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‘How very formal. I’m still not changing my mind.’
His eyes glittered with menace. ‘As I said earlier—on your head be it.’
* * *
‘Gosh, it’s hot,’ Hannah commented as she followed Francesco off the steps of the plane. She breathed in deeply. Yes, there it was. That lovely scent of the sea. Thousands of miles away, and for a moment she had captured the smell of home. Her real home—on the coast of Devon. Not London. London was where she lived.
‘It’s summer’ came the curt reply.
At least she’d had the foresight to change out of the leathers and into her sundress before they’d landed. Not that Francesco had noticed. Or, if he had, he hadn’t acknowledged it, keeping his head buried so deep into what he was doing on his laptop she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d disappeared into the screen. The only time he’d moved had been to go into his bedroom—yes, he had a bedroom on a plane!—and changed from his own leathers into a pair of black chinos, an untucked white linen shirt, and a blazer.
A sleek grey car was waiting, the driver opening the passenger door as they approached. Another identical car waited behind, and Francesco’s guards piled into it—except one, who got into the front of their own car.
The doors had barely closed before the guard twisted round and handed a metallic grey object to Francesco.
‘Is that a gun?’ Hannah asked in a tone more squeaky than anything a chipmunk could produce.
He tucked the object into what she assumed was an inside pocket of his blazer. ‘We are in Sicily.’
‘Are guns legal in Sicily?’
He speared her with a look she assumed was supposed to make her quail.
‘I hope for your sake it’s not loaded,’ she said. ‘Especially with you keeping it so close to your heart.’
‘Then it’s just as well I have a doctor travelling with me.’
‘See? I have my uses.’
Despite her flippancy, the gun unnerved her. It unnerved her a lot.
Knowing on an intellectual level that Francesco was dangerous was one thing. Witnessing him handle a gun with the nonchalance of one handling a pen was another.
He’s doing this for effect, she told herself. Remember, this is an adventure.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked after a few minutes of silence had passed.
‘My nightclub.’
It didn’t take long before they pulled up outside an enormous Gothic-looking building with pillars at the doors.
‘This is a nightclub?’
‘That’s where I said we were going.’
In a melee of stocky male bodies, she followed him inside.
The Palermo Calvetti’s was, she estimated, at least four times the size of its English counterpart. Although decorated in the same glitzy silver and deep reds and exuding glamour, it had a more cosmopolitan feel.
A young woman behind the bar, polishing all the hardwood and optics, practically snapped to attention at the sight of them.
‘Due caffè neri nel mio ufficio,’ Francesco called out as he swept past and through a door marked Privato.
Like its English equivalent, his office was spotless. Two of his men entered the room with them—the same two who’d been guarding the English Calvetti’s when she had turned up just five short days ago.
Francesco went straight to a small portrait on the wall and pressed his fingers along the edge of the frame until it popped open as if it were the cover of a book.
‘Another cliché?’ she couldn’t resist asking.
‘Clichés are called clichés for a reason,’ he said with a shrug of a shoulder. ‘Why make it easy for thieves?’
Watching him get into his safe, Hannah decided that it would be easier to break into Fort Knox than into Francesco Calvetti’s empire. The inner safe door swinging open, her eyes widened to see the sheer size of the space inside, so much larger than she would have guessed from the picture covering it.
Her stare grew wider to see the canvas bags he removed from it and she realised that they were filled with money.
Francesco and his two men conversed rapidly, all the while weighing wads of notes on a small set of electronic scales and making notes in a battered-looking A4 book. When the young woman came in with two coffees and a bowl of sugar cubes, Francesco added two lumps into both cups, stirred them vigorously, then passed one over to Hannah, who had perched herself on a windowsill.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ridiculously touched he’d remembered how she liked her coffee.
