by Maggie Marr
“Shelly, stop.” Anthony walked around the front of the car and angled to cut her off. His hand grabbed her arm.
Red flooded her vision. Heat pulsed in her chest and adrenaline spiked her blood. She’d been grabbed before. Knocked out for protecting herself. She wouldn’t be grabbed again.
Her gaze locked with his. “Better move that hand. You want me to stay, ask. You want to touch me, it’d better be gentle.” She wouldn’t play about this. Couldn’t. She doubted she’d ever be able to have a man reach out and grab for her again without feeling some tinge of terror, fright that turned into fight-or-flight.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” Anthony’s hand slipped from her arm.
“Not startling, just how it is. Nobody gets to grab me.” She pulled her hands closer together in her pockets. “I’ve got to get home and get Nonna if I’m going to make it into the city on time.”
“She’s not going. I stopped there first. She was asleep on the couch. I helped her to bed. She said to tell you to have fun.”
Going to Aubrey and Justin’s tonight didn’t sound like fun. Especially by herself. “Then I’m not going.” She whipped out her phone and scrolled to Aubrey’s number.
“Your grandmother won’t be pleased if you cancel now.”
Shelly’s gaze flicked to meet Anthony’s eyes. She lifted one challenging brow. But he was absolutely right. Nonna might be gentle and loving, but she would be unyielding in her disappointment if Shelly cancelled on Aubrey and Justin right before she was meant to arrive at their home for dinner.
“I’ll drive. I’ll even have you home before midnight.”
Anthony’s tone had shifted. The last line reminded her of the playfulness he’d once had. He might not be acting quite like the guy who’d swept her off her feet when she was sixteen, but this was definitely not the uptight stuffed shirt who’d showed up at Nonna’s last night.
He opened the passenger door. She tipped her head and nodded. She wasn’t the same girl who’d ridden around beside Anthony for years, but then again, he definitely wasn’t the same guy.
*
A quiet drive to Manhattan with no conversation. Shelly’s lips parted at the view of the city. Anthony pulled to a stop at the front of Justin’s building. The foyer glittered with Christmas decorations. Once inside, he gently reached for Shelly’s elbow and steered her to the elevator doors.
“Some pad. Suppose yours is the same. Don’t you guys ever miss the old neighborhood?”
The elevator doors opened, and Anthony followed Shelly onto the lift.
“I get back when I can.”
“From what Nonna says, you get back quite a bit.” Shelly gave him a sidelong glance as she spoke, but he didn’t respond. Anthony visited Mrs. Bello for Vinnie, maybe for Shelly, but mostly for himself. Cold calculation made up most his life. Visiting Mrs. Bello let him relax and remember simpler times, and some days just be Tony Travati from the neighborhood.
“Thank you,” Shelly continued. The edge had vanished from her tone. “I haven’t been…” Her words trailed away. She turned and those ice-blue eyes met his. “I know you help her more than she knows. She thinks all those workmen are some kind of pension program for retired teachers. But it’s you, I know it. Thank you.” She reached out, grasped his fingers, and squeezed.
Heat fired deep in his bloodstream and warmed his frigid heart.
“The house looks good, she looks good, and she seems happy.”
“She’s happiest with you here,” Anthony admitted.
The softness around Shelly’s mouth hardened, and her eyes clouded. Of course he’d said the exact wrong thing. He seemed to have a talent for saying the exact wrong thing to Shelly.
“I’m trying to get it together, Tony.” She released his fingers and hitched her purse higher up on her shoulder. “I’m doing my best. I don’t expect you or anyone else to feel sorry for me. I made my choices, I got myself where I was, but I’m trying my damndest to come back from all that shit.”
Words stalled in his throat. She hadn’t only hurt Mrs. Bello. As loath as he was to admit it, she’d hurt him too.
The elevator doors slid open onto Justin and Aubrey’s penthouse.
Aubrey and Max stood waiting at the elevator door. Love beamed from Aubrey’s face. Her left hand rested on her pregnant belly. Max, closing in on adulthood, stood beside his mother. All Travati in his stance. Head up, chest out, his jaw hard-cut. The air of confidence often mistaken for arrogance.
Justin was a lucky man. A wife, a son, and a new Travati soon to arrive, all when Justin had thought, after conquering cancer, he could never have a family of his own.
Aubrey reached out. “Shelly.” A warm, true smile lit her entire face. “Thank you for coming to dinner. Your grandmother called earlier. I’m sorry she couldn’t make it, but I’m so glad you came anyway.” Aubrey’s gaze flitted from Shelly to Anthony. Her hopeful look seemed to ask, This time, this time will you accept that I am family? This time, will you believe I truly love your brother with all my heart?
“Anthony,” Aubrey continued, in a softer voice, “thank you for coming too.”
Anthony tugged at his cuff and nodded. His eyes dropped to the roundness of Aubrey’s belly. The miracle baby that shouldn’t be. How fitting that Justin, even after being told he would never be a father, had a son, a wife, a marriage, and a new child he’d been told he could never have. Wasn’t it just like Justin to conquer impossible odds to get everything he wanted?
“Thank you for the invitation,” Anthony said. “Max.” He nodded toward his nephew, then reached out and shook Max’s hand. A firm grip. Good handshake. Sadness tinged Aubrey’s gaze, even though there was a small smile on her lips.
“How was your trip?” Aubrey turned back to Shelly, ushering her inside. Max followed his mother. Anthony didn’t hear Shelly’s response, only the laughter that the two women shared as they exited the entryway and walked toward the living room.
Before Max, before Aubrey, before the past summer, this penthouse had been a second home to Anthony. He would have walked in, grabbed a drink, and found something in his older brother’s fridge. All that had changed. Not because of Aubrey and Max, but because of his initial reaction to their presence.
“Drink?”
Anthony spun on his heels. Just past the dining area stood Justin with a bottle of red wine in one hand and an empty glass in the other. Anthony nodded and walked toward his brother. Justin filled the glass and extended it to him before turning and walking toward the den. Anthony followed him. The muscles in his neck loosened with the first sip of wine. How long had it been since the two of them had simply shared a drink together alone? Seemed like forever ago.
“Thanks for getting Shelly here. Aubrey would have been really upset if she cancelled. I’m pretty sure Shelly didn’t want to come all the way in once her grandmother decided she wasn’t up to coming tonight.”
Anthony nodded and took another swallow of wine. The den hadn’t changed with the arrival of Aubrey and Max. Built-in mahogany bookshelves, a giant desk, and leather lounge chairs decorated the room. Even the photo of the four Travati brothers, aged fourteen, ten, five, and three, standing on the front steps of their old house in Long Island, hung on the wall.
Anthony walked toward the photo, as if it were a magnet pulling him into the family circle.
“You always loved this picture.”
“Not just the picture.” Justin stood on the other side of the room. “But what it represents. Mi famiglia. My past. My future. My life.”
Anthony sipped his wine. Nice words. But the four brothers were no longer Justin’s life, nor his focus. His new family was his focus.
“What happened, Tony?” Justin’s voice dropped, softer and somber. Emotion laced his words.
“I’m not five anymore.” Anthony took a long sip of his wine. He turned from the photo, taken one Easter before they had gone to church, their hair spit-slicked and all four brothers uncomfortable in new shoes an
d stiff suits.
“That’s bullshit.” Justin shook his head. “We’ve disagreed on business in the past, even disliked personal relationships that we’ve been in, but this, this anger—it’s different. This is deeper. There’s a rage inside you that I don’t understand.”
Heat roared through Anthony’s chest. The enamel of his molars ground. “This is business, Justin. I disliked your response to my request last summer. A request that I made to protect our business.”
“I did as you asked.” Justin stood near him now, an arm’s reach away.
“Grudgingly. And you’ve never forgiven me for asking.” Anthony tilted his wine glass to his lips.
“I didn’t think you needed my forgiveness.”
“I don’t. But I do want respect with regards to my decisions for Travati Financial, and I can’t seem to get that. My division is development and real estate, the only division at the moment that actually makes money and isn’t under federal investigation, and yet, I need your approval on every move I make.”
“We work as a team—”
Anthony shook his head. “No, we work for you. You may say we work as a team, but in practice that is absolutely untrue. When was the last time we did something different than what you wanted? Being a team means everyone gets to contribute to the decisions that lead to success.”
“A team needs a leader.”
Anthony’s muscle flinched in his jaw. Hubris. Arrogance. Why did Justin think he didn’t have to listen to anyone, that being the leader meant being a dictator too? “Well, brother, maybe I’m simply tired of being led.”
“Leo and Devon don’t have these problems.”
“Leo nearly lost the entire company last year, and Devon’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up spending time in Club Fed.” Anthony sipped his wine. “At this point I’m guessing they’re both happy they still have jobs, because with those types of mistakes, they’d be out on their ass anywhere else.”
“We’re family. We help each other through the rough patches.”
“Do we? That hasn’t always been the case.” Anthony remembered too well a time when he had needed help he didn’t get. Rough, gut-wrenching times when he had been expected to confront his pain alone.
“I apologized for that. I should have been more understanding, more helpful…you…I didn’t understand what that kind of love was…well, until recently.”
Anthony emptied his glass. He wouldn’t discuss the past with his brother again. That time was gone. Anthony had made his own decisions then, and he would continue to do so now.
“She looks…healthy.”
“She is. She’s harder now, though. There’s more of an edge.”
“How could there not be?” Justin asked. His eyes flicked to his brother. “You know that while she was in Tex—”
“I won’t discuss that time in her life with you or anyone else. Understood?”
Justin nodded and fell silent. Anthony appreciated his new-found discretion. His older brother might have been an asshole about love once upon a time many years ago, but now that he’d found Aubrey, he understood the boundaries, the needs, the necessities that came with profound feelings for a woman.
Profound feelings.
Ice threaded through Anthony’s veins. His actions, his words, the feeling in his gut…how had he not recognized his own feelings, how did he not know himself? This was not just a physical reaction to a woman…this was—
“You okay?”
Anthony shrugged, cleared his throat. “Fine.” His staccato tone, he hoped, would put an end to Justin’s inquiry. “Hungry.” He turned toward the den door and exited. Shelly Bello. He was still in love with Shelly Bello, whether he wanted to be or not.
Molten emotion that flamed from lust to rage poured thick through his heart. He turned the corner into the dining room and there they stood: Aubrey, Max, and Shelly, as though already a family.
Impossible.
Too much time, too much pain, and too many uncertainties.
“We were just discussing you,” Aubrey called from the far side of the dining room. “Shelly was regaling us with stories from your shady past.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Anthony said. “You always have to consider the source.”
Despite his bantering tone, Shelly’s face paled in the light.
Aubrey and Max continued to smile. “Is it true you outran a cop car after a Green Day concert?” Max asked.
“Your uncle’s illegal antics are not an appropriate topic for dinner conversation.” Justin circled the table and pulled out the chair at the foot of the table for his wife.
Anthony pulled out the chair to the right of Justin’s seat at the head. Shelly’s eyes were an unreadable blue. Her body brushed against him as she stepped into place, and he fought the urge to lean forward and press a kiss to her head. He’d hurt her with words that were meant to be playful. Consider the source. He’d meant it as a throwaway line, an allusion to the fact that she was his best friend’s little sister. But how, with her past, the past Justin had been about to discuss, how could she possibly hear those words and think he meant anything but her time in Texas?
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” His lips grazed her hair, a ghost of the kiss he had wanted to give her.
Heat thrummed between them. Heat that was dangerous to him, to her, to both his life and the life she was carefully reconstructing. He stepped behind the chair and gently slid it toward the table. Physical and emotion distance was required. Nothing good would come of this passion between them. Any future between them held nothing but a bitter end.
Chapter 6
“What’s going on between you and Justin?”
Anthony slid his gaze from the road. Dinner had been nice. Such a bland word, but it fit. Both Aubrey and Justin had successfully steered all conversation away from anything unpleasant. No questions asked about Shelly’s missing five years. No comments made about Max and Aubrey’s arrival last summer and Anthony’s demand for a paternity test. Not a word about the Travatis’ upcoming trip to Switzerland without Anthony. No questions about whether Anthony was starting his own company. No, all conversation circled around Christmas, the Travati Teddy Bear Luncheon, the arrival of the new baby, and Shelly’s life in San Francisco.
“You two always fought like brothers, but now? It’s weird there was none of that ball-busting I remember, not from either of you.”
A tight band circled Anthony’s chest. Many years ago, what felt like a lifetime, he would have turned to Shelly first to talk about Max and Aubrey. He would have asked for Shelly’s thoughts, her guidance. He would have listened to what she told him, because he had trusted and loved her, and she had always been the person to advise him, talk him down when his first reaction was anger. That luxury, that relationship, that woman, his Shelly, the one he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with, had disappeared when she run to Texas, leaving him and everyone else behind.
“He didn’t want to do a DNA test.”
“You needed a DNA test to know that Max is a Travati? All you have to do is look at him.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched. “I understand that my nephew looks like a Travati. But Aubrey…she slept with Justin once fifteen years ago, and then arrived on Justin’s doorstep with a fourteen-year-old boy.” He looked toward Shelly. “Excuse me for being pragmatic, but our business holdings are well over a billion dollars. I felt quite justified in wanting to protect them.”
“Yeah, and Justin feels justified in being pissed.”
“Because I was reasonable.”
“No, because you thought the woman he loved was a gold digger.”
“The test is simple and painless and easy to perform—”
“And kind of pointless. Justin married Aubrey, so what would it matter? Max would be his son and your nephew through marriage even without the DNA.”
“I needed to know.”
“Okay, just so I’ve got this straight, your needs o
utweighed family harmony? Accepting what Justin wanted? The wife and son he’d chosen?”
Heat flamed through Anthony’s chest. How could she make what he’d done sound so outrageous? He knew damn well he’d been the most sane, the most reasonable, the most pragmatic one of the entire family. He had kept his head when Leo and Devon had been practically racing to accept Aubrey. “You can’t possibly understand.”
“I can’t?” A wry smile decorated Shelly’s lips in the darkness. “You always hated how Justin got to make the rules because he’s the oldest. Always. You two fought since you could talk. I grew up with you. So here comes this woman and her son and your older brother falls in love. You think he’s getting duped, so here’s your opportunity to force him to do it your way, to finally play by your rules, because you think what you want makes perfect sense and is pragmatic.”
Though he drove through the darkness of night, eyes fixed on the road, Anthony could feel Shelly’s heavy gaze on him. Damn her. He shook his head and forced the car to go faster. She didn’t get it. The DNA test wasn’t about him getting his way, wasn’t about forcing Justin to finally play by his rules. That wasn’t it at all.
“The DNA test was to protect a billion-dollar enterprise.” If Shelly couldn’t understand that, then she’d lost more brain cells than he originally thought to her years of drug addiction.
“Oh, I understand what the test was meant to protect. But that’s money. Okay? Your brother is in love.” She sighed and her voice dropped. “There’s a big difference.”
The heat in Anthony’s chest built. Intense fury hit him like a wave. He wasn’t certain he understood the anger, and yet he couldn’t seem to force the rage from his body. A big difference? Did she think he couldn’t grasp the difference between commerce and love?
What did she know about love?
He gripped the steering wheel. He understood love. Love ripped your heart from your chest still beating and pumping. Love ground your desires beneath its heel. Love…like the love he saw when Aubrey looked at Justin, or when Justin had smoothed a gentle hand over Aubrey’s rounded belly after dinner tonight. Love like Anthony had held in his hand before—
