Fate Book Two (8 page)

His head whipped in her direction. It was Nikki.

She barked something in Italian, looking like she might go all Catwoman on him and scratch out his eyes.

He glanced at me, sneered, and then released my wrists before rambling something back.

No, I didn’t understand.

Nikki tilted her head to look around Paolo or Felix—I didn’t know now—and checked me out. Once she got a good look, she smiled and bobbed her head.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

I stepped away from Paolo—
crap
—Felix. “I’m Leah.” I immediately looked at Paolo—
crap
—Felix?—to gauge his reaction.

Nada
.

“You’re American?” she asked with a very slight accent. Of course, she was the sort of girl who probably went to boarding school somewhere posh where accents in any language were frowned upon.

I nodded.

Her face lit up. “Felix tells me you know his brother, Paolo. How exciting.” She clapped. “I’ve always wanted to compare notes.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, I, uh…actually have to go.” I glanced up at Felix—
Errr…Paolo?
—and he snarled at me.

Nikki pushed out her lower lip into a pout. “So early? The night is just getting started.”

“Yeah, jet lag.” I stepped around him, feeling his hateful gaze burning a hole into the back of my head the entire way. Even as I pushed my way back onto the dance floor toward the exit, I could feel his wicked eyes.

“Leah!” Nikki called out, running after me in short, bouncy steps to keep from falling off of her enormous heels. “I am having a party tomorrow. Why don’t you come? It’s at my house.” She handed me a card from her sparkly, red purse.

“Uh…” I bobbed my head. “Thanks.” Why did she want me to come to her party? On the other hand, I needed to regroup, and I certainly wasn’t done yet. Was this man Paolo? Or was my broken, twisted heart playing a trick on me?

Paolo would never force himself on you or speak to you like that.

Confused as hell, I wove my way toward the front door and felt a hand grab my shoulder. Already completely freaked out, I jumped and yelped.

Horse immediately pulled back his hand and made a little laugh. “You okay?” he asked sweetly.

I clutched my hand over my heart. “You scared me.”
And I so need to get the hell out of here
.

“Are you leaving already?”

“Yeah.” I flicked my thumb over my shoulder toward the exit. “I’ve got some work to catch up on along with my sleep. But, uh…Nikki invited me to her party tomorrow.”

“Wonderful.” He looked a little surprised—after all, I didn’t know the woman—but he shrugged it off. “Then I will see you tomorrow.” Horse leaned down to kiss my cheek in a very innocent, European sort of way, but when he lingered a bit too long, I had to step back. My body and emotions felt like a war zone, and I didn’t want to inadvertently smack him or something.

“Goodnight, Horse. Thanks for getting me into the club.”

“Perhaps tomorrow I will let you into another exclusive venue.” He wiggled one golden brow. “My horse ranch.”

Is the whip included?
Because someone needed to flog this horn dog.

I smiled meekly, barely holding myself together. “I’ll sleep on that.” I turned for the door, and the moment I got outside, it started to pour buckets.

I rushed to my little car parked down an alley, my stomach twisting up into a knot so big and nasty that I thought it might swallow me whole. Dripping wet with October rain, I hobbled my way inside my Fiat and rested my head on the steering wheel. Seeing that…
man
in the club had not only made me feel ten times worse, but the way he’d treated me—
“street dogs”
—made me angrier than I’d ever felt. I needed to step back and think through my next step rationally. Because like it or not, something strange was going on. Was that Paolo or Felix I’d just seen? My heart said one thing and my brain another, but which could I believe? They were both a complete frigging mess.

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning, I lay there in my lumpy bed, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. I hadn’t gotten much thinking done after getting back to my hotel—turned out I really was jet-lagged—but the moment my brain started to wake with the first rays of light, the obvious questions came to mind. I had been so certain that man last night was Paolo. But his behavior? He’d have to be the best actor in the world or be suffering from multiple personalities to pull off his little performance.

Frankly, I was stumped.

Then there was one other minor detail I couldn’t make heads or tails of: My father had shown me pictures of Paolo with Nikki. At least, my father told me it was Paolo, and there was no way in hell a man like my dad would be unaware of Paolo having a twin, let alone confuse the two of them. My father made it his business to know every detail of every situation.

So where did that leave me? Confused as hell. That’s where. And the one person who probably knew the truth—my father—couldn’t be trusted to tell it.

I pulled out my journal from my backpack, the one I’d set up for Paolo, and stared at the blank pages of the thick, slightly glossy paper. The handmade leather binding against my palm felt like an old familiar friend, urging me to spill my guts as I’d done on countless occasions before I learned the truth about it.

If I could say something to Paolo right then, anything at all, what would it be?

I picked up my pen and wrote
Why? What did I do to deserve this?
and then flicked the tip on the surface of the paper, debating if I should write more.

No. This is ridiculous,
I thought.
Paolo sent you a flare to tell you he was all right, which means he doesn’t want you. Just go home and move on.

But what if that really is Felix? What if something happened to Paolo? Are you really going to walk away? No answers. No truth. Just forget that the most important person in your life vanished off the face of the earth?

I know what a lot of women would say: “Screw him, sister! He left you planted at the altar.” I had those same thoughts myself. However, if there was a chance, even a miniscule one, that Paolo had fled for another reason and wasn’t “all right”…Well?

I shook my head. What would I hope and pray Paolo would do for me? If the shoe were on the other foot and I’d gotten messed up in something horrible and had to walk away from him, what would I want?

I’d want him to never give up on me and have faith in us.
Doing otherwise would feel like a betrayal. At least to me.

Okay, Dakota. Tonight, you will do everything to find out the truth.
If that was Paolo, as my dad had told me, I’d get the truth out of him. Even if I had to use drastic measures. Not that I knew what those would be.

Wing it.

~~~

Unlike the previous day, I had most of the afternoon to do some shopping for suitable clothes, which led me to Via del Boschetto. And…Ohmygod. I couldn’t believe I’d almost given up a life of seeing places like this for quiet sunsets on the Caribbean. All right, those weren’t so bad either, but before buying wallpaper that you’ll have to see for the rest of your life, it doesn’t hurt to peruse a few catalogs. Case in point, Via del Boschetto
,
which despite the drizzle of rain was so charming it gave me a toothache. Narrow cobblestone streets lined with cute little Vespas, adorable five-story buildings with stone and plaster facades, arched doorways, and wrought-iron balconies. A café on every corner and three shoe stores, clothing stores, and restaurants on every block.

So cool.

I had to admit, seeing this beautiful city made me itch for more. Not just of Rome, but of every other place I’d ever read about or seen in a movie.

Anyway, I’d definitely found some nicer clothes, fit for my role of photographer. Tonight I’d wear elegant black slacks and a little, silky red top with some giant pink beads. I’d even managed to find a vintage clothing store and scored a cool purple broach. Lord, how I missed hitting the thrift stores back in San Francisco.

The rain had stopped, so before heading to my hotel I decided to stand in line for the Colosseum and made it inside just before closing. I was so glad I did. It was truly magnificent. And while walking around the ancient ruin, I had this strange epiphany about how short life really was. I mean, here were these people almost two thousand years ago that built this structure. Since then, hundreds of thousands had visited the place, but that was the point: we’d all come and gone, but this structure still stood. Our little lives were but a blink of an eye in comparison to a place like the Colosseum. I know that was a roundabout, abstract kind of way to think about my life, but whatever. I was about a year and a half out of high school and was wasting precious time. So what did I want out of life? What sort of future could I construct given all of my hurdles? What mark would I leave behind in the world?

I didn’t know.

But for the first time ever, while walking around that place, I realized how badly I wanted to make my time count. I wanted a life I could call my own, where I stood on my own two feet. I didn’t want to feel dependent on another person—Paolo or my father—to feel safe.
I
wanted to keep
me
safe. I wanted to “own it.”

And that’s when I took a breath, a big fat lungful of polluted city air, and felt…okay. Not great. Not bad. Just okay. And it was a drastic improvement from where I’d mentally been these past few months.

Did that mean I wanted to let Paolo off the hook? No. I didn’t feel that good yet, but maybe I would once I heard whatever messed-up excuse he had.

Later, I went back to my funky hotel, grabbing a sandwich—sun-dried tomatoes with prosciutto—
yum
—on the way, and began getting ready for my last night in Rome. Because whatever happened tonight, I’d be on my way tomorrow. This needed to be over.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I had no idea what time the party started, nor did I have a phone number to call and ask, but I knew Nikki was a night owl, so I arrived at 11:00 p.m. to find traffic, at least one mile long, blocking the street to her house.

Holy crap
. At this rate, I wouldn’t get there until 1:00 a.m.

I had my tennis shoes in my trunk along with my essentials in my bag. That was the other thing my father and Paolo had taught me: Be ready to be mobile. In other words, when there are people out there who’d like to have your pretty little head as a trophy—
Psychos!—
be ready to run. Anyway, why not hoof it? Heck, not like I was going to impress anyone pulling up to her house in my dinky red car.

I took my next right down a small residential side street, put on my sneakers, and shoved my heels in my XL tote bag.

As I strolled toward Nikki’s home, the headlights from an endless conga line of stretch limos and outrageously expensive cars—Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, more Ferraris—illuminated my way, and I began to realize what a loser I looked like walking around this posh, historical neighborhood. With its winding cobblestone streets and romantic, picturesque fountains, this wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where women walked to parties in their Skechers.

As I passed to the right of the cars, the line moved up a bit, and the window of a black stretch lowered. I turned my head and caught sight of…

Paolo. Or Felix?

Paolix.

Whoever he was, he glared at me with those dark eyes, and I half expected him to stop, get out, and smack me. He looked
that
angry.

I was about to say something as we were only five feet apart, but he quickly raised his window and kept on rolling ahead.

“Thanks for offering me a ride, asshole!” I yelled, and then quickly covered my toilet mouth. Seriously, that was not a classy move.

Twenty minutes later, I arrived—yes, by foot—to Nikki’s gorgeous Italian villa, where the limos took turns dropping off partygoers. A wall of a few hundred paparazzi standing behind a barricade clicked away on their cameras, flashes going off ten per second.

I immediately spotted Horse standing in the driveway with a bunch of burly-looking men, clipboard in hand and greeting guests. When I walked up and tried to enter limo-less, one of the guards stopped me, placing his palms in front of me. His eyes were focused on my pink-and-black sneakers. Okay, so I looked a little out of place.

“I’m actually invited,” I tried to explain, but the security guard, a tall, thick-around-the-waist kind of man, wearing a black Polo, pointed for me to go back to my unwelcomed herd.

“Nikki invited me. Ask that guy.” I pointed to Horse, who was a yard away, kissing the hands of the adoring crowd of women surrounding him.

The guard shook his head, said something in Italian—No. Dammit. I didn’t understand—and pointed for me to move back again.

I glanced over at Horse, who wore a stylish deep purple suit with tapered pant legs and a red silk tie, but he was completely occupied.
Dangit.
I needed to get into that party.

Retreated but not defeated, I moved behind the pack of photographers and stood there for a moment, thinking. Around the side of the house was a thicket of trees and a stone wall, where dancing lights poured over the top. That had to be the backyard, and apparently no one was keeping an eye on that side of the house.

I slipped off into the shadows and slung my large bag over my neck. I was only five five, but figured I should be able to climb over the wall.

I jumped, caught the top of the wall, and then did a sort of hop-kick. I managed to get the side of my shoe onto the little ledge and then used the leverage to pull myself up. The moment my head popped over the top, I saw a huge crowd of people staring at me. “Oh God. This is really embarrassing.”

“Princess Leah, so we meet again.”

I looked behind me, over my shoulder at Horse, who stood there staring with an incredibly amused look on his face.