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The kid grinned as he filled a flute. “No problem, Mr. Orsini. Me, I’m all weddinged out. Did one yesterday afternoon, another last night and here I am again. Comes my turn, my lady and I are definitely gonna pass on this kind of stuff.”
Nick raised his glass in a mock salute. It was the appropriate reaction but what he really wanted was to say was, Hell, man, why get married at all?
Still, he knew the answer.
A man made his mark in the world, he wanted to make it last. He wanted children to carry on his name.
So, yeah, he’d marry some day.
But he wouldn’t pick a wife by fooling himself into thinking it was love.
Outside, visible through the walls of glass, the sky was graying. Rain, the weatherman had said, and it looked as if he’d got it right for a change.
Nick opened the door and stepped onto the patio.
When he was ready to choose a wife, he would do it logically, select a woman who’d fit seamlessly into his life, who would make no demands beyond the basic ones: that he support her comfortably and treat her with respect. Respect was all he would ask from her in return.
Logic was everything, in making business decisions, in planning a marriage. He would never make an emotional decision when selecting a bank to take over, or a stock to ride out. Why would he do it in selecting a wife?
Relying on emotion was a mistake.
Once, only once and never again, he had come dangerously close to making that error.
At least he hadn’t been fool enough to tell anybody. Not even his brothers. He hadn’t planned it that way; he’d just kept what was happening to himself, probably because it had all seemed so special. As a result, there hadn’t been any “Oh, man, we’re so sorry this happened to you” bull. Not that his brothers wouldn’t have meant it, but there were some things a man was better off keeping to himself.
Things like learning you’d been used.
It had happened four years ago. He’d met a woman on a business trip to Seattle. She was smart, she was funny, she was beautiful. She came from a family that was as close to royalty as you could get in America but she’d made it in business on her own as the CFO of the small private bank he’d gone to the Northwest to buy.
To consider buying.
And that had turned out to be the key to everything.
She’d been in his bed by the end of the first day. And he’d wanted to keep her there. Before he knew it, they’d set a pattern. He flew to Seattle one weekend, she flew to New York the next. She said she missed him terribly when they weren’t together; he admitted he felt the same way.
He had been falling in love, and he knew it.
A month into their affair, he decided he had to tell her about his father. He’d never done that before. A woman either knew his old man was a crook or she didn’t. Who gave a damn? But this was different. This was—he’d avoided even thinking the word in the past—a relationship.
So, one night, lying in her bed, he told her.
“My father is Cesare Orsini.” When she didn’t react, he told her the rest. That Cesare was the head of a notorious famiglia. That he was a gangster.
“Oh,” she purred, “I already knew that, Nicky.” A sexy smile. “Actually, it’s a turn-on.”
A muscle knotted in his jaw.
The revelation should have set off warning bells. But the part of his anatomy with which he’d been thinking didn’t have the luxury of possessing bells, warning or otherwise.
A long holiday weekend was coming. He’d asked her to spend it with him. She said she couldn’t. Her grandmother, who lived in Oregon, was ill. She’d always been Grandma’s favorite; Saturday morning, she’d fly out to spend the weekend with her, just the two of them, alone. She smiled. And she’d tell Grandma about the wonderful man she’d met.
Nick said he understood. It was a sweet thing to do.
And then, Friday night, he thought, what if he went with her? He could meet Grandma. Tell her how important her granddaughter had become to him.
He decided to make it a surprise.
He took the Orsini jet to Seattle, rented a car, drove to his lady’s town house, took the key she’d given him and slipped quietly inside.
