Brunetti's Secret Son

Romeo shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t do the unthinkable and strangle the old man where he sat. ‘Then I guess it’s a good thing I was intelligent enough to realise early on that whether you were born in the gutter or with a dozen golden spoons clutched in your fist, our lives are what we make them. Otherwise, who knows where I’d be today? In a mental institution, perhaps? Bemoaning my fate while rocking back and forth in a straitjacket?’

The old man laughed, or he attempted to. When the sound veered into a bone-jarring coughing spell, his bodyguards exchanged wary glances before one stepped forward with a glass of water.

Lorenzo’s violent refusal of help had the guard springing back into his designated position. When the coughing fit passed, Lorenzo opened the box and took out several papers.

‘You were never going to go down without a fight. I saw that in you even when you were a boy. But you’ll do well to remember where that intelligence comes from.’

‘Are you really suggesting that I owe what I’ve made of myself to you or the pathetic band of thugs you call a family?’ he asked, incredulous.

Lorenzo waved him away. ‘We’ll discuss what you owe in a bit. Your father meant to do this before he was tragically taken from us,’ he muttered.

Romeo curbed the need to voice his suspicions that his father’s departure from this life hadn’t been tragic at all; that the boat explosion that had taken his life and those of his wife and the two half-sisters Romeo had never been allowed to meet hadn’t been accidental, but the target of a carefully orchestrated assassination.

Instead, he watched Lorenzo pull out document after document and lay them on the desk.

‘The first order of business is this house. It’s yours free and clear from any financial obligations. All the lawyers need is your signature to take possession. It comes with the collection of cars, the horses and the three hundred acres of land, of course.’

Astonishment rendered Romeo speechless.

‘Then there are the businesses. They’re not doing as well as we’d hoped, and certainly not as well as your own businesses are doing. The Carmelo famiglia mistakenly believe this is an excuse for them to start making moves on Fattore business, but I suspect that will all turn around once our business has been brought under the umbrella of your company, Brunetti International—’

Romeo laughed. ‘You must be out of your mind if you think I want any part of this blood-soaked legacy. I’d rather return to the gutter than claim a single brick of this house, or associate myself in any way with the Fattore name and everything it stands for.’

‘You may despise the Fattore name, but do you think Brunetti, son of a two-bit whore has a better ring?’ Lorenzo sneered.

It didn’t, but in the bleak, terrible hellhole of his childhood it had been the better of two evils. Especially since that greater evil had warned him never to use the name Fattore.

‘This is your legacy, no matter how much you try to deny it,’ Lorenzo insisted.

‘You can sit there and rewrite history until the walls crumble around you,’ Romeo enunciated with a burning intensity he suspected would erupt the longer he spent in this house. ‘But your five minutes have come and gone, old man. And this meeting is well and truly over. Any problems you have with your extortion business and territorial wars with the Carmelo family are yours to deal with.’

He made it to the door before Lorenzo spoke.

‘Your father suspected that when the time came you would prove intransigent. So he asked me to give you this.’

For the second time, Romeo froze, his instincts screeching at him to keep walking, but his brain warning that to do as he so desperately wanted would be unwise.

Lorenzo held out a large manila envelope, which he slid across the desk with a smug look.

‘I told you I’m not interested in anything bearing the Fattore name. Whatever is in that envelope—’

‘Is of a more...personal nature and will interest you, mio figlio. I’m confident of it.’

Romeo abandoned the need to remind the old man not to call him son. Lorenzo was enjoying needling him a little too much, and Romeo was fast reaching boiling point.

Striding across the room, he snatched up the envelope and ripped it open. The first picture punched him in the gut, expelling a harsh breath. It showed him standing at his mother’s graveside, the only attendee besides the priest, as Ariana Brunetti was laid to rest.

He flung the picture on the desk, his mouth twisting as the next picture showed him in funereal black, sitting at his hotel bar, staring into a glass of cognac.

‘So Fattore had me followed for an afternoon five years ago. Perhaps he would’ve better profited using that time to tend his businesses.’

Lorenzo tented his fingers. ‘Keep going. The best is yet to come.’

Dark premonition crawled up Romeo’s spine as he flipped to the next photo. It showed him walking out of his hotel and down the street that led to the trendy cafés near the waterfront.

He froze at the next picture and stared at the image of himself. And her.

Maisie O’Connell—the woman with the angelic face and the tempting, sinful body. The combination, although enthralling enough, wasn’t what had made her linger in his mind long after he’d moved on to other women, and other experiences.

Something had happened with her in that hotel room, above and beyond mind-obliterating sex. He’d walked away from her feeling broken, fighting a yearning that had terrified him for a long time, until he’d finally forced it back under control.

He had no intention of resurrecting those brief, unsettling hours. He was in control of his life. In control of the fleeting moments of emotion he allowed himself these days.

He threw down the pictures, not caring when they fanned out in a careless arc on the desk. Eyes narrowed at Lorenzo, he snapped, ‘It’s almost laughable that you think documenting my sex life would cause me anything but acute irritation. Irritation that might just push me into having this house torn to the ground and the whole estate turned into a car park.’

The old man reached across, shuffled through the pictures, then sat back again.

Exhaling, Romeo looked down and saw more pictures of the woman he’d shared his most memorable one-night stand with. But these were different. Taken in another country, judging from the street signs. Dublin, most likely, where Maisie had said she was from during one of the brief times they’d conversed in that electric night they’d spent together.

Still caught up in riotous emotions, he nudged the picture impatiently with his fingernail.

Maisie O’Connell, striding down a busy street in a business suit and high heels, her thick, glorious hair caught up in an elaborate bun. A vision far removed from the sexy little sundress and flip-flops she’d been wearing the first time Romeo had seen her outside a waterfront café in Palermo. Her hair had been loose then, hanging to her waist in a ripple of dark fire.

Romeo unveiled the next picture.

Maisie, hailing a taxi outside a clinic, her features slightly pale and drawn, her normally bright blue eyes dark with worry.

Maisie, sitting on a park bench, her face turned up to the sun, her hand resting on her belly.

Her very distended belly.

Romeo swallowed hard and picked up the last picture, his body suspended in shock as he brought it up to his face.

Maisie, pushing a pram down a quiet Dublin street, her mouth tilted in a postcard-perfect picture of maternal bliss as she reached into the stroller.

‘Madre di Dio, what is the meaning of this?’ he breathed, his voice cold enough to chill the whole mausoleum of a mansion.

‘I will not insult your deductive powers by spelling it out for you,’ Lorenzo answered.

Romeo flung the photo down, but he could not look away from them. Spreading his fingers through the glossy images, he found further evidence of surveillance. Apparently his father had decided to stop following Romeo and focus instead on the woman he’d slept with on the day of his mother’s funeral. A woman whose goodness had threatened to seep into him, to threaten the foundations of his carefully barricaded emotions.

‘If these images are supposed to paint some sort of picture, then you’ve wasted your time. Sexually active individuals have brief encounters and go on to have relationships and families all the time. Or so I’m told.’

He’d never indulged in a relationship. In fact, he actively discouraged his lovers from even entertaining a glimmer of the idea. Romeo suppressed a grim smile. He knew his attitude to relationships had earned him the amusingly caustic label of Weekend Lover. Not that he cared. Hell, if it spelled out his intentions before he even asked a woman out, then all the better.

Affection was never on the table, the faintest idea of love strictly and actively forbidden. His interactions were about sex. Nothing more.

‘So you don’t care to know the time span during which these pictures were taken?’