America's Star-Crossed Sweethearts

by Jackie Braun

  Dear Reader,

  It’s been years since I visited Italy, but three things have stayed with me despite the passage of time: the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the Italian countryside, and the food.

  Oh, the food. I’ve often said if I were allowed to eat only one kind of cuisine for the rest of my life I would choose Italian.

  So when I was asked to be part of The Brides of Bella Rosa continuity, I was excited that it not only explored the themes of forgiveness and family, but that it did it so against the backdrop of Rosa and Sorella, the fictional restaurants owned by Luca Casali and his sister Lisa Firenzi.

  I invite you to pour yourself a glass of wine and join Atlanta and Angelo as they travel to Italy and toward love.

  Happy reading!

  Jackie Braun

  Romance, rivalry and a family reunited.

  For years Lisa Firenzi and Luca Casali’s sibling rivalry has disturbed the quiet, sleepy Italian town of Monta Correnti, and their two feuding restaurants have divided the market square.

  Now, as the keys to the restaurants are handed down to Lisa’s and Luca’s children, will history repeat itself? Can the next generation undo its parents’ mistakes, reunite the families and ultimately join the two restaurants?

  Or are there more secrets to be revealed…?

  The doors to the restaurants are open, so take your seats and look out for secrets, scandals and surprises on the menu!

  The saga concludes next month in

  Firefighter’s Doorstep Baby

  by Barbara McMahon

  JACKIE BRAUN

  America’s Star-Crossed Sweethearts

  Jackie Braun is a three-time RITA® Award finalist, a four-time National Readers’ Choice Award finalist and a past winner of the Rising Star Award. She worked for nearly two decades as an award-winning journalist before leaving her full-time job to write fiction. She lives in mid-Michigan with her husband and their two sons. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her Web site at www.jackiebraun.com.

  For Brady Williamson and his new sister, Alexandria

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  ANGELO CASALI stood at the home plate with his feet planted shoulder’s width apart in the dust. The bat hovered in the air just beyond his right ear. It was the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, and the Rogues were trailing by two. Anxious runners filled the bases waiting for New York’s Angel to work a miracle. They and the fans knew the team’s pennant hopes rested squarely on his shoulders.

  The opposing team’s pitcher glared at Angelo from beneath the bill of his cap. Kyle Morris had one of the best arms in the league. Only a handful of batters could touch his fastball. Angelo was one of them, which was why Morris had yet to bring the heat against him this game. In fact, the pitcher had walked Angelo his last two times at bat. Morris couldn’t afford to do that now, and they both knew it.

  The pitcher hiked up his leg and levered back his arm before bringing it around. The ball blasted free of his hand like a bullet clearing the barrel of a gun. Even so, Angelo was ready, his eyes tracking its trajectory. He timed his swing perfectly and put everything he had into it, shifting his weight to his right leg as he brought the bat around.

  Crack!

  The sound of red-stitched white leather meeting wood rent the air like gunfire. It was followed by a sickening pop! that only Angelo heard…and felt. Pain, wicked and white-hot, exploded from his shoulder. The crowd’s deafening roar drowned out his cry.

  It’s worth it, he told himself. It’s worth it.

  Even as he dropped the bat and started toward first base, he knew there was no need to hurry. The ball was riding high in the clouds and showed no signs of dropping.

  “And it’s out of here!” the announcer shouted.

  The fans were on their feet, clapping and highfiving.

  “Angel! Angel! Angel!”

  Their jubilant chanting buoyed him. Along with the adrenaline streaking through his system, it allowed him to ignore the worst of the pain. He rounded the bases at a leisurely trot with his good arm raised in triumph. By the time he arrived at home plate, his teammates were out of the dugout, standing there en masse to greet him with whoops and careless back slaps that nearly sent Angelo to his knees. He kept his grin in place, enjoying the moment. How could he not? The Rogues had just sealed a berth in the playoffs. He was the city’s hero.

  Barely twenty-four hours, Angelo adjusted the ice pack on his shoulder and drank a beer in the solitude of his Upper East Side apartment. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the crowd chanting his name as the video replayed on the big screen over the scoreboard. He’d watched it from the bench in the dugout, a spot he’d most likely keep warm for what little remained of the season. Most disturbing of all, though, was the thought that this time he might have to hang up his cleats for good.

  He sipped the pricey imported brew he’d acquired a taste for his first year in the majors. What would he do then? The question nagged at him more than the pain from his shoulder.

  His cell phone trilled as he debated having another drink in lieu of the medication the team doctor had prescribed. It was probably another journalist. Reporters were eager for an interview or even just a quote from the Angel. He snatched it off the coffee table, intending to turn it off. A glance at the readout stopped him. It was his brother, Alessandro.

  He grinned as he flipped it open. “Alex. Hey.”

  “How are you?”

  “Never better,” Angelo lied.

  “Except for your shoulder, you mean.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged the body part in question and immediately winced. “Except for that. What are you up to?”

  “Drinking a beer. Been a long day.”

  “I’m doing the same. I know what you mean.”

  Angelo tossed the ice pack aside and started for the kitchen to retrieve another bottle. He wished his twin were there to share a cold one with him in person. It still amazed Angelo that Alex owned a ranch in San Antonio, Texas, and was as at home roping steer as Angelo was snapping up grounders in a major league ballpark. God knew their chaotic childhood hadn’t lent itself to either profession. For that matter, it was amazing either of them had amounted to much of anything.

  “So, is your shoulder as bad as the sportscasters are saying?” Alex wanted to know.

  Angelo made a dismissive sound. “You know how those vultures are. They’re milking the story to boost their sagging ratings.”

  His brother wasn’t fooled. “You won’t be back in uniform this season.”

  “No.”

  “And next year?”

  “Sure. After surgery and some rehab I’ll be as good as new.” Angelo’s shoulder throbbed, seemingly in contradiction. He silenced it with a gulp of beer and settled back into the leather recliner. “I’m too damned young to retire.”

  It was a lie and they both knew it. Thirty-eight wasn’t old by most standards, but in baseball it was damned near ancient. Before the injury, Angelo had remained a powerhouse, but his legs weren’t what they used to be. Things like that didn’t escape the notice of the guys in the dugout, much less the guys in management. This injury didn’t help. It was his second serious one in three years, and pulled tendons had taken him out for several games in June. No b
all club wanted to pay top dollar for a player who’d ride the pine. Even his agent was getting antsy that when Angelo’s multimillion-dollar contract expired in a couple months the team would cut him loose.

  “Well, it sounds like you’ll have some time on your hands.”

  “Yeah.” He studied the label on his beer and scraped at the edge with his thumbnail. “Maybe I’ll mosey on down to Texas and pay you a visit. I could get better acquainted with your bride-to-be and her little girl.”

  It still came as a surprise that the pretty single mom had knocked his brooding brother off his feet when she’d shown up at the ranch with her disabled daughter a few months earlier. Alex wasn’t the sort to fall fast or hard. Yet he’d done both.

  “I’d like that.” Alex paused then. “But what I’d like even more is for you to use the time to go to Italy.”

  Angelo closed his eyes. “Not this again,” he muttered after an oath.

  For weeks his twin had been urging on him to reconnect with their estranged father and meet the rest of the Casali clan in Monta Correnti, the place of their birth.

  “Go and make your peace. You won’t regret it,” Alex said.

  “I have no peace to make. I’m fine with things just the way they are.”

  “Fine? You’re ticked off, Angelo.”

  “That too,” he agreed after a long pull on his beer. “Where were they when we were stealing to eat or getting dumped into yet another foster home? Where was Luca?” he demanded, referring to their father. “No one was inviting us to Italy to visit then.”

  The way he saw it, the old man had washed his hands of his sons when he had sent them to Boston to live with their American mother, who was more suited to partying than parenting. They’d been three years old then. By the time the twins were fourteen, Cindy had drunk herself to death and the boys had been made wards of the state. Not long after, they’d made their way to New York. His skin still crawled when he thought about how close they’d come to winding up statistics.

  “They didn’t know, Angelo. None of them, including Luca, knew that Mom was gone or that we were in and out of the foster system.”

  “They didn’t know because they didn’t care enough to find out,” he shot back.

  In Angelo’s mind, it was all very cut and dried. In the past, when it could have made a real difference, his family had wanted nothing to do with him. Well, he wanted nothing to do with them now, regardless of how many olive branches they extended.

  He’d already ignored the surprise e-mail from his half-sister, Isabella, which had kicked off this whole reunion quest. Talk about a curveball. He certainly hadn’t expected to learn via the Internet that he had additional siblings in Monta Correnti, three of them born to Luca’s second wife after Angelo and Alex’s exile. He’d also passed on a wedding invitation from a cousin who’d grown up in Australia.

  Family had been falling out of the rafters for the past several months, but it was all too little and coming far too late.

  “Don’t think Luca doesn’t regret his choices,” Alex said quietly. “He does. But he can’t go back and change the past. He can only try to change the future. Go to Italy, Angelo. Spend a week in Monta Correnti. In fact, spend two. You could use a vacation. I’ve already booked you a flight and found you a place to stay. I’ll e-mail you the information. You can pay me back later.”

  “I’ll drop a check in the mail first thing in the morning, bro. But I’m not going.”

  Alex was quiet a moment before he pulled out his ace. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me. I’m asking you to go.”

  “That’s low.” And it was. His level-headed and older-by-mere-minutes brother knew he was the only person who could get Angelo to do something he didn’t want to do.

  Far from sounding insulted, Alex’s voice held a smile when he replied, “Sure it’s low, but it’s also effective. You’ll thank me later.”

  “Thank you? Right. Don’t hold your breath,” Angelo snapped before hanging up.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ATLANTA JACKSON expelled a gusty sigh as she studied herself in the hotel suite’s full-length mirror. Was the pale, hollowed-eyed woman staring back really her?

  The hair was right, a long cascade of nearly white-blonde curls. But her skin was pasty and her body a tad too angular to carry off the bombshell label that was routinely applied to it. She was a good half-dozen pounds thinner than she’d been just a month earlier, and ten pounds thinner than she’d been the month before that. Forget the low-carb fad that was all the rage among Hollywood A-listers. She’d gone on the high-stress diet, guaranteed to melt off the pounds quicker than butter on Louisiana asphalt in August.

  At least her dress, a simple navy sheath made of cotton, hid some of her new angles.

  A smile bowed her lips. Zeke would hate this dress, which was precisely why she’d purchased it the day before at a pricy Fifth Avenue boutique, outside of which she had been mobbed by paparazzi and actually booed by a couple of passersby. Buying it and now wearing it out in public were acts of defiance.

  Zeke Compton—her manager, mentor and, according to him, her messiah—hadn’t allowed her to wear navy. It was too close to black, he claimed. Black being another forbidden color since it reminded him of mourning.

  “What does America’s favorite actress have to be sad about?” he’d asked the one time Atlanta’s stylist had suggested a vintage Oscar de la Renta gown the color of onyx for a red-carpet event.

  Wouldn’t the public like to know? she’d thought at the time. Now she knew better. The public didn’t want the truth, unvarnished or otherwise. They wanted romantic, rags-to-riches fairy tales and titillating scandals. They wouldn’t accept that she was tired of being manipulated, tired of being dictated to and sick to death of living a lie.

  Atlanta slipped on a pair of rounded-toe flats. Despite the fashionable little bow on them, the shoes were another no-no in Zeke’s book.

  “You’re too short to wear anything less than a three-inch heel, love,” he’d decreed one year into their professional relationship. By then, things between them also had turned personal, and she’d moved from her West Hollywood studio apartment into his Bellaire home, playing the dutiful Eliza Doolittle to his domineering Henry Higgins.

  Atlanta was five-seven, hardly what one would consider petite, but she’d listened to him about clothing and shoes and pretty much everything else. She’d always listened to the men in her life, a habit that dated to her childhood.

  Bad things happen to little girls who don’t do what they’re told.

  The words echoed from her distant past. As she had done a million times before, Atlanta forced them and the black memories that accompanied them back. Then she glanced at her watch. It was time to go. Thank God, she thought, as she made her way out the suite’s door. She was as eager to leave New York as she’d been to leave Los Angeles. Neither place was welcoming now that Zeke had poisoned the well of public opinion against her and made her a pariah among her peers.

  In the elevator, she checked her purse one more time, making sure she had her itinerary, tickets and passport. Her luggage was waiting downstairs. The limousine she’d called for would be at the curb, only a gauntlet of paparazzi to run before she could relax in the relative privacy that its tinted windows would afford.

  In a dozen hours she would be in Monta Correnti, Italy. Her stylist, one of the few people from her old life still willing to speak to her, assured Atlanta that the remote hillside village situated between Naples and Rome was the ideal place to drop off the radar, relax and rejuvenate.

  God, she hoped Karen Somerville was right. Atlanta was wound so tightly these days she felt ready to explode. But first things first. Sucking in a deep breath, she donned a pair of dark designer sunglasses as the elevator’s doors slid open.

  “Show time,” she murmured.

  Eyes shaded with his trademark Oakleys, Angelo sauntered into the VIP lounge at JFK International as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Image
was everything, especially given all of the speculation swirling around his career.

  The official line from the team was that Angelo was suffering pulled ligaments and severe tendonitis in his right shoulder, but that after rest and physical therapy he would return to the regular lineup in the spring. The truth wasn’t quite as rosy as that. In addition to the start of osteoarthritis, he had a torn rotator cuff. Cortisone shots had kept the worst of the arthritis pain at bay in the past, but no shot would take care of the torn cuff.

  As the team’s physician bluntly put it, “You need surgery. An injury like this won’t heal on its own. And, given your age, it might never heal well enough to take the abuse heaped on it by a major league ballplayer.”

  It all boiled down to a truth he wasn’t ready to accept. Instead of scheduling surgery, he had embraced his brother’s high-handed scheme for a family reunion. He was going to Italy, where he would spend the next couple of weeks. He had no intention of reconnecting with his father, but the gesture would appease Alex. As an added bonus, that little speck on the map was a good place to duck the press and figure out his future.

  The bar area of the VIP lounge held only a smattering of patrons. None of them looked up when he entered. They were all important people in their own right—movers, shakers, captains of industry. They didn’t get awestruck or if they did, they hid it well behind blasé attitudes. His ego certainly hoped that was the case with the gorgeous blonde sitting in front of the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the tarmac.