An Offer He Can't Refuse Page 8

  Téa watched him in growing dismay. Eve would know what to do now, she thought. Eve would know how to pretend that kiss had never happened and bring the conversation back around to business. And then, as if Téa had the power to wish people into her presence, Eve’s classic Mercedes pulled up to the curb and both her sisters hurried out of the car.

  “What’s going on?” Joey demanded as she slammed the passenger door shut with a violent clang, her gaze leaping from flowers, to man, to Téa’s hand wrapped in the bloodstained handkerchief.

  Téa came to her feet. “Nothing. I had a little accident, that’s all. And Mr. Magee happened to be here and, uh, lent his help.”

  Joey shot him another suspicious glance. “Mr. Magee? Who’s he?”

  Never let it be said that her little sister was one to pussyfoot around.

  “A potential client, Joe,” Téa said, a soft warning in her voice. And then, with her sisters’ presence lending her an Eve-type talent in man-handling and also some of Joey’s own brash brand of bravado, she glanced over at Johnny and took a chance. “A client who, I think, was just about to tell me he’s giving me the job.”

  She held her breath.

  His gaze took her in, making her suddenly aware again of her unfettered hair, that unfastened button, the swollen feeling of her lips. The woman that he’d made her.

  He looked up at the sky, then back at her. “You really want the job?”

  She firmed her voice. “I really want the job.”

  “Then it’s a done deal now, isn’t it?” he finally said.

  She might have wished he sounded happier about it, but she was glad enough for both of them. Unwilling to let a moment pass without cementing the deal, she reached out her uninjured palm to shake his. “It will be my pleasure.”

  Both of ours, Contessa, I’ll make sure of that, too.

  The make-believe Johnny-voice in her mind didn’t sound any happier than it had a moment before. She frowned, trying to shake the words from her head as he dropped her hand like a hot potato and reached into his slacks pocket.

  “Excuse me,” he said, drawing out a cell phone. “I have to take this call.”

  Eve, Joey, and Téa watched in silence as he walked off to answer the phone. Then Eve looked over at Téa, eyebrows arching above the frames of her black-lensed sunglasses.

  “Client?” she asked, skepticism lacing her voice.

  “Client.”

  “Hottie,” Joey declared. “Just your type, too.”

  “I don’t have a type,” she protested. At least not one that she’d ever confessed to her sisters.

  “Any guy who can muss you up like that is your type, Téa.”

  She was spared from having to answer by Johnny striding back. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll return this afternoon to…finalize things. Ladies.” He saluted the three of them with his forefinger to his forehead and started off, but then turned back. His gaze swept the ground and Téa’s cut hand, then lifted to meet hers.

  “We’ll settle other things later, too,” he told her, and then he was gone.

  “What other things?” Eve questioned, brows once again shooting northward.

  Téa ignored her, turning to see Joey purse her lips and send a smacking airkiss in Johnny’s direction. That she couldn’t ignore. “Geez! Joey!”

  Not-so-innocent big brown eyes cut her way. “What? It was only because you wanted to and wouldn’t.” Then she clucked like a petite, Italian-American chicken.

  Téa sighed. “What do you want?” she asked Eve.

  “To take you to coffee.” When her sister smiled like that, the angels had to be singing in heaven.

  Téa was not so soft a touch. At least not with the promise of Johnny returning in just a few hours. “Can’t. Have to work. Big job, big important job to discuss this afternoon, so now I have to go home and change.” She thought of something else that had to be done as well. “And you should be sure to tell Cosimo I don’t have time for coffee or an interest in any more flowers, either. Sending gifts or my sisters is not going to work on me.”

  Eve studied her face, and then, to Téa’s everlasting surprise, shrugged her shoulders. “All right, then.”

  Joey looked at her older sister as if she’d grown another head. “What? Wait—” But Eve was already dragging her away by the simple, sisterly expedient of grabbing her shirtsleeve and towing her to the Mercedes.

  Pleasantly surprised by the quick capitulation, Téa watched after them, smiling. That had gone remarkably well. Then she turned toward her office, only to face the ruined apricot roses strewn across the concrete. Her smile died and the warm October morning turned chilly.

  Or maybe things had gone too well. In her experience, nothing came without some kind of price.

  Nine

  “It Had to Be You”

  Doris Day

  I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951)

  Riding in the passenger seat of her father’s Ford F-150, Rachele Cirigliano might as well have been on her way to a Brownie Scout meeting or a tap dance lesson. Her father’s meaty hands were in their usual ten and two position, the radio was tuned to Rush, and a quartet of empty 7-Eleven disposable coffee cups bounced around her feet like Mexican jumping beans every time the truck hit a bump on Ramon Road.

  Except Rachele wasn’t six years old and dressed in a scratchy tan dress or toe-squeezing patent leather dancing shoes. She was twenty-one, and the only uncomfortable thing she was wearing were the several sticky coats of vampire-black mascara and the tiny diamond in the new piercing in her left nostril.

  “Thanks again for the lift, Papa. My car should be fixed by four, the mechanic said. Téa will take me there to pick it up.”

  Her father grunted in acknowledgment without glancing over at her. He never looked at her, not as far as Rachele could tell. Her mother had died when she was four years old and it was probably over-the-top romantic of her, but she figured it hurt her father too much to see the reflection of that love he’d lost in Rachele’s face.

  Not that her mother had sported eleven piercings and hair freshly colored by a package of Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid.

  Her boss, Téa, had once gently mentioned that the body and hair adornment might be Rachele’s shout for her father’s attention. Not hardly. She had her father’s attention, all right. She had his overprotection.

  But because he never looked at her, in his mind she’d never grown up, and she didn’t have the guts to set him straight.

  So she wasn’t surprised that when he pulled in front of the Inner Life design office he jumped out of the truck to walk her inside. He’d make sure there were no strangers lurking in the nonexistent noon shadows and he’d do a visual sweep to make certain all was well in the reception area, too. Then he’d talk a few minutes with Téa to nail down the exact minute he should expect his only daughter home.

  This evening, Rachele would make an antipasto while he grilled steaks. After dinner, she would fold the clothes she’d put in the dryer that morning, then watch TV while turning the pages of a Jane magazine. Just another night waiting for whatever force it was going to take to rocket her from her dutiful-Italian-daughter place on the couch and into her own adult life.

  “Thank you, Papa,” she murmured as he held the office door open for her. Téa looked up from the stack of mail she was sifting through on the receptionist’s desk and winced.

  Rachele didn’t know if it was sympathy for the sore pierced nose or reaction to the muddy-violet hair color. Considering that Téa’s personal style icon appeared to be none other than vanilla-flavored First Lady Laura Bush, Rachele didn’t let the maybe-criticism bother her.

  “What’s up, boss?” she asked instead, tossing her neon backpack onto the padded secretary’s chair.

  “Hey, Rachele. Good afternoon, Beppe.” Téa moved around the desk to double-kiss Rachele’s dad’s cheeks. Then she stepped back, beaming at them both. “Guess what? Johnny Magee said yes.”

  “No kidding?” Rachele shrieked, jumping
toward her boss to deliver a boisterous embrace. “Make-me-throb gave us the job?”

  “Hush, figlia mia!” Her father said, his voice shocked.

  Téa laughed, her hands already at work to undo Rachele’s hug damage, straightening her clothing from mussed to its usual neat dowdiness. “Don’t try to rein her in, Beppe. You know it’s an impossible task.”

  Her father knew no such thing—

  “She’s a nice girl,” he said, frowning. “And she needs to act like one.”

  —see?

  “Of course she’s a nice girl,” Téa assured him. “Nothing to worry about there.”

  Ignored by the other two as if she’d left the room, Rachele rolled her eyes. Here she stood, of legal age, wearing outrageous hair coloring, amethyst lipstick, and more stud jewelry than some rock bands, and her nearest and dearest were convinced this particular “nice girl” would never do anything to cause them concern.

  It made her want to throw off her clothes and dance naked on the desktop. It made her want to embark on a new career path at some place like Hooters. It made her want to run away with a completely unsuitable man.

  Which wouldn’t be the least bit difficult, come to think of it. Her father considered any man over the age of fifteen and under the age of sixty-two unsuitable. And if they were below or above that range, yet not of Italian descent—fuhgeddaboutit.

  But as she trudged toward her chair, she dismissed the wild ideas. Watching her watusi in her birthday suit would put her father into cardiac arrest, and unlike Téa—who spent a fortune on minimizing brassieres—she didn’t have the rack for titty-bar work. As for finding some man to break her out of her rut…

  Maybe her father’s warnings regarding the hairier sex had sunk in over the years or maybe she was waiting for that love-of-a-lifetime feeling she was certain her parents had shared. Whatever the reason, she’d never yet been pricked by Cupid’s arrow.

  Settling behind her desk, she half-listened to the drone of her father’s conversation with Téa.

  How was her mother?

  Fine.

  No, really. How was her mother?

  Really. Fine.

  The conversation went like this every time the other two met as well. Her father had been Salvatore Caruso’s best friend, and he still worried about Sal’s widow, Rachele knew. As a matter of fact, her papa worried a lot, seeing bogeymen behind every bush. Sometimes she wondered if it was more than that, though. Sometimes she wondered if his concern for Bianca Caruso was a different kind of concern altogether…but no. Her father was as saintly in thought and deed as Rachele wished she wasn’t.

  Téa drew him into her adjoining office to discuss an upcoming project. Though mostly retired from a landscaping and rockwork business, her father still enjoyed looking at blueprints and home designs. So Rachele was alone in the reception area when the front door half-opened.

  One boat-sized black hightop stepped inside. Rachele caught a glimpse of a classic Beatles flop of dark hair.

  Both retreated.

  Bemused, she watched the door open again and two big feet enter this time. Then followed a lanky body of a male in his mid-twenties. He had a laptop case strapped across his chest, that shaggy mass of hair, a pair of cool, thick-framed glasses, and the shyest, sweetest grin she’d ever seen in her life.

  Ouch. A little nick, right over her heart, caught her by complete surprise. Then liquid fuel ignited somewhere inside her, propelling her in one big whoosh, right out of her comfort zone. Gripping the edge of the desk, she could only hold on for the ride and stare at the man who, in the space of a step, a heartbeat, a half-drawn breath, had just rocked her world.

  “I had to doublecheck the address,” he explained, with a self-deprecating shrug. “I have a lousy sense of direction.”

  Rachele ran a hand through her purplish hair. “You’ve found the right place,” she said over the hip-hop beat of her heart.

  He appeared pleased. “I have?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her certainty wasn’t because he carried multiple sets of rolled blueprints, Inner Life’s stock-in-trade, under one arm. It wasn’t because he’d done that doublecheck of the address. She rose from her chair, comparing her own five-five height to his—six?—feet. Perfect.

  With one hand, he worried the frayed collar of his aloha shirt. On a yellow rayon background, men lolled on a beach, watching hourglass-shaped hula girls dressed in red grass skirts and orange coconut shells. “Do we know each other?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.” He nodded, then handed over the blueprints. “Johnny was going to bring these by himself, but he was unexpectedly called back to Las Vegas.”

  “Téa will be sorry to hear that.”

  “Téa…” he seemed to be searching his memory, then he cupped his hands in a double wave. “Curvy woman, right?”

  Perhaps she should have been jealous, but there wasn’t a leer in the gesture or in his eyes, though he must possess X-ray vision to detect Téa’s measurements beneath the usual tailored body armor she wore. “Yep.”

  He nodded again, then reached into his back pocket to pull out a business card and hand it over. “Give her this too, will you? She can reach me on my cell if she needs anything.”

  Rachele looked down. Calvin Kazarsky. “Nice to meet you, Calvin. I’m Rachele Cirigliano.”

  “It’s Cal,” he corrected, and if he thought the introduction strange after her assurance that they knew each other, he didn’t comment upon it. There was a long pause, in which she could have sworn her pulse synced with his.

  “Now what?” he finally asked.

  Téa came to stand in the doorway of her office. “Now what, what? Hey, is that you, Cal?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Affirmative? Was that the cutest or what?

  “Johnny had to dash back to Vegas,” Cal continued. “He said to tell you he’ll be in touch very soon.”

  “Oh.” A strange expression—disappointment?—flitted across the boss’s face. “I understand.”

  Cal gestured toward Rachele’s desk. “I brought by the original house plans and also those of the previous renovations. Johnny thought you could use them.”

  Rachele’s father shadowed Téa in the doorway. “Who is this Johnny?” Then his gaze lasered in on the younger man and his voice went Papa Bear deep. “And who is this?”

  Rachele didn’t allow herself a hesitation. “Calvin Kazarsky, my father, Guiseppe Cirigliano. Papa, this is a client of ours.”

  Her father bustled out of Téa’s office to stand between the other man and the two young women. He was shorter than Cal, and his chest only looked more like a barrel in comparison to the younger man’s lean body. But his handshake was a white-knuckler, and Rachele was impressed that Cal didn’t cry out. Instead, he hung in there, his gaze never leaving her father’s. When their grips broke, she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “Beppe, come over here. You’ll enjoy seeing these.” Téa’s voice was excited as she spread the blueprints Cal had brought on the long table at the far end of the reception area.

  With a suspicious backward glance, he strode away, leaving Cal and Rachele gazing at each other. The younger man adjusted the strap of the laptop case over his shoulder. “Well…”

  Panic fluttered in her belly. That was a good-bye well. A have-a-nice-life well. A go back to laundry, antipasto, and nothing-more-than-the-occasional-swear-word-for-Father-Mike-to-hear-in-the-confessional well.

  Well, no way!

  Over her dead body was she going to let Cal run off. Then, thinking of her father’s strangling handshake, her stomach dipped, hoping it wouldn’t be someone else’s dead body that got between them.

  But if she wasn’t willing to let Cal out of her life so fast, how the heck to make a play with her father sharing the same carpet space? He wouldn’t be happy to hear his “nice girl” doing her best to lasso a near-stranger.

  Thinking quickly, she dug in her backpack for her cel
l phone, and quickly dialed the number on the business card, shielding the screen beneath the desktop.

  She heard a low buzz, then Cal started and reached under the tails of his shirt for the phone he must have clipped to his belt. He frowned down at the phone’s screen.

  She knew what he saw.

  IT’S ME

  Looking up, she made a point to catch his eye and nod. He frowned again, then looked back at the screen.

  She rubbed the spot of that wound right over her heart, then took a first step toward living her own grown-up life by sending another text message to him. CU @ COB?

  Translation: See you at close of business?

  He glanced up at her, then glanced back down. F2F? appeared on her screen.

  Face-to-face?

  YES

  Y MSG?

  Wasn’t it obvious why she was text-messaging him? She considered how to signal “Overprotective Italian papa bent on protecting only daughter’s virginity until menopause is standing six feet away.”

  She settled for POS, Parent Over Shoulder.

  OIC, he replied. His gaze flicked toward her father to show that oh, he saw very well indeed.

  OK? She messaged.

  Looking up into her face, he hesitated.

  She bit her bottom lip.

  He froze, his eyes narrowing, and her skin tingled from cobalt-painted toenails to silver eyebrow ring. A hot flush followed.

  Did his gaze darken? She only knew for sure that he could text message one-handed and without looking at the keypad.

  SLAP showed up on her screen.

  Sounds Like A Plan.

  Rachele couldn’t stop the smile from breaking over her face.

  “You’re sure?” he said softly.

  Her heart leaped toward her throat and seemed to expand there. “You’re not?” she said around it.

  He grinned, melting it right back down into her chest. “My friends say I’m too smart for my own good.”

  Rachele sent a warning glance in the direction of her father and placed her finger over her lips.