They could break the NASCAR record for fast turnarounds!
With all her heart, she urged Jack to say yes.
“I’m honored,” he began.
The senator held up a palm. “I know this is quite an imposition, sir, given your many responsibilities in Atlanta. We’ll do everything we can to make your trips to Washington as productive as possible.”
His blue eyes twinkled as his gaze slid past Jack’s shoulder and settled on Angela.
“You can trust my staff to see to your needs.”
Without so much as a backward glance, Jack took him up on his offer. “I accept.”
Chapter 15
“Uh-oh!”
Angela brought Gus’s Chevy to a stop in the middle of a tree-lined Baltimore street. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, she peered through the deepening twilight at the vehicles jammed bumper to bumper along both curbs outside her parents’ house.
Their home, she amended silently. She still had trouble thinking of this elegantly restored flat-fronted row dwelling in Baltimore’s famed Little Italy district as home. Soon after Tony’s accident, her parents had sold the cheerfully shabby house they’d lived in for thirty years and moved into a tiny apartment. Despite their protests, Tony had purchased this place for them within a month of opening his first auto parts store. He was now franchised in twelve states and had repaid his parents twice over for every penny they’d put toward his medical expenses, but he, like Angela, still regretted the loss of their old house.
Tony was here tonight, Angela saw. His Corvette sat in the driveway, blocked in by a green-and-tan bakery van. Two silver limos were parked nose-to-nose in front of the house. Family cars of every color and style spilled onto the side streets that led to the Harborplace, only a few blocks away. Angela eyed the congested street with a combination of resignation and dismay.
“Mother must have activated the net. It looks as though half the family’s here.”
“Only half?”
The wry amusement in Jack’s voice drew her gaze to his shadowed face.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Stop worrying, Angela. I want to meet your family.”
“I want you to meet them, too,” she muttered. “Just not all at once. Their sheer numbers can be a bit...overpowering.”
“Stop worrying.”
“Right”
She eased the Chevy into gear and wedged it into a narrow space between a street lamp and a trash can. Grabbing her purse, she joined Jack on the sidewalk. The sounds of lively laughter and animated conversation carried from the jammed house, punctuated at intervals by the soaring, soulful voice of a tenor.
“Pavarotti or Caruso?” Jack inquired, cocking his head to catch the strains of the familiar ballad.
“Neither. That’s my cousin Michael. He’s a pharmacist by day, and star of Hagerstown Little Theater by night.”
“He’s good. Very good.”
“Wait until he’s downed a few more glasses of vino. Then he’s not only good, he’s loud. Very loud.” She slung her purse over her shoulder. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Lead the way.”
He was so calm, Angela thought enviously as she weaved though the parked cars. So amazingly in control and—her mouth curved in a rueful smile——so very un-Italian.
A half pace behind her, Jack surreptitiously swiped his palms down the sides of his leg. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so damned nervous!
He hadn’t lied when he told Angela he was looking forward to meeting her family. He’d spent enough boyhood years in his grandfather’s empty, echoing house to harbor hopes for a large and lively family of his own someday. Those hopes hadn’t come to fruition with his former wife, and Jack hadn’t had the time or the inclination to pursue them since his divorce.
He’d been thinking about large, boisterous families for the past few days, however. Thinking hard. Whenever his mind wasn’t consumed by worry about Angela’s safety, it had been consumed by Angela herself. He’d never met anyone with her passion for life, and he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather share that life with.
He knew damn well he’d rushed her. Knew that he’d pushed her into his arms, despite his promise to let her name the time and the place. The rules of civilized behavior told Jack he should back off, give her time to deal with the tangled emotions of the past few days. But the primal male in him wanted to stake his claim now. Tonight. In front of her entire family. Or half of them, anyway. As he mounted the front steps, he tried to visualize her family’s reaction to such a claim.
Tony, he could handle. Maybe.
Uncle Guido, he wasn’t as sure of. The semiretired counterfeiter seemed to have some well-placed connections.
Angela’s father was as yet an unknown quantity.
But it was her mother who worried Jack the most. He hadn’t forgotten Ed Winters’s near panic at the thought of another call from Maria Paretti. Or the senator’s alarmed expression when he’d instructed his driver to call home. If Angela’s mother could put two such strong personalities into a quake, she had to be a formidable woman.
She was. Formidable and grim-faced.
She appeared the moment Jack and Angela stepped into a foyer filled with the mouth-watering aroma of garlicky lasagna and the rousing strains of Cousin Michael in full voice. “Angela!” she declared, raising her clasped hands to the ceiling in prayerful thanksgiving. “At last you come home!”
Angela gave the black-clad mustachioed woman a tight hug and a hearty kiss on each cheek. “Hello, Aunt Rose.”
Instant, cowardly relief speared through Jack.
“This is Jack Merritt, Aunt Rose. You talked to him last night...or I guess it was this morning.”
“I remember.” Rose Paretti’s three chins folded one into the other as she looked Jack up and down. “Divorced. Thirty-six. No children. I don’t know about this one, carina.”
Laughing, Angela hooked her arm through Jack’s. “He came for wine, Aunt Rose. And lasagna. And to meet everyone involved in our adventure before he has to go back to Atlanta. That’s all.”
“You’d better make sure he meets your mother first,” Rose warned ominously. “She’s in the kitchen.”
“We’ll go right there.”
Despite Angela’s assurances, it took some time to work their way through the crowd of adults, scampering children, crawling toddlers and noisy babies filling the front rooms. As he passed through the talking, gesticulating throng, Jack met Cousin Teresa. He renewed his acquaintance with her husband, Gus. He shook hands with Dominic, who urged Jack to try the spaghetti alle vongole the next time Angela brought him to the restaurant. He accepted a brimming glass of red wine from Leonard, whose mother, Helen, modestly acknowledged that she was the artist who’d baked the cannoli her niece had offered Jack on the Fourteenth Street Bridge.
Juggling the glass of wine and a slice of melon wrapped in prosciutto that someone—Michael’s mother, Julia, he thought—had pressed on him, he followed in Angela’s wake. Halfway down a narrow hall, his guide caught sight of Tony coming toward them. With a cry of joy, she threw herself at him. Tony’s bad leg buckled under the force of her exuberant greeting and he staggered back a pace or two, but his arms went around her and he hugged her as fiercely as she hugged him.
“Did you hear about Marc Green?” she asked breathlessly.
“I heard. He’d better sleep with one eye open for a while. A long while.”
Throwing a grin over her shoulder, Angela elaborated for Jack’s benefit. “A number of Uncle Guido’s, er, former business associates are behind bars.”
Tony acknowledged his presence with a neutral nod. When he released his sister and held out his hand, Jack didn’t make the mistake of thinking that he was offering friendship. Not yet. He wouldn’t, until he knew exactly how things stood between his sister and the stranger who’d plunged her into danger.
With a small smile, Jack slipped his hand into his
pocket and passed the other man the snub-nosed revolver. Tony palmed the weapon into his own pocket.
“I’d better go lock this away. Mom’s in the kitchen.”
“We’re on our way,” Angela assured him.
The mouth-watering aroma of garlic and spicy, bubbling lasagna grew thicker with each step. When Jack finally entered the mobbed kitchen, a half step behind Angela, a rush of oven-baked heat enveloped him. Wishing he’d taken the time to shed his suit coat, he felt a fine sweat film his forehead.
“Hello, Mamma.”
At Angela’s call, a tiny, delicate woman threw up her hands and gave a joyous shriek. Flying across the kitchen, she wrapped her daughter in a teary hug, kissed her, patted her cheeks and her chin several times, then kissed her again. When she finally released a laughing, equally teary Angela and turned to Jack, he felt the magnetic pull of her limpid brown eyes.
Her olive-toned skin was as lustrous as her daughter’s, he noted, and it was immediately obvious which parent had given Angela her fine bone structure. Tilting her head, Maria Paretti searched his face for long moments. What she read there, he had no idea, but a Mona Lisa-like smile lifted the corners of her lips. Releasing her daughter, she tucked her arm through Jack’s and pulled him toward a huge oval kitchen table.
“Tony told us about this business with that bastardo at the senator’s office. I want to know every detail. Every one. After you eat. Sit down. Both of you, sit down.”
More than a little stunned, Jack sat. This was the woman who set grown men to trembling with a single phone call? This luminous, smiling Madonna was the master manipulator who kept tabs on her family via a voice-activated communications net that rivaled the military’s?
Across the table, Angela knuckled the curly head of a gurgling toddler and winked at Jack.
“Don’t breathe easy yet. Your trial by fire is just beginning. Mother’s favorite tactic is to stuff her unsuspecting victims to the bursting point, then threaten them with more food unless they tell her everything she wants to know. And I’m not talking about Marc Green. You won’t have any secrets when you leave here, Jack. None!”
Confident of his abilities to hold his own against the charming, vivacious woman who set a mountain of crusty lasagna in front of him, Jack picked up a fork and dug in.
He soon learned his mistake.
Before he’d made a noticeable dent in the mountain, Maria Paretti had elicited his occupation, his family background, the precise state of his health, and the interesting information that, no, he wasn’t Catholic, but he had visited the Vatican on a long-ago shore leave.
Wisely Jack omitted any reference to the fact that he and his two buddies had been decidedly worse for their wine when they decided to get the pope’s personal blessing. He also didn’t mention that the three U.S. sailors had made it only as far as the first entry point before two large and unamused Swiss Guards turned them over to the civilian authorities.
Luckily, the arrival of two men saved Jack from further inquisition. One was a shorter, stockier, older edition of Tony, the other a bandy-legged, silver-haired gnome with a gold eyetooth.
“Pop! Uncle Guido!”
Jack rose as the gray-haired, barrel-chested Anthony Paretti, Sr., enveloped his daughter in a bone-crunching bear hug. While she exchanged a similar greeting with her uncle, her father gripped Jack’s hand with the confidence and strength of a man who’d spent his entire adult life working as a stevedore on Baltimore’s docks.
“You’re welcome in our home.”
“Thank you.”
“Tony says you took care of our Angela.”
Her little huff warned Jack to tread lightly. “She does a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”
“Yes, she does.” The weathered lines at the corners of her father’s eyes folded into a smile. “Of course, we’ll never convince her mother of that.”
“Not in this lifetime, anyway,” Maria Paretti put in complacently from across the kitchen.
Groaning, Angela introduced her great-uncle.
“Thanks for the loan of the cabin,” Jack said sincerely. “And for the assistance your, ah, associates gave the police.”
In a classic Paretti gesture, Uncle Guido waved a hand through the air.
“Angela’s family,” he said simply. “We take care of family.”
Three hours later, Angela turned down her parents’ offer of the spare bedrooms and Tony’s offer of his Vette. Promising to deliver Gus’s dark green Chevy to the lot the next morning, she escaped with the excuses that she had to make arrangements for the senator’s transportation—and that Jack had to finalize his own travel plans.
“When do you have to fly home to Atlanta?” she asked as they walked to the car, confronting the issue head-on.
“Tomorrow morning, I suppose,” Jack said slowly. “I should be there when the media starts clamoring for details of the investigation.”
Children’s Hospital would be at the center of the storm, he knew, because of his involvement...and that of his best friend, Philip. Jack had put in a quick call to his boss from the senator’s office. He’d explained about the investigation and warned that several of the hospital’s consulting physicians and suppliers were implicated.
Then he’d called Philip. Although his friend had been an integral part of the investigative team since the night Jack confronted him with the initial audit results, the physician would still have to face the censure of his associates and colleagues for the kickbacks he’d accepted. Jack didn’t want Philip and his wife to face them alone.
“Tomorrow, huh?” Angela asked softly.
As she backed the Chevy onto the street and pointed it toward the Washington-Baltimore Expressway, she struggled to accept the idea of Jack leaving so soon. She understood the heavy responsibilities and obligations that pulled at him. She respected his loyalty to his friend. She reminded herself that he’d return within a week, two at most.
The two weeks loomed ahead of her as dark and empty as the toll road.
Jack stretched an arm across the back of her seat and kneaded the back of her neck. His touch was gentle, and blatantly possessive. Her pulse leaped in response. Arching her neck under the erotic massage, she let the pleasure of his touch seep through her.
“I have to go home, Angela,” he said quietly. “But I’ll be back. Soon.”
The Chevy ate up the pavement. They sat silent for some time, each lost in their own thoughts. When the cutoff for Annapolis and Uncle Guido’s cabin flashed by, Jack roused enough to ask where they were going.
“My place,” Angela told him.
His fingers didn’t cease their slow, sensual movement. “Does it have a bed?”
“Of course it has a bed.”
“A real bed? Not one of those narrow shelf things? Not that I mind your bottom bumping and grinding into me all night, you understand. I’m just wondering.”
“It’s king-size,” she assured him solemnly.
“King-size?” His fingers stroked her neck. “How long will it take to get to your place?”
“From here, it would take most people another half hour. I put our ETA at twenty minutes.”
“Go for it.”
They made it in seventeen. Retrieving the paper sacks containing their purchased possessions from the back seat, Jack followed Angela into the rambling three-story brownstone, just a few blocks north of the Capitol. Her apartment consisted of three airy, high-ceilinged rooms decorated with drooping ferns, bookshelves crammed with textbooks, framed prints from the Smithsonian and a scattering of sneakers and athletic sweats she hadn’t had time to put away.
Jack grinned at the orange-and-purple-striped running shoes she scooped up with the sweats.
“Nice shoes.”
“A girl’s gotta make a statement,” she replied with a toss of her hair. “Even in a chauffeur’s uniform. Especially in a chauffeur’s uniform.”
Dumping the gear behind the couch, she turned to find Jack examining the collage of
framed photographs on the top shelf of the bookcase. He picked up one of Tony, flushed and triumphant as he held aloft a silver trophy. A ponytailed, grease-stained Angela grinned gleefully at his side.
“How old were you here?”
“Fifteen. I’d just gotten my learner’s permit the week before, and Tony had let me drive a test lap. He sweated the whole way around the track.”
“I can sympathize with him,” Jack murmured, replacing the photograph. He closed the distance between them and speared both hands through the hair at her temples. Tilting her face to his, he smiled down at her.
“Thanks for introducing me to your family, Angela.”
She covered his hands with hers. “I wanted you to meet them. Not all of them at once, but... Well, they’re who I am. If we’re going to see each other when you come back to Washington...”
“We’re going to see each other.”
“Then you needed to know I come fully equipped with family, friends, an assortment of sneakers...and a spotless driving record,” she tacked on. “Think you can learn to trust my driving enough to stop stomping your foot against the floor mats, Dr. Merritt?”
“I can try, Ms. Paretti.” He brushed his mouth over hers. “Think you can teach me to thread a car through an opening the size of a lug nut?”
“I can try.” Grinning, she slid her arms around his neck. “Not tonight, though.”
“No, not tonight.”
His mouth came down on hers, heavy and hungry.
Angela melted into him. They had tonight, she told herself fiercely. And tomorrow, until his flight left. And the days and weeks he’d spend in Washington during the months to come. They had time to let the passion that shimmered between them develop into the kind of enduring love she wanted with this man. The kind of love her parents felt for each other. The kind the senator and Lilly had discovered. She didn’t need to feel this sense of panic at the thought of him leaving tomorrow.
But she did. She did.
Her fingers trembled as she yanked at the buttons on his shirt. Jack caught her urgency. His mouth slanted over hers. His hands slid down her back to shape her hips. He brought her against him, and Angela’s breath caught as she arched against his hardness. When he scooped her up with the same ease with which she’d snatched up her sweats a few moments ago and headed for the bedroom, the breath left her body completely.
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