An Offer He Can't Refuse Read online

  Eve smiled. “Let’s tell her we’ll kidnap her and take her to Grandpa’s party.”

  Téa clunked her smoothie onto the table beside her. She should have known her sisters wouldn’t leave that issue alone forever, especially after she’d rebuffed Cosimo’s “invitation” a few nights before. “No—”

  “Who’s that?” Joey suddenly said, shooting up straight in her chair. “That man over there with the silver hair?”

  Téa glanced back. The man with the broken nose was across the pool, drying his chest with a towel. He caught Téa’s gaze and gave her another little nod of recognition. “A guest. He’s been here about a week, I think.” Nervous tingles were running up her back again. “Why?”

  Joey leaned back in her chaise. “A week? I doubt he’s another Fed, then. The rumors about Nonno’s impending retirement aren’t that old. And with a nose like that…he doesn’t have a chance of blending in like those other rat-faced bastards try to do.”

  “I take it those are the rats you’re planning to take your target practice on?” Eve asked.

  “Shh!” Téa said. “Geez. Can’t you guys keep it down?”

  Joey set her jaw. “I’m ready to tell the world what I think about the Federal Bureau of Ignoramuses. A thug, paid for by yours and mine tax dollars, tried shaking me down in Starbucks today.”

  “What?” Alarm stiffened Téa’s spine. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was picking up a latte this morning at my usual Starbucks, at my usual time. I gave my name, and when the barista called out that my drink was ready, a man picked it up before I could. Then he showed me federal ID and let me know that our friends in black have their eyes on us, now that the family leadership is in flux.”

  Sighing, Eve shook her head. “It’s to be expected.”

  Joey’s eyes went round. “It’s to be ‘expected’? It’s to be rejected. We put up with enough hassles after Dad disappeared.”

  Enough hassles was an understatement, that was certain. They’d been followed, questioned, and followed some more. For three little princesses bewildered by their missing king, it had been cruel.

  Téa’s stomach clenched, remembering how quickly she’d gone from feeling beautiful in her father’s eyes to seeing herself as the FBI must have—as a self-important lump of preadolescence. Just like that, an all-too-familiar sense of chaos began closing in on her. This was what happened, she reminded herself, when she let her mob ties pull tight. Taking deep breaths of the warm, perfumed air, she resisted the frightening sense of disorder, focusing only on the beautiful surroundings.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to stay poolside at the spa forever? Wouldn’t it be nice to be enclosed in a jewel box of emerald grass and turquoise water for all time? No wonder her mother was so content here.

  But this wasn’t her safe place. There wasn’t one, she knew that.

  Her cell phone rang, and with her mind preoccupied, she reached for it, flipped it open, and brought it to her ear without looking at the caller’s ID. “Hello?”

  “I was hoping I would see you today,” Johnny said.

  Flushed and wet and sprawled across the bed.

  But those were her thoughts, in her voice, that she heard this time in her head. “I…I’ve been working on the designs for your house at my office.”

  Joey let out another of her unladylike snorts.

  “I tried calling you last night,” he said. “And this morning.”

  “Oh. Well.” She’d turned off her home phone last night and only powered on her cell phone an hour ago. “Sorry.”

  “I think that’s my line.” He paused. “We need to talk.”

  Oh, God. Talk? Why did they have to talk? What possessed the man to want to rehash something that had made her look—and sound—so disheveled and disordered? She didn’t need to hear him say it was a mistake, she knew that already.

  “Téa?”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “You wouldn’t be hiding from me, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Because you sure as hell surprised me with what you are hiding beneath those librarian dresses and Iron Maiden br—”

  “Johnny.” He was doing it again, making her all flushed and damp and disturbed. “Does this phone call have a point?”

  He sighed again. “The point I want to make involves a person-to-person visit. When will you be by again?”

  Téa hesitated. “Maybe…maybe not for some time. I’ve been thinking of giving Rachele, my assistant, a bit more responsibility. She’ll be the one you’ll be seeing at the house.”

  On the lounge chair opposite, Joey was flapping her elbows and clucking like a silent pollo. Téa pretended not to notice.

  “Well. Hmm. That might be a problem. I have something of yours here.”

  She froze. Something of hers? What? Had she left a piece of clothing behind? But no, while her bra had been pushed up and her panties pushed down, her dress half-opened like a wicked, impassioned woman’s, she’d been able to stumble to his front door with everything intact. She’d even remembered to scoop up her shoes.

  “It’s a little black bag.”

  Téa squeezed the phone so tight she heard the plastic snap. The makeup bag. The Loanshark book. Oh God. Oh God. He’d made her so muddled she’d run out of his house and left the Loanshark book behind.

  She’d been on the hunt for it when he’d opened his eyes and then she’d been lost.

  And lost all sense. And sense of self-preservation.

  “I need to get that,” she said quickly, her voice hoarse. “As soon as it’s convenient.”

  “How about six o’clock tonight?” he suggested, his voice as soft as hers had been rough. “I’ve found something else you might like to see too.”

  And though he sounded like the devil again, Téa didn’t flinch. She’d put her feet on the road to hell a long, long time ago.

  Twenty-one

  “The Girl from Ipanema”

  Stan Getz/Joäo Gilberto

  Getz/Gilberto (1963)

  Dusk was overtaking day as Téa climbed the steps toward the deck surrounding Johnny Magee’s pool. At the sound of splashing, she hesitated, then forced herself forward. That he was swimming—with or without swim trunks—didn’t matter. The Loanshark book mattered. She was going to get it and get out.

  But it wasn’t Johnny frolicking in the pool. Téa stared at the two twined figures outlined by the greenish glow of the pool light. “Rachele? Cal?”

  The pair broke apart. “Oh, hi, boss,” Rachele said. She swiped her bangs from her eyes. “You remember Cal.”

  The man sketched a wave.

  “Of course I remember Cal,” Téa said. “I didn’t realize the two of you were, uh, spending time together.” A niggle of uneasiness twisted in her belly as she wondered if Rachele’s father had a clue either. But the younger woman was swishing through the water toward Téa, wearing a black bikini and such a wide smile that she didn’t have the heart to mention it.

  “We’re playing lookout for Johnny,” Rachele said. Instead of toying with one of her many piercings, her fingers reached up to touch a plumeria blossom poked in her wet purple hair. “He asked us to send you in the right direction.”

  “I know my way into the house.”

  Rachele’s smile widened. “He’s not in the house. You’re supposed to follow the path to the guest bungalows and then cross through the golf course. You’ll see where to go from there. He has a surprise for you.”

  The uneasiness in Téa’s stomach coiled tighter. “I’m only here to retrieve something I left behind. Maybe you could go get it from him for me.”

  “He wants you.”

  “No, he doesn’t!” Téa cleared her throat. “I mean, there’s no reason for me to disturb him.”

  “He’s waiting for you,” Rachele said, then ended the conversation by executing a porpoise dive to the bottom of the pool. In the next instant, Cal was jerked beneath the surface of the water. The couple became a ta
ngle of limbs and young love.

  Obviously dismissed and oddly depressed, Téa sighed and headed off as directed. Leaving behind the desert setting of the main house, she walked beyond the guest bungalows and through the golf course toward the green overgrowth that might have been planned as a lush desert oasis but was now an untamed jungle of palms, bushes, and vines. Though neglected, it obviously still received its fair share of the life-giving underground water table that had brought green and golf to the desert.

  Rachele’s “you’ll see where to go” became obvious as Téa spied a burning tiki torch at the far edge of Johnny’s Hole 3. The oily scent of the burning citronella beckoned her onto a narrow path cut through the morass of plant life. She followed stepping stones buried in the damp soil and came across another tiki torch, and then another, and then the path opened onto a lone, three-sided structure surrounded by vines and palms and more tiki torches. A nearby pile of plywood sheets explained the absence of a fourth wall.

  Inside the one-room building, illuminated by a camping lantern, was Johnny, lounging on a wicker love seat with his feet propped on a matching wide wicker ottoman. He spread his arms to indicate the 20 × 20 enclosure. “Look what I found,” he said.

  That tiki room they’d heard about at the tennis party, of course. Now that she’d found Johnny, she should just demand her makeup bag and be on her way, but despite her lingering embarrassment, curiosity compelled her to walk inside. She set down her briefcase, then slowly spun to take it all in. The linoleum floor was a natural moss green and the interior walls were covered by simple bamboo screening material accented by fishing nets dotted with blown-glass floats. Here and there hung large framed travel posters for Hawaii and Polynesia. Vintage posters, she recognized right away, and probably worth a bundle.

  Besides the love seat and the ottoman, there was an awe-inspiring set of furniture—bar and bar stools—that appeared to be hand-carved. Koa wood, Téa guessed, depicting a squat figure with the bent knees and ET-sized head that was typically tiki. The same little glowering gargoyle was cut into the face of the bar and he also appeared to be holding up the polished seats of the round stools.

  Téa drew closer, squinting to get a better look at the pieces in the dim lantern light. Were they ugly or beautiful? “I can’t decide if I’m horrified or fascinated,” she said.

  “Take a look below his waistline and let me know,” Johnny replied, rising from the love seat.

  Téa glanced over at him, distracted by the movement. In bare feet, putty colored cotton trousers, and a half-buttoned white linen shirt, he looked calm and casual.

  Her pulse jumped and she jerked her gaze away from him and back to the tiki man. Below his waist, Johnny had said. She lowered her eyes. “Huuh.” The startled sound escaped her lips as she stared at the carvings.

  “So what do you think?” Johnny asked from close behind her.

  Téa swallowed. “I can’t imagine what Tiki-Man is looking so grim about.” Because Tiki-Man was hung. In intricately carved detail, he was well-hung.

  Johnny laughed, then reached past her for two cocktail glasses sitting beside a glass pitcher on top of the bar. His hands stalled as in the distance there was an exuberant male whoop, followed by a flurry of giggles and running feet.

  “You can’t catch me!” Téa heard Rachele shriek in laughing excitement.

  “Just you wait,” Cal shouted back.

  Johnny cocked his head, a grin tugging at his lips. “Sounds like we’re all on the hunt tonight.”

  Téa froze. The hunt? What did he mean by that?

  He picked up both drinks and nudged one into her hand, then tapped the rim of his glass against hers. “To—?”

  Apprehension broke out like goose bumps all over her skin as she stared into the fruity scented liquid. “I shouldn’t stay for a drink.” The hunt, he’d said. Had he really said the hunt?

  A chill ran over her again. When it came right down to it, she was alone in the dark night with a virtual stranger. A stranger she’d had sex with, but still, a man she didn’t know at all well. It was a dangerous situation. And she’d vowed at twelve to stay away from those for the rest of her life.

  She cleared her throat. “I came to get my bag and then I’ll get out of your way.”

  “I already tucked it into your briefcase,” he said, gesturing over her shoulder. “You have a hot date tonight?”

  With her guilty conscience and her bitter regrets. “Well, I, um—”

  “Is that why you did a world-record dash out of my bed yesterday? You’re involved with someone?”

  Women the globe over knew to utter this little white lie when necessary. It’s how you got out of lunching with the nice but nerdy engineer behind you in the DMV line or from having coffee with the ex-brother-in-law of your manicurist’s best friend. “Are you?” Téa asked him instead.

  Johnny raised a brow, and in the lantern light she saw that ghost of a grin curve the edges of his mouth again. “If I was married, don’t you suppose you’d be dealing, at least some of the time, with my wife?”

  She looked him straight in the eye and told the absolute truth. “My grandfather runs a multi-million-dollar food company, but is also reputed to be the leading California crime boss. When I was three, my father brought home another daughter for my mother to raise. Another daughter, just a few months younger than me, whom he’d fathered with his longtime mistress. Not many years after that, he disappeared one day and never came back. So the truth is, Johnny, when it comes to men I don’t suppose anything.”

  And she’d learned not to give them her heart.

  Her mouth dried out by the long-winded answer, she lifted her glass and took a bracing swallow. Then choked. Coughed. Choked some more.

  Johnny clapped her on the back as she fought the tears in her eyes. “What is this?” she managed to get out, though it was more wheeze than question. It had smelled like fruit juice.

  “A zombie mai tai. I found the recipe in the bar along with some sixteen-year-old rum.” He picked up the pitcher and topped off her glass.

  Whatever it was in the drink that had made her eyes water was blazing a molten path to her stomach. Johnny clinked their rims again, and when he took a swallow, she took a cautious one too, just to make sure it was as lethal as she remembered.

  The second sip, however, went down sweet and smooth.

  She stared into the glass, wondering if he’d somehow managed to detoxify the concoction, and then took another test swallow.

  “So, to answer your question more directly,” Johnny said, refilling her glass again. “I’m not married.”

  Téa licked an errant drip off her bottom lip. “Divorced?” Not that she cared or anything, him being a stranger and all.

  Johnny smiled at her. “Never married.”

  “Well. Fine. That’s…uh, fine.” How had this conversation gotten started anyhow? She sipped at her mai tai and enjoyed another warm rush. “But still, I should be going.”

  “Not so soon,” he said, reaching a long arm over the bar. The sound of a guitar and a soft crooning voice washed into the room. A man sang in Portuguese and then the song was taken up by a woman in English. “The Girl from Ipanema.”

  Téa peered over the bar, saw the sleek boombox that was belting out the mood music, then looked back at Johnny. She might not quite know why this was, but she couldn’t pretend not to know what this was. “I hate to break it to you, but the music is just about as subtle as Tiki Man’s extralarge appendage.”

  He all-out grinned, then took her glass from her hand and placed both cocktails on top of the bar. “I’m getting desperate. You keep talking about leaving and before you go I want a dance. One dance.”

  The rum drink was making her rummy, or runny maybe, because looking at him she couldn’t muster the steel it would take to walk away. Not when he was gazing down at her with that white smile, not when she could see a slice of his golden skin and hard chest through his half-open shirt.

  The back of her neck
was hot and she swore she could feel her hair starting to wave in the new, strange humidity of this desert night.

  No, she told herself. No. But her mouth didn’t get the message. “You don’t really dance, do you?”

  He gathered her close, but not too close. One hand was at the curve of her waist, the other held her fingers against his chest. His naked chest. “My mother thought every young man should have the opportunity to learn the steps and after that we were on our own. In seventh grade, I was forced to take etiquette and dancing from ninety-year-old Mr. Benjamin.” Johnny’s hips started to sway, and his steps led her feet into a gentle samba rhythm.

  To make things even more unfair, a saxophone was playing.

  His breath smelled like pineapple juice as he pressed his smooth-shaven cheek against hers. She closed her eyes because that mai tai melt was affecting her resistance, her muscles, her sense of self-preservation.

  Remember Téa, she thought, he’s a stranger. You really don’t know this man.

  “And speaking of my family—” he murmured.

  Had they been? She had to snuggle closer to hear him. “Yes?”

  “I visited my brother yesterday. He does business in the area.”

  “Hmm.” Johnny could really dance. With just the slightest pressure of his knee between hers, he was shifting their positions, moving them farther from the bar and closer to the love seat.

  “He was recently married. He mentioned that his wife knows you and your sisters.”

  “Really?” She blinked up at him, and the reflection of the lantern light in his eyes dazzled her. She stumbled a little, and he squeezed her waist to help steady her.

  “His wife is Felicity Charm.”

  “Really?” Téa remembered Felicity well from her school years at Our Lady of Poverty. The other woman was now a star on GetTV. “I always liked her.”

  One of Johnny’s dimples deepened. “Everybody does.”

  And she’d married Johnny’s brother. Wow. Maybe he wasn’t such a stranger after all. The idea made her smile. “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”