Sandra Marton - Nicolo: The Powerful Sicilian

A mistake, because he took one to his right.

They collided.

No. Too strong a word. His body simply brushed hers.…

An electric shock seemed to jolt through her.

He looked at her. He must have felt the same thing, judging by the sudden narrowing of his eyes. Such dark eyes, the color of the strongest, richest espresso. The rest of his features were strong, too, she thought on a little inrush of breath. The narrow nose, with just the slightest dent near the bridge. The square jaw. The firm mouth.

It was a hard, masculine face. A beautiful face…

“Excuse me.”

Alessia blinked. The man’s voice was as cold and hard as his expression. And the words were a lie. “Excuse me,” he’d said, but what he meant was, “Why don’t you get out of my way?”

Her eyes narrowed, the same as his.

She took a step to the side. “You are excused,” she said, her tone as frigid as his.

His dark eyebrows rose. “Charming,” he muttered, and strode past her.

Charming, indeed. The rudeness of him! He had spoken in English; without thinking, she had answered in the same tongue. He was, without question, an American, and everyone knew how they were…

Wait.

Had there been something familiar in his voice? Deep. Husky. Silken, despite its sharpness…

A bustle of noise and motion jerked her back to the present. More passengers had just appeared. It was an interesting parade of humanity but when it ended, it had not included Cesare Orsini. There was no short, rotund figure wrapped in a dark overcoat, an old-fashioned fedora pulled low over his eyes.

To hell with this.

Alessia turned on her heel, marched through the terminal and out the exit doors. Her black Mercedes had acquired two more parking tickets. She yanked them from under the wiper blades, opened the car and tossed them inside.

Her father could deal with this nonsense.

She had had enough.

She got behind the wheel. Turned the key. Opened the windows. Started the engine. The Mercedes gave a polite but throaty roar. It had no effect on the pedestrians swarming past the hood. Crossing without acknowledging traffic was a game in Italy. Pedestrian or driver, you could not play if you showed fear.

Slowly, she inched the Mercedes forward. The crowd showed reluctance but, gradually, a narrow tunnel opened. Alessia pressed down harder and harder on the gas.…

And struck something.

She heard the tinkle of glass. Saw the crowd part.

Saw the broken taillight of the Ferrari ahead of her.

Dio, what now? she thought as the driver’s door flew open. A man stepped out, strode to the rear of the Ferrari—dammit, of all cars to hit, a Ferrari—looked at the shattered glass, then at her…

Cavolo!

It was him. The tall, dark-haired American. He didn’t just look angry, he looked furious. Alessia almost shrank back in her seat as he marched toward her. Instead, she took a long, deliberate breath and stepped from her car, her professional easing-the-tension smile on her face.

“Sorry,” she said briskly. “I didn’t see you.”

“You didn’t see me? Am I driving a slot car?”

She almost asked him what a slot car was and caught herself just in time. All she wanted was to get home—to the villa, which was not really home but would have to do—and kick off her agonizingly painful shoes, peel off her wrinkled suit, pour herself a glass of wine…or maybe two glasses—

“Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

His tone was obnoxious, as if this were her fault. It wasn’t. He’d been parked in a no-parking zone. Yes, so had she, but what had that to do with anything?

“First you try to walk through me. Now you try to drive through me!” His mouth thinned. “Did you ever hear of paying attention to what you’re doing?”

So much for easing the tension. Alessia drew herself up. “I don’t like your attitude.”

“ You don’t like my attitude?”

He laughed. The laugh was ugly. Insulting. Alessia narrowed her eyes.

“There is no point to this conversation,” she said coldly. “I suggest we exchange insurance information. There has been no injury to either of us and only the slightest one to your vulgar automobile. I will, therefore, forgive your insulting attitude.”

“My car is vulgar? My attitude is insulting, but you will forgive it?” The man glared at her. “What the hell is with this country, anyway? No direct flights from New York. A layover in Rome that’s supposed to take forty minutes and ends up taking three hours, three endless hours because some idiot mechanic dropped a screwdriver, and when I made a perfectly reasonable attempt to charter a private plane instead of standing around, killing time…”

He was still talking but she couldn’t hear him. Her thoughts were spinning. He had come from New York? A layover in Rome? A longer layover than planned?

“Do you speak Italian?” she blurted.

Stopped in midsentence, he glared at her as if she were crazy. “What?”

“I said, do you—”

“No. I do not. A few words, that’s all, and what are you, an adjunct to passport control?”

“Say something. In Italian.”

He shot her another look. Then he shrugged as if to say, Hey, why not accommodate the inmate? And said something in Italian.

Alessia gasped.

Not at what he’d said—it was impolite and it had to do with her mental state but who cared about that? She gasped because what he’d spoken was not really Italian, it was Sicilian. Sicilian, spoken in a deep, husky voice…

“Your name,” she whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“Your name! What is it?”

Nick slapped his hands on his hips. Okay. Maybe he’d stepped into an alternate universe.

Or maybe this was the old-country version of Marco Polo. Kids played it back home, a dumb game where they bobbed around in a swimming pool, one yelling “Marco,” another answering “Polo.” It made about as much sense as this, an aggressive, mean-tempered babe—if you could call her a babe and, really, you couldn’t—who had first tried to walk through him, then tried to run him down.…

“Answer the question! Who are you? Are you Cesare Orsini?”

“No,” Nick said truthfully.

“Are you sure?”

He laughed. That made her face turn pink.

“I think you are he. And if I am right, you’ve cost me an entire day.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I have been here for hours and hours, waiting for your arrival.”

Nick’s smile faded. “If you tell me you’re Vittorio Antoninni, I won’t believe you.”

“I am his daughter. Alessia Antoninni.” Her chin jutted forward. “And, obviously, you are who you say you are not!”

“You asked if I was Cesare Orsini. I’m not. I’m Nicolo Orsini. Cesare is my father.”

“Your father? Impossible! I know nothing of a change in plans.”

“In that case,” Nick said coldly, “we’re even, because I sure as hell don’t know about a change in plans, either. Your father was supposed to meet me. If I’d let him meet me, that is, which I had no intention of doing.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That makes things even. I don’t understand anything you’re babbling about, lady, and—”

“Where have you been all these hours?”

“Excuse me?”

“It is a simple question, signore. Where were you while I paced the floor here?”

“Where was I?” Nick’s jaw shot forward. “In the first-class Alitalia lounge in Rome,” he said sharply. “And trust me, princess, it loses its charm after a while.”

“The title is no longer accurate.”

Nick looked Alessia Antoninni over, from her falling-apart chignon to her wrinkled Armani suit to the shoes she seemed to be trying to ease off her feet.

“Yes,” he said, “I can see that.”

She flushed. “I was expecting—”

“My father. Yeah. I get that part. What I don’t get is what you’re doing here. Where are your old man and his driver?”

“So. You admit you knew that someone would be waiting for you. And yet, you left no word of your arrival time, of the airline you would be flying. You did not spend so much as a second looking for my father or his chauffeur inside the terminal, and you did not trouble yourself to telephone the villa when you did not see them. If you had, someone would have called me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry this didn’t go according to royal protocol, princess, but life doesn’t always do what you want.”

“I repeat, I am not a princess. And this has nothing to do with protocol. If you had left your arrival information as part of that useless voice-mail message—”

“If I had, your father would have met me. Or, as it turns out, you’d have met me. And I’m not interested in being taken by the hand and shuttled to your villa while somebody tells me how lucky I am to be given the chance to invest in what’s probably a disaster of a vineyard.”

“I thought it was your gangster father who would be investing. And to so much as suggest the vineyard is a disaster—”

Alessia caught her breath as Nicolo Orsini stepped closer. With him this near, she had to tilt her head back to see his face. Even in these shoes of medieval torture, he towered over her.

“I’m here as my father’s emissary,” he said in a cold, dangerous voice. “And I’d advise you to watch what you say, princess. Insult one Orsini, you insult us all.”

Nick frowned even as he said it. Where had that come from? Insult his brothers or, even worse, his mother or his sisters, and, of course, you insulted them all. But the old man? The don, who was part of something ancient and ugly and immoral? Was an insult to him an offense to all the Orsinis?

“Your father is what he is,” Alessia Antoninni said with dogged determination. “If you expect me to pretend otherwise, you are wrong.”

He looked down into her face. Her hair was an unruly mass of streaked gold, long tendrils dangling free of what had once been some kind of ladylike knot. Her eyes flashed defiance. There was a streak of soot on a cheekbone high enough to entice a man to trace his finger across its angled length.

The rest of her was a mess.

Still, she was stunning. He could see that now. Stunning. And arrogant. And she was looking at him as if he were beneath contempt.

His jaw tightened.

She had pegged him for the same kind of man as his father. He wasn’t—but something in him rebelled at denying it. She was an aristocrat; his father was a peasant. Nick had once delved into the origins of la famiglia, enough to know that though some scholars traced the organization solely to banditry, others traced it to the rebellion of those trapped in poverty by rich, cruel landowners.

It didn’t matter. Whatever the origins of his father’s way of life, Nick despised it.

Still, there was a subtle difference between viewing that way of life from the comfort of America and viewing it here, on such ancient soil. It brought out a feeling new to him.

“Your father is also what he is,” he said, his voice rough. “Or do you choose to forget that your vineyard was created by the sweat of others?”

“I do not need a lesson in socioeconomics! Besides, times have changed.”

“They have, indeed.” Nick smiled coldly. “You and your father must now come to me, an Orsini, to beg for money.”

Alessia stiffened. “The House of Antoninni does not beg! And you forget, we come to Cesare Orsini, not to you.”

She was right, of course. His only function was to report back to his father.…