America's Star-Crossed Sweethearts

by Jackie Braun

Surgery. The S word. After which would come the R word. Not rehabilitation, but retirement.

  “Look, I’m fine,” he said a second time. He didn’t need to see her blink to know his tone carried an edge. “Sorry.”

  “No. I’m sorry. It’s not my business.”

  It wasn’t. Yet he heard himself say, “I’m scared, Atlanta.”

  Her gaze snapped to his. “Of having surgery?”

  That was only a small part of his fear. He was far more unnerved that he might lose his overall identity. But he nodded. As he maneuvered the car back onto the road, he said, “Well, there it is. The secret no one else knows. I’m a big baby when it comes to the thought of going under the knife.”

  Her smile was the plastic Hollywood variety. She knew he was a liar.

  The sun was just starting to set when they reached Angelo’s villa. Atlanta was out of the car before he could come around to open her door.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to top the view from my place, but this does. And you have a pool. Very nice.”

  “I also have a hot tub.”

  “I’m going to have a talk with my travel agent when I get back.”

  “No need to be jealous. I’m willing to share. We can take a dip in it later if you’d like.”

  She pursed her lips in mock dismay. “Darn. I don’t have a suit.”

  Blue eyes twinkled. “I don’t mind.”

  She deflected his flirting by saying, “I bet the hot tub feels like heaven on your shoulder.”

  He scowled and started to walk away before turning back. Snagging her wrist, he hauled her close. “Let’s get something straight. I may be on the injured list, but I’m not out of the game.”

  She wasn’t put off in the least by his temper. “Are you talking figuratively or literally?”

  “Both,” he said, before bringing his mouth down on hers.

  Atlanta expected his kiss to be hard, punishing even. Angelo was angry. He was scared, too. Not of having shoulder surgery, though that was his claim. It went beyond that, she was sure. Which was why she allowed the kiss, hoping, foolishly perhaps, that he would find some comfort in it.

  It was clear he hadn’t when he broke off abruptly and stepped away from her. Shoving a hand through his hair, he said, “If you want to leave now, I’ll understand.”

  She frowned. “Why would I want to leave?”

  “I shouldn’t have done that. I…I know you have some issues regarding…control. And with, um, no meaning no.”

  Her throat ached as his words pierced the barrier protecting her heart. “I didn’t say no.”

  “If you had, I wouldn’t have kissed you,” he said earnestly.

  She nodded. “If I had, I wouldn’t have let you.”

  “So, you want to stay?”

  “I was promised a meal.”

  Angelo ushered her inside the villa. The main living space was larger than the one in hers and, she decided from the well-appointed furnishings, professionally decorated.

  “This is very nice.” The quality of the pieces was obvious. The owner had expensive taste and the bank account to indulge it.

  Angelo’s tone was wry. “You might want to reserve your opinion until you’ve seen the kitchen.”

  She understood what he meant a moment later. Rustic was the word that came to mind. The stove was a big black behemoth.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Exactly, although Isabella managed to create a feast in here.” His expression brightened. “Hey, didn’t you play a chef in one of your movies?”

  “Sous chef, but the operative word here is played. This is beyond my talents as either an actress or an amateur cook.” She exhaled softly as she turned in a semi-circle. “I don’t suppose there’s a microwave stashed in one of the cupboards?”

  “Nope. And, believe me, I’ve checked every last one of them. Apparently the guy who owns this place stopped short of renovating the kitchen. This is original to the house.”

  “So I can see. What’s wrong with the owner? He’s not a fan of eating?”

  “He’s not a fan of cooking. My sister said he doesn’t spend much time in Monta Correnti and when he does, he takes his meals elsewhere.” Angelo’s brows drew together. “You know, I have a feeling that’s what my brother had in mind for me when he booked my accommodations.”

  She chuckled. “Sounds like a bit of a set-up.”

  “I’ll find a way to make him pay,” he muttered as he crossed to the equally ancient-looking refrigerator.

  While Angelo pulled out an assortment of covered bowls, Atlanta rooted through cabinets and drawers, and came up with plates and silverware. They decided to eat the pasta cold, pairing it with fat slices of thick-crusted Italian bread. She decided to indulge in what Zeke had considered an absolute no-no and combined olive oil and some dried herbs she found in the pantry in a shallow bowl to dip the bread in. Then she took the dishes, utensils, bread and herbed oil out to the patio table. Night had fallen. Hanging lanterns illuminated the pool and patio area, while down the hillside the lights from scattered homes mirrored the stars that winked in the sky. Angelo joined her a moment later with the pasta, a bottle of wine and two glasses whose thin stems were wedged between his fingers.

  “No wine for me, thanks,” she said.

  Even so, he set one down in front of her plate. “Just in case you change your mind. Nothing brings out the rich flavors of a meal like a nice glass of wine.”

  “Okay, half a glass.”

  Before they finished their meal, Atlanta had consumed a second half. Angelo was right about the wine. It complemented the flavor of the tomato sauce perfectly. Indeed, she couldn’t recall the last time she’d enjoyed a meal as much as this one.

  “This is incredible,” she said, forking up the last bite of pasta. “I’ve always been a fan of Italian cuisine, although I can’t quite place all of the flavors in this sauce.”

  “It contains a special kind of basil. It’s grown locally. Very exclusive.” A deep groove formed between his brows. “When I arrived here the other day and smelled the sauce simmering in the kitchen, I remembered going out with Alex and my father to pick the herb. I would have been a preschooler.”

  “I’ve heard it said that smell is one of the most potent senses when it comes to memory recall.”

  “I believe it.”

  He didn’t sound happy about it, so she didn’t ask if the outing with his father and brother was a good memory. Even if it were, the intervening years surely would have soured it.

  She’d finished off her wine. He pointed to the empty glass. “Would you like some more?”

  “No, I’ve had enough.”

  “I believe the word they use here is basta,” he told her.

  “That’s right.” She nodded. “It’s a handy word to know.”

  “Just be careful,” he warned. “If you use it too often you’re likely to miss out on a lot of…adventure.”

  Angelo expected Atlanta to say she wasn’t up for any more adventure in her life. He wouldn’t blame her for feeling that way, especially with a new scandal brewing over the photos that had been snapped of the two of them in Rome’s airport. Instead, she studied him in the soft light that cascaded from the patio’s scattered lanterns.

  “I guess I’ll have to use my best judgment, then.”

  “You do that.”

  Angelo finished his Chianti and leaned back in his chair on a contented sigh that morphed into a yelp of pain when he tried to stack his hands behind his head. He lowered his arms immediately and reached for his shoulder before he could think better of it.

  Atlanta’s eyes were wide with concern.

  “Don’t say it.” His words held more of a plea than a warning.

  “Fine. I won’t ask about surgery or rehabilitation or quality of life,” she promised. “But I am curious.”

  The pain was abating. He squinted at her. “About what?”

  “What do you plan to do after baseball?”

  After? The word
hit him with the force of a fastball to the chest. There was no after. Just as he’d convinced himself over the years that there had been no before. Baseball was both his alpha and omega.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Even before she raised her eyebrows, he knew he sounded belligerent. That didn’t stop him from adding, “The Rogues still need me. I’ll be suiting up next season, make no mistake.”

  “I’m not talking about next season. Or even the season after that. You can’t play ball forever, Angelo.”

  It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard from other people, including younger players speculating on what the future held for them post-career. Usually, Angelo deflected the conversation with a witty comeback. This time, seated next to Atlanta in the cool evening air, he not only accepted reality, he met it head-on.

  Gazing up at the stars, he admitted, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “You have lots of options.”

  He did. He could branch off into coaching. One of the farm teams had already approached him with an offer. He could buy one of the existing franchises when it came up for sale. Ownership certainly held appeal. Money wasn’t an object. The endorsement well showed no signs of drying up, despite his latest injury. But…

  “Baseball is everything.”

  “Not everything,” Atlanta replied softly.

  “To me it is. It saved me. Literally. Baseball and Alex, they were what kept me from becoming a statistic.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  This wasn’t something he talked about freely, let alone with a beautiful woman who had her own set of problems. But the timing, the woman who was willing to listen, they both seemed right.

  “I was bound for trouble and taking the express train to get there. I was too young and too stupid to care about consequences. And I was just plain ticked off,” he could admit now.

  “At your father,” she guessed.

  “Him, yeah. And my mom.” Angelo snorted. “Hell, I was angry at everyone.” The sky held a million stars. He concentrated on one of them and continued. “No one seemed to give a damn about my brother and me. Our mom came home drunk most nights. She worked in public relations as a consultant. She kept a roof over our heads and, when she remembered to go grocery shopping, food in the pantry. But, honestly, I don’t know how she managed to keep a job.”

  “Not all alcoholics are falling-down drunks. Some are quite capable of leading dual lives, at least for a while.”

  “That was Cindy. She wasn’t a mean person, just disinterested in motherhood and, I think, angry with Luca that their marriage hadn’t worked out. From what little she said on the subject, they’d met while she was vacationing here, she got pregnant and they got married. They barely knew one another. Not exactly the recipe for long-term success.”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, I think she was desperate to stay young and free of responsibility.”

  “That’s pretty hard to do when you have twins,” Atlanta inserted.

  “Yeah, well, it didn’t stop her. She spent more time out partying at trendy nightclubs than she did at home with Alex and me.”

  Maybe, Angelo realized now, that was why he’d never cared for the fun-loving party girls who hung around outside the stadium after games hoping to hook up with the players. They were a little too reminiscent of Cindy and her irresponsible ways for his taste.

  The star he was staring at winked as if urging him on.

  “Some of our teachers tried to help, but they could only do so much without state intervention. Cindy was good at avoiding that. Whenever she was called in for a parent-teacher conference or visited by a social worker, she would ramp up the tears and promise to change her ways. They believed her. Hell, Alex and I believed her.”

  “Those kinds of promises are impossible not to believe coming from someone you need and love,” Atlanta said in a voice that sounded both sad and knowing.

  “Things would be good for a while, but then she’d start going out again.”

  The stars blurred out of focus. Angelo swallowed. His mother had abandoned her sons, too. Not physically, but emotionally.

  “Didn’t your father at least help out financially?”

  He shook his head. “According to her, the reason Alex and I wound up in the States to begin with was that Luca was broke and couldn’t provide for us. He was selling food from a roadside stand at that point.” Angelo’s tone turned frosty. “Eventually things turned around. He managed to open a restaurant, remarry and support a second family.”

  “He never contacted you and Alex?”

  “Once. We were eighteen and already living in New York. He managed to track us down through some shirt-tail relative of our mother’s. I was so ticked off at him that I hung up the telephone a few minutes into the conversation. Busted the receiver in two.” He snorted out a laugh that held no humor.

  “You had a right to be angry.”

  Hearing her say it opened the floodgate. During the past twenty years, he’d shared his private pain with no one except his twin. He found it surprisingly easy to tell Atlanta, “Luca forgot all about Alex and me. When you come right down to it, he abandoned us!”

  His words echoed down the hillside.

  “I’m sorry, Angelo.” Atlanta reached across the table to lay one of her hands over his.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Not so long that it doesn’t still hurt.”

  And it did. The pain in his heart throbbed as intensely as the one in his shoulder. His throat constricted with emotions he rarely allowed to the surface. Not trusting himself to speak, he nodded.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “SO, TELL me how baseball saved you,” Atlanta said after a long moment. “Did you play for your high school’s team?”

  “No. I didn’t have the grades to make the school’s team. You had to pull at least a C average in all of your classes to suit up one week to the next. I was lucky to be passing. If not for a couple of teachers who believed in social promotion, I don’t think Alex and I would have graduated the same year.” He swallowed before saying, “I wasn’t much of a studier and I have a hard time with letters. Some of them like to scramble up on me.”

  “You’re dyslexic.”

  “They didn’t use that term as much back then, but, yeah. I’m dyslexic.”

  “So, where does baseball enter this picture?” she asked.

  “Not long after I hotwired a cherry-red Porsche.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen? You can’t drive at that age.”

  “Not legally, but I’d had a lot of practice.” Some of his good humor returned and he sent a wink in her direction. “I’d had a lot of practice at other things by that age, too, sweetheart.”

  She shook her head on a weary laugh. “Just go on with the story, please.”

  “Okay. By then Cindy was dead, and Alex and I were in the foster-care system. We’d already run away from a home in Boston and had lived on the streets for a while, dodging social workers and police. You meet people there.” He sobered as black-edged memories swirled in. “They make certain things sound…acceptable, even though you know they aren’t.”

  “Things like stealing a car?”

  “Yeah. They turn crime into a rite of passage for misguided kids looking for a place to belong. Alex wanted no part of it. To this day, he doesn’t know how close I came to being completely sucked under,” Angelo said quietly.

  “How did you wind up in New York?”

  “The people I was running with in Boston had friends in the Bronx. They said they could find work for me. Alex didn’t like it. He went with me to New York, determined to keep me out of trouble. One night, I was supposed to deliver the stolen car to a chop shop. I got the street wrong.” He shook his head. “Dyslexic, remember?”

  “Then what?”

  “When Alex came to see me in jail, social services swooped in. He was assigned a foster home in Brooklyn. The father was a n
o-nonsense former U.S. Marine. Big Mike, they called him. While I was awaiting my court date the guy pulled some strings and, after spending a few weeks in juvie, I got sent there.”

  This wasn’t part of his official bio. Long ago, Angelo’s agent had talked him out of sharing any of the truly unsavory particulars. Fans rooted for underdogs, but there was no sense in making them squeamish.

  “Were you found guilty?” Atlanta asked.

  He nodded. “Grand theft auto, a felony. Even though I was a juvenile I was looking at some serious time. I had already racked up a couple of other minor offenses back in Boston. This made me a repeat offender as far as the DA in New York was concerned. So he charged me as an adult. I was facing time in juvenile detention until my eighteenth birthday, after which time I would be moved to the state penitentiary to finish out the rest of my sentence. But Big Mike, he was the foster dad, he went out on a limb for me at my sentencing hearing. He told the judge not to write me off. He said I was smart and had potential to turn my life around, but tossing me in the pen with the adult population would all but ensure I became a career criminal. Mike felt what I really needed was a good attitude adjustment and to have my energy refocused.”

  “And the judge listened?” Atlanta asked, sounding as surprised as Angelo had been twenty-some years earlier.

  “Mike’s word carried a lot of weight with the court.” He snorted out a laugh. “For good reason, as it turned out. The guy knew how to adjust attitudes and refocus energy. The first night I was in his home he sat me down at the kitchen table and point-blank told me that if I blew the second chance he’d just gotten me, he’d personally see to it that I wound up behind bars. That’s not all he told me, but I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities and won’t repeat the rest of his lecture.”

  “You were scared straight.”

  “Damned right. The guy was huge and intimidating as hell. He meant business. He also cared. What really kept me on the straight and narrow, though, was baseball. Mike coached a team in a recreational league. I’d always liked baseball. I’d always been good at it despite no formal training. But when I started playing on Mike’s team…” He shook his head, words failing him.