An Offer He Can't Refuse Page 10

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  He swallowed again, and lifted a trembling hand to comb back his hair. “What you said about what?”

  “That I have a problem with the job…with your house.”

  Join the club. But he was going to do what he must to exorcise its demons and lay his own ghosts to rest.

  “What kind of problem?” The question came out rougher than he liked.

  “Maybe we should talk about this tomorrow,” she said, her voice puzzled. “You sound as if you need some sleep.”

  He laughed, a harsh sound. “You’ve got that right.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow.” Yeah. He’d face whatever was inside that house tomorrow.

  The increasing number and intensity of the flashbacks demanded it. Tomorrow, he’d move into the house. And closer to Téa. She was both a link to his past and a salvation from it. Until he had all the answers he needed, he’d use her for both.

  He’d told her they needed to settle things. And tomorrow he would. No more doubts, no more Mr. Nice Guy. He was going to get the truth and he was going to get her.

  Eleven

  “Oh! Lady Be Good”

  Ella Fitzgerald

  The First Lady of Song (1949)

  All good things ended. She already knew that, Téa reminded herself, so there was no reason to feel such sharp disappointment as she arrived—early, of course—for her appointment with Johnny. Unlike her first visit to the compound on El Deséo Drive, this time hers was the sole car in the parking area by the large garage. Like her first visit, as she walked past the lagoon on her way to the front door, a chill crept down her spine.

  But the little shiver was chased off as she pushed through the overgrowth beyond the murky body of water and reached the concrete steps leading up to the house itself. This part of the estate had been better cared for than the rest. On either side of the wide, shallow stairs were manicured bushes showing just the slightest shagginess. Beyond them was a sloping, well-watered lawn. As she reached the last step, she took in the smooth concrete walkways that swirled left and right to follow the contours of a generous free-form swimming pool. The water looked turquoise in the morning light, and revealed partially submerged boulders before it took a turn inside the house to flow under a glass panel that delineated one wall of the foyer.

  The house itself was stunning too, its flat roof, glass walls, and box shapes seeming to grow out of the low-lying, granite-studded hills surrounding it. Following the curve of the pool, Téa passed tall fan palms and mounds of feathery grasses. At the front door, she turned, catching the breathtaking view that showed the distant and dramatic barren mountain slopes across the valley floor.

  “Already?” Johnny’s voice said.

  Téa jumped, then spun to confront him. He’d come from another direction, around the side of the house. One hand gripped a Starbucks cardboard cup carrier.

  “You’re early,” he remarked.

  “I’m always early,” she murmured, disappointment piercing her again. Not over the lost design job this time, but over losing him, or her contact with him, anyway. He was every inch the OOD—Object of Desire—that Rachele had once called him, and that based on his voice alone.

  Now—in the flesh and in soft-washed khakis and a white silk T-shirt—he was STWSADOI personified. Sex the Way She’d Always Dreamed of It.

  “The quintessential good girl, aren’t you,” Johnny said, plucking a cup from the carrier and holding it out.

  She was forced to close her fingers over it. “Thank you. I, well, I…”

  A redwood trellis above them created diamond-shaped patches of shade, and Johnny leaned against one of its supports to sip from his own coffee. “We’ve got to do something about that.”

  But there wasn’t going to be any “we,” she knew, because this property had once belonged to Giovanni Martelli, a man the Carusos were rumored to have killed in retaliation for her father’s murder.

  “Listen, Johnny. There’s something I should have told you last night…” He was digging in a brown bag centered on the carrier and she let her voice die out as she stared at the shock of golden hair falling over his forehead. Last night she’d been half-asleep during the first moments of the call. Then, later, when she should have told him she couldn’t take the job, she hadn’t wanted to.

  She’d wanted to see him one more time. One last time. That perfect hair, that rangy yet elegant body, those long, strong fingers that had touched her face and cupped her cheek, the mouth that had made her want to strip off her clothes and her common sense to let all her badness out.

  Her chest rose on a deep breath, and then she forced open her mouth again. “Johnny, the fact is, I can’t—”

  He pushed a morsel of something from the bag between her lips.

  “—mmf.” The taste of buttermilk and cinnamon melted against her tongue, derailing her train of thought. It was good. It was so good. She swallowed, the sweetness conga-dancing like a train of wanton women through her system. “What is that?”

  “Cinnamon scone.” He pinched off another piece and held it out to her.

  “No.” She stumbled back, then quickly righted herself, aware of the pool just behind her. “Thank you, but no. I don’t eat sugar.”

  “No sugar?”

  As little as possible.” Téa brushed at her tan dress, a bias-cut sheath with a flaring skirt that fell just below her knees, to make sure crumbs weren’t clinging. No sense in setting up an opportunity for a traitorous wet fingertip to go looking for them later.

  Johnny was staring at her, golden eyebrows raised, still holding the piece of scone between his fingers.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I had no idea it was this bad,” he said, frowning.

  “This bad? This bad how?” She wanted to step back again, but there was that pool and she wasn’t going to sabotage her professional image this time by falling into it. “What?”

  He seemed to shrug off the thought. “Never mind.”

  Oh, yeah, as if she could let it go now. “Tell me. What? What’s bad?”

  “This is more than a typical good-girl thing, Téa. This is some serious self-denial.”

  She made a face at him and his diagnosis. “Oh, come on. It’s watching my weight.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s more. You don’t allow yourself any of the sweet things in life. Now why is that?”

  He had stepped closer to her. Uncomfortably close. Hadn’t he?

  Because she could see the gray pinwheels in his blue eyes and the way the sun had tipped the very ends of his hair an almost baby-blond. When she took a quick breath, over the roasty scent of Starbucks she smelled a faint tang of chlorine. “You’ve been swimming.”

  “Thirty laps in the hotel pool. But you’re avoiding the question.”

  Because she should be avoiding him, and avoiding thinking of his long body stroking through the water, shoulders rearing up, hair slicked back to expose all the masculine angles of his face.

  I’d like to back you into that pool and dive in after. Right here, right now. Both of us wet. You getting wetter.

  At that imaginary Johnny-voice in her head, her gaze jumped to his face. He was looking down at her, his expression bemused. “What are you thinking now?” he asked.

  Not what he was really thinking, was it? Of course not. Blame it on the swimming. She’d had a thing for swimmers since the last summer Olympics. To be truthful, she’d had a thing for the jock Johnnys of the world since she was twelve years old and dreamed of class rings and homecoming dances to escape the reality of missing fathers and FBI raids.

  “Téa?”

  “This coffee is making me hot.” She fanned herself with her free hand.

  He lifted a brow and one corner of his mouth turned up. “Téa, Téa, Téa…”

  Just the way he was saying her name, and smiling, made her want to run screaming for safety. Could he hear her thoughts in his head? The mortification!


  “You call it coffee,” he continued, and this time she knew for sure that he moved closer. “I call it—”

  “Maybe we should go inside.” Anything to put a little distance between them. Between him, her, and that pool. Wet and getting wetter. She cleared her throat. “We can talk in the house where it’s cooler.”

  He stilled, then glanced over his shoulder at the front door. “Not yet. I can’t…let’s not go in there yet.”

  “Fine. No problem. Sure.” There was no reason for them to go inside, not when this job wasn’t going to be hers anyway. Glancing around at the beauty of the pool and then thinking of the potential to be found inside the modern-style house, disappointment sliced through her again.

  Damn her family for once more standing between her and her dreams.

  Anger went on simmer inside her, but she tried ignoring it as she faced Johnny once more. “So you know, I can’t take the job.”

  His eyes narrowed, his gaze a blue laser beam locking onto hers. “Is that right?” he said softly. “You can’t or you won’t?”

  Suppressing a little shiver, she remembered calling his money manager persona the night before boring. Now she wondered if the occupation might take more steel than she imagined. “I shouldn’t, I can’t, I won’t.” She shrugged. “It’s really all the same.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You won’t want me.”

  He smiled, making her shiver again. “Téa, you’ve got to know by now that’s not true.”

  Oh, good God. She was going hot again. Fanning her face, she tried her best to stop thinking about what he’d said and focus on what she had to say. “Bad choice of words. My family…” Shame and anger edged higher inside of her.

  “Your family—?” Johnny prompted.

  The right words wouldn’t come out. “There was a murder here,” she blurted. “Sixteen years ago.”

  “I know,” he said calmly.

  She blinked. “You do?”

  He nodded. “The realtor told me before I bought the place. But you didn’t know?”

  He was laser-beamed back onto her again. “No. Not until I saw the blueprints Cal brought over and the name on one of the sets. Giovanni Martelli.” The family enemy. The family victim. Both, according to rumor.

  Johnny nodded again.

  “It doesn’t bother you?” Téa asked.

  “Not really.” His face was smooth, his expression unreadable. “I’m a live-in-the-present, look-forward-to-the-future kind of man.”

  “That’s smart.” Why couldn’t she live like that? To some extent she tried, it was why she’d refused to move away from Palm Springs, but there were always those whispers following behind her. Those sticky webs reaching out to draw her back to the shadowy world where her grandfather lived.

  “It bothers you, though,” he said. “The murder.”

  “No.” If Giovanni Martelli had really whacked her father, wasn’t it right that he was dead too? “Yes!” Because being a daughter of the mob didn’t necessarily mean she believed in the mob brand of justice. But this ready confusion between right and wrong was just another of the reasons she couldn’t live amongst her family again.

  Johnny was just looking at her, cool and collected and so handsome that she hated having to tell him the truth.

  But she did have to tell him…some of it.

  “The thing is, Johnny, rumors are that the man was killed on orders from a member of my family.” Heat rushed to her face, shame and another sickening wave of anger that she was forced to make such a confession.

  “Téa—”

  “You don’t understand.” She gestured wildly with her hand, arcing a spray of coffee onto the pavement. He couldn’t understand or he wouldn’t be wearing that neutral expression. No man could understand what growing up with a father in the crime business was like. “The Mafia isn’t just the stuff of Scorcese movies and Godfather books. My grandfather heads up California’s most notorious crime family, Johnny. The Carusos are mobbed up.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “But what does that have to do with you? Is your business—”

  “No!” Her arm made another wild gesture, splashing more coffee. “My business has never been anything less than legitimate. You have my word on that.”

  “So then what does the Mafia have to do with us?” he asked, plucking her coffee from her hand and setting both cups and carton on the ground at his feet. He straightened and shoved his hands in his pockets, looking in control and unperturbed.

  “With me working on the house, you mean?”

  “It’s just a house, Téa. My house now.”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “But then what’s the problem?”

  Her shame of their criminal activities was the problem. Her embarrassment. And her anger. It was beginning to bubble over the edges now.

  “If you want the job, Téa, and you said you did, then why are you turning your back on the opportunity? Life’s a lot sweeter if you live it the way you want.”

  Why did his voice sound like the devil’s in her ear? But he was right, of course. There was no real reason to refuse if it didn’t bother the client.

  Though wasn’t working on the house where the man purported to have killed her father once lived weird?

  No weirder than her father’s family having then killed him.

  She put her hand to her head, trying to clear her thoughts, trying to tamp down the past that seemed to be rearing its ugly head so often lately.

  “Why would you deny yourself something you really want to do?” Johnny asked softly.

  He was talking about self-denial again. But it wasn’t that. It was bargains she’d made between herself, her conscience, and God. Deals to make up for all the other things she’d done.

  But didn’t she deserve to have something for herself? And couldn’t she, like Johnny, be a live-in-the-present, look-forward-to-the-future kind of person? Doing this design job was that chance for success she’d been waiting for.

  It was also her chance to remake the Caruso name. And maybe—just maybe—it was even more fitting to attempt that here.

  Coming to the swiftest decision of her life, she held out her hand, palm up.

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Keys,” she said. “It’s time we go inside.”

  He reached slowly into his pocket. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is.”

  The lock turned easily. She led Johnny across the threshold, never once looking back.

  “If I believed in wishes anymore, this would fulfill every one of them,” Téa declared, taking yet another tour between the kitchen and living room.

  Johnny followed, as grateful for her final decision to be his designer as he was for her enthusiasm about the house. With her waxing on about the “simple lines flowing from one room to the next,” and the glass walls that “brought the indoors out and the outdoors in,” he hoped she wouldn’t notice the tension that had stretched his nerves and tightened his muscles the instant he’d crossed the threshold. At any moment he expected this first time in the house to force another flashback on him.

  Keeping his attention honed on Téa, he watched her turn a circle, the skirt of her dress rising to show off her legs. The sight was enough to tease him with thoughts of her incredible ass, just a few feet higher up. God, he wished she’d stop with the old-maid clothes. Something a little shorter, something a little tighter, and he wouldn’t be able to experience a thing beyond this mine-all-mine lust she seemed to bring out in him.

  She was chattering again, but she’d moved from the middle of the room toward the opening that led to the bedrooms. The dim hallway beyond snagged his attention, and he peered in the direction of where he’d once slept.

  “I studied the blueprints you gave me,” she was saying, and now her voice warred with the heavy backbeat of the Beastie Boys’ song, “Fight for Your Right to Party,” that was playing in his memory. “The original architecture called for just the L-shaped main house arra
nged around the patio-pool courtyard. The golf course and the lagoon were put in by…by the next owner.”

  The next owner. She meant Giovanni Martelli. The Beastie Boys played louder, never content as quiet background music. The golf course had been playable the summer Johnny had come to visit, he remembered, and the lagoon walls constructed though waiting for water when he’d left.

  His palms began to sweat, and he focused on Téa in desperation as she moved to the windows opposite the glass walls that looked onto the pool. “The guest bungalows were built by the second-to-the-last owners, Michigan snowbirds, for the visiting families of their adult children.”

  The guest bungalows. Okay, the guest bungalows. He could think of them, concentrate on them. “Cal is moving into one of those today,” Johnny told Téa.

  She glanced at him over her shoulder. “He is? Already? I thought I’d get a chance to—”

  “We ordered the bare minimum furnishings to be delivered. Temporary stuff that we’ll dispense with once the replacements you order arrive. But we need a place to work and to sleep and hotel rooms get old, fast.”

  And he had to face the nightmares if he was ever going to make it through the nights.

  Nodding, Téa wandered away again, in the opposite direction of his old bedroom. Breathing easier, Johnny followed behind, the Beastie Boys sounding fainter in his head.

  “This part of the house is fairly recent construction as well. The Michigan couple wanted a master suite,” she said, stepping through the doorway.

  Only to make an abrupt stop. He plowed into her, his chest against her shoulder blades, his groin pressed to that glorious swell she tried so hard to hide. His hands palmed her shoulders to steady her. Then, just to make things even, he started to swell too.

  And with that, the Beastie Boys put down their instruments and went off to find their own women. This is why he needed Téa, Johnny thought. Somehow she tamed the forces eating away at him, and redirected their malevolent energy into something more earthy, pleasant, present.

  Téa glanced back at him. “There’s furniture in here.”

  So there was, utilitarian stuff that he wouldn’t be sorry to see go when the time came. “Thanks to Cal, I guess. I ordered a bed, a recliner, a big-screen TV, and a desk. All present and accounted for. They promised to deliver early.” Someone had even made up his king-size bed, complete with a sleek gold comforter. Probably the housekeeping team Cal had arranged to clean the house and the bungalows before their move-in today.