come up here with a garbage bag some time.” Sandy took in the sports trophies, the model cars, the cheesy posters. Paraphernalia of an ordinary adolescence.
So unlike her own.
“I’m surprised no one’s cleaned it out by now. It must be years since you left.” She looked up at Marco, and her heart stuttered when she saw his face suddenly taut with emotion.
“I suppose you’re wondering about my mom.” His voice was gruff.
“Not really.” Perhaps she was dead and she’d just triggered a slew of sad memories. She was the last person on earth to ask where someone’s mom was. She couldn’t even find her own.
“My parents divorced when I was eight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She couldn’t deal with my dad’s job. The hours, the stress, I guess it took its toll. She remarried.”
“Do you ever see her?”
“Not much. She has kids with her second husband.” Marco turned away from her and ripped down the poster of a girl in a wet T-shirt. “Dad raised us. He’s my hero.”
A knock on the door startled Sandy. “Yo, Marco, dinner.”
“We’ll be down in a minute, Dan. Don’t eat all the sausages before I get there.” He turned to Sandy. “At least he knows better than to just burst in. The kid is learning.”
“It’s funny you still think of him as a kid. I bet he’s older than me.”
“He’s twenty-five,” Marco’s eyes widened. “How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
Her body sizzled as his eyes roamed over her from head-to-toe. But she couldn’t help noticing his admiring gaze was shot though with alarm.
“I never thought about it. Geez, I guess I assumed you were in your late twenties when I first met you. But without the makeup—you look a bit younger.”
“I’m twenty-four. Nearly six years younger than you.”
“So? That’s not so much. C’mon, let’s go downstairs.”
Marco held her hand as he led her back into the fray of guests, who were seating themselves along a row of card tables that had been pushed together and covered with red paper tablecloths. Seated, the crowd didn’t look so large, maybe twelve or fourteen people.
“Sandy!” She jumped at the sound of Marco’s father booming out her name. “Here, next to me.” He patted the seat to his right. Sandy glanced doubtfully at Marco, who just winked at her and prodded her in that direction.
She squeezed out an anxious smile as she sat down. Vic Danieli offered to pour her some water and she nodded.
“Thanks.”
“So you’re from Jersey City?”
“Yes.” Now she was. What else did he know?
“I grew up there. It’s changed a lot, but it’s still a great town. You always lived there?”
“Oh, more or less.”
“What do your folks do?”
Think on your feet, Sandy! “They’ve both passed on.” Of course her mom had passed on into the arms of another man, probably quite a few of them in fact. She looked down at her plate and prayed he’d drop the topic.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Roast beef?”
She helped herself to the aromatic meat and assisted in passing dishes up and down the table. She found herself totally unable to initiate a conversation with Marco’s dad about the police force, and she didn’t know anything else about him.
She forked a bite of macaroni into her mouth, then realized no one else had started eating. Great, Sandy, why don’t you just show them all you were raised by wolves? She put her fork down and hoped no one would notice her blazing face. Marco caught her eye and smiled warmly at her. Perhaps he was enjoying the sight of her in the bosom of his family.
He was so confident, managed his complicated life with such ease, nothing seemed to worry him. It didn’t occur to him that he might have brought a wolf into a pen of lambs.
There’s nothing wrong with you, Sandy! You belong here as much as anyone.
Yeah, right.
Several people toasted Vic Danieli’s advanced age and robust health before he interrupted to protest that his food was getting cold.
Everyone ate with gusto for a few moments, including Sandy, until Vic leaned toward her with a conspiratorial grin. “Sandy Riley. The name Riley takes me back.”
Sandy’s roast beef congealed to a solid lump in her throat.
A balding dark-skinned man from the far end of the table jumped in. “Wasn’t he a prizefighter? Welterweight?” Sandy held her breath, hoping that was the one he was talking about. She didn’t have any boxer relatives that she knew of.
“Dunno, never followed the fights. The one I’m thinking of…” The older Danieli smiled and shook his head. “Oh, that man led me on a merry dance over the years.” He turned to Sandy. “It was back when I used to work in Atlantic City.”
Her heart sank and her eyelids itched to close and shut out the scene, but she struggled to keep a poker face. Atlantic City. Home, sweet home.
“You wouldn’t know him, but Ralph Riley was his name.”
Sandy flinched. Her heart started to pound out a retreat. Every nerve in her body sang with the instinct to leap up and flee, but she held her ground. She took a sip of her water to avoid looking into his eyes.
“He had his finger in every small-time pie on the shore. He was never involved in the big stuff, the serious money, but if two thousand Viennese linen tablecloths went missing from a dock in Elizabeth and turned up in a banqueting hall in Trenton, chances are he was behind it.”
Laughter boomed out, banging against Sandy’s eardrums. She cringed, remembering the Viennese tablecloth debacle. Her dad probably only made a few hundred dollars on the deal, and the incident made him the laughingstock of North Jersey for months. But the police never managed to pin it on him, even though everyone knew he’d done it. Ralph Riley was slippery as an Atlantic City eel and proud of it.
“But I’m proud to say I finally nailed him. He was running a phone scam, selling phony insurance. Raking in the dough for the first time in his life. I was going crazy because I couldn’t figure out who was behind it—though naturally I had my suspicions—”
He paused to take a sip from his glass of red wine. He looked around the table, obviously enjoying the rapt attention of his audience. “It was a woman that handed him to me.”
Sandy looked down at her plate. She remembered only too well. Her dad had insisted that people trusted a woman’s voice far more than a man’s, were less likely to be suspicious. He’d wanted Sandy to make the calls, had begged and pleaded with her, but she’d refused.
So he’d found a woman, Jessica Spavers, and trained her. She’d been a star, much to Sandy’s disgust. On top of that her, father had fallen madly in love her. His adoration of her had made the sting of her betrayal and its consequences that much more fatal.
“When this woman was brought in for petty larceny and she revealed she was the one making the phone calls, I couldn’t believe my luck. I hammered away at her for hours until she agreed to testify against him. She wanted a sentence reduction, I wanted Ralph Riley—the Hummingbird they used to call him ’cuz he moved so fast you couldn’t catch him—so we struck a deal and boom, Ralph’s back in the slammer—and with a ten-year sentence.”
“Go Vic!” Glasses were raised in a toast that caused a wave of nausea to surge inside Sandy. She raised her water glass to her lips and put it back down as her gut curdled with disgust. She didn’t care what they thought. She wasn’t going to toast h
er own father’s imprisonment.
Vic Danieli’s chuckle made her gut twist. “The old bastard croaked behind bars. He’s right where he should be now, down in the sulfur pits of hell with all the other small-time hustlers who gave me this ulcer.” He patted his stomach.
Sandy looked at Marco, who was eating, apparently paying little attention to the conversation. It was probably just more of his dad’s shoptalk to him. His face brightened when she caught his eye, but a dark hollow appeared above his eyebrow as he took in whatever expression she had on her face. She turned to Vic Danieli.
“Ralph Riley was my father.” She forced out the words in a harsh whisper. “He made mistakes, he made a hell of a lot of mistakes, some of them really bad ones. But he was my father and I loved him and I’m not going to sit here and listen to you dance on his grave.”
Vic Danieli’s mouth dropped open. “But he was—you know—white.”
“Yes, he was. And my mother was black. I’m biracial.” Could this get any worse? She looked up at Marco, who was staring at her in astonishment. “I’m sorry to spoil your party. I think I’d better leave now.”
She pushed back her chair, careful not to knock it over, and nodded an apology to the rest of the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marco rise to his feet.
“Wait, Sandy—”
“I’ve got to go,” she forced out. Tears gagged her as she snatched up her bag and hurried to the front door. She wrenched it open and ran out into the street. She had no idea where in Newark she was; she just needed to get as far away as possible. She ducked into a side yard. She didn’t know if Marco would follow her—she didn’t want to know—but she couldn’t face him right now.
She ran past two tiny backyards and out onto the street behind. The street sloped downhill to a busy-looking intersection, and she walked briskly toward it. She could get a bus home or something. It didn’t matter how long it took, no one was waiting for her.
She fought back the tears that burned behind her eyes. Damn. She’d been so close to being an ordinary person for a short while there. Invited to dinner with her boyfriend’s family. Even the innocent necking in his bedroom was a taste of the free-spirited teen years she’d missed out on. And she remembered Marco’s cheerful expression as he had introduced her to his father and brothers.
He’d be wearing a different expression now, all right.
How embarrassing for him. To be unwittingly dating the daughter of Ralph Riley, the mastermind of the Viennese tablecloth caper and the genius behind the All-American Life and Guarantee scam. She’d made him look like a fool in front of his whole family.
At least he couldn’t say she hadn’t warned him.
Salt tears pricked her throat, made her gulp as she struggled to keep them from spilling. She strode along the sidewalk with her head down, eyes hidden from the gaze of passersby. She’d known that no good could come of Marco getting mixed up with her. She was cursed to spend the rest of her life on the outside looking in. And she’d better not forget that again.
It took over an hour to find her way home by bus and train. An unseasonal cold front descended, chilling the air as much as her mood. It was late and the streets were deserted as she reached her block, shivering in her flimsy summer clothes.
She’d half expected to see Marco sitting on her stoop as she approached, but he wasn’t there. Then again, she wasn’t surprised by that either. Maybe he’d finally come to his senses. She wasn’t feeling too much of anything. She was numbed by the cold, by daring to dream and being so rudely awakened.
No Marco on the stairs inside either.
Had she really expected him to be sitting there, waiting for her? What a high opinion she had of herself these days. She must have some ego to think that one of the most important men in the telecommunications industry had nothing better to do than follow her around all day and night.
She slid her key in the lock and pushed the door open into the black loneliness of her apartment.
“You ran out on me again.” The graveled voice emanating from the murky darkness almost knocked her off her feet. A whimper died in her throat.
Marco.
Chapter Nine
‡
“Where are you?” She flicked on the light and saw him sitting on the sofa, elbows on his knees, hunched over, squinting at her in the sudden brightness of the overhead light. “How…how did you get in here?”
“Your landlady took pity on me.”
His hair was ruffled as if he’d been running his fingers through it. He dragged his hand down over his face. “Why’d you take off like that? Why do you always have to run away?”
“You’d have wanted me to stay?” There was no disguising her surprise.
He looked hard at her, his voice quiet. “Would it have killed you?”
Sandy was silent. She looked down at the floor. She hadn’t felt she had any choice but to take off when she did. Had she demonstrated yet another fatal moral failing? The inability to stand her ground and take her punishment? She’d had enough of being punished for the sins of others. She’d just as soon run if she got the chance.
But right now she had no energy left to run.
“I’m sorry I humiliated you in front of your family.”
“You didn’t humiliate me. My dad felt like a royal ass, but he deserved to.”
“I’m sorry I spoiled his party.” She looked up at him, blinking in the brightness. Her heart crumpled a little more as she pondered what she was about to say. “Everything he said was true.”
“He shouldn’t have said it the way he did.”
“How was he to know there was a con artist’s kid at his sixtieth birthday party?”
“He shouldn’t have spoken of anyone that way. Not a dead man.” He rubbed one hand along his forearm, pushing up his shirtsleeve. “Cops get jaded, hardened, you know. It’s hard for them to think of the people they…work with, as individuals, people like them.”
Sandy heard a harsh laugh slip from her lips. “Not like them, believe me. My dad and yours have less than nothing in common.”
“They both had kids they loved. That they raised and took care of.”
Sandy shook her head and bit her lip for a second before replying. But there was no sense hiding the truth any longer. “No one took care of me. I raised myself. You have no idea of the things I’ve done. Of the times I’ve gone to the back door of restaurants, looking for food. Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
“Damn, Sandy, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“I did warn you I wasn’t your regular, average nice girl from down the block.”
Marco raised his head and looked at her. She stood in the doorway, the door still ajar behind her. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her chest as if she was trying to hold herself together. She looked so frail in her light summer dress. Under his gaze she lifted her shoulders and tossed them back slightly, defiant.
Sandy was such a bizarre blend of frailty and indestructible strength, of mystery and allure, a source of both joy and pain. He didn’t know what to say. Truthfully, her background and behavior scared him.
“Why are you here? Why don’t you just let me go?” she asked. Her face was unreadable, a poker face, the face of a trickster. The woman who’d led him on, seduced him with her feminine artistry. She’d come to him in disguise, a con artist, playing him for a sucker.
“That’s a very good question.” He surveyed her through narrowed eyes, steeling himself against her. “Did you know that every woman I ever loved has run out on me?”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “You already know my mom left when Danny was a baby. One day she was just gone, and Steve and I were left to wipe Danny’s little butt and dry his tears.”
“My mother left, too.” She spoke quietly. “I haven’t seen her since I was little.”
A stab of compassion rocked him. “It’s a big thing, losing your mom.” The emotion he was feeling right now scared him. “Maybe we’re both damaged in som
e way that can’t be fixed. Maybe that’s why I fell so hard for Deanna. She was older than me. Just a few years, no big deal. But those few years made her impatient. It turned out she only loved me for better or worse until something better came along. Something inside me died the day she packed her bags and left.”
At least he’d thought it was dead. Until he met Sandy.
He looked up at her. Her hazel gaze dropped to the floor as his eyes met hers. His gut clenched with the longing to reach out to her, but she wrapped her arms around herself again. Keeping her distance.
“Maybe I’m doomed to be attracted to the kind of woman who’ll love you and leave you. Dump you just when you’re starting to trust them, run out on you when you needed them most.”
He looked anywhere but at Sandy. He struggled to keep his eyes off her, to keep his wits about him. If he wasn’t looking at her, if he wasn’t thinking about her, he could almost pretend she was just another girl, another person, someone who didn’t have any power over him.
But the moment he let his guard down he suffered a surge of terrible longing, a craving to touch her, to hold her, to share himself with her. He could feel the pull of her loneliness that called out him and echoed in his own bruised heart.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here—” He let the words drift away from him. “I guess I should leave now.”
He wrested his eyes away from her and crossed the room in two strides. She was blocking the way to the door, but she stepped aside as he approached, crushing herself up against the kitchen counter.
Still, the space was so cramped that he had no choice but to brush against her. His fingertips trailed accidentally over the skin of her arm and a shockwave of sensation rocked him. He jerked away, stung by the power of her touch, aching with the loss of it as he pushed past her and closed his hand over the door handle.
If he left now, he wouldn’t come back. And she wouldn’t come after him.
Goodbye.
But neither of them said it.
As the door closed behind him, Sandy crumpled to the floor. She felt like a puppet who’d been held up by a single string, a single strand of hope. When Marco closed the door and the lock clicked back into place, that single thread snapped.