by Dani Collins
Incomprehension crystalized into understanding in Paolo’s expression, maybe even something that might have been a protest, but Vito was already on the move again. If he didn’t get out of here, he wouldn’t be able to leave her.
“Finish without me. Give her whatever she wants.”
CHAPTER TEN
NOT LONG AFTER her mother had married Henry, he had said to Gwyn, “Travis can teach you to drive.”
Already far behind her age group in getting her license, Gwyn had declined, not wanting to look stupid in front of him, choosing instead to spend her hard-earned tip money on a couple of private lessons. She couldn’t count the number of times Travis had offered to buy dinner over the years, but she’d always insisted on cooking. When she tried, she could think of four distinct times when he had asked whether she was looking for work because he’d heard about a particular position and was willing to recommend her. She’d always taken it as a criticism of the work she was doing or a favor that would make her indebted to him.
Not once had it ever occurred to her that he might give one solid damn about her.
He did. He might have blown up her relationship—arrangement—with Vito, but he was sorry. He was treating her like she was made of butterfly wings and soap bubbles, barely touching her, moving her with the gentle cadence of his voice. He told her that he shouldn’t have waited for her to ask for help, but that he knew how important her independence was to her. He had wanted to respect her choices, but he couldn’t watch her get hurt. He told her she could do better.
“I thought he cared about me,” she finally broke her silence to say, as they flew first class back to Charleston.
“I know,” he said after a surprised pause. She hadn’t spoken since Vito had left the conference room, afraid her voice would crack and the rest of her control would follow. “And there are times when an affair like that is harmless. But you weren’t coming into it as his equal. By that I mean the position you were in at the time, life experience, money, influence,” he said with a glance from the corner of his eye. “You’re a helluva better person.”
“You don’t know him,” she mumbled into the drink he’d ordered her.
“I know him,” Travis snorted. “It’s like looking in a mirror.”
For some reason that made her laugh, jaggedly and with fraught emotion, but as powerful and intimidating as she’d always found Travis, Vito was so much more. Everything she felt about him was massive and angsty and not the least bit brotherly.
Travis twisted his mouth and said, “Why is that funny? Shut up.”
Which made her laugh more. Because the alternative was to cry and she’d wait to do that when she was alone.
He took her to Henry’s and she really only meant to stay a week or so while she sorted out her life and got a job, but Henry practically begged her to stay. Then Travis walked her into an office a few blocks away and told her she was the comptroller for his friend’s chain of high-end restaurants.
“Nepotism?” Her ego really needed to earn something on her own merit.
“Don’t be like that. You’re overqualified. But it’s close, the money is good and no one will bother you. It’s an excellent stepping stone,” Travis urged. “It reestablishes you in the field which is something you need. He really needs someone who can upgrade his system and train the team to use it. You’ll be doing him a favor.”
“Right,” she mumbled, but took the job.
It was awkward at first. Not so much at work. Everyone there was quite nice to her, but as she began moving around in public some people had the audacity to stare. Sometimes they asked outright if she was that woman. Usually if she replied, “Yes. Why?” it shut the interest down to a startled, “Just wondering.”
Then there was the one day when she was feeling really thin-skinned and went off with the kind of fury that Vito had always warned her against.
It happened to be her mother’s birthday. Her period had arrived that morning, severing any crazy illusions she had been nursing that she’d have a lifelong tie with Vito. Then a knock at the door had announced her things from Italy. Not just the boxes from her flat that had gone into storage. All her things. Gowns that had hung next to Vito’s suits. Scarves and scent and sandals.
Her gaze had scanned the entire inventory list, from eyebrow tweezers to toe rings, seeing novels and anklets and flower vases, but no mention of “Vito’s heart.”
She had asked the men to stack the boxes in the den, closed the door on them, made a huge breakfast for Henry, ate none of it herself and had cried in the shower before forcing herself to leave for work, already thirty minutes late.
So when she parked her car outside her new job and saw the cameras running at her like laser-shooting weapons in a sci-fi movie, she was already on her last nerve. A million babbled questions washed over her, all of them prompted by some shred of news in the Jensen case that she no longer cared anything about. But when one of the voices said, “We deserve to know everything that happened between you and Vittorio Donatelli,” she lost it.
“You deserve to know? I’m supposed to betray his confidence and my own right to privacy and tell strangers about our personal relationship? What is wrong with you people? Do you understand what a relationship is? You rely on the other person not to talk about you. That’s why humans make connections, so we have a safe place to be ourselves. Vito Donatelli gave me that. That’s what happened between us, okay? Trust. What a kinky, filthy concept, right? I’m sure it is to you!”
She used her elbows to get through the crowd, rather pleased when she heard grunts of startled pain and anxiety for their precious equipment.
“You don’t deserve one damned thing.”
* * *
Vito started to replay the moment where Gwyn gave the paparazzi a piece of her mind, but heard a squawk through the closed doors to Paolo’s office.
He rose, not getting any work done anyway, and went through to find Lauren pacing in a light, bouncing step, patting the back of her fussing son.
“Hi,” she said with a warm smile, coming across to kiss his cheeks. “Paolo’s meeting me here with the other two, but I’m early. Sorry if we disturbed you. This one’s fighting sleep even though he’s overtired and grumpy.” She wrinkled her nose at her son, then kissed his crinkled little chin.
Vito took him and settled him into what he privately labeled The Sleeper Hold. He’d learned it from watching his many relatives comfort his many infant relations. If a baby didn’t take to the shoulder or a cradle hold in the arm, they wanted to lie on their stomach across a forearm, head pillowed in the crook of his elbow, limbs dangling.
Arturo made a stalwart effort to keep up his complaints, but settled in short order with one discontented kick of his leg and a weary sigh. Vito kept rubbing his back, pacing laconically to the window and back. Moments later, he held a warm, limp, sleeping baby.
“You’re such a natural,” Lauren said, stroking her son’s hair, stopping short of the words he’d heard from countless women in his family. Don’t you want children of your own?
“Paolo was visiting the old bank today,” Vito said. “He took Roberto and Bianca?”
Lauren nodded. “Your aunt was meeting them there with a photographer.”
Erecting this modern building and moving the Donatelli fortune into it had been a massive decision into which the entire family had weighed. While no one could dispute the practicality of bigger rooms and proper air-conditioning, or the SMART Boards and Wi-Fi and improved security, there was something to be said of the old financial district. The community was a tight one there. It had relied for centuries on old-fashioned networking in the narrow, cobbled streets of the city center.
It was how a young, beautiful daughter of an Italian banker had wound up catching the notice of a mafioso’s son looking to launder his own father’s ill-gotten gains.
“I’ve read there are hidden passageways under those old banks where secret deals were arranged back in the day. Paolo won’t tel
l me if it’s true.”
“If he did, we would have to kill you,” Vito said casually. It was a myth that all of Milan enjoyed perpetuating.
“You bankers,” she said, with a teasing grin. “You pretend to be so boring, but you’re walking secrets, aren’t you?”
Vito glanced down at the sleeping baby to disguise his reaction. “Hardly. What you see is what you get, cara.”
“So you won’t tell me yours,” Lauren said after a brief, decidedly significant pause.
“Secrets? I have none to tell,” he said, lifting his head and looking her in the eye as he spoke his bold-faced lie.
She tilted her head, but her gaze was soft with affection. “I’ve always imagined you fell in love with someone you couldn’t have. That’s why you won’t marry and have children when you would make such a wonderful husband and father—”
“Lauren,” he said gently. “I adore you. Let’s keep it that way. Stop now.”
“But then I saw you with Gwyn.” Here was the woman who was strong enough to be Paolo’s match. She rarely had to show this sort of steel because her sweet nature inevitably paved smooth streets wherever she went. But Paolo was not as domesticated as he appeared. A weak woman would not have fared well as his wife.
“Take him,” he said, rolling Arturo into her arms. “We’re not having this conversation.” He started back to his office.
“I spent five years married to a man who didn’t love me because I was afraid of what I felt for Paolo. Five years sleeping with the wrong man,” she said to his back. “She’ll find someone else you know.”
He was at the door, feeling the latch like a knife hilt against this palm. A pain in his chest was the blade. He twisted it himself.
“She’ll try to make babies with him,” her voice continued in brutal purity behind him. “I did. Because she’ll think that any man’s baby is better than no baby at all...”
He almost had the door shut on her. Rude, but necessary.
Her voice elevated. “If you won’t tell me, at least tell her why you’re breaking her heart.”
He pulled the door closed and turned the lock for good measure. Then he leaned his forehead upon it, blood moving like powdered glass in his arteries, the baby’s body heat still imprinted on his aching arm.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GWYN THOUGHT SHE was doing pretty well. It had been two months and most of the paparazzi vultures had learned that she lived a very boring life, going from Henry’s to work to the grocery store to the dentist to the quickie oil change place. Even she was bored with her life.
Which is why she went on a date with a friend of her brother’s. She told herself it was any number of things: getting back on the horse, research about a possible move to New York, interest in a career change to landscape architecture—hilarious. As if she had any interest in watching grass grow. But it was also an opportunity to eat in a restaurant where she didn’t work, to see a jazz trio and wear one of the dresses she couldn’t bring herself to discard.
She also told herself it was a test, to see if she could let any man other than Vito kiss her.
She was honest with him, told him up front that it was her first date since “it” had happened. He was good-natured, kept things casual and friendly, was a gentleman and a pleasant companion, making her laugh. He made her forget for moments at a time that she was pining and lost without the man she really loved.
But at the end of the night, when he moved to kiss her, she balked. It was instinctive. He wasn’t Vito. It felt wrong.
He drew back, solemn and knowing, ruefully disappointed. “Not ready, huh?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He picked up her hand and kissed her bent knuckles. “I’ll be back at the end of the year. We can go out again then. See if you feel differently.”
“Thank you,” she said, privately sighing. But I won’t.
Then Henry turned on the porch light and they both chuckled.
Travis was at the breakfast table when she walked into the kitchen the next morning.
“Do not look at anything,” he warned.
She knew the paparazzi had gone crazy. Cameras had been flashing around them all evening.
“He said we could go out again the next time he’s in town.” She poured a cup from the coffee he’d made. “But he doesn’t realize how notorious I really am, does he?”
Travis said it wouldn’t matter to his friend and as Gwyn went about her week, she wondered if anything mattered. It certainly hadn’t mattered to Vito that she was dating other men.
Because deep in a sick corner of her soul, that was the real reason she had done it. She had hoped he would see one of those images that had been taken of her dining and dancing. She had hoped it would make him react.
Nothing.
Crickets.
Which was as painful and disheartening as the fact that she’d felt nothing for a perfectly nice man when he’d acted like he liked her, not just her face or body or the bare skin he’d seen online, but her.
With a shaky sigh, she looked down at the payments she was approving and wondered how many times she’d written her initials without taking in what she was actually signing. She started again.
When she walked outside, summer was announcing its intentions with a heat just this side of uncomfortable and a memo that humidity intended to climb to unbearable.
She dug her keys from her purse, ignoring the sound of a car door opening because it was likely yet another paparazzo—
“Cara.”
Cupid’s arrow, right through the heart. Sweetly painful, painfully sweet.
She turned to regard him and wished she’d taken a moment to find a bored expression. Instead, she was sure he read all the mixed feelings of welcome and yearning and hurt and betrayal. Why would he show up now, as she was finding ways to live without him?
Why like that? So iconic in one of his banker suits, cut to precision on his leanly sculpted form. He wore a hint of late-day stubble on his cheeks and his eyes were the color of morning light on mountain glaciers.
He stepped to the side and indicated the interior of his limo.
She sputtered, arms folding, aware of footsteps running toward them as some lurking paparazzo realized who she was talking to.
“Have dinner with me,” Vito said, paying no attention to the click and whiz of the camera.
“It’s four-thirty. I have my own car.” She showed him her keys.
He turned and leaned down to speak to his driver, then slammed the door, walking toward her to hold out his palm.
“Really,” she said, letting the full scope of her disbelief infuse the word. “Just take up where we left off? No.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Does it occur to you that I might not want to talk to you?”
“That is a bluff.” He met her gaze and there was a myriad of emotions behind that brutally beautiful face and somber expression. Knowledge shone in his eyes, knowledge of her and what he did to her, his patented arrogance, a kind of desolation that stopped her heart. Heat that made it jump and race again.
He took her keys from her limp fingers.
“I said I wanted to talk. You only need to listen.” He touched her elbow, turning her toward the parked cars. At the same time, he clicked the button so the lights on her hatchback flashed. Then he held the passenger door for her.
She hadn’t sat on this side of her new car, which wasn’t bottom of the line, but wasn’t the kind of luxury Vito was used to. While he drove, she took out her phone long enough to punch in Henry’s number, leaving a message that she wouldn’t be home right away because she was going to dinner with Vittorio.
He glanced across as she dropped her phone into her purse.
“Things are well with your family? You’re living with your stepfather. Is that because of the attention?”
He knew she hadn’t moved into her own place? She hardly stalked him at all.
She shrugged. “He wants me
there. I guess if there’s a silver lining to the photos it’s learning that I really do have a family. I know now exactly what other women mean when they say that older brothers are annoying. Your sisters must say that a lot.”
His brow cocked at her cheeky remark, but he only said, “His protectiveness surprised me after the way you sounded so dismissive of him.”
“Join the club,” she snorted under her breath.
“He knows you went out with a man the other night?”
“I assume the whole world knows it, if you’ve heard about it.” She reminded herself that it didn’t matter that he was bringing it up—even if his voice had lowered to a tone that pretended to be casual, but was actually quite lethal. “He’s a friend of Trav’s so yes, he knows. He set it up.” Chew on that.
“You had a nice time?” Again with the light tone, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
“I don’t talk about the men I date,” she said flatly.
Silence for a full minute, until he stopped behind a line of traffic waiting for a light.
“No. You don’t. I appreciate that, cara,” he said softly, and this time his voice was filled with gravity and sincerity. “I know you’ve had offers for tell-alls. They must have been generous. You wouldn’t have to work again, I’m sure.”
She only turned her face to her side window. If he thought she was the least bit tempted in profiting from what they had shared, he really didn’t know her at all.
“How do you like your job?” he asked.
“It’s a job, Vito. It’s no pin-up gig as Kevin Jensen’s piece on the side. It’s no mistress to a playboy banker. But it pays the bills.”
“You’re angry that I sent you away.”
“I’m angry that you’re here,” she said, swinging her head around to glare at him. “My life was starting to look normal. Why stir it up again?”
* * *