But starting the second act of your life, whether you were a twenty-five-year-old divorced mom or a thirty-year-old secret tabloid rat with a sketchy past and an unfortunate connection to Italian white-collar criminals, wasn’t guaranteed to be pretty or painless.
Sometimes you had to cry the tears and swim across to get to the other side.
“I can’t help you if you try to figure this out on your own,” Izzie said gently. “Have you been here at Paris since last night?”
“No. First I went home—to his house.”
“Asher’s?”
“Yes. He texted me yesterday, asked me to meet up with him. It was this big fucking ambush. His legal team was there, at the house, and they surrounded me and he asked me to change my name. He said Holden can keep his last name, since the paternity test he’d had ordered confirmed the biological match. But he wants me to give up Messa and go back to Keech.”
“Toya…” Izzie awkwardly patted her friend’s hair. She’d never been the there-there type—she had learned by her mother’s example that compassion was a privilege, but she had to do something that might be comforting. “Listen, Toya Messa is a woman bound to a man who doesn’t want her. Toya Keech is a woman ready for her second chance. You don’t need his name. You belong to you.”
“I took a bunch of my clothes,” Toya said, sitting up and leaving the mascara-smeared cloth on Izzie’s shoulder, “and stuffed them in my car. I put on this dress and I’ve been at this hotel for hours, wondering if…I wanted to see if anyone… God, I’m pathetic.”
“You wondered if a man like Asher Messa would come along?” Izzie understood. She’d been in this position before—but she hadn’t allowed her broken engagement to send her back into the cycle. “Starting over hurts. I know it. But it gets better, Toya. Someone who’s good for you comes into your life.” For Izzie, it was a man she hadn’t let herself anticipate. Beneath all the complicated threads, her relationship with Milo Tarantino was undefined and new and sexy and dangerous—as hopeful as it was risky.
“Your baby is right here.” Izzie removed the burp cloth and scooped the infant from the car seat to pass to his mother. “Did you drink this wine or have any other drinks? I’m going to call a car service so you won’t drive home emotional and intoxicated.”
“I didn’t drink and the tears are gone. I’m fine to drive back to East Dune.”
“Please, don’t look past your son or let fear come between you. Just take him home and hug him.”
“Okay. What are you going to do?”
“Don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy myself a steak.” She watched Toya stand up with the baby tucked tight against her. “I won’t hang out here too long. There are baby goods in my Jeep.”
“You didn’t have a car seat. Where did this come from?”
“A friend brought it over so Holden and I could hit the road.”
“One of the girls?”
“No,” she said with a wistful smile. The circle was broken and the girls had kept their distance. “A different friend.”
“A man? Who?”
“Someone,” she said elusively. It was a much neater answer than “My almost-stepson, the man I had unforgettable Valentine’s sex with on the Seychelles. The man who had me tailed and, yes, the guy I agreed to sell out for some steady employment.”
That last part gave her bats in the stomach. It wasn’t that she owed Milo her loyalty—she owed him nothing at all. But she felt guilty all the same, as though she were hanging on too tightly to tactics that had never benefitted her.
“We should set up a system, should you and Mister Someone want a sleepover at the apartment. Bra on the doorknob?”
“Yuck, no.”
“Sticker?”
“No. It’s not going to happen. He and I—we can’t happen.”
“Why do love and romance have to be so hard to get?”
Izzie shrugged. “I think it comes in its own time, and if you miss it…”
“It’s gone? For real?”
“Yeah, possibly. Don’t squander it if you catch it. And that, guys and dolls, is the moral of our story.” She smiled broadly, waved as Toya left with her son, then let the smile slip away and signaled for a waiter. She didn’t order a steak, but went for dessert instead.
The decadent toffee dessert was devoured too soon, but she felt rejuvenated as she got up from the table to wash her hands in the powder room. She stepped away from her table but turned back when she realized she’d left the car seat. Snatching it up, she started back for the restrooms and halted to let a man and two women pass her. A long-legged woman with golden-red hair dropped her handbag.
A bottle with pills rattling inside rolled to Izzie’s feet. She picked it up. Prenatal vitamins. “Your vitamins?”
The woman turned with her hand out and took the bottle. “Thanks—Oh.” Aly Greer, youngest daughter of the Las Vegas Villains’ new owners, was involved with a billionaire boxer everyone called The Brawler. And according to her fat bottle of prenatal vitamins, there was a bun baking in her oven.
Gossip was raining down on her—Why hadn’t she capitalized on any of it by now? Why was she having so much trouble going through the motions of the procedure that had for months satisfied her cost of living?
Saying nothing more, Izzie glanced once at the man and woman accompanying her—her parents, J.T. and Joan Greer—and edged past them, lugging the car seat.
In the powder room, she set the seat on the counter and—
A gust of fragrant air preceded the drop-dead classy woman who entered the restroom on Izzie’s heels and engaged the lock.
“Hey—”
Joan Greer interrupted her with the iciest glare Izzie had ever seen. “Izzie Phillips, before you get on your phone to exploit my child’s personal life, we need to have a little chat.”
“Talk all you’d like. I’m out.”
“Aly’s pregnancy is a private matter, but you’re going to use it for revenge or personal gain, just as you did when you launched that little media attack on my daughter Waverly.”
“Do you think I’m proud of everything I’ve done? Thirty years gives a hell of a lot opportunity to screw up.”
“Am I supposed to believe you have a conscience?”
“I didn’t take photos of Aly’s pills, so what proof would I have to exploit? Pics or it didn’t happen, right?”
“Rumors don’t require proof.”
“Credibility helps.” Izzie proceeded to wash her hands, and by the time she was done lathering, rinsing, and drying, she’d be done with this terse conversation. “Joan, I am not a threat to your daughters.”
“You’re a threat to anyone who gets in your way,” the woman retorted. “You and Luca Tarantino—”
“Are not of the same mind or body. His sins aren’t mine, and I’m damn sick and damn tired of people linking me to what he did. Is this how you see Jeremiah—as an extension of his father? The man’s got balls of steel if he’s committed to marrying Waverly, knowing she comes with you and J.T.”
Joan’s white-gold bracelets gleamed under the powder room lights as her arms shook. “What did you say?”
A whole fucking lot of stuff. Izzie started for the hand dryer, but the other woman darted in front of her.
“You said ‘marrying Waverly.’ Jeremiah Tarantino—”
“Is marrying your daughter. His brother told me. Now ask yourself why I knew that before you did.” Izzie gestured for Joan to step back, and she continued drying her hands. “Your daughters don’t seem the type to hold back, so I’m sure your nightmarish parenting techniques have already been pointed out to you. If I had a mother like you—Actually, I do have a mother like you, and she’s in Illinois while I’m in Nevada. Connect the dots.”
“Izzie, my daughters would never say that their father and I don’t love them. We don’t always agree, 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, Joan.”
Izzie collected her stuff, unlocked the door, and walked calmly from the restaurant. And in light of Aly Greer’s prenatal vitamins oops and Toya Messa’s face-to-palm divorce paperwork and hemorrhoid ointment debacle, 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 Izzie had seen them off in the airport. Afterward, she’d grudgingly acquiesced to a face-to-face meeting with Rick Smoltz, who’d applied the pressure for an update. Until the day before, she’d had nothing to report to him about Luca Tarantino or Antony Grimaldi.
Standing at the counter of a downtown coffee shop, Izzie had told Rick that Luca still hadn’t shown signs of resurfacing. She thought it was far past fucked up that the man who cared so deeply about bloodlines and lineage was missing out on his sons’ lives. He wouldn’t see Jeremiah’s wedding day. What if his heir-apparent, Milo, 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.
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 Milo Tarantino, of all guys, breaking the mold when he was suspicious enough to have her followed out to the Indian Ocean.
Cornered, Izzie had passed along what Milo 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 Rick Smoltz absorb that information and give her a self-gratifying leer, had 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 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, Izzie had given herself ample time to backpedal. So when she dialed a familiar number, she couldn’t say she was uncertain.
“Where are you?” she asked Milo, setting her phone on speaker and putting it on the mantel to free her hands.
“Working out.”
Izzie paused midway, with her rain-drenched 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. She encountered the dictionary she’d rescued from Toya, who’d hilariously attempted to use it to burst a ganglion cyst. She placed it on a shelf with her Bible, dreidel, and an unopened box of thank-you notes she’d found in an old-fashioned stationery store in London. “How soon can you get showered and meet me for that dinner you demanded at Target?”
She pulled off her jeans, let them join the discarded shirt, and waited.
“Do you really want dinner, Phillips, or do you want me to tap you?”
“Dinner.” The bra hit the floor. She so wanted him to “tap” her. And anything else he’d do when he had her naked and at his mercy. “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 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 Rick Smoltz’s intentional offensive ways, she could handle Try Me’s wait staff. “Sounds like a date— I mean, sounds like dinner.”
“No, this is 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 piled on top of her head to showcase her diamond raindrop earrings, and Milo Tarantino was escorting her in a very unmistakable “Hell, yeah, I’m with her. Fuck off.” 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 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,” Izzie whispered to him as he banded an arm around her waist and they followed their waitress to a shiny black table. “I’m still Izzie Phillips. You’re still Milo Tarantino. 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 them before twisting her mouth into a devious little smirk and writing something on one menu, then another. “Complimentary tap beer, coming soon.”
Izzie read the silver ink scribbled at the top of her menu. “‘I paid two grand for my tits.’” She snorted a laugh, looked around for the waitress and was fully prepared to bounce her natural breasts. “Wow.”
“They’ll write whatever they want to get under your skin, Phillips. I’ve handled your tits—really thoroughly—and I know what she wrote about you isn’t true.”
“What’d she say about you?” Izzie asked. Milo picked up the menu, flipped it around for her to read. “‘Hung like a…horse’?”
Laughing, he watched her trip over the last word.
Tracing her lips with her index finger, she said, “I know that to be true.”
Milo’s face turned serious quick. “Izzie, I’ve been wanting you since I first saw you with my father. I watched him kiss you and put a hand on you, and I wanted to put my goddamn fist in his face for touching what’s mine. I wanted to have you.”
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.
“Is that why you put me through hell when I was his, Milo? Because you were jealous?”
“You were never his.”
She swallowed, stunned at the growl of anger that rasped in his voice.
“If you’re ready for more truth than that, tell me, Izzie.”
She 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 moved aside, and Izzie let her, not bothering to complain about the comment written on her menu.
“Why did she call?” Milo asked her once privacy revisited them.
“She didn’t say. If it was important, she would’ve sent certified mail or a text message. The social media accounts were closed a while ago.” The tough things Daphne Phillips preferred to convey in the most impersonal ways possible. “This place should cons
ider offering bowls of candy on each table. Nothing very special, but a few chocolates would be a nice touch.”
Milo 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?”
Izzie 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.”
Milo didn’t sound as intrigued as she expected he would. He sounded as though she’d stated 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 curbed my valium addiction. Do you suppose the burgers will be much longer?”
Milo covered her hands, but after a second she pulled away. To let him reassure or comfort her tonight would feel like surrendering what little control she had. “Not many people can come out on the other side of hell, Izzie. Do you want to talk about this?”
“No, I’ll save that exciting conversation for the next date.”
“I want that—the next date and the chance to talk about your addiction.”
“Milo, listen, it’s not a drawn-out struggle. I was a problem child, according to my mother. I had issues that my parents had difficulty coping with, and they gave me valium when I was about seven years old. It was for sleep-away 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.” Izzie 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 feel sick that I’d taken two doses. I’d forgotten.”
The Hook Page 14