The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3)

by Nicole French

  Faber shrugged. “Eric is more like his family than he thinks he is. When I informed him of the society’s plans, his response was something along the lines of, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ And if that makes me his enemy…well, I’ll be working harder now to be his friend again. And so will everyone else.”

  That might have been the exact moment when Gardner’s blood ran cold.

  “So, what?” he demanded, spitting onto the table before he could help it. “Did you call me to this fucking cell to tell me I have to kiss Eric’s ass now?”

  “Oh, I think that time has passed, don’t you?” Faber replied. “I just called you here to see you squirm. And to tell you that as of today, to you, the Janus society does not exist. The accounts in the Caymans have been transferred to Deutsche Bank under a different name. The properties in New England will still belong to you under Pantheon—until the IRS seizes them, I assume—but we will have no more dealings with you, your company, or any of your known associates, including Ms. Calvert.”

  Shaw, Gardner thought. That must have been why the old codger had dropped Caitlyn the second she was implicated in the trial. She might as well go back to using Csaszar, if she could even remember how to say it.

  Faber slapped his palm on the table, startling Gardner and yanking him out of his own thoughts.

  “This is your only warning,” Faber said. “As of now, you’re on your own. If you contact me or any member using the society name again, it may be the last thing you ever do.”

  He stood back up with a terrible, chilling smile. One that Gardner had wished he could give to his own enemies, once upon a time.

  “Goodbye, Gardner. I’d say good luck, but I’m not sure I mean it.” Faber cocked his head. “To be honest, I’m sort of hoping Eric still has a taste for vengeance. It’ll make this year a lot more fun if he does.”

  The door slammed behind him, and Gardner waited another full twenty minutes, until his heart rate dropped to half normal, until there were no longer telltale drops of perspiration across his brow. Then he stood up and climbed the stairs to the lobby to exit the building himself.

  Once outside, the blare of New York shouted at him from all around. He pulled out his cell phone as he turned in the direction of the subway—the fucking subway—and dialed the first name on his recent contacts.

  “Bleeker and Levy.”

  “Isaac Levy,” Gardner barked, ignoring the loud cry of a taxi horn when he almost stumbled into the street.

  “One moment, please.”

  He had finally reached the subway top, but he would wait here to have his conversation. He wasn’t interested in the cretins down below overhearing his private business. After the fucking Village Voice article, you never knew who was looking in on you these days.

  The hold music switched off and was replaced by the bored tones of his erstwhile attorney.

  “Mr. Gardner,” said Levy. “I don’t know what this is about, but—”

  “Levy, you have to push through the probate fight. I need that money! As soon as you get it, you’ll get paid, I promise.”

  “Mr. Gardner, as I’ve told you several times, the likelihood now of winning your challenge of Celeste de Vries’s will decreased substantially when you were indicted. It would be wiser now for you to take the money from your bankruptcy filing and move on from your fight with the de Vrieses.”

  “I don’t fucking care about a fight!” Gardner hissed. “I just want to take them down. It’s what they deserve! They will not win this one, not after ten years!”

  There was a long sigh, audible even on the busy street.

  “Mr. Gardner, you haven’t paid your last bill. I’m sorry, but until the bankruptcy goes through, I’m afraid I cannot do any more on your behalf in this trial or your divorce, nor will I. And if you do not secure representation or respond to Ms. de Vries by the end of March, she may be able to petition for divorce on grounds of abandonment. I don’t think I need to tell you that would be very bad for your case.”

  Gardner swore. He had known from the start that tactic was never going to work. Nina had the might of Eric’s money behind her. And now that rat bastard was going to be caesar?

  He, on the other hand, had jack shit.

  “Fucking fine,” he snapped before cutting off the call. But instead of putting his phone away and descending into the train tunnel, first Gardner pulled up a web browser and typed in a search.

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Gardner muttered to himself as he looked through the results. “If Nina thinks she’s bested me now, she’s got another thing coming.”

  II

  Secondi

  Chapter Ten

  January 2019

  Matthew

  The train was late. That in itself wasn’t particularly surprising.

  But the train was late when I had double parked the black Ferrari (Eric’s assistant had gone a little overboard with the rental—not that I was complaining) outside at the curb after bribing a station agent to watch it for twenty minutes.

  I pulled on the brim of my fedora and checked my watch. We were at eighteen now.

  I had originally planned to pick her up right after she landed, but had scrapped that as soon as I’d arrived two days prior and discovered how fucking big Fiumicino Airport was. Sifting through international arrivals for Nina would have been like finding a needle in a haystack, beautiful blonde needle or not.

  Jane had informed me, however, that Nina wanted to travel a bit more modestly on this trip, despite Eric’s offers otherwise. She had insisted on flying commercial and taking public transportation to Florence. Like she was still a nineteen-year-old student and not a thirty-year-old heiress. She wasn’t even taking security, now that news had gotten out about Calvin Gardner’s bankruptcy. Her argument was that the paparazzi wouldn’t recognize her here, nor would there be an investigator, so why worry?

  “I get it,” Jane said after Eric and I had both voiced our doubts about her plans.

  “Why?” I demanded. “You guys have more money than God. If I had access to a company plane or a charter that cost me the equivalent of a bagel for most people, I’d never deal with TSA again.”

  “Exactly,” Eric said. “What is the point?”

  “It’s about independence,” Jane said. “The first time Nina went to Italy, it was to find herself. My guess is, she’s not just doing this for Olivia. I think she’s going back there to get a taste of herself again, too. And when you’re nineteen, that starts with getting around on your own.”

  “Il Leonardo Express dall'Aeroporto di Fiumicino è ora in arrivo al binario quarantadue.”

  The announcement of the train’s arrival blared almost unintelligibly over the intercom, and I held up a hand to block the sun as I watched the train from Fiumicino slow as it approached, its red-painted nose pointed where I stood. I tried to wait patiently as the train stopped, and people began to pour out of its exits, luggage in tow, all of them eager to stand up and get moving.

  No blondes, though. No tall ones anyway. With exquisite bone structure. And legs that stretched for miles.

  I searched and searched until most of the train seemed to have emptied. Shit. Had she missed it? Had I written down the wrong one? Or she decided to hell with the whole remembering-her-student-past thing and gotten a car instead?

  So much for a good surprise. Calling up to her hotel room wasn’t nearly as romantic.

  “This way, um, per favore.”

  Down at the end of the platform, I finally caught a familiar sight: Nina, caught in a ray of sun that lit up her chin-length hair like a halo. Immediately, I started jogging toward her. She, however, was too busy to notice, trying in broken Italian to direct the porters carrying her four giant suitcases.

  “Per favore portami a—shoot, how do you say ‘just bring it to a taxi’?”

  “Scusi, signorina,” I said, ignoring the fact that she was married to use the more playful “miss.” “Can I be of some assis
tance?”

  At the sound of my voice, Nina whirled around with a squeak.

  “Matthew?” She glanced around like she thought the boogie man might jump out from behind me. “Matthew, what—how—what are you doing here?”

  The look on her face was almost as adorable as the way she was stuttering. And by adorable, I mean uncertain and perfect and completely fucking kissable.

  I hadn’t seen Nina since the night of Jane and Eric’s party, and since then, I’d been spending my time taking every shift I could at Envy, tying up odds and ends for my family back home, attending Mass with Nonna five separate times over another chaotic Zola family holiday season. All while anticipating this exact moment.

  This right here—this was my real merry Christmas.

  Or in this case, a happy New Year.

  “Hey, doll.”

  I slipped a stealthy hand around her waist and delivered a quick kiss to her cheek, getting a brief whiff of roses as I did. God, she smelled good. It had been nearly a month since the party—a solid month of unanswered calls and terse text replies.

  I’m not ready, she kept saying every time I tried to contact her. I need time.

  Well, time was up. I had a job to do in more ways than one.

  She looked a bit more like herself, though. Gone was the dark eye makeup and the body-baring dress. The hair had grown out close to an inch, and Nina was back in shades of white and gray—a lacy sweater on top of tailored gray pants, over which she wore her favorite heather gray cashmere coat.

  Her lips, though. Those were bright red again.

  She sucked in a breath as I released her. Maybe I shouldn’t have—she was wobbly for a moment, even in flats.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again.

  “Would you believe me if I said it was fate?”

  Nina only tipped her head, not even bothering with a reply.

  “Jane and Eric didn’t like the idea of you going alone. Come on, do you really blame them?” I asked when Nina opened her mouth to protest.

  She closed it, then opened it again. “I…well, I suppose not. But—”

  “I know you didn’t think we were done talking after the party, duchess.”

  She blinked. “Well, you never came back, did you?”

  “I called. I texted. Accepted your one-word answers. And then the holidays, you know. I do have a family of my own. Anyway, I figured this was a pretty good way to show you.”

  Her brows wrinkled, revealing that cute little furrow between them that I wanted to kiss. “A good way to show me what?”

  “That you mean the fucking world to me.” I reached up a hand and gestured toward the porters clearly looking at Nina as their target. “Plus, I’m pretty sure if Jane suggested it that night, you would have said no. We agreed a surprise was a better tactic.”

  “Matthew, this really isn’t necess—”

  “Per favore, porta i suoi bagagli alla Ferrari nera fuori,” I interrupted her to give the porters instructions about where to take her bags and handed one of them twenty euros.

  They nodded, one of them with an impressed whistle at the mention of my car, and ducked around us. Nina was still watching me with a little irritation and a lot more shock.

  “You were saying?” I said.

  She just folded her arms and snorted adorably.

  “All right, duchess,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll go if you can tell me what I just said.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it, opened it again, closed it again until that furrow had appeared once more. Picture-perfect frustration. Her lips, however, were twitching at the corner.

  “Fine,” she said. “It was a little fast for me. But it will come back, you know. I just need to practice.”

  I grinned. “Well, I think we can both agree that you need an interpreter until then. Lucky for you, I’m available.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Then you can start by telling me where you just sent all my things.”

  The little black coupe dipped and dived around the traffic on the congested Via Giovanni Giolitti with ease. I didn’t mind driving in Italy as much as I remembered. For all their reputations as crazy drivers, Italians weren’t any worse than the average New York cabbie. I was used to this kind of frenetic pace.

  “Do you even know where I’m going?” Nina called over the roar of the road and the traffic. It was hard not to watch her enjoying the sun. It was an unseasonably warm day for January in Rome with temperature topping seventy, so we drove with the windows down, listening to the cacophony of the city. Thank you, global warming.

  Nina, however, was dressed for it, having shucked her coat and sweater to make herself more comfortable in the thin cotton tank top that showed off a distracting amount of her neck and collarbone. With a silk scarf wrapped around her head and a pair of white, cat-eyed frames guarding her eyes, she looked more like a silver screen film starlet than ever.

  “Jane sent me your itinerary,” I called back as I swerved around a delivery truck that made a sudden stop. “I changed it for a better one. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Nina pulled off her glasses to stare at me. “You didn’t.”

  “It might have been five stars, but that hotel was full of tourists and stiffs,” I said. “I thought you wanted to work on your Italian, baby.”

  When she worked her face into a tight little scowl, I had to laugh again.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I found a great pensione, owned by the same family for five generations. Right in the middle of Trastevere, with house-made cacio e pepe to die for. I promise, you’ll love the beds too.”

  “Matthew!”

  I almost held my hands up in surrender, but reminded myself to keep both on the wheel.

  “In separate rooms, of course,” I amended.

  Was it my imagination, or did she look a little disappointed when I said that? I just laughed and shifted gears. The Ferrari shot forward, and the streets of Rome flew by.

  I parked the car in a small garage a few blocks from the pensione, but only after depositing Nina and her monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks near the entrance to wait for me.

  “Did you bring your entire wardrobe with you, doll?” I asked when I returned to find her still standing outside the closed front door.

  She snorted. “Hardly. But I had to pack heavy. I don’t know how long I’m staying.”

  “You do know they have laundry services in Italy, don’t you?”

  She ignored me as the door opened after I knocked, and a kindly-looking landlady greeted us.

  “Salve, signora.” I tipped my hat toward her, then asked about our reservation and whether or not they had a bellhop. I prayed to God they did. Otherwise I’d be stuck dragging these mini ship containers up four flights of stairs.

  “Sì, ce l’abbiamo,” she replied before instructing me to leave them inside the door.

  Thank Christ.

  The landlady smiled and stepped back to let us into the inner courtyard at the center of the U-shaped building common to this part of the city. I heaved the trunks to the place where she pointed and checked us in while Nina wandered around the courtyard, looking around with an expression somewhere between familiarity and awe.

  The building had a gray baroque facade made of stone, but its inner peristyle and the colonnades surrounding the lower level indicated that, like so much of Roman architecture, it had probably been erected over a much older foundation stemming from ancient times. The joke in Rome, I’d heard, was that no one could build anywhere because every time you dug for the foundation, you’d find something else that needed to be preserved. It was true, too. In a single city block, it wasn’t uncommon to spot a two-thousand-year-old ruin, a medieval church, a Renaissance-era villa, and a jumble of baroque and neoclassical apartments.

  Nina weaved her way around the columned floor, sometimes fingering the leafy vegetation and what looked like a few dormant grape vines for good measure. A fountain sang in the center, surrounded by a few bistro table
s and an in-house bar at the far end. Balconies ringed the courtyard four stories up, at the top of which I could just see the remains of a much larger balustrade around the penthouse suite. Our suite. Containing two rooms. For us to sleep in. Separately.

  I was frowning by the time I looked down again.

  “It’s very lovely,” Nina admitted when she returned to where I stood.

  “Just something I happened to find.”

  I didn’t mention that Jane and Eric had actually put me up in the very hotel Nina booked—some five-star swank fest where even the bellhops wore tuxedos. I decided to cancel the reservation before I even made it to the front desk to check in. Nina had enough sterile glamour. This was a trip for family. For rediscovery. She needed intimacy and warmth. Places that felt a little like home.

  And so, over the last two days, I’d been scouring every corner of Rome looking for something that would produce that exact expression of shy pleasure. Worth every damn minute.

  “Signore.”

  I turned as the landlady approached and gestured toward the balconies.

  “Do you want to take dinner in your room later?” she asked in Italian. “We serve directly to the penthouse. It’s very beautiful to watch the sunset with aperitivos and then to eat.”

  Beside me, Nina stifled a yawn. I glanced at my watch. It was closing in on five—laughably early for dinner by Italian standards, but pretty damn late for Nina, who looked like she was about to fall over from jet lag.

  “If the kitchen’s open, we’ll take dinner in thirty minutes,” I replied with a glance at the menu drawn on a chalkboard by the bar. “Two of the daily specials, every course. And a bottle of your best white wine.”

  The landlady’s brow rose with that curious look people get when they smell money. “The best?”

  I nodded. “The very best.”

  Two hours later, Nina and I were lounging on the rooftop deck, bellies full of pasta and wine just as the sun was finishing its sojourn below the horizon. Nina’s long legs were splayed out in front of her while she stared up at the sky, looking for stars. I hated to tell her that we probably wouldn’t see any more here than we would in New York. But I supposed she could always hope.