what are you doing?” Giovanni exclaimed.
“This is a mistake, Malatesta,” the leader rasped angrily. He sneered. “And I’m surprised to see you hiding behind a woman this way. I thought you were a nobleman.”
Giovanni’s face flushed darkly in the torchlight at that insult. He said, “Denise, put that gun away. Or better yet, give it to me.”
“The signorina is not the only one who is armed.” The leader made another sharp motion to the other three. Knives came out from somewhere. The red glare from the torches glittered on the blades.
“None of that will do you any good,” Denny said. “You’ll be dead before they can reach us.” She paused. “Anyway, if you kill Giovanni, who’s going to pay the man you work for? That’s what this is about, right? A debt that needs to be collected? Maybe something can be done about that.”
The leader cocked his head slightly to the side. “What do you propose, signorina?”
“No!” Giovanni cried. “This is not right! This is none of your affair, cara mia—”
“If I’m really your beloved, then I think it is my affair, too,” Denny said. To the leader of the toughs, she went on, “Go back to your boss and tell him that things will be worked out if he’ll just be a little more patient. I give him my word, and Jensens don’t lie. You think he’ll go along with that?”
“I would not presume to speak for the signore without talking to him first.”
“Then go talk to him,” Denny snapped. “Or keep crowding us and we’ll see what happens.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Giovanni glaring furiously at her, but she kept most of her attention focused on the man she was looking at over the revolver’s sights. He seemed pretty observant. He must have noticed that even while holding a gun on him, her hand was rock steady.
After a long moment, the man shrugged. “I will speak to Signor Tomasi, but I make no promises. The day of reckoning may be postponed, but the debt must still be settled. You know this, Malatesta. And the next time . . . there will be no woman for you to hide behind.”
Giovanni growled and started to move forward, but he stopped himself and with a visible effort controlled his rage. “Go,” he told the men. “Run away like the craven dogs you are.”
For a second, Denny thought the insult was going to be more than the men could stand. She was ready to pull the trigger if she needed to. She didn’t figure she could gun down all four of the men before any of them reached her, especially with the small-caliber weapon. If her father had been here with a Colt .45 . . . with Smoke Jensen’s deadly speed and accuracy . . .
But Smoke wasn’t here, she reminded herself again. She was the lone Jensen, so it was up to her to uphold the family name. The Jensen brand was on her, just like it was on all those cattle roaming the lushly grassed meadows of the Sugarloaf.
Without saying anything else, the leader turned and motioned for the men with him to go back up the steps. He trailed them, pausing at the top to cast one last hostile look over his shoulder at the man and woman on the landing. Then he was gone like the others, vanishing into the shadows.
“Denise, I am so sorry. This . . . this is terrible—” Giovanni began.
Denny lowered the gun slightly but didn’t put it away. “Maybe you should see if you can attract the attention of another gondolier. I don’t think I want to go back up there, and we need to get somewhere we can talk.”
CHAPTER 9
“I never meant for my difficulty to involve you, cara mia,” Giovanni said as he poured wine from a bottle into glasses on the sideboard in his apartment. “A signorina as beautiful as yourself should never have to trouble herself over something as ugly and sordid as gambling debts.”
“That’s what you owe to this man Tomasi?” Denny asked. “Gambling debts?”
“Salvatore Tomasi makes a business of buying debts from gambling houses and individuals alike. I had a run of terrible luck.” Giovanni shrugged. “I would have recouped my losses sooner or later, but Tomasi is not a patient man. He demands payment now.”
“And you don’t have the money,” Denny guessed. It wasn’t really a question.
“I have experienced . . . financial reverses. Much as it pains me to admit it, I lack the funds to satisfy Tomasi’s demands.”
“Can’t you get your family in Sicily to advance some money to you?”
Giovanni laughed, but there was no humor in the sound.
“I am, what do you call it, the black sheep of the Malatesta family. My family cannot strip me of my title, but neither are they inclined to share their riches with me. I have my own money, of course, but much of it is tied up in investments and is not actually available to me at present.”
“You could borrow on it,” Denny suggested.
“A well I have gone to before, on occasion, to live in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed,” Giovanni said with a slight grimace. “Not a viable alternative at the moment, unfortunately.”
She finally took the glass of wine he held out to her and downed a healthy swallow. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. “How much do you need to get Tomasi to leave you alone?”
“No! Take money from a woman, from my beloved? No, I say, a thousand times no!”
With anybody else, she might have thought he was being too dramatic. But such flamboyance was just who Giovanni Malatesta was, Denny told herself.
“There’s nothing wrong with letting someone who cares about you help you out of a problem,” she argued. “My grandparents are wealthy, and my father’s ranch is one of the biggest and most lucrative in Colorado. All I need to do is send a few telegrams, and I can have the money wired to a bank here in Venice. Just give me the details of where it should go and how much you need, and we can take care of this first thing in the morning.”
Stubbornly, Giovanni shook his head and said, “I cannot do this. Bad enough that I had to hide behind your skirts . . . and your gun . . . when Tomasi’s men cornered us.”
“They were threatening me, too, you know,” she reminded him. “And I’m sure they’ll continue to do so, now that they know I’m someone important to you. Men like that are no different than the outlaws my father has dealt with back home. They’ll use any leverage they have to get what they want.”
“This is true,” Giovanni admitted. “Salvatore Tomasi and the men who work for him are ruthless.”
“So it’s in my interest to help you with this, too,” Denny said. “Please, Giovanni, let me help. Tell me how much you need.”
For a long moment, he stood there, glaring, then he abruptly lifted his glass and drank down all the wine in it.
“All right. I don’t like it. This still seems wrong. But I will pay you back, every bit.” He named an amount that sounded enormous to Denny and must have seen the look of surprise on her face,
