She took his hand and led him to a damask-covered divan. They sat together. “I’m not being hurt, Pappa.”
He frowned at her. “You look well, but every day they won’t allow you to leave I grow more certain they will hurt you.”
“I don’t think the don will.”
His frown deepened, and he cocked his head. “You mean the Beast.”
Before all this, in those days between her uncle losing his hand and her stabbing Paolo on the street, Mirabella had refused to let anyone around her call him any other name but the Beast. Now, that name sounded harsh and ill-fitting.
It seemed she was behaving like a damsel in a fairy tale, falling in love with her captor. Beauty and the Beast. In Italy they had a similar tale, Il Re Porco, The Pig King, but the French version was popular even there.
Mirabella flinched as that thought moved through her mind. Falling in love with her captor? Hardly. Realizing he was a man, with strengths and weaknesses, and not an ogre or a marble statue was not falling in love. She still hated the man.
She did.
Didn’t she?
“Mira?” her father asked and tightened his grip of her hands.
She pushed her confusing thoughts aside and focused on the man before her. A man she loved wholly and purely. “I don’t think Don Romano will hurt me. We have a problem to solve, and when we do, I think he’ll let me go.”
“What problem is that?”
“How I pay the debt I owe him.” She sounded ridiculously naïve.
“Mira, this is not you. If I weren’t sitting with you, seeing my daughter here before me, I wouldn’t believe my ears. Listen to your own words. You’ve seen, with your own two beautiful eyes, how this don takes his payments. Where is your fury?”
He was right, of course; she’d asked herself that question often through all these dark nights. On the other side, however, her quick temper and hot emotions were a worry and a disappointment to her father. He’d wanted her to find peace. He’d wanted her to allow herself to set down her anger and find joy.
She had found neither peace nor joy, but her anger, at least in this instance, had cooled.
“I tried to kill him, Pappa. I nearly succeeded. There is a debt—in a New York prison or in this house, there is a debt.”
He sat back with a heavy sigh. “I hoped this place would be different from home. I hoped for the golden promise. But it’s no different at all. Bad men and rich men make the rules and everyone else suffers them.”
“Pappa. I need you to let me make my deal with the don. Don’t offer yourself, don’t make a sacrifice. Don’t do anything reckless to help me. I don’t need you to save me. I don’t want it.”
“How can you ask such a thing of me? You are my daughter. We are all that’s left of our family.”
“I know. You are all I have left, and you’ve done nothing wrong. Please don’t make me carry the guilt if you took the consequence for something I did.”
“Was it not owed, what you did? This don seems to care much about what is owed and what is paid.”
She’d thought so at the time, but all these hours of contemplation had adjusted her thinking—and her understanding of the uncle she’d mostly known by letters.
Rather than answer her father’s question, she asked one of her own. “Was Uncle Fredo a serious gambler, Pappa? Do you know?”
Her father’s eyes slid away, and Mirabella knew the answer. “He enjoyed cards and games of chance. We grew up playing Briscola and Scopa, and he liked dice. American poker, too.”
“But it became serious here, didn’t it?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. We were apart a long time in the old country. I didn’t know it until you brought him home without a hand, but his debts were deep. So yes, I suppose he was a serious gambler.”
“He owed and kept gambling until he couldn’t pay.”
“It appears so.”
“So he did gamble his hand away.”
Her father’s expression darkened. She knew the look. Unlike her, her father rarely got demonstrably angry. He could be righteous and reckless, but he rarely raged. Her temper came from her mother.
The look on his face now was something akin to anger, but quieter and softer. Disappointment. He’d looked at her that way whenever she’d done something rashly, or spoken unkindly, or threw something in a fit of pique. He’d looked that way when she was seventeen and had tried to sneak into their home in the grey hours of a dawn, after dallying with a young man.
The first time she ever had. She’d scaled the trellis and climbed in through her window, and her father had been sitting on her bed, waiting for her. He’d looked at her just this way; he’d somehow known exactly what she’d done.
“You sound like the Beast, Mirabella,” he said quietly.
“But he isn’t wrong, is he? Uncle knew the risk and bet against it.”
“I was worried about your health. I thought they could be hurting you here. But that wasn’t the danger, was it? They’re doing something to your mind. Changing how you think, who you are.”
“No, Pappa. I’m not different. I’ve only had more time to think and no chance to act. If what happened to Uncle was a bet he made, then everything that follows is different. What I did isn’t justice. So it is a debt.”
A small smile emerged within her father’s beard. “More time to think and no chance to act. I suppose, for you, that is a rare instance.”
Mirabella smiled back. “You’ve called me impulsive a few times in my life.”
“A few?”
“More.” She took her father’s hand again. “Will you please trust me? I think my life was in danger when the don was ill from my attack. If he’d died, I think his men would have killed me right then. But he’s stronger, and he says he doesn’t hurt women. I can’t tell you why, but I believe him when he says it.”
“I’ve heard the same, I admit.”
“If he feels he needs to hurt me, it will be you he comes for. Please, Pappa, don’t make me live with that. Trust me to save us both. I will find a way to pay my debt and come home. I promise.”
Her father sighed and cupped her cheek in his hand. “I hope you’re right, Mira. I pray you’re right.”
So did she.
“So,” Paolo said and handed a basket of sweet rolls to Mirabella, “after a pause, we are back where we left things. A debt in need of payment.”
It was the next morning after she’d seen her father. Instead of Maria coming in with a tray, Aldo had taken her to the bathroom and told her—he was speaking to her again—to prepare to break her fast with the don.
Now they sat together at the table in his apartment. This time, her place had been set closer to his—not at the opposite end but just around the corner from him. The table was heaped with fruits, sweet bread, hard rolls, sausages, eggs, and coffee. Paolo was eating carefully, but more solid foods than the soup he’d barely touched at their previous meal.
“You look better,” she said as she selected a flaky roll from the basket. “Are you feeling better?”
“I am. I feel well enough not to be distracted by dubiously intended questions about my health. It’s time we solve our problem, or I will have to find a solution myself.”
“You don’t need to find your own solution. I want to find one. I would do almost anything to keep my father safe.”
A corner of his mouth twitched slightly—a twitch that might have become a smile but did not. “Almost anything?
“I have integrity. I have principles. I wouldn’t cause another innocent person harm to save him.”
He’d been sipping his coffee. With the cup near his mouth, he paused and studied her. “You are an interesting woman, Mirabella.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Do you have an offer?”
And here was the sticking point. Mirabella had been thinking for days, since the conversation they’d had over dinner, about what she could offer the don as recompense for trying to kill him, and there was not
hing. She had nothing at all to her name but the clothes she’d been able to pack within the steamer ship’s severe limit and a few trinkets of her mother’s. Of skills, she had few. She was a competent seamstress. Competent, nothing more. And she could sing.
And she had herself, her body, but she couldn’t offer that in this trade. She didn’t have precious ideas about her ‘purity’—and she wasn’t a virgin, anyway. But she simply could not offer herself as a whore.
If he demanded it, she would go that far. To save her father from harm, she would do it. But she couldn’t be the one to raise the possibility.
“I’ve thought hard about this, don. I want to make it right. Truly, I am sorry for what I did. I was angry, and I act before I think …”
She’d meant to say more, but he was smiling at her. It changed so much about him she had trouble keeping straight thoughts in her mind.
“Did something I said amuse you?”
The smile faded slowly, but again, his eyes remained warm with its glow. “No. I’m not often amused. What you said made me think of something.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Are you finished?”
“No. I’m sorry for what I did. But I don’t know what I have, or what I can do, that you’d want.”
“There must be something. You aren’t a simple peasant.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was.”
His aspect as he said those three words had a shade of confrontation about it, a defensiveness. She saw him wonder what she made of that revelation. The powerful Beast had risen from the humblest earth.
It was another layer of knowing. A deepening of her understanding of this man. Humble origins. Broken family. Deep regret. A heart hardened, but not born hard.
“I also know because I asked. Your father had his own shop in Firenze and dressed many fine gentlemen and ladies. You had schooling. And then you worked there, as you work here at Campanelli’s. You have that skill, at least—a dressmaker.”
“A seamstress. Not like my father. I can sew from someone else’s designs and patterns. Most women can do the same. I can’t imagine that’s enough to make us even.”
“No. But you also sing.”
“Do you need a singer, don?”
“No.”
They were very close to the last thing she had left. The thought of it made her stomach feel hot and heavy. Her body was all she had to give, but what would it be like? How would he treat her? He was handsome, and she’d seen that night he’d careened to her in his delirium that his body was handsome as well. But he was the Beast—capable by his own admission of brutality. She’d seen how brutal he could be with her own two eyes. What kind of lover would such a man be?
Did he even want her that way?
“Do you have anything else, Mirabella? A skill I could use? A token of value you could part with, something precious worth my life?”
There was no question in her mind that he was thinking exactly what she was—the one thing she had left—and he meant to make her say it. He wanted her to make the offer.
Her feelings for this dangerous, complicated man had softened and warmed somewhat over the past two weeks, but now, while he clearly meant to force this humiliation upon her, her hate rekindled.
She stared stonily and refused to make that offer. If he wanted her to be his whore, he would have to say it.
The tense, silent moment seemed to last forever, and then the don leaned back in his chair. He gestured at the desk across the room. “Do you see all those papers?”
Mirabella had been expecting him either to push her with more leading questions or simply make a demand for her body. His change of topic startled her, and she took a few seconds before she was able to turn and look. “Yes.”
Did he want her to do secretarial work? She had no skills whatsoever in that field, but she could learn.
“I’m involved in a significant acquisition. It’s put me in a position to walk among men who have thought themselves my betters. Now they have no choice but to deal with me, and they know it. Some of them are even beholden to me.”
She shifted her attention from the desk back to the man. He was looking at her.
“An invitation arrived today, to an event near Central Park next month. Do you know of Central Park?”
“Of course. I haven’t gone so far yet to see it, but it is said to be beautiful.”
“It is. The most beautiful thing this city has to offer, and the thing least like a city at all. But the event isn’t in the park, it’s in one of the homes facing it. Where the brightest stars of New York society shine.”
A flash of understanding brought Mirabella the answer. It was more than a whore he wanted. He wanted a cortigiana. Someone to share his bed in private and his arm in public.
“The invitation is for you and a guest?” she asked.
“It is, yes.”
“That’s what you want of me? To be your … guest?”
“Yes. Not only for this event, but whenever I have need of a guest on my arm, that would be you.”
“And when you have other needs, I’m at your beck and call then, too?”
His expression narrowed and darkened at once, and Mirabella caught a glimpse of the rage she’d felt thrumming beneath his icy surface. Then he turned from her, lowered his head until his chin nearly touched his chest, and was quiet.
When he met her eyes again he said, “I am not looking for a whore, Mirabella. I have all the whores I want, and I wager they’re better at their work than you would be. I’m asking you to be my guest when I need one. To dress elegantly and do me credit among the society pigs. To show them we’re not all simple peasants with olive skins caught in our teeth.”
Perversely, it was on her tongue to protest his poor estimation of her skill—but she had enough restraint to keep that to herself and focus on the much more important point. He’d made his offer.
And that was all he wanted? He should have said so from the start. She would have agreed and could have been home days and days ago.
But would she have agreed days and days ago, when her anger and hate was keen? Perhaps not.
Before she leapt at an offer that now seemed an incredible boon, she poked around for snags and catches.
“All you want is someone on your arm during such events?”
“Someone dressed in the fashion, who knows how to comport herself amongst elegant people. And someone who has learned enough English to make their mindless prattle.”
“You want me to learn English, too?”
“You need English regardless, Mirabella. Life will be much easier here if you speak their language. I can teach you.”
“It’s an ugly language.”
“Yes. But here, it’s the language of power.”
“For how long would I be this someone on your arm?”
Another twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Rather than length of time, let’s negotiate in terms of events. I’m not sure yet how often I’ll get such an invitation, or how often I’ll accept one. Twenty-five events. If there’s an average of one each month, that would be about two years during which you’d be at my, as you say, ‘beck and call.’”
“But you don’t know how often you’ll be invited, so it could be many more years than two. Six events,” she countered.
He cocked his head. “Mirabella. Is that all my life is worth? Eighteen events.”
“You survived,” she said, feeling a little thrill of enjoyment in the haggle. It was one of her favorite things to do. “Ten.”
“Twelve—and …” he paused, seemed to think twice, and then added, in a more subdued voice, “and you teach me some elegant manners, too.”
Mirabella considered the man before her. He was the coldhearted monster who’d maimed her uncle, making her watch. He was the wealthy businessman who’d come into the shop where she and her father worked to order a brand new suit of the most expensive fabrics and paid for it all up front. The fearsome don
negotiating terms. The wounded man, struggling to show strength. The dying man racked by old regrets. The gentleman who’d set his hand at the small of her back to lead her down the stairs. The peasant forcing his way into the castle. And now, just now, in those last words, a tiny glimpse of the innocent he’d once been.
“What if you fall in love with a woman? Wouldn’t you want her on your arm instead?” The question made a tiny point of discomfort poke at her. Mirabella didn’t want to think too much about what that discomfort might be, so she ignored it.
“I have no desire to be in love.”
“Yes, but sometimes such things happen whether you want it or not. What if it does?”
He stared at her. On another man, that look might be a glare, but this man was too cool for that. Only the lively flash of his eyes suggested he felt anything.
She stared stubbornly back, waiting for his answer.
Finally, he gave it. “In that case, I’ll release you from the debt.”
“Ten events, and I teach you what I know about society manners.” She offered her hand.
True society was above her station as well, but she’d lived in a city, she’d had the chance to attend school, and her father had dressed its wealthiest residents. Often, for the biggest social events, Mirabella had gone with him to help dress the ladies, and she’d had cause then to eavesdrop and snoop. She had been close enough to elegant society to know its quirks and habits—of Italian society, at any rate. American society couldn’t be so much different, could it?
Paolo took her hand in his. He didn’t shake. Instead, he pulled her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles—a society kiss, as a lord might kiss a lady’s hand in greeting. Mirabella ignored the feeling that gesture provoked, too.
“We have, then, a deal. And you may leave at your will. Shall I call Aldo now?”
They’d barely touched their breakfast.
“We can finish our meal first.”
He smiled. That was three smiles now, and each one stopped her breath.
X
“Are you ready, sweetheart?”
Il Bestione (The Golden Door Duet Book 2) Page 11
