Romeo barely stopped his lips from curling. The subject of his mother was one he’d sealed under strict lock and key, then thrown into a vault the night he’d buried her five years ago.
The same night he’d let his guard down spectacularly with a woman whose face continued to haunt him when he least expected it. A woman who had, for the first time in a long time, made him want to feel the warmth of human emotion.
A tremor went through him at the memory, its deep and disturbing effect as potent, if not more so, than it’d been that night when he’d realised that his emotions weren’t as clinical and icy as he’d imagined them to be.
He shut down that line of thought.
Maisie O’Connell had had no place in his life then, save as a means of achieving a few hours of oblivion, and she most certainly didn’t have one now, in this cursed place. Like the bush outside this miscreation of a mansion, she represented a time in his life he wanted banished for all time.
Because it makes you uncomfortable...vulnerable even?
Basta!
‘You seem to be under the misapprehension that I’ll indulge you in fond trips down potholed memory lanes. Be assured that I will not. If I remember correctly, you helped to throw me out of the gates when I was a child. Your exact words, presumably passed down from my father, were—I see you again, you leave in a body bag.’
Lorenzo shrugged. ‘Those were hot-headed days. Look at you now. You’ve done very well for yourself despite your less than salubrious beginning.’ A touch of malice flared in his eyes. ‘None of us imagined a boy conceived in the gutter would rise to such esteem.’
Romeo shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t do the unthinkable and strangle the old man where he sat. ‘Then I guess it’s a good thing I was intelligent enough to realise early on that whether you were born in the gutter or with a dozen golden spoons clutched in your fist, our lives are what we make them. Otherwise, who knows where I’d be today? In a mental institution, perhaps? Bemoaning my fate while rocking back and forth in a straitjacket?’
The old man laughed, or he attempted to. When the sound veered into a bone-jarring coughing spell, his bodyguards exchanged wary glances before one stepped forward with a glass of water.
Lorenzo’s violent refusal of help had the guard springing back into his designated position. When the coughing fit passed, Lorenzo opened the box and took out several papers.
‘You were never going to go down without a fight. I saw that in you even when you were a boy. But you’ll do well to remember where that intelligence comes from.’
‘Are you really suggesting that I owe what I’ve made of myself to you or the pathetic band of thugs you call a family?’ he asked, incredulous.
Lorenzo waved him away. ‘We’ll discuss what you owe in a bit. Your father meant to do this before he was tragically taken from us,’ he muttered.
Romeo curbed the need to voice his suspicions that his father’s departure from this life hadn’t been tragic at all; that the boat explosion that had taken his life and those of his wife and the two half-sisters Romeo had never been allowed to meet hadn’t been accidental, but the target of a carefully orchestrated assassination.
Instead, he watched Lorenzo pull out document after document and lay them on the desk.
‘The first order of business is this house. It’s yours free and clear from any financial obligations. All the lawyers need is your signature to take possession. It comes with the collection of cars, the horses and the three hundred acres of land, of course.’
Astonishment rendered Romeo speechless.
‘Then there are the businesses. They’re not doing as well as we’d hoped, and certainly not as well as your own businesses are doing. The Carmelo famiglia mistakenly believe this is an excuse for them to start making moves on Fattore business, but I suspect that will all turn around once our business has been brought under the umbrella of your company, Brunetti International—’
Romeo laughed. ‘You must be out of your mind if you think I want any part of this blood-soaked legacy. I’d rather return to the gutter than claim a single brick of this house, or associate myself in any way with the Fattore name and everything it stands for.’
‘You may despise the Fattore name, but do you think Brunetti, son of a two-bit whore has a better ring?’ Lorenzo sneered.
It didn’t, but in the bleak, terrible hellhole of his childhood it had been the better of two evils. Especially since that greater evil had warned him never to use the name Fattore.
‘This is your legacy, no matter how much you try to deny it,’ Lorenzo insisted.
‘You can sit there and rewrite history until the walls crumble around you,’ Romeo enunciated with a burning intensity he suspected would erupt the longer he spent in this house. ‘But your five minutes have come and gone, old man. And this meeting is well and truly over. Any problems you have with your extortion business and territorial wars with the Carmelo family are yours to deal with.’
He made it to the door before Lorenzo spoke.
‘Your father suspected that when the time came you would prove intransigent. So he asked me to give you this.’
For the second time, Romeo froze, his instincts screeching at him to keep walking, but his brain warning that to do as he so desperately wanted would be unwise.
Lorenzo held out a large manila envelope, which he slid across the desk with a smug look.
‘I told you I’m not interested in anything bearing the Fattore name. Whatever is in that envelope—’
‘Is of a more...personal nature and will interest you, mio figlio. I’m confident of it.’
Romeo abandoned the need to remind the old man not to call him son. Lorenzo was enjoying needling him a little too much, and Romeo was fast reaching boiling point.
Striding across the room, he snatched up the envelope and ripped it open. The first picture punched him in the gut, expelling a harsh breath. It showed him standing at his mother’s graveside, the only attendee besides the priest, as Ariana Brunetti was laid to rest.
He flung the picture on the desk, his mouth twisting as the next picture showed him in funereal black, sitting at his hotel bar, staring into a glass of cognac.
‘So Fattore had me followed for an afternoon five years ago. Perhaps he would’ve better profited using that time to tend his businesses.’
Lorenzo tented his fingers. ‘Keep going. The best is yet to come.’
Dark premonition crawled up Romeo’s spine as he flipped to the next photo. It showed him walking out of his hotel and down the street that led to the trendy cafés near the waterfront.
He froze at the next picture and stared at the image of himself. And her.
Maisie O’Connell—the woman with the angelic face and the tempting, sinful body. The combination, although enthralling enough, wasn’t what had made her linger in his mind long after he’d
