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Say something, he thought furiously. But his mind was blank.
Instead, he strode past both Anna and Izzy. “No calls,” he barked, ushering his PA out the door and slamming it after her.
“Nick,” Izzy said, “we want an answer.”
Izzy, normally as sweet and gentle as the flowers she loved to nurture, looked as if she wanted to slug him. Anna was breathing fire as only she could. He had a quick flash to what she’d been like as a teenager, how she’d dyed her pale blond hair black, painted her nails black, dressed in black, wore black lipstick, how she’d stood up to her brothers’ teasing, their mother’s hand-wringing and, most impressively, their father’s fury…
“Are you deaf?” she snapped. “We were just at your place. We saw her. And we want to know—”
“What were you doing,” Nick demanded, narrowing his eyes, “snooping around in my place?”
“Oh, that’s perfect!” Izzy laughed with disdain. “He’s going to try and lay the blame on us—but what else can you expect from a man?”
“Listen here, you two—”
“No,” Anna said, tossing her blond hair out of her eyes and pointing an accusatory finger at his chest, “you listen! You are married. You have a wife. And you’re expecting a baby.”
Nick glared back. Then he let out a groan, went behind his desk and sank into his swivel chair.
“Yes.”
His sisters looked at each other. Anna snorted. Izzy shook her head.
“And when,” she said, “when, exactly, were you going to let the rest of the world know?”
Nick gave a strangled laugh. “I don’t know. After the baby’s born. After my divorce.” He looked up, laughter gone, jaw flexing with tension. “Now, what were you doing at my condo?”
“We met for lunch,” Isabella said. “And Anna remembered you had something for her at your place.”
Nick looked blank. Anna rolled her eyes.
“I’m taking tort law this semester, remember? The day of Falco’s wedding, you promised you’d give me the legal analysis from that French deal you did last year—you said you had it in your home office and if you didn’t remember to courier it to me, I could just stop by if I was in the neighborhood and get it myself, but I got busy and forgot about it until now and—”
“And,” Isabella said impatiently, “we were having lunch a couple of blocks from your condo, and Anna thought of that file. So, she phoned to make sure your housekeeper was in, a woman answered—”
“A woman answers,” Anna said, picking up the story, “and I say, ‘Hi, this is Anna Orsini,’ and she says, ‘Who?’ and I say, ‘Anna, Nick’s sister, who’s this?’ and she says, ‘This is his wife,’ and then she bursts into tears!”
“Merda,” Nick said, and instead of yelling at him again, his sisters saw the misery in their brother’s face, looked at each other and went around the desk. They squatted beside him and each clasped one of his hands.
“Nicky,” Izzy said softly, “tell us what happened.”
So he told them. Everything.
Almost everything.
He left out the part about the pain lodged deep within his heart because he’d barely begun to admit that to himself. Why should a man’s heart ache over a woman who was a cheat and a liar?
But he told them all the rest. How he’d thought Alessia was an honest, good woman. How he’d discovered, by accident, that she wasn’t. That she had lured him into doing what her father had wanted, lured him into more than that, into having to marry her…
They listened.
That had always been the thing about his sisters. They both knew how to listen. They never sat in judgment. Anna, maybe because she’d been judged too many times in her black hair/black nails/black clothes/black lipstick days; Isabella, maybe because from childhood on, she’d given herself over to nurturing things that nobody else thought could be saved. They listened, and when he finally stopped talking, they sighed.
“You want my third-year, almost-ready-to-graduate-from-NYU-law-school-and-pass-the-bar, legal-eagle opinion?” Anna asked. Nick nodded, and she sighed again.
“You’re screwed.”
Nick looked at her. For the first time in weeks, in what felt like centuries, he laughed. Really, really laughed.
