Playing Dead

She nodded in the direction of the study. The apartment was massive, and Old Colonial in its style of decor. It was one of only two apartments on this floor, with full-service white-gloved doorman, concierge and elevator operator.

‘Is he free?’ she asked.

‘For you?’ Nico rose to his feet with a courtly smile and a bow. ‘He’s free.’

Annie gave him a smile in return. She liked Nico. She felt he would throw himself under a ten-ton truck to protect Constantine, and she liked that; he needed good people around him.

Nico was a big friendly bear of a man with a thin scraping of darkish hair remaining on his big dome of a head. He had humorous and shrewd dark eyes, half hidden under thick eyebrows. In his gait and mannerisms he was shambling and casual, he always looked untidy. But he was loyal to the core and – this was the nailer for Annie – he had been hugely instrumental in recovering Layla when she had once been snatched away, and for that she was forever in his debt.

She went over to the closed study door. She knocked.

‘Come!’ came from inside, and she slipped in, closing the door behind her.

He was there behind the desk, replacing the phone on its cradle, looking up at her expectantly.

The silver fox. And he was a fox in every way. When Constantine Barolli was in a room, it filled with his presence. He was a man at the very height of his powers. Tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, he had thick silver hair, an all-American tan, and armour-piercing blue eyes. Anywhere he went, a cloud of bodyguards swarmed around him like gnats. They swarmed around her, too, and she hated that – but she knew it came with the territory.

Now they had this to look forward to. She was going to give him his fourth child. His first three had been born to another woman – his first wife, Maria – who had died over six years ago. Alberto, Lucco and Cara were his grown-up children. Now he was approaching fifty, and he would soon have a new baby to a woman not yet thirty. She was so much younger than him, and she knew that people talked, disapproved.

She was not from the old country – Sicily – and she wasn’t even American. She barely spoke a word of his native language, but it didn’t matter because he’d been raised in New York and his accent was pure Bronx. But he was the Don, Il Padrone, the godfather, so if people spoke of it, this scandalous second marriage of his, then it was only in whispers, never to his face.

Annie had heard some of those whispers. Caught the edge of them, before silence and watchfulness and fake smiles took their place. Puttana, she had heard them whisper. She’d looked it up in her phrasebook but it wasn’t there. She’d asked Constantine what it meant, and he’d told her, asking where she’d come across a word like that.

‘Oh, just something I overheard.’ She’d shrugged it off.

He told her it meant ‘whore’.

Well, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

Rich powerful men want young women, and young women are drawn to rich, powerful men, she thought. It was a story as old as time itself. Some people derided it as mercenary or shallow. But even if beauty was desirable, even if power was an aphrodisiac, there was still – in her case, and in his – more to it than that. There was still love. Loving him wasn’t always comfortable; frequently she was isolated, heavily guarded – and this ritzy apartment sometimes felt like a gilded cage. But then, had she ever thought this was going to be easy?

‘So what’s the news?’ he asked, pushing his chair back from the desk and beckoning her over.

‘The news is that both baby and mother are doing well,’ said Annie, coming around the desk, sitting down on his lap and linking her arms around his neck. She nuzzled into his shoulder, inhaling his own unique scent overlaid with Acqua di Parma cologne.

‘Twelve weeks,’ he said reflectively, putting his arms around her.

Annie nodded. He had wanted to tell the family at twelve weeks, when they could be sure the baby was safe, that it was truly there. And now here they were. Time up. ‘Yeah. Twelve weeks.’

She wasn’t overjoyed at the thought. She had loved it when the baby was their secret, just hers and his alone. Now it would be public knowledge; now things would get tricky.

More and more lately, she found herself thinking of her old London life. She missed her friends, Dolly and Ellie in particular. She hadn’t even told them about the baby yet during their occasional phone conversations. Soon, she would.

She thought of Dolly there, running the three Carter clubs and swanning around town in a chauffeur-driven Jag. Even the thought of it made her smile. Once Dolly had been the roughest of all Aunt Celia’s in-house prostitutes; now she was like the Queen. Wistfully, Annie thought of how good it had been, having her pals around her; but this was her life now, here with Constantine. Sometimes she did get a twinge of homesickness, but she always suppressed it.

‘We could call him Vito after my father, if it’s a boy.’

Constantine’s father had been killed in a hit from a rival family in Sicily. Although he rarely talked about it, she knew that he had lost his mother and brother the same way. It was said that Constantine’s hair had turned from black to white overnight with the shock of losing his mother and brother in so brutal a fashion.

‘What makes you think it’ll be a boy?’ she teased.

‘Fifty-fifty chance.’

‘Ha.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, kissing her dark brown hair. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’ That was the deal. The family had to know sometime, after all. Annie expected ructions, nevertheless. She knew that – apart from Alberto – all Constantine’s grown-up kids and even his sister Gina resented her.

Right now, Gina was babysitting Layla, Annie’s daughter by her first husband Max Carter – not to please her, but to ingratiate herself with Constantine, as always. Alberto would be collecting Layla and bringing her home in an hour or so – because he liked her and Layla.

‘There was something else I’d been meaning to talk to you about,’ said Constantine.

‘Yeah? What?’ Annie cuddled in close to him, watching him with her serious dark green eyes.

‘My will.’

‘What?’ Annie raised her head, stared anxiously at his face. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’

He gave a smile. ‘Perfectly. But I have you to consider now. And our child.’ He leaned in and kissed her. ‘I just want you to know that it’s all in there. That this apartment’s your home for keeps, and the Holland Park place in London . . .’

‘Stop,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling a nervous shudder, as if someone was walking over her grave. She didn’t want to talk about this.

‘. . . and if anything happens to me, then my forty-nine per cent share of the Times Square club passes in its entirety to you . . .’

‘Stop it,’ she said, and quickly silenced him with a kiss. His words were raising memories, fearful memories – because once there had been another man she loved, and she had lost him. ‘Just stop it right there,’ she murmured against his lips.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stopping.’ He kissed her deeper, harder.

Annie clung to him. What was he doing, talking about wills? She didn’t want to hear it.

When he made the necessary calls to the family, she decided she didn’t want to hear those, either. She left the room.

Chapter 2

It was mid-afternoon and Lucco Barolli was lying in the super-king-sized bed in his chic, ultra-modern Upper East Side condo with its red-lacquered walls and black Oriental furnishings when he took the call from his father. He put the phone down and lay there, staring into space.

‘Wassup, sweetie?’ asked Sophie, her lovely nakedness tangled up in the red silk sheets after their marathon love-making session.

Lucco stared absently at her. Sophie was as fair as he was dark. Unlike his father, Lucco truly looked Sicilian, with straight black hair, nearly black deep-set eyes and olive skin as fine as any woman’s.

‘My father’s puttana of a new wife is expecting a child,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ The girl propped herself up on her elbow, her delectable tits swinging in his face. She was an English model and beautiful – he could afford the best and Sophie Thomson was renowned. He had pulled strings, got her the plum jobs using his connections. Nobody said no to a caporegime of the family. Now, with her tall athletic body and the face of an insatiable fallen angel, she could command ridiculous fees worldwide.

‘Well that’s good news.’ She smiled engagingly. What the fuck’s a puttana? she wondered. ‘You’ll have a new brother or sister.’

Lucco looked at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses.