An Offer He Can't Refuse (46 page)

"You're Breaking My Heart"

Vic Damone

Angela Mia
(1959)

Johnny was sorry that his father had killed hers. Téa just
blinked at him. He thought finding the remains here, at Giovanni Martelli's former house, was proof positive that his father was a murderer.

"I didn't want to believe it," he said. His fingers dropped hers and he shot to his feet and rubbed both hands over his face. "I'm such a fucking fool. Everything that I did, every time I was with you, every time I touched you, teased you, took you to bed, I told myself it wasn't so bad because I'd find out that my father had nothing to do with the death of yours."

Rachele clutched Téa's arm. "What's he talking about?" Téa closed her eyes, her emotions reeling. "He's Giovanni's son. Rachele, meet Gianni Martelli, aka Johnny Magee."

Rachele rose to her feet and sidestepped to stand between Téa and Johnny. "I don't understand what's going on."

"He seduced me under false pretenses."
Why pretty it up
?

"Shit," Johnny muttered. "I think I'm going to be sick." He ran into the nearby tangle of vegetation.

Rachele stared after him. "This is seriously cracked."

"This is a serious mess." Téa put her face in her hands. "We're going to have to call someone, the police or—"

"Let me take care of that," Rachele said. "You stay here and keep breathing and I'll go get… I'll figure out who and I'll tell them what they need to know."

Téa couldn't muster the energy to do anything else. She watched Rachele hurry off, her thoughts refusing to coalesce into anything meaningful. Instead, her mind replayed snippets of earlier conversations.

Can't you just forget about the past so we can get on with the rest of our lives ?

We've got to find a way around all this.

I'm so sorry my father killed yours.

In the distance, faraway strains of a song caught her attention. The band. That's right, she thought dully, there was a party tonight. They were celebrating while her father's remains were being uncovered.

Then, closer, came other, more violent noises.

Pop.

Pop. Pop.

Téa's body jerked straight.

Another
pop
, followed by the wild whoop of a young man.

A final phrase echoed in her mind.
Rachele and I saw some young guys with champagne bottles looking to hold a private bash
…

Still uneasy though, Téa came to her feet. "Johnny?" She took a step in the direction she'd last seen him take. "Johnny? Where are you?"

When silence was her only response, she took a few more unsteady steps, her heartbeat stumbling as well. "Johnny!
Johnny.
¹
"

He materialized like a ghost between the trunks of two palm trees. His face was moonlight pale and his eyes looked flat. Lifeless.

She hugged her body so that she wouldn't go to him. "Are you hurt?"

He moved, and immediately stumbled too, his momentum taking him forward until he found the boulder she'd been sitting on. He put out his hands, feeling for it as if he were blind, then sank down onto it.

"Johnny, what's the matter?"

"It's all the blood," he muttered.

Now she ran to him, patting him to find his injuries. "What blood? Where are you hurt?"

He caught her hands. "Contessa," he murmured. "This is real. You're real."

"Of course I'm real." His fingers were icy on hers. "I'm real and I'm right here. Are you hurt?"

Squeezing her hands, he shook his head. "Not hurt." His chest rose in a long, deliberate breath. "Talk. Talk to me."

"You're scaring me," she said. "I need to know what's the matter. Johnny! What's the matter?"

He shook his head again, as if he were trying to shake off a blow.

She'd seen him like this once before, she remembered. That first day they'd made—had sex. "Are you sick?"

"Sick in the head, maybe." He sucked in another breath, shook his head again. "You're real. You're real."

She knelt so she could look into his face. "Johnny, it's Téa. I'm here, I'm real. What's happening to you?"

His eyes were squeezed shut. Slowly, he opened them, his fingers biting into hers. He let out another breath, this one easier. He took in another, blew it out. "I'm all right now. I'm okay."

She tried to move away, but he wouldn't let go of her hands. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Flashback," he muttered. "The mother of all flashbacks. Probably because of the body. And then those sounds. Like gunshots."

The pops. That other day there'd been gunshot-like sounds too. Backfires from the gardener's truck. "Flashback to what?"

Now he released her hands, and stared down at his own. He took in another breath, let it out. "Flashback to the night of my father's murder."

She frowned. "Why—"
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no
. "Were you here when it happened? Oh, God, Johnny, were you
here
?"

"Annual summer visit. First night. Last night, too, I guess."

She backed a step away from him. "You never told me."

He laughed, a harsh, tired sound. "As you well know, I didn't tell you a lot of things."

"Tell me now." When he hesitated, she strengthened the words. "Tell me all of it now."

He glanced at her, then looked back at his hands, his voice low, but clear. "My parents divorced when I was a baby. My mom remarried Phineas Magee. But every summer I'd spend a couple weeks with my real dad, Giovanni Martelli. When I was seventeen, I flew from Washington state into the Ontario Airport and my dad picked me up on his way back from Vegas. He brought me here, to this house." A half-smile quirked the corners of his lips. "Which I thought was pretty cool, even then. Didn't know mid-century modern from a rat's ass, of course."

His dad had picked him up on his way back from Vegas. Téa latched onto that piece of information and played it over in her head. His dad had picked him up on his way back from Vegas. "And that first night…"

"I heard the gunshots. I ran down to the garage and found my father's car… and my father. I tried to keep him alive, Téa," he said, his voice roughening. "He was bleeding everywhere. All that blood. All that blood…"

She put her hand on his shoulder. "Stay with me."

His hand covered hers. "I called for an ambulance and they took him to the hospital. He went into surgery and came out, but then he died shortly afterward."

A new voice cut through the shadows. Joey's voice, cold and hard. "And you expect Téa to feel bad about that? He died as a consequence for killing
our
father, Johnny. Or do you prefer Gianni?"

Johnny let go of Téa's hand and leaped to his feet. They both swung toward Joey and took in the knot of people who'd arrived on the scene with her, presumably mustered by Rachele, who stood to one side, worrying her eyebrow ring.

Téa's mother, Joey, Eve, Beppe Cirigliano, and… Cos-imo Caruso.

Téa's grandfather.

Eighty didn't look a day over sixty-five on him. Maybe it was his Mediterranean diet. Or good genes. Or a criminal conscience. He was upright and lean in his dinner jacket and dark slacks, his full head of silver-threaded hair brushed back from his face with its Roman nose—the masculine form of her own—and sharp, black eyes.

He addressed his first words to Johnny, his voice soft and holding only the slightest of accents. "My son has been found?"

"Yes," Johnny replied, his voice and poker face at their noncommittal best. "Interred, I suppose you'd say, in the wall of the lagoon."

"By
your
father," Joey said, taking a step forward.

Eve caught her arm. "Stay put, little sister."

"Are you all right, Mom?" Téa asked, her gaze traveling from vibrating-with-emotion Joey, to the older woman who was now clutching Beppe's wrist as if she needed support.

"I don't know," she whispered.

Joey sent another venomous look toward Johnny. "See what you've done," she said. "See what you and your father have done."

He flinched. "Forgive me," he said. "I'm sorry for bringing this back to all of you."

Téa almost laughed. It had never left them. Never left any of them.

"You'll get nothing from us," Joey spit back. "Nothing."

Téa understood her sister's fury. God, she'd felt it herself, hating whoever had taken her father away from them, hating her father for being the kind of man who
would
get taken away, hating her grandfather for his part in bringing them into this kind of life.

But she'd never hated Giovanni Martelli, because she'd always suspected he wasn't the one responsible. And now she was certain he wasn't.

My dad picked me up on his way back from Vegas
. She could tell what she knew… or she could keep it to herself.

Johnny had done her wrong. He admitted that. He had betrayed her with his lies. And leaving him with the image of his father as murderer was the perfect revenge.

She was Caruso enough, ruthless enough, to enjoy the poetry of the payback. She'd given Johnny her body, and—though she was going to have to fight to get it back from him—her heart. He'd betrayed her and she could have her vengeance by giving him coin in kind.

Oh, yeah, that sounded really, really right. Really bad.

Wickedly good.

She could link arms with her sisters right now and walk away, leaving Johnny with his pain and herself with the smug warmth of the perfect reprisal. Salvatore's crown princess having herself a royal good time at Johnny's expense.

But…

"He didn't do it," she heard herself say aloud. "Giovanni Martelli didn't kill our father."

Johnny stared at Téa. The night was only turning more surreal. The damn party, the grisly discovery of Salvatore's remains, the suffocating flashback, this surprise confrontation with the Caruso family.

He wanted to disappear, go away, forget his time here and go back and accept the sweaty nightmares and the paralyzing memories because they seemed infinitely more bearable than this endless night. If only he'd never met the dark-haired, sloe-eyed contessa that could wound him with only the tragic expression she was wearing on her beautiful face.

"Giovanni Martelli didn't kill our father," Téa said again.

Wound him with a sentence. Of course his father had killed hers. Giovanni had been a murderer because Téa's father was truly dead. Bile splashed against the sides of Johnny's empty stomach.

"Oh, right," Joey scoffed. "Giovanni is innocent and you know this how?"

Johnny heard Téa take a breath. "I know," she continued, "because of the book."

His gut roiled. Not—

"The Loanshark book?" Eve said, asking the question for him. 'That book? What does it have to do with this?"

Tension radiated from Téa's body. Standing this close to her, he could see the way her fingers twined and tightened upon one another. "I happen—"

Johnny grabbed her shoulders, and yanked her around to face him. "Don't, Contessa."

She was ashamed of her part in that cursed thing. He couldn't imagine why she was bringing it up now, but he wouldn't let the shock of their finding her father's remains lead her to make admissions that would only hurt her. His conscience couldn't take the added weight of that too. Téars stung the back of his eyes and the bile churned inside his belly.

"Johnny—"

"
No
, Téa."

Impatient as usual, Joey called out again. "Well, if somebody has something more to say, they better say it right now now."

It was Beppe Cirigliano, Rachele's father, who spoke up first.

"I killed him. God help me, it was an accident, but I killed my best friend. I killed Sal."