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“You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Rob could barely believe it himself. “Do you think my dad noticed?”
“Dude, everyone noticed,” Nick said. “You looked as if either you wanted to kill each other, or tear each other’s clothes off.”
It was a little bit of both. “Remember the woman I told you about? The blonde from the bar?”
Tony nodded. “What about her?”
Nick being Nick, he was way ahead of Tony. He started to laugh. “No way. No one’s luck could be that bad.”
“Apparently it can.”
Tony looked from Nick to Rob, and then he laughed. “Are you saying that Caroline Taylor is Carrie from the bar?”
He glared at them both. “I’m glad you find this so amusing.”
“More ironic than amusing,” Tony said.
“Yeah,” Nick agreed. “But still funny as hell.”
If it were happening to anyone but him, Rob probably would have thought so, too.
“So what are you going to do?” Tony asked.
“What can I do? I already asked her to leave, said it would be a conflict of interest for her to stay, and you can see how well that went.”
“Did you see how much we’re paying her?” Tony said. “Can you blame her for not walking away?”
“Well, I’m going to make sure that she earns every penny.”
Tony shook his head, like he thought that was a bad idea. “You know that if you screw with her, your dad will be pissed.”
“Not if he doesn’t find out.”
“You don’t think she’ll rat you out?” Nick asked.
“Only if she wants the entire family to know how she and I first met. If it gets around that she picks up men in bars for one-night stands, her credibility will be in the toilet. Every potential future client will believe that a bedroom romp is included in the contract.”
“You don’t think that’s a little harsh?” Nick said.
If she could play dirty, so could he. “I’m not the one who declared war in front of the entire family. And you can damn well bet she plans to discredit me and my team every opportunity she gets.”
“Are you sure? She comes off as smart and savvy but not vindictive.”
If Nick had just heard her in the conference room, he might feel differently. And if she could be ruthless, so could Rob. She was on his turf now, and she would play by his rules.
“Nick and I are getting a late breakfast at the diner,” Tony said. “Are you going to hang around and work, or do you want to come?”
He thought of all the work Carrie expected him to complete before Monday and smiled. “Breakfast sounds good.”
He was getting ready to stand when his office phone rang. It was his sister Megan. “Give me fifteen minutes and I’ll meet you by the elevator.”
“We’ll get our coats,” Tony said.
“Hey, Meggie,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I just heard from the real estate agent,” she said, her voice squeaky with excitement. “They accepted my offer! The apartment is mine!”
“Congratulations,” Rob said. His younger sister had spent the past nine months looking for exactly the right place, and had been outbid on the first two. “And you’re sure it’s within your budget?”
“That’s my other good news! You know Rose Goldwyn?”
Rob had met her briefly at work, then a few times at family gatherings. She was a recent hire. The daughter of the woman who had been Nonno’s secretary for the better part of his career.
Rose seemed nice enough, but there was something about her, something just a little…off. “What about her?” Rob said.
“She’s going to be my roommate.”
“But you hardly know her.”
“Actually we’ve been talking a lot lately. We have a lot in common.”
“Isn’t she like twenty years older than you?”
“What difference does that make?”
“I don’t know, Meg. Something about her…”
“What?”
“I don’t trust her.”
“Robby, I’m twenty-five” was her plucky response. “It’s not your job to protect me anymore.”
It would always be his job to protect her. She was an infant when his parents adopted her, and although he was six years older, they had always been close. He’d set her classmates straight when they made fun of her for looking “different” than the rest of her family. “Do me a favor and at least have legal do a background check on her. Just in case.”
Her sigh of exasperation meant she was giving in. “Fine, if it makes you happy.”
“It does.” From the hallway he heard a door slam, then after a two-or three-second pause, raised voices. One of them definitely belonged to their father.
What the hell?
“Meggie, I have to go. I’ll call you later.”
“Love you, Robby!”
“Love you, too, Megs.”
He got up and walked past his secretary’s desk into the hall. At one end, near the conference room stood his dad and his uncle Tony, and his dad looked furious.
“I was never given a choice,” his dad was saying, to which his uncle Tony answered, “You gave that up when you left her.”
Whatever that meant, his dad’s face flushed deep red and he gave his brother a firm, two-handed shove that sent him stumbling backward several feet into the conference room door.
Rob had seen his dad and uncles argue, and at times it could get heated, but he had never seen them come to blows. Uncle Tony was stocky and muscular, but Demitrio, Rob’s dad, was taller, younger and trained by the military to fight. That apparently wasn’t going to stop Uncle Tony because he looked as if he were about to lunge.
From behind him, Rob heard his cousin Tony yell, “What the hell is going on?” and turned to see Nick and him running down the hall toward the older men. Rob followed them.
Both older men, red-faced and out of breath, jaws and fists clenched, stopped and turned to him.
“What the hell, Dad?” Tony said. “What is with the two of you lately?”
Demitrio turned to Tony Sr. “Why don’t you tell him, Tony.”
“I’d like to know, too,” Rob said. The last time Uncle Tony had been to their house, Rob showed up to find his mom in tears. He wanted to know why.
“Boys, this is between me and my brother,” Tony Sr. said. “There’s no need to be concerned—”
“Dad!” Tony said. “You were two seconds from beating the crap out of each other.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I beat the crap out of him,” Demitrio said, glaring at his brother.
“When you were kids maybe,” Rob said, “but you’re in your sixties. You could have a heart attack.”
“Did I miss the fun?”
Rob turned to see Leo, Nick’s dad, walking toward them.
“They’re fighting,” Tony said, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Physically fighting.”
“It’s nothing to worry about, boys,” Leo said, laughing heartily. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I had to get between these two when we were kids. It’s that middle-child curse, I guess.” He stepped strategically between his brothers and gave each of them a slap on the back. “Come on, gentlemen, let’s go in my office and settle this.” He turned to Rob and his cousins. “You boys can head on out. I’ve got this.”
Reluctantly the three cousins walked to the elevator.
“So what do you think that was about?” Tony asked him.
“I don’t know,” Rob said. “But it’s been building for a while now. Things have been tense for a couple of months.”
“Don’t forget, Tony’s mom was arguing with your dad at Thanksgiving,” Nick told Rob. Sarah, Tony’s mom, used to date Rob’s dad before he joined the army. The fact that Tony Sr. married her shortly after he left had been a minor source of friction among the three of them over the years. Certainly, it was nothing they would come to blows over now, unless the dynamics of those relationships had changed… .
“Tony, you don’t think that your mom and my dad…”
“Honestly, Rob, I don’t know what to think anymore. But things have seemed off with my parents, as well. I went to a New Year’s party with them and they seemed…I don’t know, out of sync, if that makes sense. They’re typically very physically affectionate with each other, and I barely saw them touch.”
“Maybe my dad can help them figure it out,” Nick said.
“Is your dad still sleeping with your mom?” Rob asked him.
Nick made a face. “Yeah. It’s bad enough knowing about it, but to actually see them…you know…” He shuddered involuntarily. “Talk about scarring a person for life.”
“That’ll teach you to barge into your mom’s house without knocking,” Tony told him.
“I think it’s pretty cool that after being divorced for so long, they reconnected,” Rob said.
“They do seem happy,” Tony told Nick. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but they were at the New Year’s party, too. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and they disappeared long before the ball dropped.”
“Regardless,” Nick said, “I’ll never get how two people who despised each other, and had a messy and uncivilized divorce that scarred all three of their children, could suddenly change their minds and hop in the sack.”
“I’m sure that if they’d had a choice, they would have preferred to be happy the first time around,” Tony said.
Nick shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. So long as I don’t have to see my dad’s bare ass again, they can be ‘happy’ all they want.”
“So, breakfast?” Tony said.
They said goodbye to Sheila as they passed the reception desk, then rode the elevator down to the lobby. Dennis, the security guard, nodded as they walked past.
“Who are you betting on in the playoffs?” Nick asked him, walking backward to the door.
“Steelers-Lions,” Dennis said. “And the Lions will take it.”
“No way! The Lions haven’t won a championship since what, the fifties?”
“Fifty-seven,” Dennis said. “But this is the year.”
Nick laughed. “Dream on. I say Steelers-Chargers, and the Steelers will take the championship.”
Dennis grinned and shook his head. “Keep dreaming, boss.”
Nick laughed as they walked out the door into the bitter wind. Parking was a bitch downtown, so they pulled up their collars and walked the three blocks to the restaurant. The pavement was slick, so it was slow-going, and by the time they got to the diner it was already filling up with the lunch crowd. Every seat was taken and there was a line of people ahead of them.
“Feel like waiting?” Tony asked.
Rob shrugged. “Could be a while.”
“I say we wait,” Nick said. “It’s too damn cold to go back out there.”
“Hey, Caroselli!” someone called. Rob followed the voice, cursing under his breath when he realized whom it belonged to.
Four
“Is that Carrie?” Nick asked.
“That’s her,” Rob said. She sat alone in a booth near the back, and she was waving them over. She was still wearing the ugly suit, but she’d lost the shapeless jacket. She’d let her hair down so it fell in soft waves over the shoulder of a rose-colored shirt made of some sort of stretchy nylon that clung to her curves.
Tony’s mouth dropped open. “Holy hell. No wonder you picked her up. Look at her.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Her body is…wow.”
Yes, it was, and as much as he didn’t want to, Rob couldn’t help but look. Just as he couldn’t help it the other night either. In her clothes she was smokin’ hot, but out of them she was a goddess. A work of art.
