Sandra Marton - Nicolo - The Powerful Sicilian

“Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

His tone was obnoxious, as if this were her fault. It wasn’t. He’d been parked in a no-parking zone. Yes, so had she, but what had that to do with anything?

“First you try to walk through me. Now you try to drive through me!” His mouth thinned. “Did you ever hear of paying attention to what you’re doing?”

So much for easing the tension. Alessia drew herself up. “I don’t like your attitude.”

“ You don’t like my attitude?”

He laughed. The laugh was ugly. Insulting. Alessia narrowed her eyes.

“There is no point to this conversation,” she said coldly. “I suggest we exchange insurance information. There has been no injury to either of us and only the slightest one to your vulgar automobile. I will, therefore, forgive your insulting attitude.”

“My car is vulgar? My attitude is insulting, but you will forgive it?” The man glared at her. “What the hell is with this country, anyway? No direct flights from New York. A layover in Rome that’s supposed to take forty minutes and ends up taking three hours, three endless hours because some idiot mechanic dropped a screwdriver, and when I made a perfectly reasonable attempt to charter a private plane instead of standing around, killing time…”

He was still talking but she couldn’t hear him. Her thoughts were spinning. He had come from New York? A layover in Rome? A longer layover than planned?

“Do you speak Italian?” she blurted.

Stopped in midsentence, he glared at her as if she were crazy. “What?”

“I said, do you—”

“No. I do not. A few words, that’s all, and what are you, an adjunct to passport control?”

“Say something. In Italian.”

He shot her another look. Then he shrugged as if to say, Hey, why not accommodate the inmate? And said something in Italian.

Alessia gasped.

Not at what he’d said—it was impolite and it had to do with her mental state but who cared about that? She gasped because what he’d spoken was not really Italian, it was Sicilian. Sicilian, spoken in a deep, husky voice…

“Your name,” she whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“Your name! What is it?”

Nick slapped his hands on his hips. Okay. Maybe he’d stepped into an alternate universe.

Or maybe this was the old-country version of Marco Polo. Kids played it back home, a dumb game where they bobbed around in a swimming pool, one yelling “Marco,” another answering “Polo.” It made about as much sense as this, an aggressive, mean-tempered babe—if you could call her a babe and, really, you couldn’t—who had first tried to walk through him, then tried to run him down.…

“Answer the question! Who are you? Are you Cesare Orsini?”

“No,” Nick said truthfully.

“Are you sure?”

He laughed. That made her face turn pink.

“I think you are he. And if I am right, you’ve cost me an entire day.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I have been here for hours and hours, waiting for your arrival.”

Nick’s smile faded. “If you tell me you’re Vittorio Antoninni, I won’t believe you.”

“I am his daughter. Alessia Antoninni.” Her chin jutted forward. “And, obviously, you are who you say you are not!”

“You asked if I was Cesare Orsini. I’m not. I’m Nicolo Orsini. Cesare is my father.”

“Your father? Impossible! I know nothing of a change in plans.”

“In that case,” Nick said coldly, “we’re even, because I sure as hell don’t know about a change in plans, either. Your father was supposed to meet me. If I’d let him meet me, that is, which I had no intention of doing.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That makes things even. I don’t understand anything you’re babbling about, lady, and—”

“Where have you been all these hours?”

“Excuse me?”

“It is a simple question, signore. Where were you while I paced the floor here?”

“Where was I?” Nick’s jaw shot forward. “In the first-class Alitalia lounge in Rome,” he said sharply. “And trust me, princess, it loses its charm after a while.”

“The title is no longer accurate.”

Nick looked Alessia Antoninni over, from her falling-apart chignon to her wrinkled Armani suit to the shoes she seemed to be trying to ease off her feet.

“Yes,” he said, “I can see that.”

She flushed. “I was expecting—”

“My father. Yeah. I get that part. What I don’t get is what you’re doing here. Where are your old man and his driver?”

“So. You admit you knew that someone would be waiting for you. And yet, you left no word of your arrival time, of the airline you would be flying. You did not spend so much as a second looking for my father or his chauffeur inside the terminal, and you did not trouble yourself to telephone the villa when you did not see them. If you had, someone would have called me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry this didn’t go according to royal protocol, princess, but life doesn’t always do what you want.”

“I repeat, I am not a princess. And this has nothing to do with protocol. If you had left your arrival information as part of that useless voice-mail message—”

“If I had, your father would have met me. Or, as it turns out, you’d have met me. And I’m not interested in being taken by the hand and shuttled to your villa while somebody tells me how lucky I am to be given the chance to invest in what’s probably a disaster of a vineyard.”

“I thought it was your gangster father who would be investing. And to so much as suggest the vineyard is a disaster—”

Alessia caught her breath as Nicolo Orsini stepped closer. With him this near, she had to tilt her head back to see his face. Even in these shoes of medieval torture, he towered over her.

“I’m here as my father’s emissary,” he said in a cold, dangerous voice. “And I’d advise you to watch what you say, princess. Insult one Orsini, you insult us all.”

Nick frowned even as he said it. Where had that come from? Insult his brothers or, even worse, his mother or his sisters, and, of course, you insulted them all. But the old man? The don, who was part of something ancient and ugly and immoral? Was an insult to him an offense to all the Orsinis?

“Your father is what he is,” Alessia Antoninni said with dogged determination. “If you expect me to pretend otherwise, you are wrong.”

He looked down into her face. Her hair was an unruly mass of streaked gold, long tendrils dangling free of what had once been some kind of ladylike knot. Her eyes flashed defiance. There was a streak of soot on a cheekbone high enough to entice a man to trace his finger across its angled length.

The rest of her was a mess.

Still, she was stunning. He could see that now. Stunning. And arrogant. And she was looking at him as if he were beneath contempt.

His jaw tightened.

She had pegged him for the same kind of man as his father. He wasn’t—but something in him rebelled at denying it. She was an aristocrat; his father was a peasant. Nick had once delved into the origins of la famiglia, enough to know that though some scholars traced the organization solely to banditry, others traced it to the rebellion of those trapped in poverty by rich, cruel landowners.

It didn’t matter. Whatever the origins of his father’s way of life, Nick despised it.

Still, there was a subtle difference between viewing that way of life from the comfort of America and viewing it here, on such ancient soil. It brought out a feeling new to him.

“Your father is also what he is,” he said, his voice rough. “Or do you choose to forget that your vineyard was created by the sweat of others?”