An Offer He Can't Refuse

by Christie Ridgway

  “I’m estranged from the Carusos, Johnny. At least from my grandfather and his…men.”

  “Huh?”

  “My grandfather still keeps his eye on me, I’ve always known that, but recently he’s been upping the pressure to bring me back into the fold. It’s been little stuff until now—my sisters, the flowers, that invitation to espresso, but it could get worse.”

  She’s estranged from the old man. She’s estranged from the old man.

  “So, if we’re…together…we might find ourselves followed on occasion. Or Cosimo himself might try to make contact. I’ll understand if it creeps you out. Frankly, it creeps me out.”

  She’s estranged from the old man.

  “Johnny?”

  He wrenched his gaze off the tablecloth to stare into her face. “What?”

  “I understand if the situation means you’ve changed your mind about…being social with me on a more regular basis. But so you know, I’m never going to be around him again.”

  The waitress slipped their bill onto the table. Johnny automatically reached for his wallet and fished out plenty of cash to cover it. He didn’t check the numbers because he didn’t think his brain had the focus for anything but…

  She’s estranged from the old man.

  Suddenly, he laughed out loud. Téa looked at him as if he was crazy, and he felt a little that way too, but he continued laughing as he pulled her up from the table and walked her to his car. Oh, the irony.

  Yet his mood continued to lighten on the drive to his house. As he tugged her toward the front door, Téa tugged back, her feet slowing. “Johnny, are you sure about this?”

  The catch in her voice made him catch her in his arms. Oh, yeah, with Cosimo out of the picture he was really, really sure about this. There was no reason to hesitate. “Aren’t you?” he whispered against her lips.

  In the bedroom, he remembered he’d wanted to have candles. Téa naked in the candlelight and spread out for his hands and for his tongue. But he didn’t want to trek back to the car, not when she was warm and heating up.

  She made him keep the lights off.

  He knew she was thinking of the mirror overhead and that made him laugh again. It turned to a groan as she pushed his shirt off his shoulders and spread her fingers across his chest.

  She made little noises as he made love to her. He thought she was biting back the sounds and he promised himself he’d make her really let go soon. But now he fought hard for his control too, making sure that he played her with his fingers and felt her come before letting himself inside the tight wet glove of her body.

  He was going to pull out and taste her, he promised himself, just two thrusts more…just one. Now. But then she tilted her hips and her sleek inner thighs slid along the outside of his.

  Without skill, without suavity, without any of the finesse he’d honed for years, he came. His rough thrusts slapped his belly against hers. He couldn’t help it.

  When he collapsed on top of her, she cradled his head in her palms. “I’ll move in a second,” he promised.

  She murmured something that sounded already half-asleep.

  They dozed.

  Johnny came awake in a rush. There was a fragrant pillow…

  Téa. He smiled to himself and gathered her close, two spoons in the cozy drawer of his bed.

  “Johnny?”

  “Shh. Go back to sleep.”

  Her arm shifted against the one he had tucked beneath her breasts. The movement must have pressed the backlight button on her watch, because the businesslike face blinked on. It was 3:12:37.

  For the first time in months, he’d slept through the witching hour.

  Twenty-seven

  “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”

  Johnny Mathis

  Warm (1957)

  Rachele danced around the kitchen, preparing the evening meal for herself and her father. Over the weekend, she’d made a big pan of lasagna and then frozen it in individual squares. Two were warming in the microwave. A little bread, a little salad, and her father would sit down to one of his favorite dinners.

  Little did he know it was eggplant that gave the pasta dish its heartiness. The tomato sauce was purely vegetarian as well, with grated carrots, honey, and the juice of a fresh lemon to balance the flavors. Her traditional Italian papa didn’t know how untraditional the Ciriglianos could be.

  She caught sight of her reflection in the stainless steel toaster and grimaced. You’d think one look at her dark makeup and nose and eyebrow piercings would drive the point home, but no.

  A few minutes later, with a full, fragrant plate in front of him, her father didn’t even appear to notice when she seated herself across from him. It didn’t wipe the smile off her face. It couldn’t.

  “Why are you humming?” her father asked, his attention still focused on his lasagna.

  Humming? “I am?” She had been, she realized. One of Dean Martin’s signature songs, “On an Evening in Roma.”

  You could put Usher in an Italian girl’s iPod, but you couldn’t take Dino out of an Italian girl’s mental music files. “It was a good day at work, I guess,” she said.

  Her father grunted what might pass for an, “Oh, yeah?”

  She decided to accept it as such. “First, Téa—”

  “How’s her mother?”

  “Fine, I guess.”

  His head came up, his gaze fixing somewhere over her left shoulder. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  Rachele frowned. “Let me think…last week? She stopped by with a new product for Téa to try. She’s been moaning that her hair refuses to stay straight.”

  “Bianca has been moaning?”

  “No, Téa. Her mother seems just fine.”

  “Fine?”

  Rachele sighed. “Just fine.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good.” Her father’s head dipped back toward his food.

  Rachele frowned at the top of his head. Did he really have the jones for Téa’s mother or was the suspicion just a hangover from the bubbly atmosphere that had been floating around the design office in recent days?

  “Téa’s got a boyfriend,” she blurted out.

  Her father’s fork paused between his plate and his mouth. He appeared to study the bite of lasagna.

  Maybe he was noticing the eggplant for the first time in seven years. But then he shoveled it into his mouth without comment.

  “As long as I’ve been working for her, she’s only dated these fuddy-duddy fix-up guys, but this time she found a man all on her own.” And Rachele couldn’t have been more surprised if her father had commented upon the midnight-black shade of her fingernail polish. “She’s been coming into the office late.”

  Her father grunted again, so Rachele felt obliged to tell the whole truth.

  “Well, it was only once and she blamed it on a blow-dryer malfunction.” Since Téa’s hair had been a wiggly mass of waves lately, it was sort of hard not to believe her. But there’d been something that looked an awful lot like a case of beard burn on the underside of her chin. Rachele smiled to herself and rubbed a finger along her own jaw. Cal kept a close shave, but there was the teeniest rough edge to his skin that made his kisses only that much more exciting.

  “Who’s this man?”

  “Cal…” Rachele started, then caught herself. “You mean Téa’s…uh, man? His name is Johnny. Johnny Magee.” And when he came into the design office, sometimes he’d hang in the reception area and lean against the wall, looking Rat Pack-cool if you didn’t take into account the way he gazed through Téa’s office doorway and just watched her working at her desk.

  As if she was a present he’d never asked for and didn’t deserve, but that he wouldn’t ever, ever give back.

  The thought was kinda weird, but Rachele wondered if it was the way her mother might have watched her when Rachele was a little girl. As if the other person mattered in a totally unexpected way.

  “Johnny Magee owns the property on El Deseo,�
�� her father said between bites.

  “Yes,” Rachele answered. “I told you about that job.”

  “I’ve been there,” he said. “Looking for you, but you’d let this Johnny’s associate drive you home.”

  Rachele gripped her fork. Was this the right moment to talk to her father about her new relationship? She’d put it off time and again, and she knew Cal was getting impatient with her excuses. “His name is Cal. Cal Kazarsky.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter what his name is, because I don’t want you going over to that house anymore.” Her father didn’t look up from his food. “And I don’t want you going home with some stranger.”

  “Cal’s not a stranger, Papa.” A tense little laugh escaped from her mouth. “And I didn’t go home with him, he drove me home.”

  “No matter.” He waved his fork. “You won’t see him again. You will not go back to that house.”

  She stared at the man across the table. He was in his mid-fifties, still handsome, she supposed, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. But he was her father, not her keeper, and Cal was right. If she didn’t come clean, he would continue to treat her like a child. She’d kept her secret for too long already.

  “You don’t even know Cal,” she said.

  He waved his fork again. “Neither do you.”

  “Yes, yes I do.” She swallowed. “I’ve been seeing him for a couple of weeks. We’re…we’re dating. Like a couple.”

  Her father frowned at his plate. “A couple? No. I didn’t give you my permission to date.”

  His flat tone started her pulse thumping. She set down her fork and clasped her hands in her lap, trying to stay calm. Trying to sound calm. “Papa, I’m a grown woman. Twenty-one years old. I don’t need your permission to do anything.”

  “You are my daughter,” he said. “And you will do as I say.”

  She swallowed again. “Let’s try this one more time. Papa. I don’t need your permission to come and to go, to do my job, and especially not to…to fall in love.”

  His head jerked up. “I forbid you to use that word.”

  “Love?”

  “I forbid you to use it.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “I forbid you to use it!” he repeated, his voice rising as he shoved back his chair. He stood, his hands in fists at his sides. “I forbid you to make mistakes or to be hurt or to have your heart broken. Do you understand me?”

  “Papa—”

  “There’s to be no more discussion of this.”

  Rachele rose to her own feet, her legs shaky. She started backing away from the table, not afraid of her father, but afraid of what they might be about to sever. “We need to discuss this. This isn’t a field trip you’re forbidding me to go on. This is about my becoming my own woman. A grown woman.”

  “There will be no men in your life,” her father asserted again. “And there will be no mistakes or hurt feelings or having your heart broken. This is for your own good.”

  She still couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d expected him to be worried, but not to out and out refuse to be reasonable.

  “Papa, I care for this man. I have feelings—”

  But he couldn’t concern himself to listen to them. “Defy me in this, Rachele,” he declared with such conviction that she could only believe him, “and you are no longer my daughter.”

  Cold washed over Rachele’s skin as she stared at the man who had raised her. Was this really her father? Was he really the kind of person who could dismiss her feelings, dismiss her, so easily? For years she’d thought it was grief that kept him at a distance, but now…now she could see that it was indifference. She was an obligation and a responsibility, but not a person to him.

  “Then I guess I’m no longer your daughter,” she said slowly. “Because I am going to defy you.”

  “You will do no such thing—” Then her father blinked, and blinked again, his expression growing bewildered. “What is that on your face, Rachele Maria?” His forefinger touched his nose, his eyebrow. “What have you done to your face? You don’t look like my daughter anymore.”

  And she realized that for the first time he was seeing her.

  “How could you do that to your face?” he asked.

  Her father was really seeing her. But he still hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Rachele felt a wild urge to laugh.

  Because it was too late for him to finally open his eyes.

  It was too late to keep her from Cal.

  It was too late to keep her from falling in love.

  And, she thought, looking at the father who was, she realized, the true stranger in her life, it was too late to keep her heart from breaking.

  He’d already done the job.

  Twenty-eight

  “I’m Confessin’”

  Kay Starr

  Rockin’ with Kay (1958)

  Téa sat at a table on the patio outside of the Kona Kai Spa’s small bar, a glass of wine in front of her as she waited for Johnny to arrive. It should have been a peaceful place to wait, because a mid-October late afternoon in Palm Springs meant the air was a perfect 75 degrees. Palm fronds created spiky shade across the pebble-paved patio, and twenty feet away, a swimming pool refreshed the eyes. The scent of blooming gardenias in a nearby terra-cotta pot wafted by in the slight breeze. Behind her, water trickled from a wall-mounted fountain into a clam-shaped bowl.

  But though Téa appreciated her environs, they didn’t bring her a measure of peace. Ten days had passed since she and Johnny had decided to become each other’s “distraction.”

  Ten days that had felt so right she was now convinced that something was about to go very, very wrong.

  Her growing dread had only been exacerbated by the certainty that eyes were watching her every move. With her stubborn refusals, she’d managed to discourage the mobsters roaming around town from hanging about her office, but when she was driving the streets and particularly when she was with Johnny, she sensed a stranger’s scrutiny. It had to be someone sent by her grandfather.

  She refused to think anyone guessed she possessed the Loanshark book. The watcher was Cosimo sending her a message, she insisted to herself, staring at the straw-colored liquid in her glass. He was sending a signal just as clear as the one that had come with the apricot roses. He wanted her back in the family fold.

  Footsteps sounded behind her, paused. Not Johnny, she would feel him in the air, but this presence set the hair rising on her arms in an entirely different way. She didn’t look up, even when olive-skinned fingers gripped the back of the chair beside hers. Coarse black hairs curled between scarred knuckles.

  “I’ve been looking for you. I have a message.”

  She hadn’t spoken to him in years, yet she recognized his voice. “Is that right, Nino?” Nino Farelle. She glanced up. He was in his thirties now, but he was still as darkly handsome as he’d been when Eve had fancied herself in love with him eight years ago. Before he’d given her the black eye and the split lip.

  Téa met his gaze. “I couldn’t have been that hard to find since you’ve been following me all over town for more than a week.” At least now she knew who the watcher was, and that her instincts had been right. Nino worked for her grandfather.

  His expression didn’t flicker. “Sorry, sweet cheeks. But it hasn’t been me on your tail until about thirty minutes back.”

  Sweet cheeks. Téa tried hard not to let that old nickname he used get under her skin. Eight years before, she’d tried to tolerate him for Eve’s sake, though his snide “sweet cheeks” had only made her feel more fat and undesirable. “Nino, I know you, or some other of Cosimo’s minions, have been watching me for days.”

  His face flushed ruddy. “I’m no minion anymore. I’ve moved up in the ranks. Way up. And nobody’s been clocking you, sweet cheeks. Your grandfather ordered the kid gloves…” his voice took on a threatening tone, “until today.”

  “Oh wow, Nino. Now I’m scared.” But she w
as. If it was true and her grandfather had been keeping his distance, then who had been stalking her and Johnny?

  Johnny. She took a quick glance around. She didn’t want him, or anyone else for that matter, to see her with a man as nasty as Nino Farelle. It was the kind of association that wouldn’t do her business any good and it only served to remind her of all the things she wished to forget. “What is it you want, Nino? Spit it out quick.”

  He smiled, and that felt threatening too, even as he slid his hands in the pockets of his ash-colored slacks. “I knew I could get you to come around. Told Cosimo I have a special touch with you girls.”

  “I know all about your ‘special touch,’ Nino,” she said, her stomach starting to churn. “So you better stick to the message and then get going.”

  His eyes narrowed. Apparently he hadn’t known she was aware of the beating he’d given Eve and how it was her sister’s promise not to tell Cosimo that kept Nino away from her…and him, most likely, alive. “Your grandfather wants to see you at his party, va bene? He’s feeling his age and wants to have all his family around him on his special night.”

  Out of Nino’s mouth, this argument had even less chance of plucking her heartstrings than when it came from her sisters. “Maybe I’ll send something from Hallmark, but I won’t be coming to the party.”

  Nino took her refusal less well than they had. He glowered at her. “Your grandfather says it won’t be a celebration unless—”

  “Come on. He doesn’t need me to help blow out the birthday candles. I’m not buying it, Nino.”

  “Merda! Fine. It’s more. It’s to show unity within the family at this time of change.”

  She’d known sentiment wasn’t driving Cosimo. Still…“He’s done just fine without me all these years. I’m confident he’ll continue to do fine without me the next few months.”

  Nino’s dark brows drew together in frustration. “He’s expecting me to bring back your word you’ll come.”

  “Then you’re going to disappoint him, because I’m not offering it.”

  He set his jaw. “Sweet cheeks—”