An Offer He Can't Refuse Read online

  “You’re scaring me,” she said. “I need to know what’s the matter. Johnny! What’s the matter?”

  He shook his head again, as if he were trying to shake off a blow.

  She’d seen him like this once before, she remembered. That first day they’d made—had sex. “Are you sick?”

  “Sick in the head, maybe.” He sucked in another breath, shook his head again. “You’re real. You’re real.”

  She knelt so she could look into his face. “Johnny, it’s Téa. I’m here, I’m real. What’s happening to you?”

  His eyes were squeezed shut. Slowly, he opened them, his fingers biting into hers. He let out another breath, this one easier. He took in another, blew it out. “I’m all right now. I’m okay.”

  She tried to move away, but he wouldn’t let go of her hands. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Flashback,” he muttered. “The mother of all flashbacks. Probably because of the body. And then those sounds. Like gunshots.”

  The pops. That other day there’d been gunshot-like sounds too. Backfires from the gardener’s truck. “Flashback to what?”

  Now he released her hands, and stared down at his own. He took in another breath, let it out. “Flashback to the night of my father’s murder.”

  She frowned. “Why—” Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. “Were you here when it happened? Oh, God, Johnny, were you here?”

  “Annual summer visit. First night. Last night, too, I guess.”

  She backed a step away from him. “You never told me.”

  He laughed, a harsh, tired sound. “As you well know, I didn’t tell you a lot of things.”

  “Tell me now.” When he hesitated, she strengthened the words. “Tell me all of it now.”

  He glanced at her, then looked back at his hands, his voice low, but clear. “My parents divorced when I was a baby. My mom remarried Phineas Magee. But every summer I’d spend a couple weeks with my real dad, Giovanni Martelli. When I was seventeen, I flew from Washington state into the Ontario Airport and my dad picked me up on his way back from Vegas. He brought me here, to this house.” A half-smile quirked the corners of his lips. “Which I thought was pretty cool, even then. Didn’t know mid-century modern from a rat’s ass, of course.”

  His dad had picked him up on his way back from Vegas. Téa latched onto that piece of information and played it over in her head. His dad had picked him up on his way back from Vegas. “And that first night…”

  “I heard the gunshots. I ran down to the garage and found my father’s car…and my father. I tried to keep him alive, Téa,” he said, his voice roughening. “He was bleeding everywhere. All that blood. All that blood…”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “Stay with me.”

  His hand covered hers. “I called for an ambulance and they took him to the hospital. He went into surgery and came out, but then he died shortly afterward.”

  A new voice cut through the shadows. Joey’s voice, cold and hard. “And you expect Téa to feel bad about that? He died as a consequence for killing our father, Johnny. Or do you prefer Gianni?”

  Johnny let go of Téa’s hand and leaped to his feet. They both swung toward Joey and took in the knot of people who’d arrived on the scene with her, presumably mustered by Rachele, who stood to one side, worrying her eyebrow ring.

  Téa’s mother, Joey, Eve, Beppe Cirigliano, and…Cosimo Caruso.

  Téa’s grandfather.

  Eighty didn’t look a day over sixty-five on him. Maybe it was his Mediterranean diet. Or good genes. Or a criminal conscience. He was upright and lean in his dinner jacket and dark slacks, his full head of silver-threaded hair brushed back from his face with its Roman nose—the masculine form of her own—and sharp, black eyes.

  He addressed his first words to Johnny, his voice soft and holding only the slightest of accents. “My son has been found?”

  “Yes,” Johnny replied, his voice and poker face at their noncommittal best. “Interred, I suppose you’d say, in the wall of the lagoon.”

  “By your father,” Joey said, taking a step forward.

  Eve caught her arm. “Stay put, little sister.”

  “Are you all right, Mom?” Téa asked, her gaze traveling from vibrating-with-emotion Joey, to the older woman who was now clutching Beppe’s wrist as if she needed support.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  Joey sent another venomous look toward Johnny. “See what you’ve done,” she said. “See what you and your father have done.”

  He flinched. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m sorry for bringing this back to all of you.”

  Téa almost laughed. It had never left them. Never left any of them.

  “You’ll get nothing from us,” Joey spit back. “Nothing.”

  Téa understood her sister’s fury. God, she’d felt it herself, hating whoever had taken her father away from them, hating her father for being the kind of man who would get taken away, hating her grandfather for his part in bringing them into this kind of life.

  But she’d never hated Giovanni Martelli, because she’d always suspected he wasn’t the one responsible. And now she was certain he wasn’t.

  My dad picked me up on his way back from Vegas. She could tell what she knew…or she could keep it to herself.

  Johnny had done her wrong. He admitted that. He had betrayed her with his lies. And leaving him with the image of his father as murderer was the perfect revenge.

  She was Caruso enough, ruthless enough, to enjoy the poetry of the payback. She’d given Johnny her body, and—though she was going to have to fight to get it back from him—her heart. He’d betrayed her and she could have her vengeance by giving him coin in kind.

  Oh, yeah, that sounded really, really right. Really bad.

  Wickedly good.

  She could link arms with her sisters right now and walk away, leaving Johnny with his pain and herself with the smug warmth of the perfect reprisal. Salvatore’s crown princess having herself a royal good time at Johnny’s expense.

  But…

  “He didn’t do it,” she heard herself say aloud. “Giovanni Martelli didn’t kill our father.”

  Johnny stared at Téa. The night was only turning more surreal. The damn party, the grisly discovery of Salvatore’s remains, the suffocating flashback, this surprise confrontation with the Caruso family.

  He wanted to disappear, go away, forget his time here and go back and accept the sweaty nightmares and the paralyzing memories because they seemed infinitely more bearable than this endless night. If only he’d never met the dark-haired, sloe-eyed contessa that could wound him with only the tragic expression she was wearing on her beautiful face.

  “Giovanni Martelli didn’t kill our father,” Téa said again.

  Wound him with a sentence. Of course his father had killed hers. Giovanni had been a murderer because Téa’s father was truly dead. Bile splashed against the sides of Johnny’s empty stomach.

  “Oh, right,” Joey scoffed. “Giovanni is innocent and you know this how?”

  Johnny heard Téa take a breath. “I know,” she continued, “because of the book.”

  His gut roiled. Not—

  “The Loanshark book?” Eve said, asking the question for him. “That book? What does it have to do with this?”

  Tension radiated from Téa’s body. Standing this close to her, he could see the way her fingers twined and tightened upon one another. “I happen—”

  Johnny grabbed her shoulders, and yanked her around to face him. “Don’t, Contessa.”

  She was ashamed of her part in that cursed thing. He couldn’t imagine why she was bringing it up now, but he wouldn’t let the shock of their finding her father’s remains lead her to make admissions that would only hurt her. His conscience couldn’t take the added weight of that too. Tears stung the back of his eyes and the bile churned inside his belly.

  “Johnny—”

  “No, Téa.”

  Impatient as usual, Joey called
out again. “Well, if somebody has something more to say, they better say it right now now.”

  It was Beppe Cirigliano, Rachele’s father, who spoke up first.

  “I killed him. God help me, it was an accident, but I killed my best friend. I killed Sal.”

  Thirty-six

  “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”

  Dean Martin

  This Time I’m Swingin’ (1960)

  Rachele rocked back as if her father had struck her with his fist. “Papa?”

  He took a step toward her, then halted. “My little girl. My Rachele. I never wanted you to know I killed Salvatore.”

  Téa’s mother, Bianca, tried to put her arm around him. “Beppe, you must not be feeling well.”

  He spun away from her touch, his lumbering movements making him look like an overwound mechanical bear. “It’s true, Bianca. I killed Sal.”

  “Beppe?” Old Mr. Caruso could have been carved from stone. His voice was hard too. Cold and hard. “Calmati. Get ahold of yourself.”

  Rachele’s father laughed. “I haven’t had ahold of myself in sixteen years.”

  Rachele crossed to her father. He didn’t know what he was saying. He must be sick. “Let me take you home, Papa. After a good night’s sleep—” She reached for his hand.

  He jerked away from her and she froze, stung by the rejection. But he’d been rejecting her for years, she reminded herself. She’d just been too immature to see it clearly.

  “It’s been eating at me all this time,” he said, looking at Téa’s mother. “I know you won’t understand, Bianca, but I thought I was helping you.”

  “By killing Sal?” she answered, her voice faint.

  Eve moved to stand beside her mother, but Joey seemed transfixed, all her earlier attitude gone. Mr. Caruso’s stiff posture gave nothing of his emotions away. Rachele felt as frozen as Johnny and Téa looked.

  “I was working on the rockwork around the lagoon,” her father said, his gaze still on Bianca. “It was getting dark and I’d sent the other laborers home, but I had cement mixed in my wheelbarrow that I wanted to use before I called it a day. Then Sal showed up. He’d been in Vegas the past week and said he’d stopped in at your house, but you and the girls were out shopping so he came here.”

  He looked down and shook his head. “You know Sal. Couldn’t stand to be alone with his own company. Always had to have some action going—somebody to talk to or something to do.”

  His head came up and he looked over at Cosimo. “Remember that, Mr. Caruso? Sal was always the life of the party. Hell, he was the party. I always loved that about him.”

  “I remember, Beppe,” Mr. Caruso said, his voice soft. “I know you loved him. So what happened that day?”

  “Night,” Beppo corrected. “It was almost night. I’d been working a lot of hours because the house seemed so empty with my Maria gone. Rachele was invited to a friend’s for dinner. There wasn’t any reason for me to hurry.” He stared off into the distance. “The house seemed so cold and empty without Maria.”

  Her mother would have been dead for about a year, Rachele thought. Taken by pancreatic cancer that had been as quick as it was deadly. Rachele’s only real memory of her mother was a white face on a white pillowcase. Pale lips, pale, chapped lips, that had smiled at Rachele even while her eyes had filled with tears. “Take care,” she’d whispered. “Take care of Papa.” And Rachele had tried to live by that promise.

  “Beppe, we know you were hurting over Maria,” Bianca said. “Sal and I both worried about you.”

  His head swung toward her and he smiled. Rachele couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smile. “You were so good to me, Bianca. To me and to Rachele. Always. It’s why I couldn’t stand what Sal was doing.”

  “What was he doing?” Cosimo Caruso asked. “What bothered you, Beppe?”

  His smile faded away. “I don’t want to say.”

  “It was a woman,” Bianca said, her voice matter-of-fact. “I always knew when there was another woman.”

  “But they didn’t mean anything to him,” Rachele’s father protested quickly. “That’s what made me so mad. He was hurting you without good reason.”

  Hurting Bianca. And that was what had bothered her father, Rachele figured out. With her mother gone, her father had found himself another woman to love. Bianca Caruso. Rachele had always suspected it was more than mere concern he felt for his best friend’s widow.

  He’d loved her sixteen years ago.

  Perhaps he loved her still. She wondered if he realized.

  “I talked to him about it that night,” her father said. “I told him he shouldn’t be so foolish. I told him maybe you’d get angry and fed up enough to file for divorce and take the girls away from him.”

  “What he’d say to that?” Téa asked. She was still standing near Johnny, but she’d put a bigger distance between them and was hugging herself.

  “He got angry. If there was one thing that Sal cared about more than a good time, it was you three little girls. When I said your mother might take you away from him, he went a little crazy. He swore at me, and when I said it again, he came after me.”

  Rachele’s father shifted his gaze to Bianca and Cosimo. “You know what a hothead he was. I was only trying to defend myself. I was standing by the wheelbarrow, stirring the cement with a hoe, when he went for me. I held the hoe across my body.” He pantomimed the scene, showing how he gripped the handle of the tool chest-high.

  “Sal ran into it and then stumbled back. He tripped over the rocks I had piled up and he fell, his head slamming against the section of the ledge I’d just finished. He was gone. It only took a few seconds for the whole thing to happen. But he died the instant his head hit. The instant. I swear that on Maria’s grave.”

  “But why didn’t you call an ambulance—or at least the police?” Téa asked.

  Rachele’s father blinked. “I couldn’t risk it. What if they didn’t believe me? Who would take care of my little girl? She didn’t have a mother, so how could I possibly put her in a position of losing her father too?”

  What? Had Rachele heard right? He’d hidden the accident because of her?

  Rachele felt the freaky numbness that had overtaken her begin to wear off, pins and needles pricking her skin and then her heart. Perhaps her father had confronted Salvatore Caruso because he’d loved Bianca, but afterward he’d kept quiet about what happened out of his concern for Rachele.

  Oh, Papa.

  “So you buried him here, Beppe,” Cosimo said. “And his car?”

  “I drove it home and put it in my garage. A few days later, I took it out to a desert wash I know about and torched it.”

  “So that’s what happened to the damned Loanshark book,” Eve murmured. “Up in flames.”

  “I felt sick when someone else got the blame,” Rachele’s father went on, looking over at Johnny. “But I didn’t know he had a son. Giovanni Martelli’s murder only made me more determined to keep my mouth shut.”

  There was a long moment of stunned quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” Beppo said again, and his shoulders bowed as he aged before Rachele’s eyes. “I’m so very sorry.”

  It was Joey who next found her voice. “What now?”

  “Now…” Cosimo Caruso inhaled a long breath. Then he looked around the small group. “Now I put some men to stand guard down here and we go back to the party. We’ve been away too long already.”

  “Back to the party?” Joey started to protest. “But—”

  The old man cut her off by holding up his hand. “We’ll deal with this tomorrow. Tonight, there’s too much at stake. We need to show happy faces. Happy, strong, united faces. Avete capito? Do you understand?”

  Rachele shivered at the steel beneath the words. This was the Mafia don in control, the CEO of crime who had ruled California for decades. Tonight they had a reprieve, some time for these new facts to sink in. But tomorrow, her father’s fate would be in the mob boss’s hands.


  Rachele moved to her father and slipped her arm through his. He didn’t pull away this time. “Papa, let me drive you home now.”

  He let her take the lead. When she stopped in front of Cosimo Caruso, her father seemed not to notice. “He’s a good man, Mr. Caruso,” Rachele said, remembering her promise to her mother and pinning the old man with her gaze. Her heart pounded and the spit in her mouth dried as she gave her voice its own edge of steel. “What happened to your son was an accident and I expect you will treat it as such.”

  The head of the California Mafia dropped his neutral expression. For an instant he looked surprised, then admiring, then—nothing again. Perhaps she’d imagined it. But he nodded his head at her. “All will be handled fairly, Rachele.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  His dark eyebrows rose. “Must you ask?”

  “Yeah, I think I must.”

  “Le donne!” he remarked, the tiniest of smiles crossing his face. “Then it’s a promise.”

  Giving him her own dignified nod, Rachele set off, keeping her father close to her side. She didn’t know exactly what would happen now. Maybe she and her father would finally talk, adult to adult. Maybe her father was going to break her heart all over again. But not because he’d never cared for her.

  Her father knew how to love. Perhaps he’d even loved too well. He’d cared enough to try to intervene in his best friend’s marriage. He’d cared enough about his best friend’s wife to stick up for her. He’d loved Rachele enough to keep a secret buried here and in his conscience for the last sixteen years.

  She had been immature.

  Before now, she hadn’t known that bad things could happen to good people. She hadn’t known that good people could do bad things in the name of love.

  Because it wasn’t simple or easy. Love wasn’t the bam-slam lightning bolt that made all things possible. After what her father had done, she couldn’t believe that anymore.

  She saw Cal in the distance and gave a little wave. He’d be there tomorrow when she needed him, she didn’t doubt that. She still believed in love; her father’s actions had proved its very real power, too.