Bella Rosa Proposals: Star-Crossed Sweethearts

www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author

JACKIE BRAUN is a three-time RITA® award finalist, a four-time National Readers’ Choice Award finalist and a past winner of the Rising Star Award. She worked for nearly two decades as an award-winning journalist before leaving her full-time job to write fiction. She lives in mid-Michigan with her husband and their two sons. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.jackiebraun.com.

For Brady Williamson and his new sister, Alexandria

PROLOGUE

ANGELO CASALI stood at the home plate with his feet planted shoulder’s width apart in the dust. The bat hovered in the air just beyond his right ear. It was the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, and the Rogues were trailing by two. Anxious runners filled the bases waiting for New York’s Angel to work a miracle. They and the fans knew the team’s pennant hopes rested squarely on his shoulders.

The opposing team’s pitcher glared at Angelo from beneath the bill of his cap. Kyle Morris had one of the best arms in the league. Only a handful of batters could touch his fastball. Angelo was one of them, which was why Morris had yet to bring the heat against him this game. In fact, the pitcher had walked Angelo his last two times at bat. Morris couldn’t afford to do that now, and they both knew it.

The pitcher hiked up his leg and levered back his arm before bringing it around. The ball blasted free of his hand like a bullet clearing the barrel of a gun. Even so, Angelo was ready, his eyes tracking its trajectory. He timed his swing perfectly and put everything he had into it, shifting his weight to his right leg as he brought the bat around.

Crack!

The sound of red-stitched white leather meeting wood rent the air like gunfire. It was followed by a sickening pop! that only Angelo heard…and felt. Pain, wicked and white-hot, exploded from his shoulder. The crowd’s deafening roar drowned out his cry.

It’s worth it, he told himself. It’s worth it.

Even as he dropped the bat and started toward first base, he knew there was no need to hurry. The ball was riding high in the clouds and showed no signs of dropping.

“And it’s out of here!” the announcer shouted.

The fans were on their feet, clapping and high-fiving.

“Angel! Angel! Angel!”

Their jubilant chanting buoyed him. Along with the adrenaline streaking through his system, it allowed him to ignore the worst of the pain. He rounded the bases at a leisurely trot with his good arm raised in triumph. By the time he arrived at home plate, his teammates were out of the dugout, standing there en masse to greet him with whoops and careless back slaps that nearly sent Angelo to his knees. He kept his grin in place, enjoying the moment. How could he not? The Rogues had just sealed a berth in the playoffs. He was the city’s hero.

Barely twenty-four hours, Angelo adjusted the ice pack on his shoulder and drank a beer in the solitude of his Upper East Side apartment. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the crowd chanting his name as the video replayed on the big screen over the scoreboard. He’d watched it from the bench in the dugout, a spot he’d most likely keep warm for what little remained of the season. Most disturbing of all, though, was the thought that this time he might have to hang up his cleats for good.

He sipped the pricey imported brew he’d acquired a taste for his first year in the majors. What would he do then? The question nagged at him more than the pain from his shoulder.

His cell phone trilled as he debated having another drink in lieu of the medication the team doctor had prescribed. It was probably another journalist. Reporters were eager for an interview or even just a quote from the Angel. He snatched it off the coffee table, intending to turn it off. A glance at the readout stopped him. It was his brother, Alessandro.

He grinned as he flipped it open. “Alex. Hey.”

“How are you?”

“Never better,” Angelo lied.

“Except for your shoulder, you mean.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged the body part in question and immediately winced. “Except for that. What are you up to?”

“Drinking a beer. Been a long day.”

“I’m doing the same. I know what you mean.”

Angelo tossed the ice pack aside and started for the kitchen to retrieve another bottle. He wished his twin were there to share a cold one with him in person. It still amazed Angelo that Alex owned a ranch in San Antonio, Texas, and was as at home roping steer as Angelo was snapping up grounders in a major league ballpark. God knew their chaotic childhood hadn’t lent itself to either profession. For that matter, it was amazing either of them had amounted to much of anything.

“So, is your shoulder as bad as the sportscasters are saying?” Alex wanted to know.

Angelo made a dismissive sound. “You know how those vultures are. They’re milking the story to boost their sagging ratings.”

His brother wasn’t fooled. “You won’t be back in uniform this season.”

“No.”

“And next year?”

“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?

Maybe it was Angelo’s ego talking, but the woman who’d turned him down flat in a nightclub a few years earlier hadn’t seemed the sort to stray. With that in mind, he crossed to her table and waited until she looked up to speak.

“I’d offer to buy you a drink, but you’d probably turn me down. So, how about some meaningful conversation until one of our flights boards?”

He couldn’t see her eyes behind the glasses, but her full lips twitched with amusement. “As lines go, that’s very original, Mr. Casali.”

“Thanks.” He didn’t wait to be offered a seat. He pulled out one of the chairs and straddled it backward. “So, you do remember me. I wasn’t sure you would. It’s been a few years.”

His ego took another little hit when she replied, “Well, you’ve been in the news a lot these days.”

“I could say the same about you.”

Her mouth tightened fractionally. “Yes, I have.”

“Is that why you’re wearing sunglasses inside?”

“Maybe.” She motioned to his Oakleys. “And you?”

“Definitely. This way no one can be sure I’m making eye contact with them. I find it discourages conversation.”

A pair of finely arched brows rose over the top rim of her dark lenses.

“You find that ironic,” he guessed.

“A little.” She shrugged delicately.

“Here’s the thing. Since you and I are the only two people in the lounge wearing shades I figure we probably should stick together. You know, play for the same team.”

“Given all that is being said about me right now, are you sure you want me on your team, Mr. Casali?”

“The name is Angelo.” He cocked his head to one side. “We’ll consider this a tryout.”

Atlanta laughed if for no other reason than the man’s sheer nerve. A tryout? She hadn’t had to read for a part in quite a while. The starring roles in her last three movies, each of which had grossed well over a hundred million dollars in the American market alone, had been written specifically with her in mind. Everyone in Hollywood knew that no one played the vulnerable vixen better than Atlanta Jackson. It was her niche. Her character type. She sobered at that.

“What if I don’t want to be on your team?” she asked.

“You do.”

She wanted to be turned off by his unflagging confidence or at the very least irritated by it. She found herself intrigued instead and maybe even a little envious. While she could portray confidence in front of the camera, she seldom felt it in real life. It was just one of the many things she was working to rectify.

“How can you be so sure?” she wanted to know.

“Everyone wants to be on the winning team.”

“And that would be yours?”

“Of course. I’ve got the golden touch. The Rogues are in the playoffs because of me. We’re heading to the World Series.”

“That’s only an assumption at this point.”

“No. It’s a fact, sweetheart. We’ll be there.”

Normally, she didn’t care for empty endearments, but his casual use of sweetheart complemented his bravado so perfectly, she let it pass. Instead, she honed in on another matter.

“We? Are the news reports wrong, then?” Her gaze strayed to his shoulder. It didn’t look injured. Indeed, nothing about the man’s rock-hard physique appeared compromised…or compromising, for that matter.

“You know the media.” He shrugged.

Atlanta might have believed that news of Angelo’s professional demise was vastly overblown if he hadn’t grimaced after making the casual movement.

“They’re ruthless when they scent blood,” he was saying.

Thinking of Zeke, she replied, “They’re even more ruthless when they’ve got sources happy to help draw it.”

Her image was being put through the shredder, and, while she wasn’t all that sad to see some of the false layers she’d once agreed to peel away, she certainly didn’t want them replaced with more lies and half-truths. Unfortunately, that was exactly what Zeke was feeding the hungry hordes these days, and they were eating it up, ravenous for more.

I made you. I’ll ruin you.

Zeke’s parting words. Foolishly, she hadn’t believed he’d do it. She knew better now. He was doing a bang-up job of making good on his promise.

Angelo was apparently far less naïve than she. “The world is full of people eager to sell you out. You have to be careful who you trust.”

“At this point, I trust no one.” Surprised to have told him that, She asked, “Who do you trust?”

“My twin,” he replied without hesitation. “Alex has always had my back.”

“You have a twin?” Good heavens, there were two men on the planet as good-looking as this one? She’d worked with A-list actors, bona fide heartthrobs, who couldn’t match Angelo’s rugged male perfection. “Are you identical?”

“Not quite. I’m better looking.”

“No doubt you’re more modest, too,” she replied dryly.

“Sure.” Angelo wasn’t put off. In fact, he pulled the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and winked as he boasted, “I’m also better with women.”

God help her. The man was every bit as sexy as she recalled from their brief meeting in a nightclub a few years back. He also was every bit as cocksure. She was used to being around oversized egos, her own included. Angelo, at least, tempered his with humor. He was harmless, she decided, especially here in a public place.

Which was what gave her the nerve to lean closer and say, “So, Don Juan, if I’m going to be on your team, perhaps you should explain the game we’re playing.”

“Distraction.”

“Is that the name or the object?”

“Both.”

“I’m intrigued. Tell me more.”

He glanced at the chunky Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Here’s the thing—I have an hour and forty minutes to kill before my flight departs. I could get my own table, order a drink and sip it alone while I wait. Or I could stay here with you and enjoy what is bound to be some fascinating conversation.”

A lifetime ago, Atlanta had thought herself interesting, but it had been a very long time since a man had said so. “What makes you so sure the conversation would be fascinating?”

“You’re a fascinating woman. What else would it be?”

Come-on or not, his reply caused her breath to catch. Clearly, being a pariah among the people she’d considered her friends had taken its toll on her self-esteem.

“I like your answer,” she told him.

“Enough to let me buy you a drink?”

“Enough that the drink’s on me.”

Angelo waved over a server and they ordered their beverages—an imported beer for him and a glass of unsweetened iced tea for her. As the waitress left he was frowning.