by Mandy Rosko
Martina didn’t demand the blond-haired man leave, but neither did she make him welcome either.
Who was he?
The man kicked Isla’s bag with the tip of his foot. “Who does this belong to?”
“Not to Angela. Will you please stop that?”
“Who does it belong to?” the blond asked again, a glint of impatience and anger in his eyes when he spoke through his teeth.
“That’s mine,” Isla said, kind of pissed herself as she finally found her spine and rushed down the stairs. “Stop kicking my things.”
The blond frowned at her and stepped back as she got up into his face.
The younger brunet standing next to him backed off, his eyes wide.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she snapped. “You can’t just stomp into places and kick around people’s stuff!”
The blond grinned. “What? Are you serious? Who the hell are you?”
“That’s not your fucking business.” Yeah, she was kind of angry now. Or, maybe a lot angry. If any of her jewelry kits had been inside, she would have been majorly pissed off if they’d popped open and beads and whatnot had spilled all over the floor. Her panties and a bra were all bad enough. Not to mention his treatment of the staff was pretty bad in the ten seconds she’d been around him. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Definitely not Arturo’s new fuck toy, that’s for sure.”
“Sebastian, please,” said the brunet helplessly.
Sebastian? The name was familiar, and then it clicked who he was. She was instantly not so sure of herself.
Oh, shit, this was one of Arturo’s brothers. His half-brother.
She swallowed hard and tried to regain her composure on the double. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Arturo’s brother. You don’t have the right to kick around my things and make trouble for them because of it. And I am not Arturo’s fuck toy!” she added, even more enraged than when she’d started talking.
Sebastian just smiled at her, a light, condescending shake of his head that made her blood bubble and boil even more. “Right. That’s what all those thongs and lacy things mean, right?”
She slapped him. Hard. Her hand flew like it was riding the wind on a mind of its own.
There was a gasp as Sebastian’s head turned to the side. His eyes were wide. He probably felt the pain, but couldn’t believe she’d done it.
Too bad for him.
Martina was the first to recover and react. “Miss King!”
Martina gently took Isla by the shoulders and pulled her back. She put herself in front of Sebastian just then. “I apologize, Mr. Calendri.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Don’t apologize for me!” Isla snapped.
Great. Now she was the one yelling at people.
The brunet stepped forward. “She’s right. She didn’t do anything wrong,” he said softly. “Sebastian, that was mean, come on.”
Actually, Isla thought she was the one who should apologize, but her hand stung from the strike and she was angry and embarrassed. She couldn’t get it out. This was the second time she’d hit someone like that in just a matter of days. She didn’t like this side of herself, and she didn’t know what to say about it.
“It’s okay, I shouldn’t have—”
Sebastian glared at the man. “What? You want me to apologize to her? Fuck her and fuck Arturo, too. All of you can go to hell,” he snapped, and then spun on his heels and marched toward the door.
Okay, now she wasn’t so sorry anymore. They were even as far as she was concerned.
“Sebastian,” said the brunet, who tried to follow.
“Get away from me!” Sebastian snapped, halting the other man in his tracks just as the door slammed.
The noise echoed in the vast foyer, leaving only the sounds of Robert and the others getting her bags in order.
The shorthaired brunet scratched a hand through his hair before turning around. He had something of an apologetic smile on his face, as if he worried what Isla would have to say about one of the Calendri men being an angry asshole.
They probably were all used to being treated that way.
"Sorry about my brother. He's just… angry."
"Brother?" Isla asked, her stomach sinking heavier and heavier inside of her.
She was so glad she'd thought the angry asshole comment instead of saying it out loud.
She was so focused on her embarrassment, she barely noticed the man stepping forward and extending his hand. "I'm Orlando Calendri. You just met Sebastian."
She shook his head. "R-right, I know you. I mean, not really. I know of you."
"Good things, I hope," Orlando said, putting his hands into his pockets as he stared down at her, that same soft smile still on his face.
This guy didn't look at all like he had one dickhead bone in his body.
She tried to bring up the files in her brain of what Orlando Calendri was like, but there wasn't much there.
He was the youngest of all the brothers, she knew that much, and supposedly the nicer, more approachable Calendri.
That part was proving to be true right about now.
"Is he always like that?" she asked, motioning to the door where Sebastian just stormed off.
"No, usually he's angry," Orlando said.
Isla's eyes flew wide, and Orlando laughed. "Sorry, I couldn't resist. That was bad, though. Uh, yeah, he's just pissed off at Arturo."
"What? Why?"
Orlando shrugged. "Arturo and Silvio have this game with him. Someone insults or does something to someone else, and so the other has to get some kind of proper revenge. I usually try to stay out of it."
Orlando's smile faded when he said that. This wasn't just a brotherly rivalry that was going on. From the sound of it, Sebastian had been majorly ticked off about a woman named Angela.
Could she be the blonde from the other day? The one Isla had seen coming out of Arturo's back office?
No wonder Sebastian had called her his fuck toy.
"Well, don't let it bother you so much," Orlando said. "Are you with Arturo?"
She realized after about two seconds how he meant that. "Oh, well, not… not really?"
"Not really?"
Orlando looked like a sweet guy, but he was smart enough to realize something was up. His eyes flicked over to her luggage, which was being taken up the stairs to her room now that everything had been cleaned up.
He'd seen her underwear and black lacy things pop out of her bags as much as Sebastian had seen them.
Great.
Orlando smiled. "Sorry. Not my business, but Arturo really is a good guy. He'll treat you right while you're with him."
She smiled back at him as she breathed a tiny sigh of relief, which she hadn't even been aware she was holding onto.
It was nice hearing from someone in the family, who seemed so nice and already easy to talk to, that she was in okay hands.
She didn't like being thought of as a fuck toy, but in hindsight, as much as she hated to admit it, that was what she was.
But Orlando seemed all right. He turned to Martina. "When does Arturo get back? I wanted to talk to him about the Walt contract."
Martina almost looked like she was about to bow at the waist. She didn't. "I'm very sorry. He must be working late tonight. Would you like to stay and wait for him, or should I pass along a message?"
"Uh," Orlando looked to Isla, and she realized he was only unsure because he figured his brother would want to be having sex with her when he got back, not discussing the contracts of whatever poor company was being taken over.
"Maybe I'll come back later. He must've forgotten our appointment."
"If it's important work, you should stay. I'll prepare you some coffee," Martina said.
Isla wanted to tell him to not feel unwelcome in his brother's home on account of her, but part of her didn't want Orlando speaking with Arturo about another company takeover either.
Even the nic
e Calendri was still a shark searching for prey, it seemed. Everyone always said business wasn't personal, but according to a lot of the movies she had seen over the course of her life, that was what most of the people in the mafia said, too.
Nothing personal.
"Don't worry about it, Martina. It can wait until morning." Orlando looked back at Isla, and she nearly froze right on the spot. "It was nice to meet you."
"You, too," she said, and Orlando turned and let himself out of his brother's house.
Yeah, he definitely didn't look the same as he did in his pictures. The lack of a suit tended to do that to a person, but he was still so damned nice, even if what he did for a living sucked.
Why couldn't he be the one she met with to ask for her family’s business back? He looked like he would hand it over to her in a second.
Or, at the very least, it would be easier to convince a guy like that to have mercy on her.
All the same, Orlando was nice enough, and easy on the eyes as far as his looks went, but Arturo was still definitely the older, more handsome brother.
She wondered if she would be meeting the last Calendri brother tonight as well. She needed to get upstairs and onto her iPad so she could look up all the pictures again.
The last thing she needed was to get up in the face of another Calendri without recognizing him.
11
Isla put on some background music as she surfed the Internet. It always helped her to think and calm down.
Ugh, she'd told off Sebastian Calendri, got all up in his space and everything. That had probably not been the best idea if she was trying to impress Arturo enough that he'd sign over her grandfather's business.
But, if what Orlando said was true, then they didn't much get alone either.
Of course, that didn't discount the fact they were still family, and it might not matter how much Arturo argued with him. He still might be majorly angry she had yelled at him.
She needed something to do to keep her mind occupied until he decided to get his ass here. So, she spent the next couple of minutes refreshing her memory on the Calendri's and what they looked like. Most of their pictures were taken a couple of years ago when the paparazzi were going even more crazy than usual to get their photos.
The Calendri's were damn near American royalty. Their wealth wasn't the most extravagant in the country, but they were definitely in the top 1 percent of the population.
No, what made them so beloved by the media was the fact that Vincenzio Calendri and his late wife, had been known for throwing extravagant balls, and not the sort to raise money for their favorite politician.
It was all charity work. The money went to school libraries, children's hospitals, women's shelters, health clinics, and a number of other places that were either in desperate need or weren't popular to donate to, or even both.
The couple had been loved the whole country over and hailed as the perfect couple.
All of that, until it had been discovered that Vincenzio was guilty of a number of affairs.
Which all came out during his trial for the murder of his wife.
The press hadn't just had a mild liking for the Calendri's then, they'd been like sharks that had scented blood.
It had turned into reality television that everyone in the country tuned in to watch as Vincenzio Calendri was accused and on trial for his wife's murder. When he'd been found guilty, Isla had been with Jane, watching on their television. She could still recall the sound of the people in the apartments next to hers as some of them cheered, and others roared.
She had heard there were parties and barbecues.
She'd felt bad for it back then, but she'd also been kind of relieved that Vincenzio Calendri would be going away, because when she'd heard about that, she'd been so sure it meant her grandfather, her mother, and her aunts and uncles, would all get their jobs back because Baciami Boutique would be returned.
Not so. Though the Calendri sons had been teenagers when the murder happened, they hadn't been children when the trial finally came. They'd been grown men, even the youngest of them. More than grown, their educations done with, they had experience in the world of business, and Arturo had immediately taken over for his father.
She swiped through the list of pictures. Some of them showed Arturo as very young when his mother was killed. Not a kid, but not yet a man either. She did the math on the dates, discovering Arturo actually wasn't a teenager when his mother was killed, but just barely twenty years old. Not much better. There was nothing better, actually.
Many pictures showed a wide-eyed, shell-shocked young man, still reeling from the fact his mother was gone and realizing death was not something anyone could come back from.
Especially with the terrible way she'd been murdered.
Isla's heart ached for him, for the younger Arturo in those pictures. She spotted Orlando in some of them, his face youthful, showing him as a boy of thirteen or so. Silvio had been seventeen when it happened. Children weren’t supposed to have their pictures taken, but someone had snapped these, and once something was put on the Internet, everyone knew it stayed there forever.
The press hadn't given the boys much mercy whenever they'd dared to go out in public.
Sebastian, the only blond, hadn't been in any of the pictures.
As the trial went on, the pictures of Arturo showed someone much different than the scared, stunned young man from the other photos. In these, he was a man with his shoulders filled out, his back straight, and his dark eyes hard and fearless as he watched his father answer questions and deny what he'd done.
The earbuds in her ears were so roughly yanked out, that the lack of music was more of a shock than anything else.
Except for Arturo's irritated voice coming from right next to her. "Doing a little research, I see."
She damn near jumped right off the bed, and her iPad certainly went flying. "What the hell are you doing here?"
He reached his hand up and effortlessly caught the flying tablet before it could crash onto the floor and break.
Her heart raced too damned much for her to be overly impressed by that.
Arturo's dark eyes stared at her. He wasn't glaring. He didn't look remotely angry, considering what he'd just caught her doing, but his expressionless face still gave off a cold chill that made her freeze in place on the bed.
That chill was made only about a thousand times worse when he looked at the tablet screen and started scrolling through what she'd just been reading. Then his eyes glanced back to her.
This time, he did look a tiny bit irritated as he tossed the tablet onto the bed. "Find everything you were looking for?"
Isla stared at the screen in front of her. The picture of Arturo, still looking dazed and confused, was in front of her now.
"I'm sorry. I just…. It's public information."
Fuck, she knew instantly that was a dumb thing to say the second it came out.
His brows lifted. He stared at her as though she was one of the biggest fools he'd ever laid eyes on. "How old are you?"
She blinked. "What?"
"Your age. I'd like to know it."
"Why?" She wanted to tell him it wasn't polite to ask about a woman's age, but after what he'd just caught her doing and what she'd said, she wisely managed to keep that to herself.
"I want to know because you act like a little teenaged twit. You look like I'm about to ground you to your room."
Teenaged twit? Oh, screw him. She bristled. If she'd been a cat, her hair and tail would be spiking up right about now, though the noise that came out of her throat was damn near a catty growl. "I'm trying to apologize to you, you dickhead."
"And now I'm a dickhead, even though I caught you violating my privacy, and I don't care if that shit was on the Internet. If you wanted to do your research on me, you should have done it and looked everything up anywhere but in my house."
That got her feeling mighty guilty again, but Isla sucked that feeling back. He thought she was w
eak for apologizing, so she wasn't going to do it.
"Wait," she said, frowning and looking at her door, which was open. The fact that Arturo was in here meant that he'd walked through it. It certainly wasn't a hologram in front of her, though she didn't doubt he could afford something like that. "What are you talking about invading privacy? You just walked into my room unannounced. What if I'd been naked or getting dressed?”
"So? I'm going to see you anyway," he said, crossing his arms. "And I knocked three times and called your name, so I let myself in. This isn't your room either. I'm letting you use it while you stay here."
She glared at him, though she didn't have the energy to put much feeling into it. "Do you have to have a response to everything?"
He didn't respond to that. He just looked at her and smiled.
Asshole. Total asshole. Even if he didn't have to have a response for everything, he certainly needed to be right about everything, and this definitely proved as much.
"Whatever," she said, ignoring his tsking sound at her immature choice of words. "Anyway, I'm sorry for loading that up in your house if it offends you. I already knew about a lot of it anyway, but I saw some of your brothers today, and I wanted to see their pictures again since I didn't recognize them."
"I was told Sebastian came to visit." Arturo’s smile widened enough to show off a perfect row of white teeth. "How was he?"
She slid off the bed to stand. "Well, I didn't know him before today, so I don't have anything to compare him to, but he seemed pretty pissed off at you." She considered not asking, but she had to. "I'm guessing Angela was someone he cared about that you messed with?"
“A mutual agreement between us. Trust me, she didn't mind."
Isla barely held back her noise of disgust. Really? This was how he acted about sleeping with his brother's girlfriend? Or, at the very least, someone his brother apparently cared for. A lot.
She hadn't read a Harlequin since she was a teenager and snuck them out of her mother's purse, but of all the billionaire romances she'd gobbled up back when she was fourteen, none of them had acted like such a cruel jerk. He certainly didn't fit the bill for any charming man who was waiting to be healed by a good woman. He was certainly scarred and fucked up, but Isla knew that. Even if she left this place with a little less dignity, she was still going to leave it with her heart intact. There was no chance of her developing unwanted feelings for this guy like Jane had worried about.
