Last Man Standing

Chapter 3

Apart from the sweet odor of Scotch that had trailed him out of the bar, Lucky Masado showed no outward signs that he was drunk. His speech was clear, and he’d walked in a fairly straight line down the hall.

Elena heard the door click shut, and before she turned around, she made a quick assessment of the no-frills room. It had definitely been designed to keep the customer’s minds on what they were paying for. There was a small table and two chairs, and a double bed. Nothing else.

She was well aware that she was in a by-the-hour room and that her lips still tingled from a surprise kiss that wasn’t really a kiss. Why she had taken the time to analyze what did or did not constitute the proper definition of a real kiss made no sense at all.

Yes, she had noticed Lucky Masado at Santa Palazzo; it was impossible to ignore a man whose reputation was as black as his hair. And yes, there was no disputing that he was handsome or that she’d found him interesting to watch. But then, so was a tropical storm, from a distance.

She slowly turned and found him leaning against the door with his arms crossed over his broad chest. He wore faded jeans and a light-colored shirt beneath a battered brown leather jacket. Pretty much the same clothes she’d seen him wearing when he’d visited Frank at Santa Palazzo two weeks ago, minus the jacket. He was tall, six-two, or maybe three.

He said, “You wanted to talk, Elena. Someplace private. Here we are.”

She backed up until she felt the corner of the bed at her back. “You knew before we met that I wasn’t your sister. How?”

“I flew to Santa Palazzo a little over a month ago on what you might call a witch hunt and ended up discovering you, along with Rhea and Niccolo.”

“By spying on your father?”

“Yes.”

“You invaded our privacy.”

“Yes.”

There was no apology in his husky voice. No regret in his brown eyes. He said, “You take morning walks along the beach. Sometimes as early as 5 a.m. You wear loose-fitting clothing the wind can play with. You take off your…shoes when you walk.”

Elena’s stomach knotted.

“When I discovered Rhea and Niccolo, I suspected the boy was my brother’s son, but I had to be sure. I went to the hospital for proof. While I was there, I checked you out, too. That’s the first I knew Grace was alive. That somehow my father had been able to get her out of Chicago years ago without anyone knowing it. There was a rumor she was pregnant when she disappeared.”

Elena listened carefully to each word. “And what did you do with the information?”

“Nothing. You weren’t going anywhere that I could see, so I concentrated on Rhea and Niccolo. Joey had been searching for Rhea for three years. He had no idea Frank was hiding her in Florida or that she’d had his son. When Frank arrived in Chicago days later, I waited for your name to come up. When it did, Frank threw me a curve by claiming you were our sister. I knew it wasn’t true, but I figured he had a reason for lying, so I kept quiet until I learned what it was. And you, Elena? How long have you known the sister story was a lie?”

“Not long.”

“Not long doesn’t answer my question. When I was at Santa Palazzo and Frank introduced us, you knew then, didn’t you? How long before that?”

“The night you and Joey came and took Nicci, Rhea was extremely upset. She had a right to be, but it was more than that. There were so many things I felt she wanted to say but couldn’t. After she left Santa Palazzo to follow Nicci here, I decided to investigate a few things for myself. Like you, I ended up at the hospital several days later checking records and discovered Frank wasn’t my real father.”

“But you didn’t go straight to him with what you’d learned? Why?”

Elena tossed her coat on the bed. “By then he was here in Chicago. Rhea had lived with us at Santa Palazzo for three years. She and I had grown close. I was concerned about her and Nicci. I wanted things to work out for them, so I decided to table what I knew until things settled down.”

“Frank was home almost a week before we arrived. You had five days to talk to him.”

“And I was going to the night he returned. We sat down to talk and then he started telling me about his double life. About his sons, my half brothers. I knew it was a lie, the brother part, but I just listened.” Elena shrugged. “I guess I was too confused at the time to question him.”

The look Lucky gave her clearly called her a liar. “The truth is, Elena, you didn’t trust him to tell you the truth. So you decided to make plans to find out the truth for yourself.”

“It wasn’t that easy. My mother is very dependent on me. I do things for her that no one else does. In order to leave Santa Palazzo to learn the truth, as you put it, I needed to teach Frank how to do those things. Since he’s now retired, with no plans to ever leave Santa Palazzo, I spent the next week—” Elena paused “—I suppose you could call it, weaning Mother away from me.”

“And he was willing to do these things for her?”

“I’ve never doubted Frank’s love for my mother. Of course he didn’t know I had an ulterior motive for suggesting that he get more involved in Mother’s therapy now that he’s home to stay. Tonight I gave him one more chance to tell me the truth. I told him I knew he wasn’t my father. I asked him to give me my father’s name. He refused, so here I am.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know who your father is.”

Elena arched her delicate black eyebrows. “If you know, then Frank knows.”

“Did I say I knew?”

“Come on, Lucky. Not you, too.”

“Lucky? At Santa Palazzo it was Tomas. Out there—” he motioned to the other side of the door “—it was, ‘Listen, you.’ What broke the ice? My charm in the hallway?”

There was no reason for him to bring up that stupid kiss, so why had he? And as far as his nickname went, she wasn’t sure why she’d used it. But did it really matter? What was in a name?

Everything, she decided. After all, that was one of the reasons she’d come to Chicago.

Elena shoved away from the bed and gave him her back. The way he continued to take her apart with his dark eyes since they’d entered the room was starting to make her feel self-conscious. She had bought her outfit at the airport out of necessity. She hadn’t thought about the weather until she’d gotten off the plane in her white summer skirt and sandals to twenty degrees and snow-flakes.

“You came to talk, Elena. So let’s talk.”

She turned back around and boldly studied him the way he’d been studying her for the past five minutes. He was taller and broader than his brother and father, but leaner.

Still, that wasn’t what she’d noticed first about him—his drinking or his classic Italian nose. Or the visible scars on his hands and neck. What she’d noticed as she’d stepped onto the veranda at Santa Palazzo and laid eyes on Lucky Masado for the very first time was the rebel length of his midnight-black hair and how much of his soul she’d glimpsed in the depths of his brown eyes.

Again she focused on those soulful eyes, then on the way his sleek nose led her gaze straight to his rugged mouth and unshaven jaw. A second later she was appreciating the open V of his collarless muslin shirt and how it showed off his rich Sicilian skin and a smattering of black chest hair.

When she began to examine his beat-up leather jacket and the number of holes in it, she decided that they couldn’t possibly be what they appeared to be or he would be dead, right?

Yes, he was his father’s son. But even Frank, with his eye patch and all his intimidating ways, looked like a pussycat next to his street-soldier son with a rumored scar that ran more than half the length of his body.

Suddenly Elena needed to say it. To demand he give her what she’d come for. “Who is he, Lucky? Who is my father? I want his name.”

“I can’t tell you that, Elena.”

Elena ignored the way her stomach did a slow flip. When he said her name, he dragged it out, reminding her of thick syrup fighting to stay in the bottle.

He angled his head just enough to give her a better view of the vivid scar that ran down the side of his neck and disappeared into his shirt. Was that the one? Elena wondered. Was that the beginning of the rumored scar that had almost killed him?

He unfolded his arms and shrugged off his leather jacket and dropped it on the floor. She watched the way he moved, ran her tongue over her teeth. Remembered the kiss that wasn’t a kiss.

“You could be in danger if certain people in Chicago were to find out your identity, Elena. You’re what is known as a loose end.”

“A complication.”

“Yes. Coming here and stirring things up is no good. Your father’s name was not kept from you to hurt you, but to protect you. You and your mother.”

“That’s what Frank said, but I didn’t—”

“Believe him? This isn’t a game, Elena.”

She stiffened, resenting that word more and more. “I know that. I have no intention of broadcasting my identity to the world. All I want is his name. Give it to me, and I promise I’ll be on the next flight back to Key West.”

“You think his name will be enough?”

“Yes.”

“I think you want the name to be enough.” He shook his head. “We both know it won’t be.”

“I don’t think you know me well enough to say that.”

“What I know is that Frank has successfully kept your mother alive for twenty-four years. Do you want that to change, Elena? Is a name worth jeopardizing her safety?”

“I love my mother. I don’t want to hurt her. I want to understand. I want to know who I am. Why—”

“Why what?”

“Why it was kept from me.”

“You ask for something I can’t give you. Only your mother has a right to tell you who your father is. Or Frank.”

“You know Mother can’t tell me because she can’t remember the past. And Frank won’t. That leaves you.” Frustrated, afraid she’d come all this way for nothing, Elena said, “The saying goes, every man has his price. Since we both know you don’t need money, what do you want for the name?”

“You don’t have anything I want.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Sì. I am sure.”

He shoved away from the wall and moved past her to the bed and picked up her jacket.

“I saw you,” she said, watching him rifle the pockets.

Finding nothing, he tossed the jacket back on the bed, then glanced at her. “Saw me where?”

“Hiding in the shadows outside the house at Santa Palazzo the night before you flew back here with Joey and Rhea. I knew it was you because I smelled the smoke from your cigarette.” And the Scotch, Elena wanted to say, but she didn’t. “And when I went for a walk along the beach, you followed me.”

“Did you intend to swim?” he asked. “You brought a towel, but you never used it.”

“Did you follow me hoping to see what you could see?” she asked boldly.

He smiled and it softened his hard mouth. “Maybe I followed you to protect you from the dark. Or from the ocean monsters who come out after midnight to watch the sea witch swim naked in the moonlight.”

He had admitted to knowing her morning routine. What had made her think he hadn’t followed her after dark, as well—more than once?

That realization sent Elena’s stomach into another slow nervous flip—he’d seen her shed her clothes and swim naked in the moonlight.

“All right,” Elena said softly. “Once more. Right here. I’ll take off my clothes so you can get a closer look. Then afterward…for looking your fill, you’ll give me my father’s name.”

She waited for his answer. Waited, and felt her cheeks come alive with embarrassment over the insane proposition she’d just offered him. She’d never done anything so utterly reckless in her life.

“You think all I want is to look? To see what I can see?”

Those words on his lips, as slow and liquid as her name, tripled the color in Elena’s cheeks before moving down her throat.

He reached out and brushed the back of his hand along her hot cheek. “It’s generous of you to be willing to sacrifice so much for a name, but I’m going to have to pass on your offer.”

When he started past her, Elena panicked and stepped into his path, again nearly knocked over by the sweet smell of liquor. “Okay, more. You can—” her face burned hotly “—touch me.”

His expression never wavered as his gaze slowly traveled over her, seemingly assessing what he would get to touch. His eyes spent time appreciating the exposed swell of her breasts, then drifted to the gold ring in her navel.

Elena bit her lip, afraid he was going to again pass on her offer. Desperation was the only logical reason for the next thing that came out of her mouth. “Okay, everything, then. All of it. You can have—”

With lightning swiftness, he lifted her off her feet and tossed her onto the bed. Elena cried out, but that didn’t stop him. The second her back hit the bed, he was straddling her and pinning her hips to the mattress with his stone-hard thighs. “I can have what, Elena? Are you going to spread you legs for me, too?”

The words sounded crude. More embarrassment flooded Elena’s cheeks as she studied his clenched jaw and his angry black eyes. “I want my father’s name,” she whispered in an attempt to explain herself. A place to start, she thought silently.

His gaze settled on her breasts where they were straining the buttons of her sweater. While she struggled to breathe, he said, “I can get what you’re offering any day of the week. Free of charge now that I own this place. And I’m sure the girls here are more experienced.”

His insult fed Elena’s bravado. “They should be,” she reasoned. “I’m not a whore. I’m—”

His eyes lit on her face. “You’re what?”

She clamped her mouth shut, closed her eyes to conceal the emotions storming her body, as well as her mind. She had never had a man on top of her before.

“Come on, Elena,” he coaxed. “What are you? A virgin, maybe? A twenty-four-year-old virgin? No, I don’t think so. Virgins don’t swim naked and they don’t sell their bodies for information.”

She blinked open her eyes to argue the point and found him staring at her with a mocking grin on his face that made her feel cheap and dirty. Overcome with anger, she raised her hand and slapped his face. Hard.

For a moment there was nothing but silence while her handprint turned a vivid shade of red on his cheek, and in that space and time she became acutely aware of the heat growing between them. The sudden tightness drawing her nipples into hard peaks and the weakness in her limbs making her want to fidget.

“Get off me, Lucky. Presente!”

“You’re a virgin?”

“Get off me.”

“Answer me, dammit.”

She heaved her body up to fight his weight. “Get off me!”

“Or what, Elena? What will you do, my hot-tempered little virgin?”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Get off me or I’ll scream.”

Instead of doing as she asked, he reached out, clamped his hands around her wrists and wrenched her arms over her head. Leaning forward, he said, “They’re used to hearing screaming coming from these back rooms—that’s why the music is so loud. Go ahead, Elena, wear yourself out.”

She didn’t scream, but she renewed her fight, twisting and wriggling while she began to curse him using every filthy word she knew in both English and Italian.

He shifted his body, and she suddenly felt more of him. Too much of him. She saw his jaw tighten. His nostrils flare. She stopped thrashing.

“I thought you were going to scream,” he taunted. “What are you waiting for?”

Above her head, he collected both of her wrists into one hand, then ran the fingers on his free hand down her throat and over the swell of her left breast. She sucked in her breath, shook her head. “No! Lucky, please…”

“I’m going to ask you some questions, Elena. And you’re going to answer them. Say, yes, Lucky, I’m going to answer your questions. All of them.”

His voice was soft, his breath eighty-proof. Could a person get drunk on fumes? Elena wondered. For she had to be drunk; why else would she have made him that stupid offer? Why else was she suddenly feeling like a cat needing to be stroked?

“Elena—”

“Yes, Lucky,” she managed. “I’m going to answer all of your questions.”

“Frank has no idea you’re here, right?”

She swallowed hard, shook her head. “I don’t think so. He shouldn’t discover I’m gone until around seven tomorrow morning.”

He slipped her top button out of its bound buttonhole. “And then?”

“And then he’ll find the note.”

His hands were warm on her flesh, torturously gentle. His fingers moved to the second button. “The note says what?”

Intoxicated, yes—his breath was making her dizzy.

“What’s in the note, Elena?”

She licked her lips, stared at his mouth. “I told him that I went to visit friends in Miami. College friends.”

She felt his sweet breath touch her breasts and knew another button was lost. She tried not to think about it, about what he could see. About the fact that the bra she wore was pale blue and as sheer as fishnet.

“Mother suggested a vacation,” she said. “I told Frank to tell her that I would call in a few days.”

Another button.

Elena heard herself moan when his lips brushed her mouth. Oh, God… “Piacere,” she whispered.

“Please what, Elena?”

She closed her eyes. “Please…no more. Please stop.”

Immediately his hand lifted off the fourth button, and she felt him draw himself upward. Though he remained straddling her, he let go of her wrists. In an ultrasoft voice, he demanded, “Open your eyes.”

She blinked them open, fought to breathe.

“The lesson here, sweet Elena, is that I could take you with or without your consent. I could take…everything. All of it, as you say. I could hurt you. Scar you. Even kill you. Never play a game you can’t win, Elena. And there are damn few you will ever win if you play with me.”

His gaze dropped to the swell of her breasts, and Elena knew his interest centered on her puckered dark nipples. He stared at her for a few seconds longer, then he began to work the buttons back into the holes.

He was on the second button from the top when he let out a strangled groan—a sound of pure agony that stiffened his body like a knife had been driven into the middle of his back.

Elena watched as he wrenched hard to the right and rolled off her. A second later he was sprawled beside her on his back, his expression fighting an invisible pain.

Lucky recognized the rush of pain and knew what it meant. Flattened out on the bed, he gritted his teeth against the burning sensation racing the length of his spine, and the knowledge of what the outcome would be in a matter of seconds.

Not now, he thought, not the hell now. Not here and not in front of her.

He continued to lie there while the hot pain worked its way into his thighs, then began to melt away, taking with it the feeling in his limbs.

“What is it?”

Sweat beading his forehead, Lucky glanced at Elena. She was sitting up and staring down at him. He would have liked to have been sitting up, too. But without looking like a snake dragging a fifty-pound ball and chain, he wasn’t going to be able to haul his body up.

“What’s happening?” She slid off the bed. “It’s your back, isn’t it? Something happened to your back.”

“What do you know about my back?”

She stepped between his open legs where they hung limp off the bed. “I heard Joey talking to Frank about some kind of surgery you’re supposed to have.”

“You just happened to hear?”

“All right, I was eavesdropping. And why shouldn’t I? In a matter of weeks I learned that my father who isn’t really my father is living a double life. Has two grown sons. And that they all work for the mafia.”

“We don’t work for the mafia, Elena.”

“Sorry. You are the mafia.”

Not liking that definition any better, Lucky checked his watch. The paralysis he’d been experiencing for the past three weeks was erratic. He could be up and moving within ten minutes or down and out for an hour.

“I take it this has happened before. You don’t look too surprised.”

No, he wasn’t surprised. His doctor had warned him that the scar tissue from his old wound had begun to strangle his spinal cord. Internal adhesions—those were the words used—were constricting the blood flow. He’d had a few problems with the scar over the years. But it had gotten a helluva lot worse since Milo’s boys had worked him over a few months ago and he’d wound up in the hospital losing a kidney.