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CHAPTER ONE
THE wedding at the little church in lower Manhattan and then the reception at the Orsini mansion had made for a long day, and Nicolo Orsini was more than ready to leave.
A naked woman was waiting in his bed.
She’d been there when he left his Central Park West triplex at ten that morning.
“Must you go, Nicky?” she’d said, with a pout almost as sexy as the lush body barely covered by the down duvet.
Nick had checked his tie in the mirror, checked the whole bit—the custom-tailored tux, the white silk shirt, even his wing tips, spit-polished the way he’d learned to do it in the corps. Then he’d walked back to the bed, dropped a light kiss on her hair and said yeah, he did.
It wasn’t every day a man’s brother got married.
He hadn’t told her that, of course, he’d simply said he had to go to a wedding. Even that had been enough to put a spark of interest in her baby blues, but if he’d said it was one of his brothers doing the deed…
Talk about the Orsini brothers and weddings was not a thought he cared to leave bouncing around in any woman’s head.
“I’ll phone you,” he’d said, and she’d pouted again—how come that pout was becoming less of a turn-on and more of an irritation?—and said maybe she’d just wait right where she was until he returned.
Nick lifted his champagne flute to his lips as he thought back to the morning.
Damn, he hoped not.
He had nothing against finding beautiful women in his bed, but his interest in this one was definitely waning and the female histrionics that sometimes accompanied the end of an affair were the last thing he wanted to deal with after a day like this. Much as he loved his brothers, his sisters, his mother, his sisters-in-law and his little nephew, there was such a thing as too much togetherness.
Or maybe it was just him. Either way, it was time to get moving.
He looked out the glass-walled conservatory at the garden behind the Orsini mansion. The flowering shrubs his sister Isabella had planted a couple of years ago were still green despite the onset of autumn. Beyond the shrubs, stone walls rose high enough to block out the streets of his childhood, streets that were changing so fast he hardly recognized them anymore. The Little Italy that had been home to generations of immigrants was rapidly giving way to Greenwich Village.
Trendy shops, upscale restaurants, art galleries. Progress, Nick thought grimly and drank some more of the champagne. He hated to see it happen. He’d grown up on these streets. Not that his memories were all warm and fuzzy. When your old man was the don of a powerful crime family, you learned early that your life was different. By the time he was nine or ten, he’d known what Cesare Orsini was and hated him for it.
But the bond with his mother and sisters had always been strong. As for the bond with his brothers…
Nick’s lips curved in a smile.
That bond went beyond blood.
All day, his thoughts had dipped back to their shared childhoods. They’d fought like wolf cubs, teased each other unmercifully, stood together against kids who thought it might be fun to give the sons of a famiglia don a hard time. Barely out of their teens, they’d gone their separate ways only to come together again, their bond stronger than ever, to found the investment firm that had made them as wealthy and powerful as their father but without any of the ugliness of Cesare’s life.
They were part of each other, Raffaele, Dante, Falco and him. Close in age, close in looks, in temperament, in everything that mattered.
Was that going to change? It had to. How could things remain the same when one after another, the Orsini brothers had taken wives?
Nick tossed back the rest of his champagne and headed for the bar that had been set up at one end of the conservatory. The bartender saw him coming, smiled politely as he popped the cork on another bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon and poured the pale gold liquid into a Baccarat flute.
“Thanks,” Nick said.
Unbelievable, he thought as he watched Rafe dancing with his wife, Chiara. His brothers, married. He still couldn’t get his head around it. First Rafe, then Dante and now even Falco. I-Am-An-Island-Unto-Myself Falco…
Absolutely unbelievable.
His brothers had fallen in love.
“So will you, someday,” Rafe had said last night, as the
four of them had toasted Falco’s coming nuptials in The Bar, the Soho place they owned.
“Not me,” he’d said, and they’d all laughed.
“Yeah, my man,” Dante had said, “you, too.”
“Trust me,” Falco had said. “When you least expect it, you’ll meet the right woman and next thing you know, she’ll have your poor, pathetic heart right in the palm of her hand.”
They’d all laughed, and Nick had let it go at that.
Why tell them that he’d already been there, done that—and no way in hell was he going to do it again.
Sure, it was possible his brothers would end up on the positive side of the grim statistics that said one in four marriages wouldn’t last. Their wives seemed sweet and loving, but that was the thing about women, wasn’t it?
They played games.
To put it bluntly, they lied like salesmen trying to sell ice to Eskimos.
Nick scowled, went back to the bar and put his untouched flute of champagne on its marble surface.
“Scotch,” he said. “A double.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have Scotch.”
“Bourbon, then.”
“No bourbon, either.”
Nick narrowed his dark eyes. “You’re joking.”
“No, Mr. Orsini.” The bartender—a kid, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two—swallowed hard. “I’m really sorry, sir.”
“Saying you’re sorry isn’t—”
A muscle ticked in Nick’s jaw. Why give the kid a hard time? It wasn’t his fault that the only liquid flowing today was stuff that cost two hundred, three hundred bucks a bottle. Cesare’s idea, no doubt. His father’s half-assed belief that serving a classy wine would erase the stink that clung to his name.
Forget that. Falco would have paid for the wedding himself, same as Dante and Rafe had done. That was the deal, the only way any of them had agreed to hold the receptions in what their mother insisted would always be their home. Isabella had done the flowers, Anna had made the catering and bar arrangements. If he wanted to bite somebody’s head off, it would be hers.
That did it. The thought of taking on his fiery kid sister—either one of them, actually—made him laugh.
“Sorry,” he told the kid. “I guess I only thought I was all champagned out.”
