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The friends had touched glasses, drunk some of their bourbon. Then, Dante had cleared his throat.
“So, we hear you’re building a place in the Hamptons.”
Rio had nodded. Word got around. Nothing new to that. New York was a big city but people like he and Dante moved in relatively small circles.
“Southampton,” he’d said. “I visited a friend there one weekend last summer. Lucas Viera. You know him? Anyway, Viera has a house on the beach. Very private, very quiet. I liked what I saw, and now—”
“And now,” Gabriella Orsini had said, smiling as she joined the men and slipped her arm through her husband’s, “you need a landscaper.” Her smile broadened. “You do, don’t you?”
Rio had shrugged. “Well, sure, but—”
“We just happen to know a very good one.”
To Rio’s amazement, Dante had blushed.
“Izzy,” Gabriella had said. She’d nodded toward the lush plantings along the borders of the terrace. “That’s Izzy’s work. Spectacular, don’t you think?”
Rio had looked at the plantings. Not spectacular, but nice. Natural-looking, which could not have been easy to accomplish when the setting was a three-level penthouse in the sky.
“Uh,” Dante had said, “see, Izzy is sort of trying to branch out, and—”
“And,” Gabriella had said sweetly, “we’re not above a bit of nepotism. Are we, darling?”
The penny had finally dropped.
His friend, actually, his friend’s wife, was hustling the work of one of her husband’s relatives. A cousin, maybe an uncle, because there were only four Orsini brothers. Rio had met them all and not one was named Izzy.
Whatever, it didn’t matter.
The terrace plantings had looked good. And, what the hell, Rio liked Dante and Gabriella, who happened to have been born in Brazil, his adopted country. So when it came time to deal with the landscaping, Rio gave Izzy Orsini’s name and email address to his contractor, who’d made the contact and set up the time and date of the meeting.
A meeting for which Izzy Orsini had not showed.
Time had passed, with the contractor trying hard not to look at his watch until, finally, Rio had thought, basta. Enough. He’d told the contractor he was free to leave.
“I’m sure you have better things to do than wait around for some guy who’s going to be a no-show.”
“You sure, Mr. D’Aquila? ‘Cause if you want, I can—”
“It’s Rio, remember? And it’s not a problem. I’ll hang around for a while, just in case.”
Which, Rio thought grimly as he dug the shovel into the soil in the trench, brought things straight to the present.
To two bloody hours, waiting for Izzy Orsini to put in an appearance.
“Merda,” he muttered, and stabbed the shovel blade into the earth again.
His temper was rising in inverse proportion to the depth of the trench which would ultimately be the foundation for a low stone wall but at the rate he was going, he was liable to dig his way to China.
He’d run out of excuses for Dante’s cousin.
Rio leaned on the shovel handle, wiped sweat from his eyes with a tightly muscled forearm.
Maybe Orsini got the time wrong. Maybe he’d had a flat. Maybe his great-aunt had come down with an attack of ague, or whatever it was great-aunts came down with, assuming he had a great-aunt at all.
Any of those things could have been explained by a phone call, but Orsini had not called.
Rio’s lips thinned.
Okay. He’d wasted enough time on this. It would be sticky, telling Dante and Gabriella what had happened, but he’d had it.
A shadow passed overhead. Rio looked up, tilted his head back, watched a squadron of pelicans soar overhead, aiming for the ocean. The cool, refreshing ocean.
That did it.
He yanked the shovel free of the soil and put it back where he’d found it.
He’d bought this place as somewhere he could relax. Well, he damned well wasn’t relaxing now. Thinking about an idiot who’d let a chance at a job like this slip through his fingers made his blood boil.
Back when he was just starting out, he’d never have let something so important get away. He’d have walked, crawled, done whatever it took to snag even a chance at a job that would pay well and could lead to something even better.
No wonder Gabriella was hustling this Orsini jerk. The fool couldn’t do anything on his own.
Rio stretched and rotated his shoulders. His muscles ached. He’d skinned a couple of knuckles and there was dirt under his usually well-manicured fingernails.
The truth was, he’d enjoyed a couple of hours of work. Real work, physical work just as he enjoyed being in the ring at his gym. But enough was enough.
Sweat dripped off the end of his nose. He yanked his T-shirt over his head and used it to mop his face.
The sun was starting to drop lower in the sky. The day was coming to an end. He hated to leave. The city would be hot and noisy …
Rio made a quick decision.
He’d take that swim. Then, instead of flying back to Manhattan, he’d spend the night here. Hell, why not? Most of the furniture he’d ordered was in. Thanks to his property manager, he had steaks, fresh corn, even wine. The more he thought about it, the better it—
Bzzzz.
What the hell was that? A bee? A wasp? No. It was the intercom at the gate.
He wasn’t expecting anyone …
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz.
Orsini. It had to be. The fool had shown up after all, except he was three hours late.
Rio almost laughed. The guy had cojones, he had to give him that, but that was all he had. No way was he going to buzz him in. The business of the day was over. This was his own time. His quiet time. His—
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz.
Rio folded his arms. Stood his ground.
The damned thing buzzed again.
Cristo! What would it take to get rid of the guy?
More buzzing. Rio narrowed his eyes, marched to the intercom and depressed the button.
“What?” he snarled.
A blast of static roared from the speaker.
Rio cursed, slapped the button. No good. Orsini had to be leaning on the button at his end, or maybe the freaking thing wasn’t working again. Nothing but static was coming through.
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzz.
His jaw tightened. If Orsini wanted in, then “in” and a lesson on courtesy and punctuality was what he’d get. And he was in the mood to give it to him.
Rio balled up his T-shirt and tossed it aside, yanked open the glass French doors that led into the great room, marched through the house to the entry foyer, his work boots leaving muddy prints on the Carrara marble floors.
“Damnit,” he roared, as he flung open the front door—
And stopped.
A figure was coming toward him, hurrying up the long, unfinished driveway. Trying to hurry, at any rate, but how fast could a person go on that uneven, pitted, rocky surface in—in—
Were those stiletto heels?
His visitor was not Izzy Orsini.
It was a woman.
Damn the malfunctioning intercom and gate!
He’d been this route one time before. A woman had decided he was her true love. He’d never talked to her, never heard her name, never seen her in his life but he’d turned out to be a fixture in her mental landscape. She’d sent him letters. Emails. She’d sent him gifts and cards. She’d stalked him without letup, settled in on the corner near his Manhattan condo, which was when he’d finally, if reluctantly, pressed charges.
Was this her again?
No. His stalker had been fiftyish, short and rotund. This woman was young. Mid-twenties. Tall and slender, and dressed as if she were on her way to a board meeting: the stilettos, a white blouse showing under the suit jacket, dark hair pulled severely back from her face. She didn’t look like a crazy stalker or like a nosy reporter, though in Rio’s book, the two could easily be one and the same, but who gave a damn?
She had no business here and that was all that mattered.
“Hold it right there,” Rio barked, but his command didn’t stop her and he trotted down the steps, eyes narrowed. “I said—”
“Mr. D’Aquila expects me.”
Not a reporter or a crazy, at least not one looking for him if she didn’t recognize him, even shirtless, in jeans and work boots, but clearly a liar with an agenda all her own.
Rio gave a thin smile.
“I assure you, madam, that would be news to him.”
There were only a couple of feet between them now. Close up, he could see that there was a rip in her skirt, dirt on those stiletto heels and a smudge on her blouse. Her hair wasn’t quite as neatly drawn back as he’d at first thought; tendrils of it, dark and curling, were coming loose around her face.
It was an interesting face. Triangular. High cheekbones. Big green eyes. Feline, he thought.
Not that it mattered, but if she’d been in some kind of accident he supposed he could, at least, offer to—
“It is your attitude that would be news to him,” Isabella Orsini said, hoping her voice would not tremble because everything inside her was bouncing around like an unset bowl of gelatin and after all she’d gone through today, there wasn’t a way in hell she was going to permit this half-naked, good-looking-if-you-were-foolish-enough-to-like-the-type flunky of a too rich, too powerful, too full-of-himself ape to stop her now.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Mr. Half-Naked raised one dark eyebrow.
“Really.”
His tone was soft but it made Izzy’s heart thump. To hell with thumping hearts, she thought, and lifted her chin.
“Really,” she said, with all the hauteur she could muster.
Mr. Half-Naked gave another of those thin smiles and motioned toward the door.
“In that case,” he said, in a voice that was almost a purr, “you had better come in.”
CHAPTER TWO
A NAKED man.
A house in the middle of nowhere.
An open door, and an invitation to step through it.
Izzy swallowed hard.
Did she truly want to do that? She was not into taking risks. Everyone knew that about her, even her father, who didn’t actually know anything about any of his children.
I have heard that you are considering taking on a new client, Isabella, Cesare Orsini had said during one of the inevitable Sunday command performance dinners at the Orsini mansion. But you will not.
“Excuse me?” Izzy had said.
Her father had given her what she’d always thought of as one of his “I am the head of this family” glares except, of course, his glares as don of the East Coast’s most powerful famiglia had more impact on those who feared him than they did on his sons and daughters.
To them, he was not the head of anything. He was just a shame to be borne for the sake of their mother.
“Do I not speak English as well as you? I said, you are not to work for Rio D’Aquila.”
“And you say this because …?”
“I know of him and I do not like what I know. Therefore, accepting a position that will make you his servant is out of the question.”
Isabella would have laughed had her father’s view of what she did for a living not been such an old argument.
