Beauty and the beast: A Modern Day Fairytale Billionaire Mafia Romance

by Georgia Le Carre

  Once she left I had nothing to do but wander around the stunning house. I could hardly believe how beautiful and luxurious everything was. It was like being in a dream. Everywhere I looked was beauty and cleanliness. When I looked out of the tall windows I saw more beauty, pristine snow on painstakingly precise hedges and flat grounds that seemed to go on forever. I would have loved to have gone for a walk, but it would have been impossible in the high heels I had on let alone most likely freezing cold too. It was nearly time for lunch and I had still not finished exploring the house.

  I was on my way back to the conservatory when I saw Mary Jane coming towards me. “There you are,” she called cheerfully. “A doctor is here to see you.”

  I felt my stomach clench, but I smiled. “Oh good.”

  She smiled back. “After you have seen your doctor, you can have lunch.”

  “That’s good because I’m hungry.”

  “Would you like to eat in the orangery, the blue room, or the dining room?”

  “The orangery will be fine,” I said quietly.

  We dropped into an easy conversation about the house until we got to a small room that looked exactly like a doctor’s exam room. I turned to Mary Jane. “There’s an exam room in this house.”

  “Yes, but nobody’s used it before.”

  At that moment a man in a white coat walked in from a connecting door. He had a swarthy complexion and dark, shifty eyes. He looked coldly at Mary Jane. “You can leave now.”

  She disappeared like smoke and he turned to me. “This won’t take long,” he said, opening his bag. I had been dreading a physical exam, but all he did was draw some blood. He asked me if I was on the pill and I nodded. He asked me for the brand and noted it down. After that he nodded formally and told me I could leave.

  The relief of not being poked and prodded was so great I almost skipped towards the orangery. I knew I had no diseases. In my whole life I’d never had sex without a condom. Mary Jane was waiting for me.

  “That was quick,” she commented.

  “Which is always a good thing.”

  She laughed and gave me a choice between lasagna, pan fried chicken breast with rocket salad, and lightly smoked salmon with wild rice. I chose the salmon and it turned out to be the best thing I’d ever tasted. Whoever the Chef was he was astonishingly good.

  The rice was delicate with a faint whiff of some spice I could not recognize, and the creamy yellow sauce that came with it was to die for. Dessert was a slice of cherry pie, not made in the way American pies are, but open with a thin flaky crust. It reminded me of a piece of pastry I’d once bought from a French patisserie.

  Anna Franklin must have arrived while I was eating, because just as I finished she was at the doorway and had prepared everything in another room for me. “Are you ready to try out some clothes?”

  I nodded and rose.

  “I am pretty sure everything will fit perfectly, but there might be one or two things that you simply don’t like and we can take those away,” she said, as she led me to the music room where there were three racks of clothes and a long mirror on wheels. A dark-haired, pale girl, in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, smiled at me.

  “This is Elizabeth, my assistant,” Anna introduced.

  “Hi,” I greeted.

  “It’s lovely to meet you, Miss,” she replied formally.

  “What would you like to begin with?” Anna asked, waving towards the racks. On the racks were sequins, silk, and tweeds. Dresses, coats and skirts.

  “Um, the underwear.”

  “Of course,” she said and made a gesture with her hands towards one of the racks. The assistant jumped to her command. I grabbed a lacy white bra and panty set and both women turned away politely as I got out of my slutty bra and into my new underwear. It was obviously very expensive, because the fit was amazing, but the material felt soft and silky.

  “Ready,” I said and both women turned around to face me.

  “Great, let’s start with this dress,” Anna said, as she reached for a blood red, silk dress with a plunging neckline.

  I stepped carefully into it and the assistant zipped me up. It was so expertly cut it flowed over my body like a second skin. I stepped into the red shoes Anna’s assistant laid out in front of me. It had a modest slit that came to about halfway up my right thigh. If it had been blue or green I would have felt like a mermaid.

  Anna clapped her hands together with satisfaction. “Wow! I knew the moment I saw it that it would be perfect for you. You look fantastic.”

  Her assistant wheeled the mirror towards me and I saw my reflection.

  For some seconds I couldn’t help staring in astonishment at me in that dress. I looked… regal and beautiful, like a Princess in a fairy tale. And yet, I was not regal or a princess in a fairy tale.

  I was…

  When I was growing up I had always been given the role of the fairy or the Princess in school plays and even as far back as two months ago I had felt unsoiled and unblemished, but now I no longer knew what I was.

  When Katie had first found out about my arrangement with Salvatore, she had asked me how I was going to survive the psychological impact of selling myself for money?

  My response had been simple. “By not thinking. If I don’t think about it, I’ll get through it. And besides, there’s really nothing to think about. It’s just one man, for one month. For my father’s life, it’s worth it. It’s truly not that big of a deal.”

  Then it had become two months, and now it had become two men. Suddenly a panic arose on my insides and I couldn’t stand the dress on me. This was not who I was. I immediately began to take it off.

  “Hey,” Anna called, her eyes filled with surprise. “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s beautiful. I’m just not sure about the color,” I mumbled as I pulled the zip down.

  “Okay, no problem. But red is always a good color for blondes.”

  “Yes, I’m sure, but um… maybe… um… something black.”

  “All right we’ll try something black, but I’m not taking that red dress back. It was made for you. One day you will realize that.”

  I nodded numbly.

  Anna and her assistant stayed for nearly two hours. At the end of it I had more clothes than I had at home. I kept saying I didn’t need that many, but Anna just kept reminding me that she had been hired to dress me for a month and she had to earn her keep. They had also brought velvet covered boxes of jewelry. I stared at my reflection in a daze as they fussed about with my appearance.

  Finally, they left. For a while I stared bemused at the shoes, the jewelry, and two racks of designer clothes that was now all mine. I was the girl who shopped at Target. Once this month was up I wouldn’t even know where to wear these fine clothes.

  Then I snapped out of my stupor and quickly changed into a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and a thick sweater. I pulled on knee-length, flat-heeled, black boots, and shrugged into a gorgeously soft cream coat.

  It was nearly time to visit my dad.

  Chapter 14

  Skye

  A dark green BMW waited for me at the bottom of the entrance steps. The engine was running and a man with black hair and a very hard face was sitting in the driver’s seat. When he saw me appear at the top of the steps he jumped out of the car and held the passenger door open for me. He made no greeting and his face was unsmiling. But I was used to it by now. Except for Mary Jane it seemed to be the popular expression across the staff I’d met so far. She was a much needed dose of fresh air in that house.

  After I got into the car, he closed the door, and got in himself. To my surprise I noticed that my father’s address was already keyed into the GPS system inside the car, which meant Luca must have given it. I didn’t want to think about how Luca knew it. Without a word to me the sullen driver put the car in motion, and we were on the way to my father’s home in Beacon Hill.

  I turned my head towards the window and thought about my father. Two years ago he beat colon c
ancer and was declared to be cancer free. Five months ago I was devastated when I found out it had come back, and the doctors needed to remove the metastasized cancer in his left lung.

  I had exhausted all my savings with treatments and surgery with his first bout of the disease. Everything was gone. The bank turned me down on the spot. I even contacted a loan shark who laughed at my naivety when I told him I was a waitress and would pay with my wages. And then my boss told me about Salvatore. He gave me the money for the initial treatment, but he had already made it clear there would be no more for further testing and treatments.

  Then Luca walked into my life…

  My gaze lowered to my fidgety hands and upon pulling them apart, I regretted not stopping by my apartment and dressing in my own clothes. My father probably would not notice my lavish clothes, but my stepmother might.

  I couldn’t bring myself to completely lie to either of them so I prayed the issue would not come up. With a sigh I leaned my head against the cold window. What did it honestly take for one to get out of poverty so that their life didn’t keep getting chipped away day after day? No doubt that was a question millions of people across the world asked each day, and they too had never found the answer.

  Trees and empty landscapes became suburbs, and they melted into the city scenery. The car turned into the poorer areas, and finally we arrived at our destination.

  “Could you park and wait here for me, please,” I said, when we were about two houses away from my father’s bungalow.

  The driver frowned, but he did as I asked.

  I debated leaving the coat in the car, but that would be even more suspicious. Snow crunched under my new black boots as I approached the red scuffed door I had grown up seeing. I walked up the old wooden steps and rang the bell.

  A few minutes later, Laura, my stepmother answered the call. I always liked Laura. Sometimes I pitied her, because she was such a good woman, and she didn’t deserve being married to a man who was still in love with his dead wife. But she had hung in there, steadfast, loyal, and never once wavering in her love or devotion to my dad. She was wearing her apron and had a carrot in hand and was still finishing a sentence to someone, most probably my dad as she had opened the door.

  “Hi,” I greeted. Already, I felt a little sad, because the first whiff from inside the house was the stale smell of medicine and illness. The difference between the living conditions of my family and that of Luca’s couldn’t be starker.

  “Oh, wonderful. You just caught Diana in time. She was just leaving, but now you can both say hello to each other.”

  My heart sank at her words. Diana was Laura’s daughter and my stepsister, and we simply didn’t get along. Growing up together and sharing a room in a tiny house had been difficult to say the least. Diana was four years older than me and I was desperate to please her, even be like her, but no matter what I did I always managed to irritate and annoy her. I must have been ten when I finally stopped trying and simply avoided her as much as I could. The strange thing is we both pretended to be friends in front of our respective parents. It was almost an unspoken agreement.

  I plastered a smile on my face. “That’s good.”

  Diana already had her coat on and was standing in the middle of the small living room. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me.

  “You two girls sit down and have a little chat. I’ll go put the kettle on. It’s nearly time for your dad to take his pills.”

  “Where did you get that coat from?” Diana demanded, as soon as Laura disappeared into the kitchen.

  “A friend gave it to me,” I said casually. Calling Luca a friend was a bit of a stretch, but what the hell. I didn’t owe Diana any explanations. She certainly didn’t furnish me with the details of her life.

  “A friend? What kind of friend?” she asked incredulously.

  I looked at her curiously. “What’s up with you? You’re never interested in anything that happens in my life.”

  Her head jerked forward. “Are you aware the coat you’re wearing was featured on the front cover of Vogue last month?”

  “What?”

  “Yes, it costs twelve thousand dollars,” she whispered fiercely.

  I blinked in shock. Of course, I knew it was expensive, but I had no idea it was worth six months of my wages at the restaurant.

  “So… who gave it to you?”

  I could hear children playing in the snow, shouting, carefree. In the kitchen, I could hear Laura talking lovingly with my father. Here in the living room the air was thick and poisonous.

  “My boyfriend,” I said quietly.

  There were twin spots of color on her cheeks as she walked up to me. She stood directly in front of me. Her eyes glittered strangely. And I realized then that she was jealous of me. She always had been. Maybe even from that first day Dad and Laura had introduced her to me. She was ten and I was six, and when my father and her mother had left the room, she had told me my blonde hair was ugly, and I should dye it a different color. Maybe brown or black. I was so young and clueless I had actually believed her and grieved that my hair was not brown like hers.

  Now I looked into the jealousy pouring from her eyes and said, “My boyfriend is Luca Messana.”

  She gasped with shock. “I don’t believe you.” She dropped her voice again to a whisper. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. I know exactly how you paid for your father’s medical bills. You’re a whore, Skye. Nothing but a cheap whore. You can wear the most expensive coat in the world and it won’t change that little fact.”

  Without waiting for an answer from me, she stalked out of the house. I turned towards the window and watched her walk away, her movements were stiff and full of fury.

  “Has she gone without saying goodbye?” Laura asked in surprise as she came into the room.

  I turned to look at her. “Yeah, I think she had to go somewhere.”

  “Oh, she never mentioned it, but that’s okay. I’ll see her tomorrow,” she said cheerfully.

  “How’s Dad doing?”

  “Come and see for yourself,” she invited.

  I took my coat off and slung it over the sofa.

  “That’s a lovely coat,” Laura said admiringly. “I’ve never seen you in it. Is it new?”

  “Yes, it’s new. A friend gave it to me.”

  “I’m glad. You’re a good person, Skye. And you deserve good things.”

  I looked into her eyes and all I could see was sincerity. Unlike her daughter, it appeared as if she believed my story about borrowing money from my boss to pay for all my father’s bills. Well, I was about to stretch her credulity even more when I came up with the story that I was going to borrow even more money soon.

  “Thank you for being here for Dad, Laura.”

  She shrugged. “There’s no other place in the world I would rather be.”

  Her words were simple, but powerful because they shone with truth. In that tiny house that smelled of medicine and sickness, she shone like an angel. She was truly heroic and I admired her.

  “You’re a hero, Laura, and one day I hope to become like you,” I said softly.

  “You’ve already done far more than I could do for your dad,” she replied softly, sadly.

  And suddenly I knew that she knew what I had done to get the money for Dad, but there was no condemnation there. Only sadness that we had both been brought to this level, by a medical system that was the cause of two out of three bankruptcies in America. There was no more to say and we walked quietly down the dark narrow corridor towards the kitchen. The sounds from the television grew louder.

  Dad was in a wheelchair, which immensely surprised me. Although his grey and thinning head was facing the television, the slight slant of his neck told me that he was probably asleep. It seemed like just a while ago, I’d heard Laura speaking to him, but this quick knockout was nothing new to me. He had always been able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and I had always been like that too until I took on the responsibility of h
is hospital bills.

  I gently tugged Laura back out into the corridor. “Why is he in a wheelchair?” I whispered.

  “He slipped,” she replied with a sigh.

  My heart slammed into the walls of my chest. “What? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What’s it to you?” my father’s weak but annoyed voice rang out across the kitchen.

  Laura nudged me with her fingers, and smiled. “Go on. You haven’t been around for a week, and he’s missed you. So much.”

  “What the hell are you whispering about behind my back, woman?” he called out again.

  Laura rolled her eyes. “You called me a piranha last night,” Laura shot back at him. “Why the hell wouldn’t I whisper behind your back today?” Then she gave me a gentle push into the kitchen.

  “Hey big guy,” I said as I rounded the wheelchair and came face to face with him. I definitely wasn’t ready to see how much weight he had lost in just a week. He looked frail, the disease was quickly sucking the life out of him and I felt despair inside me if we were ever going to beat this. The feeling made me choke up.

  He watched me, ever able to read what was going on inside me. “You’re going to choke up at seeing me when you’ve abandoned me for a week?”

  “I didn’t abandon you!” I said quietly. “I’ve been busy. You know I would never do that on purpose.”

  He was quiet for a while with me refusing to meet his gaze. “I know that,” he said finally. “And that’s why I’ve been so worried.”

  “Oh, Dad,” I whispered as the dam in my chest broke.

  I turned away and a quiet stream of pain ran down my face. He waited till I was back under control and his silence allowed me to attain that state faster than if he or Laura had fussed over me. I wiped my eyes with my hands and turned back to face him.