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CHAPTER TWO
DOMINIC
Gio was a born early riser. When we were kids, he would always shake me awake at some ungodly Saturday morning hour to come watch cartoons. No matter how tempted I was to shove him away, I never did—he was my kid brother. No one else on earth wanted my company as badly as he did.
I always chalked all that attention up to the fact that Giovanni never really got over the pain of being abandoned by our mother, even though he could barely remember her. I remembered her, though. I understood that the day she deposited us at our grandparents’ house with a dry kiss and a quick wave was the most fortunate day of our young lives. Our mother didn’t scream a lot or smack us around too much, but she’d forget to buy food and wouldn’t turn on the heat even in the dead of a New York winter. She also never seemed to hear Gio when he howled, wanting to be held. My own earliest memories involved comforting a crying baby brother as best I could, though I was little more than a toddler myself.
Anyway, I like to think that Marie Esposito’s last act as a mother was a loving one. A year before she died in a car accident on a New Jersey bridge, she finally realized two things—the married man who’d fathered us wouldn’t ever step up to the plate and she didn’t have enough spirit to support us on her own. We had her last name, not his, and that was good because our name meant something special. For eighty years there had been an Esposito’s restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Our grandparents, Leo and Donna, were both pushing sixty the day we were left in their care twenty-four years ago, but they loved us and raised us as their own. We were lucky. Not all abandoned kids are.
But all of that happened a long time ago, and today, as I was jerked out of a peaceful sleep by the sound of steady hammering at my front door here in Phoenix, I knew only one person could be responsible. My brother’s stubbornness was damned inconvenient when I was trying, for once, to take advantage of the opportunity to sleep in. I groaned and rolled out of bed because I knew that if I didn’t answer the door now, he’d just keep calling and coming back until something changed.
“Were you sleeping?” Gio seemed surprised when I flung open the door and glared at him.
“Yeah, I was sleeping,” I muttered. “People tend to do that early in the morning.”
He frowned. Everyone had always said we looked alike, but when Gio scowled, I felt like I was gazing into a damn mirror. “It’s not early, Dom. It’s eleven for god’s sake.”
“No way.”
Gio shoved his watch in my face before stepping over the threshold, even though I hadn’t invited him inside yet. Serves me right for buying a condo two doors down from his.
“Are you sick?” he asked with curiosity, knowing that these days I didn’t sleep in because there was so much work to do.
“No,” I grumbled.
“You don’t have company, do you?” he said, glancing around with disapproval at the usual disorder of my living room.
“Tons. A quartet of hookers I picked up on Van Buren.”
Gio smiled vaguely and took a seat on my leather couch.
“Guess you’re staying awhile,” I grumbled as I moved to the kitchen and turned on the coffee machine.
“Tara took the baby to her mom’s house for brunch.”
“Isn’t spending time with your wife and daughter a better alternative to defiling my sleep?”
“Always, but her brother’s back in town, and things get uncomfortable when I have to sit across a table from him and defend you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shit, that again? It was three years ago. I apologized to Ryan about sixty times, and anyway the girl never said a word about being engaged.”
“The sizable rock on her left hand might have given you a clue.”
“In my defense I wasn’t looking at her hand when she bent over the hood of my car and pushed her dress up.”
“Do you have any idea what a Neanderthal you sound like right now?”
“Give me a break,” I griped. “She couldn’t drop her panties fast enough. I didn’t know who she was, and in the long run, it seems like I did that guy a favor.”
“Well, Ryan’s managed to hold a grudge.”
“He should get over it.”
“Like you, Dom?” Gio teased, tossing a couch pillow at my head with a laugh. “After all, you don’t even have room in your head for things like the name of the guy who pantsed you in front of the girls’ varsity soccer team fifteen years ago.”
I stuck a mug under the coffee spigot and pressed a button. “I have no memory of the incident you refer to.”
Gio cracked up. “Right. That’s why you tracked him down four years later and beat him out of his crappy paycheck inside a pool hall before you beat him to a pulp out in the alley. Then you treated everyone in the place to a shot of tequila with your winnings.”
