But once he realized death would follow him at every turn, he also realized he could never settle down, marry, have children. He could never grow old with that one special woman he had imagined he would someday find. Because a man who loved a woman, knowing that in his untimely dying he would cruelly desert her, knowing that his disgrace would haunt her and their children forever… he deserved to burn in hell.
So his relationships were fun, joyous, short-term, and trivial. He fell a little in love with each woman. He thought they all fell a little in love with him. But his lovers
knew the score, and they were never surprised when he smiled and kissed them good-bye.
He had broken his own rule only once.
Now, as he watched his brothers, he envied them fiercely. They had what he would never have.
Eli, always solemn, always mature, laughed and tried to wrap Chloë in his sweaty, dirty arms while she edged away, screaming, “No! No! You’re yucky!”
But she didn’t scamper very fast, and when he caught her, she didn’t seem worried about his yuck.
Rafe willingly made a fool of himself by flexing his muscles while Brooke made cooing noises and ran her fingertips over his pecs.
Nonna laughed aloud.
And an image rose unbidden in Noah’s brain. Penelope Alonso, her heavy, long black hair hanging in a braid down her back, her exotic brown eyes peeking from beneath the sweep of long, thick, dark lashes, her full lips smiling as she watched him make a fool of himself… for her…
He told himself it wasn’t surprising he had broken his rule for Penelope. He had been almost twenty, and still grieving over his broken future and the inevitable loss of his own life.
More important, she had been everything he’d ever wanted: tough, proud, joyous, ambitious, hardworking, smart, and brash. He supposed she hadn’t been technically beautiful: a little short, very curvy, a quarter white, a quarter Hispanic, and half something else—she didn’t know who her father was. Not that she’d cared. Nor had Noah. Because he’d seen her, and he’d loved her, and she’d loved him back.
At the end of that summer, he’d realized what a bastard
he’d been to start a relationship with her, and he’d sent her away.
Noah promptly put the image out of his mind.
He saw no point in remembering her. In a moment of weakness three years ago, he’d looked her up on the Internet and come across photos of her wedding.
He was glad she’d moved on. Because no woman deserved a man who kept secrets, a man doomed to die for his misdeeds.
Thank God Penelope Alonso was the only woman who had ever tempted him, and thank God she had moved forever beyond his reach.…
Chapter 5
P
enelope arrived at Joseph Bianchin’s estate at precisely nine a.m. Thursday morning—late enough that she couldn’t possibly be rude, but early enough to catch Bianchin before he left to run errands, or go to work, or go golfing, whatever eighty-one-year-old extremely wealthy men did with their time.
But no matter how many times she rang the electronic buzzer placed outside the closed gates, no one answered.
Stone lions glared down at her from atop limestone pillars, their claws raised and threatening, while she stood like a beggar, her hands gripping the cold metal bars blocking the wide driveway. She stared across the wide swath of grass at Joseph Bianchin’s house, stared so hard her eyes hurt.
House?
No, it wasn’t a house. It was a mansion, built in the style of a formal Italian villa. Its pale yellow stucco walls
rose two stories to a flat roof. Along the top, a balustrade ran like a series of stone teeth, and in the forward left corner a narrow watchtower rose, surveying the countryside with cold authority.
Penelope was an interior designer; architectural classes had been a requirement for her degree, but she so loved the craft she’d taken extra credits. So she knew her stuff. She knew the building before her was perfectly designed, perfectly proportioned, a monument to good taste. But its perfection repelled rather than attracted… or maybe it was simply that she had stood here for ten minutes, fruitlessly pushing the electronic buzzer and getting no response, and so she hated the place.
She supposed she shouldn’t have expected Joseph Bianchin to open the door to her so easily. She’d thoroughly investigated him, reading every biography she found online and following up every rumor.
The verdict was unanimous: The man was like the house that stood before her: arrogant, cold, friendless, and uncaring. His wealth had been handed to him by his family and he had ruthlessly increased it by fair means and foul.
The dense shade of the live oak trees that dotted the lawn increased the gloom that hung over the place, and although at a distance she could see a single, tall, thin, aging Asian gardener who clipped the spent blooms off the rhododendrons, she had to admit the house had an air of abandonment.
Joseph Bianchin wasn’t home. From the looks of things, he had been away for a while.
But in her life, she’d been rejected so many times… and to have come so far, to be standing at this gate and have to leave without saying what she’d come to say…
A dreadful thought brought her up short.
Oh, God.
What if he was dead? She’d packed and loaded the car and made the drive from Oregon without allowing herself to think too much about what she meant to do. Because if she really thought about it, she was afraid she would chicken out.
But she knew the facts. Joseph Bianchin was eighty-one years old. He could have died yesterday, or the day before, or while she visited her mother’s grave and tried to express her frustration and unhappiness in a manner both respectful and firm. Because somewhere, she knew, her mother was listening.
Pulling out her phone, Penelope checked the local obituaries.
No. There was no death notice for Joseph Bianchin. He might not be
here
. But he was alive somewhere.
She sighed with relief, then brushed at her wet eyes. She shouldn’t be surprised that her mind had jumped in that fatal direction. For far too long, she’d been surrounded by death in all its forms.
It was hard to be alone.
Squaring her shoulders, she made a new plan.
The thing was… all those years ago, when she left Bella Terra, she hadn’t truly understood how she had come to be there in the first place. Now she knew.
Now she wondered whether she could ever forgive her mother. For anything. For everything.
Bella Terra wasn’t huge. About forty thousand people—and in the wine-growing season, a whole lot of tourists—so Penelope would be able to find someone who could tell her where Joseph Bianchin was hiding.
As she turned away, she cast a last wistful, resentful glance toward the house—and saw a flash at the upstairs window.
She turned back and stared.
Was someone watching her?
But nothing stirred, not even the leaves on the live oak trees.
Maybe it had been the reflection of a bird’s white wing.
Maybe she had imagined it.
Maybe Joseph Bianchin was skulking in his house and refusing to speak to her.
But that made no sense at all. He had no idea who she was—why wouldn’t he at least answer his intercom, if only to tell her to go away?
Resolutely, she turned away, made her way to her car, and drove into Bella Terra.
Chapter 6
“W
ho was that girl at the gate?”
Joseph Bianchin sat in his leather club chair in the master bedroom and glared resentfully up at his kidnapper, that cruel, damned blond giantess—his jailer.
He didn’t dare call her a giantess to her face. He called her that only in his mind, because like it or not, he was afraid of her.
She called herself Liesbeth Smit. When they were both standing, she was tall enough to look him in the eyes, and although he’d lost two inches of height since he turned seventy-five, he was still six feet tall. Liesbeth played up her athletic figure, her long blond hair, and beautiful green eyes as part of her carefully cultivated Nordic aspect.
After his confrontation with that little upstart Noah Di Luca, Joseph had decided it was best to revisit the European sights he’d enjoyed before. In Amsterdam,
he met Liesbeth, but she wasn’t Nordic; he would swear to that. He didn’t for a minute believe her true hair color was blond. As old as she was, it was probably gray. Or white. But hell, he didn’t even believe her eyes were blue. Or that her name was Liesbeth Smit. Nothing about her was real. Nothing.
He did believe she was athletic. When he’d gotten suspicious of her intentions—he’d thought she was a chance-met whore, then realized she had stalked him—and he refused to go with her to her hotel, she had taken him down as if he were a weak old man.
He was not. He was in excellent health.
“Who is she?” Liesbeth stood over him, asking questions. Always asking questions, interrogating him as if she had the right.
He hated her. He resented her for overpowering him. “I don’t know.”
“She rang the bell for ten minutes.”
“I don’t know her.”
“She wanted to see you badly.”
Liesbeth was a woman, younger than him, but not young. He didn’t know her exact age, but he guessed she was at least sixty-five. Yet she controlled him with the use of some goddamn fancy karate moves that made him buckle from the pain. He was pretty sure she used pressure points. He needed to learn them ASAP.
“She probably wanted a job as a maid.” He didn’t give a crap who the girl at the gate was. She couldn’t help him out of this mess, so she was useless to him.
“She was dressed awfully nice for wanting a job as a maid.”
When Joseph had met Liesbeth, her English had made him think she was from London. As soon as the
private plane he’d hired had landed in the States, her accent changed, became purely American English.
He didn’t know how she did it, but it was spooky to watch her move from one environment to another and adapt so smoothly that everyone in the vicinity thought she was a native.
“Khakis and a button-down shirt?” He raked Liesbeth with his gaze. “You’ve got low standards.”
Unfazed by his condemnation of her denim capris and tight T-shirt, Liesbeth asked, “Is she your current lover?”
“No. I told you. I’ve never seen her before.” Although there was something vaguely familiar about her.…
He stared into space, trying to remember. Whom did she look like? A business associate? One of the damned Di Lucas? Or some movie star he’d seen on the Internet?
Liesbeth studied him, knew every nuance of his expressions. “You do know her.”
“Let me use the phone, and I’ll call around and see what I can find out.”
“If I did that, and you called the wrong person, I’d just have to kill you.” She smiled kindly and without an ounce of compassion.
And he believed her. “Look. The trouble with being our age is, there aren’t that many different kinds of faces. Everyone looks like someone I’ve already met.”
Liesbeth waggled her head as if admitting he had a point.
“I don’t understand what you want with me. Why me?” he asked, not for the first time. “I’ve offered you money. And yet you refuse and continue to keep me prisoner here. What was your reason for kidnapping me?”
“You’re the one who put that ad on the Internet and made it necessary for me to move on this job before I was ready.” Her green eyes gleamed like an icy glacial stream. “So you might as well provide us room and board while we take care of the matter, and keeping you here—well, it’s easy to ensure that you don’t get your hands on our little prize.”
It’s not your little prize.
But according to her, it was.
He simply didn’t give a crap what she thought.
Liesbeth glanced up a split second before one of her young male cohorts wandered in. “What do you want, Hendrik?”
In his singsong Dutch accent, Hendrik said, “This is a very nice bedroom. I think I should take it.”
Joseph growled like a lone wolf who had been challenged. “And do what with it? Spit on the floor?” As far as Joseph could tell, Hendrik was Liesbeth’s enforcer: big, ugly, and mean. He seemed to have no sophistication, no manners at all, and the lustful way he eyed Joseph’s possessions made Joseph want to slap him. Hard.
“I would sleep here, of course.” Hendrik strolled over to Joseph’s seventeenth-century baroque Italian antique bed and caressed the wood with covetous fingers. “You must imagine yourself to be a king, lolling around in such a valuable piece of furniture.”
“I do not loll,” Joseph said coldly. His designer had created this room as a reverent homage to Joseph’s importance in the world, with a fireplace, a sitting area, and that bed, raised on a dais and enfolded with velvet bed curtains. To be here, insulted and disdained, cut off from the world, his privacy stolen by gangsters who wanted a place to stay and the bottle of wine he so deservedly coveted—it was almost more than he could bear.
“Enough, Hendrik,” Liesbeth said. “What do you want?”
“To find out what you want on your pizza.” Hendrik grinned like a half-wit and rubbed his stomach in a crude imitation of hunger.
Joseph snapped in bitter irritation. “I don’t want pizza again. My God, how often can you eat that crap?”
Hendrik’s grin widened. “Why shouldn’t I, old man? And in fact, why shouldn’t you? You’re Italian. Don’t all Italians like pizza?”
The cold rage of helplessness burned in Joseph’s gut. “No wonder
you
work for
her
.” He pointed a shaking finger at Liesbeth. “You are so
stupid
.”
Big, bulky, mean, and so fast Joseph never saw him move, Hendrik lunged.
Liesbeth punched her elbow hard in his chest, and the move made a sound like thumping a ripe watermelon. “No, Hendrik. We need him.”
Hendrik lunged again, trying to get around her, snapping like a junkyard dog.
She stiff-armed him, knocking him against the wall. One of Joseph’s finest pieces of art, an original Klimt art nouveau painting, rattled and turned sideways on its hook.
Joseph gasped in horror, and snapped, “Be careful, you careless fool.”