Sunset Flare

by Shannyn Leah

  She tore her eyes away from Gunner’s smug look to find Marc already halfway across the room.

  “No, Marc! Wait!” She jumped to her feet, intending to follow him and argue the quandary he’d put her in. Forgetting her wrist was attached to the chair, her hasty movement snapped the handcuffs to their limit, again, and more pain seared across her skin. She fell back on her ass in a huff of anger, sending the chair rolling backwards. The wheels took her to the end of the table where Gunner stopped it and bent down to her eye level. “Are you finished acting like a spoiled, rotten brat?”

  “Are you finished breaking the law?” Her first impression of this man had been spot on. She glanced over her shoulder at Marc, who had now made his way to the top of the stairs. “Marc! Stop, you can’t leave me with these two. We don’t even know them.”

  “Anton is family,” Marc called back with a wave.

  “No. Marc. Marc!”

  He shut the door and Izzy’s shoulders dropped in defeat. Her own brother, her flesh and blood had actually left her in the dark, cold and damp basement with two complete strangers. She’d bet Gunner had suggested the handcuffs after her threats this morning. He thought he was so smart. When she finally looked back at him, his hands rested on the arms of her chair, and his face still wore his smug smirk. He could get away with murder in this basement, right here, right now, and Anton wouldn’t even notice.

  “Take these handcuffs off me. Now.”

  He patted her arm. “One afternoon, sei dolcissima.”

  Anton snorted.

  She didn’t dare ask what he’d called her.

  “Dolcissima, just don’t do anything that forces me to phone the authorities.”

  “You’ve done that all on your own.” She shook her handcuffed wrist at him.

  He leaned in closer. So close she could smell his woodsy scent—masculine pine. She generally preferred a good designer cologne, but this smell sent flutters through her stomach.

  “Dolcissima, these handcuffs are the least of your worries.”

  “Call me ‘dolcissima’ again and those smashed cameras will be the least of your worries.”

  A flicker of anger darkened his eyes—she would bet regarding his precious cameras—but then his look turned quizzical. “You don’t speak Italian.” A shocked statement rather than a question.

  “And you don’t speak very good English.”

  Shaking his head, he pushed the chair, with her in it, away. She rolled across the wood planks and he rejoined Anton at the table.

  Pushing with her feet, she turned the chair away from the men, needing a break from their watchful eyes. Lately these damn files were all her family cared about and in the process of deciphering their contents she’d been thrown in a pool, her phone destroyed and now she’d been reduced to a jail guard position, but she was the one wearing the handcuffs.

  Today sucked.

  Chapter Six

  GUNNER POURED THREE coffees. Black for him, black with a splash of rum for Anton and a he-didn’t-really-give-a-shit-what-princess-took-in-hers for Izzy. He couldn’t believe Marc thought this arrangement would work. He also couldn’t believe that Marc had allowed him to handcuff Izzy to the chair. He inwardly snickered with an amusement he hadn’t felt in years. After her threatening to cuff him and hand him over to the authorities, he’d turned the tables and cuffed her. The irony.

  He set the mug down in front of her, but her attention was locked on the staircase.

  She planned on making a run for it.

  Try it, dolcissima. He chuckled internally at the Italian word for sweetheart, which was the total opposite of Izzy. He wasn’t sure what gave him more entertainment: the irony of the name or the fact that she didn’t understand the foreign word.

  He set Anton’s coffee a good distance away from his stacks of paperwork, knowing how absorbed the man often became in his work sometimes incoherent to the rest of his surroundings. The mug was still within arm’s reach though. Gunner knew better than to get in the way of the old man’s caffeine addiction.

  Gunner slanted his head, subtly checking on his prisoner.

  She didn’t stand a chance of escape. Compared to him, she was the size of a twig. His body heated in all the places her pesky hands had caused havoc earlier by the pool. The little shoves and pushes had him scrounging up every last inch of self control not to push her back in the water. Had Marc not been standing there he would have given her a light shove...and he would’ve enjoyed it. Still, the aftermath of her touch heated his body.

  He wondered what would possess her to try running and put herself through the humiliation of failing...again. She’d likely injure herself in the process. Besides, with the magnitude of files to be read, her time could be better utilized assisting with the paperwork. But spoiled Caliendo women lacked respect and their ignorance burned his core with disgust. Izzy fell directly into that category.

  In comparison, the Caliendo men were tough, like Anton, and most of them untrustworthy and deadly dangerous if you ended up on their bad side. If Anton hadn’t helped Gunner break free from the ties that bound him to the Caliendos back home, he would’ve never spoken to another Caliendo for the rest of his life, much less agreed to sort through top-secret files. But, then again, without Anton, he’d be dead.

  Gunner swallowed a mouthful of coffee, the hot liquid burning a blazing path down his throat. A reminder to focus on the work at hand. He picked up his pen, zeroing in on the words of treachery and deceit spewed across every page.

  Resting one elbow on the table, he rubbed his forehead, inwardly rolling his eyes at the foolishness of this family’s way of thinking. It was one thing to help the locals out of their debt, or return to them whatever Robert had taken, but these documents weren’t so easy or straightforward. The family should forget these people altogether, burn the evidence and count their blessings that since Robert’s death no one had come looking to settle unpaid debts.

  Anton had briefed him before arriving about Robert being as knee deep in the online gambling ring as they were back home. On top of that, from what he’d read so far, Robert had been in regular contact with the rest of his family in Italy, up until his death. If his immediate family were truly blind to his activities, they better pray he’d tied up his loose ends before his passing.

  However, that could be why he and Anton were here, too: to make sure all had been settled, giving them the freedom to move on with their lives. Hopefully, they wouldn’t find any details to incriminate them or face any repercussions for Robert’s actions...but there were a lot of files ahead of them. They’d only just tasted the icing on the top of this five-tier cake, leaving lots of layers of possibility for dues unpaid. The sooner he and Anton gave Marc what he wanted from these files and got the hell out of here, the better.

  Gunner shot a quick glance at Anton, unable to help the mixture of sour bitterness and relief trickling through his veins. On one hand, this deal would give him his freedom. On the other hand, being holed up in a basement with Miss Designer Perfume grated on his nerves. And, just like that, his attention turned back to Izzy.

  Designer this and designer that.

  Lord, he was thankful to be away from the materialistic shit that forced people to do the very things in these files: lie, scheme, scam, and even kill people.

  Gunner scrubbed his hands over his face and dug the tips of his fingers into his closed eyes. He needed to stop judging and do what he’d come here to do. Inhaling deeply, he opened his eyes.

  But his eyes didn’t land on the papers. They landed on Izzy instead. Her big, brown eyes were accessing the distance from her chair to the staircase, to Anton...and back to him.

  If she wasn’t a girl, he would smack the stupid right out of her.

  “How much is my brother paying you?” she asked.

  Why wasn’t he surprised? When all else fails, pull out Daddy’s money.

  “He’s not,” Gunner said.

  “Someone is. Anton?” she shouted across the table.
“How much is Marc paying you?”

  Gunner held back the amusement creeping up inside him. She might boss her family around, but Anton was not a man who took orders, nor a man to be bothered when consumed in a project.

  Through the old man’s thinning grey eyelashes, he blinked up at her. His head remained tilted in the direction of the pages from which he’d been interrupted. Gunner could see irritation raise the old man’s shoulders, tighten his jaw and narrow his eyes.

  Gunner flipped an unread page, feigning attention, but couldn’t tear his eyes away from Izzy, not wanting to miss a second of Anton giving this hoity-toity dolcissima her first reality check.

  “Not everything can be bought,” Anton said.

  “Try me,” Izzy said, missing the “conversation over” tone in the old man’s voice. ”Everything can be bought. Set your price.”

  Without breaking eye contact, Anton lifted his plaid scarf from the table. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of summer, he always wore a dress scarf. A strange accessory, but his staple non the less. “Don’t make me muzzle you, child.”

  A glare shadowed Izzy’s eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Says the girl handcuffed to a chair.” Anton snickered. “Do you honestly want to find out what I’m capable of, my child? In this dark basement, where the walls don’t talk and no one would hear your screams?”

  Izzy’s eyes practically popped out of her sockets, but to Gunner’s suprise, he didn’t see the layers of fear expected from Anton’s clear threat. She was worse than spoiled—she lacked apprehension.

  “Things are different in my world...” Anton’s stone-cold realism reverberated against the walls. “...and trust me, Miss. Caliendo, you don’t want to discover what it is I’m referring to.”

  “Is that a threat?” Izzy’s snarl gave her an edge.

  “Do you really have to ask?” Anton’s lips curled into a wickedly villainous sneer, as his thick, hairy eyebrows creased together. Most people would take a step back or run the opposite direction, but, of course, not Izzy. Well, technically, in her situation she couldn’t run, but maybe roll her chair back with fear.

  “Such a big man when your victim is contained.” She jerked her wrist and the handfuls rattled. “Let’s try this again later, when I’m not tied up.” If she held fear inside, she certainly wasn’t letting either of the men know it.

  Anton slammed his files together and tossed the scarf at Gunner. “I cannot deal with her. You wanted a Caliendo to supervise, so you deal with her.”

  Gunner’s fingers lightly touched the wool scarf, not daring to point out the old man had requested a Caliendo present. He stalked off before Gunner had a chance to nod his understanding.

  Stopping at one of the doors, he turned back and said, “If I were you, I would tie that scarf over her mouth, unbutton her blouse and give her good reason to panic.”

  Izzy stood abruptly with a furious gasp. The short chain tugged her off-balance, but she somewhat recovered, pointing her free hand at Anton. “Listen here you miserable old son of a—”

  The door slammed shut with an echoing thud. Izzy’s mouth snapped closed without finishing her sentence. The tight lines around her mouth were less than appealing and, for a brief moment, Gunner envisioned his mouth softening the area around her lips.

  Izzy stared at him. “If you put that scarf anywhere near me, or undo a single button on my blouse, or even slip the material off of my shoulder, I will remove the parts of you that make you a man.”

  Now would be the moment to point out she was only wearing a bathing suit cover-up, but he bit his tongue.

  “And that is a threat.”

  Skillfully, she eased her body back onto the chair, her eyes trained on him. Was she daring him to muzzle her? Lord knew he wanted to. She’d been nothing but a pain in the ass since sitting her tight little rear on that chair. Plus, his reaction to her irritated the shit out of him. Equal parts in his head were annoyed and turned-on at the same time.

  Gunner had spent so many years away from women, it terrified him that he envisioned plopping her derrière on the edge of the table and slipping every last inch of material off her body.

  Even just a minuscule thought of involving himself with another Caliendo woman threatened far worse than anything either her or Anton could say. He would never do it again.

  “I can see you have fantastic concentration,” Izzy said and Gunner had to blink back to reality, finding himself still staring at her. “My breasts appreciate your recognition, but at your rate, my day just turned into a week.”

  Had he been staring at her breasts? He’d been thinking about her breasts, so he wouldn’t have been shocked if his eyes traveled to the round mounds pressing against the thin material of her swimsuit.

  Gunner cleared his throat. “Stop talking, or I use the scarf.”

  Izzy rolled her eyes and turned away from him, defeating the purpose of her presence, but giving him the silence he needed to start back into the files.

  Chapter Seven

  HOURS HAD PASSED, sending the day well into the evening and past supper. Izzy guessed at the time because her stomach played a silent growling tune. What a waste of a good day, of her day.

  Izzy’s attention had drifted everywhere in the passing hours. First, and foremost, she’d planned on escaping, picking up the old, but solid wood chair her butt occupied, and carrying it with her right out of this room, but then she figured she would end up falling down the staircase. Then she’d considered breaking the arm off the chair, but the old piece of furniture’s thick solid wood seemed better quality then a new chair. She’d tried to slip her hand out of the silver ring, the pink lines around her skin were evidence. She’d even attempted to pick the lock of the cuffs with a bobby pin. Having seen it done in the movies like a bazillion times, she figured it was worth a go.

  Fail.

  After finally giving into her predicament for the day, she’d slumped back in her chair and had let her mind wander. She’d debated how to punish Marc for leaving her down here. She wondered what he’d been thinking leaving her handcuffed with strangers. She’d contemplated how she could go about getting tickets to Manzedi’s show and still wondered how she hadn’t gotten front row tickets in the first place. She speculated about whether Abby would show up or not. Living a couple hours away from each other had taken a toll on their time spent together.

  With no concrete answers to her musings, her attention had shifted back to her surroundings. The aged brick and wood walls weren’t contemporary and sleek like the resort’s neutral beige walls highlighted by white wainscoting. The dim sconces on the wall and bar-style fixtures hanging from the twelve-foot ceiling didn’t brighten up the room or a person’s mood like the vivid fixtures throughout the halls of the resort. This basement lacked the cozy, warm, and tropical feel she was used to. Instead, the scent of old mildew filled her nostrils.

  But the age of the atmosphere brought about a wave of nostalgia and she found herself thinking about when her grandparents would have moved to Willow Valley. She’d never even met her grandparents since they’d died long before she’d been born. They’d purchased the resort’s land with only a stone house which they’d transformed into an inn and had run for decades.

  The stone house had long since been demolished, but Izzy found herself wondering if this basement was part of the original house she’d seen in old photographs. Which would mean the basement had once belonged to her grandfather. Her grandfather had been as malevolent as Robert and, after her grandparent’s death, Robert and Carl had invested their inheritance into building the resort. From there, Caliendo resorts had popped up across the country, but the Willow Valley location had always been home to her and her siblings.

  Izzy wondered again if Robert had salvaged the basement from the original house. Were these antique doors installed by her grandfather and could some of the files the men were sorting, in fact, belonged to her him, too?

  The prospect of such deep history intr
igued her, almost enough to want to glance behind each door and peak into the files. However, being forced here against her will kept her planted on her chair with a scowl across her face.

  Not that anyone noticed.

  Gunner kept reading, deeply engrossed in the paperworl. Even if she tried to escape up the stairs, he’d likely pay no attention. It was tempting. Very tempting.

  Bored, she rolled over the bumpy floor, stopping at the west wall where Anton hid behind a door avoiding distractions...like her.

  Big, mean, Anton.

  Pu-lease. Tie a scarf around her mouth, just try it, old man, and I will knock you off your rickety legs.

  Slowly, she looped the chair in a circle, and repeated. She slouched further, rolling the back of her head along the chair’s back edge. She pressed the soles of her feet against the floor, watching Gunner. The seconds turned into minutes, and minutes stretched into time unknown.

  His forehead had a permanent wrinkle while he read, his lips a scowl, but he hardly moved a muscle. She’d practically memorized his face. What else was she going to do?

  But as she watched and moved to the right, she noticed a shift in his body. When she rolled to the left he shifted with her. He was watching her...and she liked it. She rolled back to the right, watched his shoulders tense until she finished. She rolled back and watched his head move ever so slightly.

  She sat on the edge of laughing out loud when his head snapped up. “You could help sort these files rather than attempting to break out of the cuffs, make a run for the stairs and roll around like you’re on an ice rink.”

  “I’m not much of a skater.”

  He ignored her comment. “Here is your stack of files.” He stood, lifted a handful and dropped them at the end of the table. They thudded so loudly she jumped. “I need you to look for anything marked ‘terminated’.”