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Stella took two and walked to a little breakfast nook off the kitchen where a stack of books was spread out, three dolls propped up on the bench.
“Please, sit,” Angel said, gesturing to one of the chairs next to the counter. “I hope you don’t mind the informality. We don’t have company often these days.”
“Not at all.” Aria slid onto one of the chairs as she sipped from her glass. “This is good.”
“We grow the lemons here, if you can believe it,” Angel laughed.
Aria smiled. “I believe it.”
It seemed like a charmed existence — the villa in Rome, the obvious adoration with which Nico looked at his wife and daughter, the American woman who somehow ended up the wife of a notorious crime lord in Italy. She tried to remember what she’d heard about Angel, thought it had something to do with her father being a rival of Nico’s, but couldn’t quite pull up the details.
Angel traced a pattern on the counter, running a fingertip through the condensation from her glass. “I don’t mean to pry, but I think I know a little bit about where you’re coming from right now.”
“Is it that obvious?” Aria asked.
“We belong to a select club.” Angel touched her glass to Aria’s in a mock toast.
Aria raised an eyebrow. “Family members of organized crime?”
“For lack of a better word,” Angel said. “I didn’t know about my dad at all until I met Nico.”
“You didn’t know?” Aria asked. “Or you pretended not to know?”
“Believe it or not, I was really naive enough not to know,” she said. “I was shuffled off to boarding schools, had a different last name from my father… I thought he was a real estate developer.”
“I’m sure he was,” Aria said drily.
Angel laughed. “Exactly.”
“How did you deal with it when you found out?”
“Not well,” Angel said. “But by then I was already in deep with Nico, even if I didn’t know it yet. I just…” She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t be without him, you know?”
Aria nodded.
Angel shrugged. “So I found a way to live with it. We have a charitable foundation. I get a lot of satisfaction out of the work we do. I don’t try to pretend it makes everything else okay, but somehow it feels like I’m living the life I was meant to live.”
Aria looked around the sun-drenched kitchen, the smell of lemons and rosemary drifting in from the courtyard. “It looks like it worked out alright.”
“It wasn’t always that way,” Angel said. “But we got here.”
“Was it worth it?” Aria asked. “All the times when it wasn’t working out alright?”
Angel reached across the counter, rested her hand on Aria’s arm as she looked in her eyes. “Without question.”
