Star-Crossed Sweethearts / Secret Prince, Instant Daddy!: Star-Crossed Sweethearts / Secret Prince, Instant Daddy!

“Sure. After surgery and some rehab I’ll be as good as new.” Angelo’s shoulder throbbed, seemingly in contradiction. He silenced it with a gulp of beer and settled back into the leather recliner. “I’m too damned young to retire.”

It was a lie and they both knew it. Thirty-eight wasn’t old by most standards, but in baseball it was damned near ancient. Before the injury, Angelo had remained a powerhouse, but his legs weren’t what they used to be. Things like that didn’t escape the notice of the guys in the dugout, much less the guys in management. This injury didn’t help. It was his second serious one in three years, and pulled tendons had taken him out for several games in June. No ball club wanted to pay top dollar for a player who’d ride the pine. Even his agent was getting antsy that when Angelo’s multimillion-dollar contract expired in a couple months the team would cut him loose.

“Well, it sounds like you’ll have some time on your hands.”

“Yeah.” He studied the label on his beer and scraped at the edge with his thumbnail. “Maybe I’ll mosey on down to Texas and pay you a visit. I could get better acquainted with your bride-to-be and her little girl.”

It still came as a surprise that the pretty single mom had knocked his brooding brother off his feet when she’d shown up at the ranch with her disabled daughter a few months earlier. Alex wasn’t the sort to fall fast or hard. Yet he’d done both.

“I’d like that.” Alex paused then. “But what I’d like even more is for you to use the time to go to Italy.”

Angelo closed his eyes. “Not this again,” he muttered after an oath.

For weeks his twin had been urging on him to reconnect with their estranged father and meet the rest of the Casali clan in Monta Correnti, the place of their birth.

“Go and make your peace. You won’t regret it,” Alex said.

“I have no peace to make. I’m fine with things just the way they are.”

“Fine? You’re ticked off, Angelo.”

“That too,” he agreed after a long pull on his beer. “Where were they when we were stealing to eat or getting dumped into yet another foster home? Where was Luca?” he demanded, referring to their father. “No one was inviting us to Italy to visit then.”

The way he saw it, the old man had washed his hands of his sons when he had sent them to Boston to live with their American mother, who was more suited to partying than parenting. They’d been three years old then. By the time the twins were fourteen, Cindy had drunk herself to death and the boys had been made wards of the state. Not long after, they’d made their way to New York. His skin still crawled when he thought about how close they’d come to winding up statistics.

“They didn’t know, Angelo. None of them, including Luca, knew that Mom was gone or that we were in and out of the foster system.”

“They didn’t know because they didn’t care enough to find out,” he shot back.

In Angelo’s mind, it was all very cut and dried. In the past, when it could have made a real difference, his family had wanted nothing to do with him. Well, he wanted nothing to do with them now, regardless of how many olive branches they extended.

He’d already ignored the surprise e-mail from his half-sister, Isabella, which had kicked off this whole reunion quest. Talk about a curveball. He certainly hadn’t expected to learn via the Internet that he had additional siblings in Monta Correnti, three of them born to Luca’s second wife after Angelo and Alex’s exile. He’d also passed on a wedding invitation from a cousin who’d grown up in Australia.

Family had been falling out of the rafters for the past several months, but it was all too little and coming far too late.

“Don’t think Luca doesn’t regret his choices,” Alex said quietly. “He does. But he can’t go back and change the past. He can only try to change the future. Go to Italy, Angelo. Spend a week in Monta Correnti. In fact, spend two. You could use a vacation. I’ve already booked you a flight and found you a place to stay. I’ll e-mail you the information. You can pay me back later.”

“I’ll drop a check in the mail first thing in the morning, bro. But I’m not going.”

Alex was quiet a moment before he pulled out his ace. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me. I’m asking you to go.”

“That’s low.” And it was. His level-headed and older-by-mere-minutes brother knew he was the only person who could get Angelo to do something he didn’t want to do.

Far from sounding insulted, Alex’s voice held a smile when he replied, “Sure it’s low, but it’s also effective. You’ll thank me later.”

“Thank you? Right. Don’t hold your breath,” Angelo snapped before hanging up.

Chapter One

ATLANTA JACKSON expelled a gusty sigh as she studied herself in the hotel suite’s full-length mirror. Was the pale, hollowed-eyed woman staring back really her?

The hair was right, a long cascade of nearly white-blonde curls. But her skin was pasty and her body a tad too angular to carry off the bombshell label that was routinely applied to it. She was a good half-dozen pounds thinner than she’d been just a month earlier, and ten pounds thinner than she’d been the month before that. Forget the low-carb fad that was all the rage among Hollywood A-listers. She’d gone on the high-stress diet, guaranteed to melt off the pounds quicker than butter on Louisiana asphalt in August.

At least her dress, a simple navy sheath made of cotton, hid some of her new angles.

A smile bowed her lips. Zeke would hate this dress, which was precisely why she’d purchased it the day before at a pricy Fifth Avenue boutique, outside of which she had been mobbed by paparazzi and actually booed by a couple of passersby. Buying it and now wearing it out in public were acts of defiance.

Zeke Compton—her manager, mentor and, according to him, her messiah—hadn’t allowed her to wear navy. It was too close to black, he claimed. Black being another forbidden color since it reminded him of mourning.

“What does America’s favorite actress have to be sad about?” he’d asked the one time Atlanta’s stylist had suggested a vintage Oscar de la Renta gown the color of onyx for a red-carpet event.

Wouldn’t the public like to know? she’d thought at the time. Now she knew better. The public didn’t want the truth, unvarnished or otherwise. They wanted romantic, rags-to-riches fairy tales and titillating scandals. They wouldn’t accept that she was tired of being manipulated, tired of being dictated to and sick to death of living a lie.

Atlanta slipped on a pair of rounded-toe flats. Despite the fashionable little bow on them, the shoes were another no-no in Zeke’s book.

“You’re too short to wear anything less than a three-inch heel, love,” he’d decreed one year into their professional relationship. By then, things between them also had turned personal, and she’d moved from her West Hollywood studio apartment into his Bellaire home, playing the dutiful Eliza Doolittle to his domineering Henry Higgins.

Atlanta was five-seven, hardly what one would consider petite, but she’d listened to him about clothing and shoes and pretty much everything else. She’d always listened to the men in her life, a habit that dated to her childhood.

Bad things happen to little girls who don’t do what they’re told.

The words echoed from her distant past. As she had done a million times before, Atlanta forced them and the black memories that accompanied them back. Then she glanced at her watch. It was time to go. Thank God, she thought, as she made her way out the suite’s door. She was as eager to leave New York as she’d been to leave Los Angeles. Neither place was welcoming now that Zeke had poisoned the well of public opinion against her and made her a pariah among her peers.

In the elevator, she checked her purse one more time, making sure she had her itinerary, tickets and passport. Her luggage was waiting downstairs. The limousine she’d called for would be at the curb, only a gauntlet of paparazzi to run before she could relax in the relative privacy that its tinted windows would afford.

In a dozen hours she would be in Monta Correnti, Italy. Her stylist, one of the few people from her old life still willing to speak to her, assured Atlanta that the remote hillside village situated between Naples and Rome was the ideal place to drop off the radar, relax and rejuvenate.

God, she hoped Karen Somerville was right. Atlanta was wound so tightly these days she felt ready to explode. But first things first. Sucking in a deep breath, she donned a pair of dark designer sunglasses as the elevator’s doors slid open.

“Show time,” she murmured.

Eyes shaded with his trademark Oakleys, Angelo sauntered into the VIP lounge at JFK International as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Image was everything, especially given all of the speculation swirling around his career.

The official line from the team was that Angelo was suffering pulled ligaments and severe tendonitis in his right shoulder, but that after rest and physical therapy he would return to the regular lineup in the spring. The truth wasn’t quite as rosy as that. In addition to the start of osteoarthritis, he had a torn rotator cuff. Cortisone shots had kept the worst of the arthritis pain at bay in the past, but no shot would take care of the torn cuff.

As the team’s physician bluntly put it, “You need surgery. An injury like this won’t heal on its own. And, given your age, it might never heal well enough to take the abuse heaped on it by a major league ballplayer.”

It all boiled down to a truth he wasn’t ready to accept. Instead of scheduling surgery, he had embraced his brother’s high-handed scheme for a family reunion. He was going to Italy, where he would spend the next couple of weeks. He had no intention of reconnecting with his father, but the gesture would appease Alex. As an added bonus, that little speck on the map was a good place to duck the press and figure out his future.

The bar area of the VIP lounge held only a smattering of patrons. None of them looked up when he entered. They were all important people in their own right—movers, shakers, captains of industry. They didn’t get awestruck or if they did, they hid it well behind blasé attitudes. His ego certainly hoped that was the case with the gorgeous blonde sitting in front of the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the tarmac.

Despite the oversized sunglasses perched on her small nose, Atlanta Jackson was easy to recognize. The actress had starred in a dozen bona fide blockbusters. He took in the naturally pouty lips and the trademark blonde hair that tumbled just past her shoulders. Interest stirred. Again. He’d met her at a New York nightclub a few years earlier. They’d talked briefly. He’d flirted shamelessly, but to no avail. She’d turned him down flat when he’d asked her to dance. A couple of Angelo’s teammates still liked to razz him about the fact that he, Angelo Casali, had struck out.

She shifted in her seat to cross her legs. The demure hemline of her simple navy dress pulled partway up her thighs. Interest turned to outright lust. Not many women were built as she was: long-limbed and slender, yet curvy in all of the places a man liked to rest his hands. A little less curvy than he recalled. He could guess why. Her image was taking a beating in the tabloids ever since she’d walked out on her much older manager slash boyfriend.

According to one story Angelo had read, the guy claimed Atlanta had betrayed him with a slew of lovers over the years, most recently bedding his twenty-year-old son.

Had she?