An Offer He Can't Refuse Page 9

  He nodded, then turned toward the door.

  As it closed behind the man of her dreams, Rachele flopped back against the padded back of her desk chair, stoked with this new feeling, this unexpected infatuation, this…love.

  She’d always suspected love was going to be easy. And it was. The right guy walked through the door and bam! She went from immature and untried to a woman knowledgeable in the ways of the world and men and women.

  Her imagination played it all out. With Johnny Magee as their client, there would be plenty of opportunity to run into Cal Kazarsky. And no one—her father—would be any the wiser. A smile played over her face as she watched the future unfurl.

  “Oh my God!” Téa’s shocked exclamation startled Rachele out of her seat.

  “What? What?”

  “I just knew there’d be more problems.” Téa was hugging herself, as if the air-conditioning had suddenly gone arctic. Rachele’s father’s face was grim.

  “What? What?” she repeated, rushing toward them.

  In answer, Téa pointed a quivering fingertip at the name on the bottom of one set of blueprints. “Prepared for Giovanni Martelli,” it read.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  Apparently the house they’d agreed to redesign was once owned by Giovanni Martelli, the Mafia triggerman who reputedly had taken out Téa’s father. As quick as it had come alive, Rachele saw her promising new love die a swift, painful death.

  The wound over her heart throbbed in unrequited agony. Unless Téa took this job, Rachele would never find a way to get close to Cal Kazarsky. She would be stuck in the purgatory between girl and grown-up forever.

  Ten

  “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan”

  Bobby Darin

  Love Swings (1961)

  Johnny hadn’t been to the cemetery in sixteen years. He would have sworn he couldn’t have located it on his own, but somehow the rented Jag found its way there after his return to the Palm Springs airport.

  The “emergency” trip back to Las Vegas the day before had been nothing more than a bad case of jitters from one of the syndicate’s longtime investors. Johnny had nursed a vodka tonic at a Bellagio baccarat table, sitting beside the retired CFO of a health care conglomerate. The other man had dropped ten large bills in less than an hour, all the while bitching about the business’s change of venue.

  If the fool had a lick of sense, he wouldn’t be playing baccarat in the first place. Somewhere in heaven or hell Ian Fleming was laughing his ass off at the way his fictional spy had fueled the fantasies of thousands of James Bond-wannabes to play a game that was essentially nothing more than calling heads or tails. Two hands of cards dealt. The player bet on which would have a point total closest to nine. Might as well be a damn coin flip. With that, the odds were better.

  Johnny had gone to bed in his Las Vegas condo in a lousy mood, got up in a nasty one, and then spent a few hours making the people who worked for him in the penthouse office miserable before catching a plane back to Palm Springs. What a way to cap off the day, he thought, driving through the cemetery’s open gates.

  But then again, perhaps this was exactly what he needed.

  Maybe his subconscious was telling him he’d been wrong and it was returning to the grave, not the house, that would exorcise the demons that had been dogging him since his thirty-third birthday.

  In a more determined, if not hopeful, mood, he followed the directions to the grave the cemetery’s office had solemnly supplied, along with a stapled three-page listing and map that marked the resting places of such long dead celebrities as William Powell, Sonny Bono, Busby Berkeley, and a handful of Sinatras, including Ol’ Blue Eyes himself.

  The office had reminded him that any flowers he left behind would be cleared out on Wednesday. Nodding, Johnny hadn’t confessed he’d brought nothing for the grave site. He wasn’t sure he was going to get out of the car.

  But he did. He forced himself to open the door and leave the cool, controlled climate of the Jag. Braced for pain, but hoping instead for some new power to re-inter the memories that had been hounding him, he slowly approached Section A-4, plot #52.

  In an area with a billion and six golf courses, the carpet-quality of the grass was no surprise. But his father’s grave marker was. Johnny supposed he’d ordered the simple gray granite piece mounted flush to the ground, but he didn’t remember it. It certainly hadn’t been in place on the day of the burial.

  From the foot of the site, he studied the marker as if it was one of Dan Brown’s famous DaVinci clues. Noting the words “Loving Father” and the 8 × 10 black-and-white of a cocky, laughing Giovanni Martelli mounted under clear plastic, he waited for revelation or reaction.

  And the only thing he felt was the mundane certainty that it was his mother who had selected the stone. She would have been the one to provide the photo of Giovanni, circa eighteen years old, too.

  Johnny focused on it, seeing nothing of himself in the handsome features. While he was 100 percent Italian, the progeny of a Martelli and a Travisano, he had the blond hair and blue eyes of the Northern variety. He looked, as a matter of fact, much more like European mongrel Phineas Magee, the man whose surname he’d used as long as he could remember.

  Johnny’s parents had been divorced since he was a baby, Giovanni agreeing with Johnny’s mother that it created a more stable family if their son used the same name she used, that of her second husband and the little half-brother that came along shortly after that new marriage.

  To his credit, Giovanni Martelli had been fully aware that his own life and lifestyle weren’t winning any stability prizes.

  The devil-may-care tilt of his father’s head in the photo said it all. He’d been a kid from a seedy Los Angeles suburb who’d knocked up his girlfriend at sixteen. Yeah, he’d done the right thing and wedded her in the Catholic Church, but then she’d used the brains that had put her on the Honor Roll at the high school for teenage mothers and gotten out of the bad marriage and into college. There she’d met a graduate student who didn’t mind the little kid that came as part of her package.

  Anna Travisano Martelli might have fallen for Phineas Magee fast, but she fell in love with him for good.

  After the divorce, Giovanni Martelli had moved from Los Angeles to Palm Springs and found work doing…as a child, Johnny was never sure what. But whatever it was meant there were lean times and there were flush times, and which kind of time it was was evidenced by the digs his father would bring Johnny to during his annual ten-day summer visit.

  Sixteen years ago, Johnny’s father had been flush. He claimed to be selling cars at a luxury lot and told Johnny there was a special woman he hoped to bring into his life. He said he was out of debt and not playing deep anymore and that he was keeping clear of the “old crowd.” As he’d always kept Johnny far away from that crowd, it wasn’t until he was dead that Johnny learned from the cops that Giovanni had been hanging around the California Mafia for years.

  His gambling habit had been his entrée into the underworld. Rumors were that he’d paid off some of his debts to the bookies with the kinds of favors that cops didn’t want to detail to a shell-shocked teenage kid.

  But not one of that old crowd or the special woman had shown up at Giovanni Martelli’s closed-casket funeral or subsequent burial.

  Being gunned down in your own driveway apparently put people off.

  Being gunned down by the Carusos in retaliation for your own alleged hit of that family’s crime boss really put people off.

  “Mi scusi!”

  At the unexpected sound of the voice, Johnny jolted. His heart slamming like a hammer against his breastbone, he spun around in a semicrouch.

  A black sedan idled at the nearby curb, an elderly, hook-nosed little man wearing a straw fedora sitting low behind the wheel. “Excuse me,” he said again in Italian, beckoning toward Johnny. There was a shadowy figure beside him, riding shotgun. “Mi potrebbe aiutare?”

  Can you help me? the
old man was asking.

  The Boy Scout in Johnny straightened, and took an automatic step forward. “Sì.” Then he froze, spooked. Riding shotgun. There was a shadowy figure riding shotgun in a black sedan driven by an old Italian in a hat.

  Dread washed over him like a cold sweat. Hadn’t retired reporter Stan warned him of how protective Cosimo was of his granddaughters? What if the Carusos had discovered his identity and wanted to rub him out as they’d rubbed out his father?

  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. The desperate prayer whispered inside of him, the remnant of a thousand hours in catechism class.

  The old man’s arm extended out the side window.

  Johnny lurched back, expecting…what? Then he saw the man held one of the cemetery maps, not a gun.

  “Sinatra.” He shook the stapled papers as if to make his point understood. “My wife wants to see where Frank is buried,” the man said in Italian.

  Where Frank is buried. Frank Sinatra.

  Of course that’s what the wife wanted, Johnny thought, as the dread leeched out of him. To the Italian Geritol set, Frankie’s grave would be both Mecca and Graceland rolled into one.

  The last of the anxiety drained away, leaving Johnny still shaky yet more certain of one thing.

  Jesus. God. Holy Mary, I’m in bigger trouble than I thought.

  Revisiting his father’s burial place hadn’t eased one damn thing, he acknowledged as he walked his still-stiff body forward to direct the elderly couple. It had only made his problem more clear to him. If he didn’t get a handle on these—panic attacks, there was no point in pretending they were anything else—he was going to be seeing demons in Disney characters.

  And drive himself right over the edge of sanity.

  Johnny brooded over the truth of that through dusk and moonlight. As his hotel room clock edged past midnight—he tried to yank the damn thing from the wall, but then found out that even five-star hotels welded their property into the plaster—and closer to his personal witching hour of 1 A.M., he couldn’t stand his own company any longer.

  At 12:50, instead of crawling out of his skin, he made a call.

  “’Lo?” Téa sounded warm and sleepy, and in his mind’s eye he saw her perfect skin flushed, the exact shade of those apricot roses she’d dropped to the ground just minutes before the feel of her lips on his had blown off the top of his head.

  “How are you?”

  “Johnny?” she breathed his name in a way that made him think she was only half-awake. “Johnny, is that you?”

  “In the flesh.”

  “Not flesh.” Sheets rustled. “Phone.”

  “Such a stickler for details,” he scolded.

  He heard the squeak of bedsprings. “What do you need?” she asked.

  Release. Relief. Sleep. “I was thinking about you.” And he hoped talking to her would distract him from the dark turn his thoughts always took at this time of night.

  “You finished your business?” she asked, her voice still husky with sleep.

  “Mm-hmm.” He wondered what she was wearing. Flannel? Silk? Skin? In his mind’s eye her dark hair tumbled across her naked shoulders and waved over her breasts, playing peekaboo with her—raspberry-, mocha-, peach-colored?—nipples. “Business all done,” he murmured.

  “I don’t even know what it is you do.”

  Distracted by the fantasy, he opened his mouth. “I’m a—” Gambler. Like my father before me, I’m a gambler.

  The thought popped that naked-Téa bubble hovering in his mind. Like his father before him, he mused, scrubbing his hand over his face. Was that why he hadn’t been sleeping since his last birthday? Was he afraid that following in his father’s footsteps meant he was also destined to die at the age of thirty-three?

  But he wasn’t a wiseguy. And his father hadn’t been one either, damn it. Sixteen years ago, his father had said he’d left all that behind and Johnny believed him.

  Or he only wanted to.

  “Johnny? Are you there?”

  He wrenched his thoughts from that shadowy path. His phone call to Téa was supposed to give him a rest from all that. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “I’m here,” he said, then remembered her question. “I’m a…money manager.”

  She made a little noise.

  “What?”

  “Sounds boring.”

  That made him smile. “Ouch,” he said. “Then I suppose I’m obligated to prove to you just how fun I can be.” He thought once more of her mouth beneath his, warm and wet. Of the heat of her curvy body beneath yet another matronly outfit. “Now boring, if we’re talking about that, are your wardrobe choices. You shouldn’t be hiding behind those bland colors and schoolmarm suits.”

  “Now you sound like my sister.”

  “But I don’t kiss you like your sister, do I?”

  There was a startled pause, and then she let out an embarrassed laugh. And as if he’d lit a fuse, that sexual time bomb between them started ticking across the phone lines. He relaxed, settling more comfortably against the pillows he’d doubled behind his back. This was more like it. This was why he’d called.

  Yes, he’d felt guilty about getting involved with Téa. Yes, he’d come close to bailing on the whole idea. But that mouth-to-mouth outside her office had made one thing perfectly clear.

  There was an honest-to-hormones, sizzling chemistry between him and Téa that was too hard to ignore. And why should he? After all, if they’d met in another time, in another place, that potential combustion between them meant he would have done his damnedest to hustle her into his bed.

  His conscience had no reason to squeal about him doing that very thing now. If it furthered other goals, so what, right?

  He crossed his ankles on the mattress, ready to play the next hand in the game. “And about that kiss—”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about that.”

  Oh, but she was already thinking about it, he could hear it in her voice. “I’m with you, I’d much rather repeat it, but—”

  “Johnny!”

  He had her laughing that scandalized laugh again, and he wondered—

  “Are you blushing?”

  “I—what? It’s dark.” She was trying to sound brisk and unaffected, but he didn’t buy it for a second. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Téa. Come on. You don’t have to have the lights on and a full-length mirror to answer the question. Are you blushing? Does your skin feel hot? Tight?”

  The little catch in her breath made his own skin feel hot. Tight.

  “Just slip your fingers between the edges of your pajama top,” he coaxed. “Tell me if your heart’s beating faster.”

  There was a pause and he tried to picture a mix of temptation and trepidation on her exotic face.

  “What makes you think I’m wearing pajamas?” she finally said.

  He grinned. “My imagination says no, but—”

  “I also say no.” She took a breath. “We are not continuing this conversation. At least not like this.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “The kiss…I need to explain, apologize…surely you can concede that it was a mistake.”

  Right. His tongue in her mouth, her warm body grinding against his was an error. As if he’d let her get away with that.

  “I’d been startled by the flowers, okay? And then there was the broken glass and all that blood on my hands…”

  Blood. Blood on her hands.

  Blood on his hands.

  Johnny’s gaze jumped to the alarm clock. 1:09:09.

  The numbers receded, the hotel room receded. Sixteen years vanished.

  He ran his fingers through the blond buzzcut that was his hair, knocking askew the headphones blasting The Beastie Boys. Before he could resettle them, he heard the noise.

  Pop.

  Pop. Pop.

  Pop pop pop.

  Johnny leaped up, flinging the ’phones away. As tires shrieked again
st the driveway outside, he tripped over the pair of Air Jordans he’d left out, then ran in his stocking feet along the cool floors through the dark house. After only a few hours in his father’s new place, he made a wrong turn, jamming his toes against the leg of a sturdy side table.

  “Dad?” he yelled, switching directions and limping as fast as he could toward the front door. “Dad?”

  The silence turned his heart into a battering ram. It pounded against his chest as he flung himself through the entry and into the warm night, running down the path and past the newly completed lagoon to the circular parking area by the garage.

  “Dad?” Even the insects had been silenced.

  His father lay on the ground beside his Cadillac, the driver’s door still open. Bullets had shot out the interior lights.

  Bullets had left dark holes in Giovanni Martelli’s body.

  Johnny tried to keep those holes from leaking, pushing hard here, there, and there. Shoulder, chest, arm. But it kept bubbling out. Blood. Life.

  He ran for the nearest phone, leaving scarlet prints on floors, doors, walls. The 911 operator told him to stay on the phone, but he threw it aside and went back to his father.

  To his father’s body.

  The knees of his jeans soaked up blood as he begged his dad to open his eyes, to speak to him.

  “Johnny? Johnny, are you there?”

  The voice yanked him out of the nightmare. “Téa?” he croaked.

  “Johnny? What’s the matter?”

  Like that afternoon at her house, Téa was able to pull him from the vacuum-suck of the past. He followed her voice, holding onto the sound of it, holding onto that feeling of her vital and alive and so damn sexy in his arms when he’d kissed her, letting that more recent memory lead him back to the present. Letting Téa bring him back to the present.

  The shirt he was wearing was soaked with sweat. His hair was wet with more of it. He smelled fear. He smelled of fear.

  He couldn’t, wouldn’t, live like this any longer.

  “Johnny, speak to me.”

  “I’m here.” He swallowed, struggling to bring his voice back to normal. “I’m right here.”