An Offer He Can't Refuse (4 page)

"The Man That Got Away"

Judy Garland

A Star is Born
(1958)

Following the brush with her grandfather. Téa escaped
from the restaurant foyer to a corner booth. She grabbed up one of the waiting glasses of ice water and swallowed the liquid down, intent on drowning the sudden disquiet churning inside of her. The back of her neck prickled, and her gaze jumped across the room, catching the Caputo-Caruso woman casting her a nervous look over her lemon-sherbet shoulder.

Maybe she
should
have changed her last name, Téa thought. She'd considered it dozens of times. But years ago she'd vowed not to allow any more deceit into her life.

It was a promise made in response to her father's abrupt disappearance and her sudden understanding of the trouble he'd brought them. Both explained her need to always know exactly where she stood. Both were why she never wanted a man to surprise, shame, shock, or betray her ever again.

So she hadn't run away from her last name and she hadn't run away from Palm Springs either. Instead, she'd cut her ties to her grandfather. And those ties were still cut, she assured herself, forcing down another swallow of water.
Still cut
.

Her mother and sisters were all the family she wanted. All the family she needed. The only people she truly trusted.

So where were they now?

She held the cold, sweating glass to her cheek, then checked her watch again, telling herself that three minutes tardy didn't really mean twenty-three minutes late.

It only felt that way. It only felt that way to
her
.

At least that's what her mother and sisters claimed. They teased her, claiming that along with a priggish appearance she was punctual to the point of compulsion.

What was it, exactly, that made a woman's closest female relatives feel entitled to identify her most serious character flaws? Not that they were wrong about TeVs—the four of them knew each other just that well.

The product, she supposed, of having their hearts broken by the same man.

The thought sent uneasiness churning inside her again until her two sisters finally walked through the restaurant doors. Younger by less than a year, Téa's half-sister, Eve, was dressed in a slinky, pearl-colored wrap dress. As usual, heads turned. With her golden-blonde hair and pouty mouth, she was the reincarnation of some sophisticated young starlet who'd spent her cocktail hours poolside in the Palm Springs of the 1950s. Beside her, in pipestem black pants, youngest sister, Joey, was oblivious to the attention. She pulled an impatient hand through the pieced-out chunks of her short hairstyle, further disordering its trendy disorder.

Téa blinked, and the years dropped away.
Once upon a time there were three little princesses
…

She saw them in her mind's eye. Towheaded Eve, wearing a stiff pink tutu, spinning dizzying, show-offy circles while chattering Joey monkeyed up the back of their father's chair.

Plump Téa sat on his lap as it if were her throne, serene in her position as the oldest princess, the smart one.

She blinked again and the image vanished, leaving behind the grown women her sisters had become.

Her sisters.

Of course!

Her sisters were the solution. She could count on them to make sure their grandfather understood her position hadn't changed, eighty birthday candles or no. Her sisters would help her maintain the safe distance she'd kept for all these years.

She waved to catch their attention. Their gazes found her, and all at once identical expressions dawned across their very different faces. Téa froze, cemented to the chair just as her shoes used to stick to the floor of the bathroom they'd shared as teenagers. But it wasn't a heavy layer of hair over-spray that was gluing her down now.

Oh, hell
! she thought, parochial-school guilt tacking on an automatic
pardon my French
.

But
oh, hell
! Eve and Joey were beaming smiles her way. Nice, fake, "Hello, sucker-sister" smiles.

Téa smiled back; there was no other choice. Anything less and they'd sense weakness—or even worse, willingness. And she was definitely not willing, because whatever it was they wanted, it had to be something terrible, very terrible, if it required those NutraSweet grins.

The party sprang to mind. They wouldn't… no.
No
. It couldn't be that.

But it had to be
something
. Thinking quickly, Téa pushed menus into their hands the instant they sat down. "Hello, hello! How are you?"

Without another weapon available, she whipped open her own menu, using it and a torrent of talk as a shield until she could get a bead on what they were after. "Do you know what you want? I'm starving. What a morning! My early meeting ran late. A rug I ordered weeks ago is missing and needs to be tracked down. I have two appointments this afternoon and then a slew of paperwork to get through back at the office. Oh yes, and Mrs. Duncan…"

She risked a glance over the top of the menu to gauge how her spur-of-the-moment plan of distraction was working. Her sisters were staring at her, Eve's blue eyes wide and Joey's narrowed into slices of bittersweet chocolate. If the two weren't derailed from whatever they wanted as she'd hoped, they were at least disconcerted by the way she was rattling on about her day. No surprise there, because as the ever-responsible big sister she usually encouraged
them
to talk about
their
days—probing for problems and doling out advice, all the while trying to inconspicuously nudge their water goblets away from their elbows or the table edge.

A balding waiter glided up.

"Are you ready to place your order?" he asked Eve.

Téa's sister started, then turned to him, sliding right into her regular routine: wiggling her butt, wetting her lips, waiting the second it took for the poor guy's tongue to hang out. During the past sixteen years, each sister had developed her own way of handling the Caruso connection. Like her mother, Téa pretended it didn't exist. Her sister Joey clung so closely to the Caruso's legitimate side—the gourmet food company, La Vita Buona—that she was blind to the other.

Eve diverted attention from who she was by how she looked.

Long accustomed to the process, Téa let her gaze drop from Eve's face to the glass of water in her hand and the bright crimson lipstick print along its rim. The last time they'd been out together, Eve's latest escort—a tennis star named Alex, or was it a rock star named Andre?—anyway, the guy had caught Eve's eye then shared her drink, turning it to sip from her raspberry-vodka martini right over the mark of her scarlet-tinged kiss. Téa had never witnessed anything so subtle yet so steamy in her life.

But felt not the slightest pang that even though she wore EverPerfect, the lipstick that claimed to be "flawless, 24/7," no date of hers had ever so much as picked up her smearless glass. Apparently the men who asked her out harbored a lingering, elementary-school fear that even grown-up girls had cooties, or perhaps her conservative attire made it clear she wasn't in the market for hot-blooded passion. Anything that uncontrollable was dangerous to a woman harboring her kind of secrets.

"And for you?" the waiter asked Téa. She requested her usual, the raw salad with the balsamic-lemon vinaigrette on the side. Then he took Joey's order.

As the man moved off, Téa's sisters glanced at each other, took a collective breath, then shared another glance. Téa opened her mouth to put them off again, but Eve beat her to it.

"Your hair looks wonderful," she gushed in synthetically warm tones. "A new style?"

Now it was Téa's turn to stare. "I've worn my hair like this for months. Mom calls it my Malibu Barbie look, remember?" And without her daughter-discount at the spa, she couldn't afford the Japanese straightening process that flattened out her waves, not to mention the delicate bronze highlights that had been woven into her half-yard of dark hair.

Joey jumped in, gesturing. "New dress, then. Nice."

The same tailored sheath her youngest sister had disparaged as "a cross between a nurse's uniform and a nun's habit" the last time she wore it in her company.

The compliments only underlined Téa's growing concern and she sighed. Clearly there was no point in putting this off.

"All right, what's this all about?" she asked. "Your phone message said you wanted a 'sit-down.'" A sit-down was their code for a not-to-be-missed meeting. She tensed as her sisters exchanged another speaking look. "And you said—"

"Family business," Eve interjected. "It's family business."

Téa slumped back against her chair. Well. Foreboding substantiated. Sham smiles explained.
Family business
was a code phrase too. For their paternal family. She took a breath then folded her arms over her chest. "You know I don't get involved in family business."

Joey rolled her eyes again. "You haven't spoken to Nonno or any of the rest in years. But the time's come for you to stop blaming him for… for whatever happened to Dad."

"It's
not
—" Téa swallowed her comeback. The reason she distanced herself wasn't something she could explain to her sisters without talking about other things she'd always protected them from. "Look, if this is about the invitation, it already arrived. I'm sure it was sent in error, but in any case I'm counting on you to make my excuses for me."

"Well, this
is
about that invitation," Eve said, then hesitated, sliding another glance Joey's way. "But you should also know that Grandpa is preparing to step down—retiring from all the family businesses. He's announcing it shortly after his birthday party."

"Preparing to step down?" Téa's heart skipped. Their father's disappearance sixteen years before had set off a small war on the urban streets of California—it was described in graphic detail at www.mafiatales.com. It had taken their grandfather's iron fist to rein in the criminal chaos that had erupted then and he'd remained in complete control since.

Then Joey released her own shocking dart. "And Nonno has just one birthday wish—he wants
you
at the party. He said to tell you he won't take no for an answer."

Now Téa's heart seized. To get it beating again she had to cough, the sound so harsh it caused the waiter, arriving with their meals, to tear his gaze off Eve a moment. But by the time the man had set down their plates and moved away again, Téa managed to form actual words.

"Why?" She tried not to let panic color her voice, but what could be their grandfather's motive for trying to reel her back after all these years? "Even if he really is retiring—which I find hard to believe—why does he need me at his birthday bash when he has you two? You're the party girl, Eve. And Joey, you work for him."

Eve shrugged one slender shoulder. "Because you're the oldest grandchild."

The oldest grandchild. The oldest child of his only child, the latter presumed dead, the former who pretended the family was dead to her. If Cosimo was truly planning to pass on the family leadership to someone else, was this his way of demonstrating the prodigal granddaughter was still under his protection?

But he had no reason to believe she needed protecting. He didn't know her secret. No one did.

"You know I won't come," she said aloud.

Joey scowled. 'Téa—"

"I won't." She picked up her fork and toyed with her salad, assuming a calm she didn't feel. "For one thing, there'll be too many of them. A party like that means people from the families all over California. The second cousins will fly in from New Jersey. The others from New York. Not to mention that sleazy Miami group."

Just the idea of seeing the large web of mobsters, of looking into faces that might suspect what she'd kept hidden all these years, made the skin along her spine shiver and sweat at the same time.

"The guest list's at three hundred," Joey admitted. "So far."

Shaking her head, Téa stared down at the mix of greens on her plate. Great, just great. Even if she kept well clear of it, an event as big as that, for someone as powerful as their grandfather, would be news. The story would make the California society pieces like Eve wrote as well as the Mob-watch columns in the Eastern papers. Remaking the Caruso name, let alone living it down, would only prove that much more difficult.

Her head jerked up and she held her sisters' gazes. "I don't care that he's retiring. You two will make him understand I'm not coming. He won't miss me. I haven't done more than glimpse him from afar in years, except for today, when—"

The sudden guilt on their faces explained that odd little "coincidence."

"I can't believe this," Téa said, slowly. "You told him where we were meeting." Meaning his appearance at the restaurant had been pure emotional blackmail—which shouldn't surprise her, given the other type he was so expert at.

Still, her right hand strangled her fork, while the other, in her lap, curled into a defensive fist. This wasn't right.
This wasn't fair
! She'd made a bargain—she was never quite sure if it was with God or with her guilty conscience—that went like this: She would stay away from trouble, and God—or her guilty conscience—would let her get away with her crime.

"Come on, Téa," Eve urged. "We could be a family again. That's all we want. That's all Grandpa wants. Remember that after Daddy… left, he was like a father to us. Do it for that. Do it for him because he loves you and wants you near again."

Or he wanted what she'd kept hidden all these years.

Joey scooted her chair closer. "Hey, do it for Eve and me." She sent Téa a grin that made her look ten years old instead of twenty-six. "We swore a blood oath to Nonno that we'd get you to agree."

Téa stared at their two entreating faces. Oh, but they were good, her sisters.
We swore a blood oath
. Joey counted on changing Téa's mind by counting on her big-sister sense of loyalty.

Do it for him because he loves you and wants you near again
. Eve would know that in her secret heart of hearts Téa longed for the impossible—to be able to trust some man enough to get close to him.