grinned, trotted over and fell in alongside him.
“Any slower,” he said, picking up the pace, “we’d be walking. You getting too old to run fast?”
Damian, who at thirty-one was exactly the same age as Nicolo, shot him a deadpan look.
“I’ll call the paramedics when you collapse.”
“Big talk.”
“A hundred bucks says I can beat you.”
“Twenty times around?”
“Forty,” Nicolo said, and shot away.
Moments later, they finished in a dead heat and turned to each other, breathing hard and grinning from ear to ear.
“How’s Rome?” Damian said.
“How’s Athens?”
The men’s grins widened and they clasped each other in a bear hug. “Man,” Damian said, “you’re a sweaty bastard.”
“You’re not exactly an ad for GQ.”
“How was your flight?”
Nicolo took a couple of towels from a stand beside the track and tossed one to Damian.
“Fine. Some weather just before we landed, but nothing much. Yours?”
“The same,” Damian said, wiping his face. “I really like this little Learjet I bought.”
“Little,” Nicolo said, laughing.
“Well, it’s still not as big as yours.”
“Mine’s always going to be bigger than yours, Aristedes.”
“You wish.”
It was an old line of banter and made them grin again.
“So,” Nicolo said, “where’s Lucas?”
“We’re meeting him in—” Damian looked at his watch. “In two hours.”
“You guys picked a restaurant?”
“Well, more or less.”
Nicolo raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Damian said, “our old friend bought himself a club. Downtown. The club of the minute, he says.”
“Meaning, crowded. Noisy. Lots of music, lots of booze, lots of spectacular-looking women out for a good time…”
“Sounds terrible,” Damian said solemnly.
Nicolo smiled as he draped his towel around his shoulders. “Yeah, I know. But I have an important meeting Monday morning.”
“Well, so do I.”
“Very important.”
Damian looked at him. “So?”
“So,” Nicolo said, after a moment, “I’m hoping to finalize a deal. With James Black.”
“Whoa. That is important. So, tonight we celebrate in advance, at Lucas’s place.”
“Well, I want to stay focused. Get to bed at a decent hour tonight and tomorrow night. No liquor. No distractions—”
“Thee Mou! Don’t tell me! No sex?”
Nicolo shrugged. “No sex.”
“Sex is not a distraction. It’s exercise. Good for the heart.”
“It’s bad for the concentration.”
“That’s BS.”
“We believed it when we played soccer, remember? And we won.”
“We won,” Damian said dryly, “because the competition was lousy.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Giving up sex is against the laws of nature.”
“Idiot,” Nicolo said fondly. The men walked to the free weights area and made their selections. “It’s just a matter of discipline.”
“Unless, of course, there was such an instant attraction you couldn’t walk away.” Damian grunted as he lifted a pair of twenty-pound weights. “And how often is that about to happen?”
“Never,” Nicolo answered—and, unbidden, the image of the blonde with the hot eyes and the cold attitude flashed before his eyes.
He had been reaching for the twenty-pound weights, too. Instead he lifted a pair of heavier ones and worked with them until his mind was a pain-filled blank.
Farther downtown, in a part of Manhattan that was either about to be discovered or still a slum, depending on a buyer’s point of view, Aimee Stafford Coleridge Black slammed her apartment door behind her, tossed her black suede coat at a chair and kicked off her matching boots.
The coat slid off the chair. The boots bounced off the wall. Aimee didn’t give a damn.
Amazing, how a day that began so filled with promise could end so badly.
Aimee marched into the kitchen, filled the kettle with water, put it on to boil and changed her mind. The last thing she needed was a caffeine buzz.
She was buzzing enough without it, thanks to her grandfather.
Why had he summoned her to his office, if not to make the announcement she’d been anticipating?
“I shall retire next May,” he’d told her almost a year ago, “when I reach ninety, at which time I shall place Stafford-Coleridge-Black in the charge of the person who will guide it through its next fifty years. A person who will, of course, carry on the Stafford-Coleridge-Black lineage.”
Lineage. As important to James as breathing but that was fine because she, Aimee, was the only person with both the necessary lineage and the proper education to assume command.
She had a bachelor’s degree in finance. A master’s degree in business. She’d spent her summers since high school interning at SCB.
She knew more about the bank than anyone, maybe even including Grandfather, who still believed in a world devoid of computers and e-mail.
Aimee marched into the bedroom and methodically stripped off the gray wool suit and white silk blouse she’d deemed appropriate for the meeting with Grandfather this afternoon. She’d wanted to look businesslike, even though she knew damned well you could do as much business in jeans as you could in Armani.
She’d even worked up a little speech of assurance about how she wouldn’t change a thing, though she’d mentally crossed her fingers because there were things
