This Time I Choose Mr. Mafia novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Widow by Spring

Odessa exposes Rhett's affair with her stepsister on the front steps, sets her terms with Damiano and his sister over pastries in her father's study, and hears Danielle promise she'll be a widow by spring.

I didn't get to ask Damiano how he knew.

My father called my name from the stage in the voice he used on union bosses, and the party came apart around us.

Half the guests left within twenty minutes to be the first to tell it.

By the time I reached the front steps, a line of them stood under the awning waiting for their cars.

Rhett caught me on the second step.

His fingers closed around my wrist hard enough to grind the bones together.

"Smile," he said through his teeth. "People are watching."

In my first life, I would have smiled.

Damiano came down the steps behind me without hurrying.

He didn't say anything.

He took Rhett's hand by the wrist, lifted it off mine, and let it drop.

Rhett went pale under his tan.

"This is a family matter, Bastiani."

"Then you should go home to yours," Damiano said.

Rhett ignored him and leaned toward me.

"Whatever this is, I forgive you. Get in my car and we'll fix it tomorrow."

I looked at his open collar.

He had walked into my party wearing a tie.

Blue silk with a thin gold stripe, the one I'd given him at Christmas.

In my first life I'd found that tie three years later, in a drawer at Danielle's apartment, and she'd told me I was imagining things.

Danielle stood at the top of the steps with her mother's arm around her and a little beaded clutch held tight to her chest.

The clutch didn't quite close.

"Mrs. Ambler," I said.

Rhett's mother turned from the curb in her gray chiffon.

"Rhett came tonight in a blue tie," I said, clearly, to the whole line of guests. "Danielle, would you open your bag?"

Danielle's eyes went wide.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Then it won't take long."

She didn't move.

That was all anyone needed.

But her mother, trying to shield her, reached for the clutch, and it tipped open in her hands.

A tail of blue silk with a gold stripe slid out and hung there under the porch light.

Nobody on those steps said a word.

Mrs. Ambler looked at her son's bare collar, then at the tie, then got into her car without him.

Rhett's eyes on me were flat and furious.

"You'll be sorry you did that."

"I'm sorry about a lot of things," I said. "Not this one."

Damiano opened the door of a black car at the curb and held it for me.

I didn't get in.

"I'm sleeping in my own bed tonight," I said. "Come in the morning, Mr. Bastiani. Bring your terms."

One corner of his mouth moved.

"Nine o'clock," he said, and shut the empty car door.

My father didn't speak to me that night.

At nine the next morning he was in his study, still in yesterday's shirt, and he'd found his voice.

"You humiliated this family in front of everyone who matters in Chicago."

"Rhett did that," I said. "I only opened the bag."

"You chose a gangster, Odessa."

"I chose sixty million dollars with no Ambler strings on it."

My stepmother sat on the leather sofa in her silk robe, stirring her coffee.

"She did it for attention, Clifton. She always has."

"I'm standing right here," I said.

"I know, dear. That's the problem."

The doorbell rang at nine exactly.

Damiano came in with a woman about my age, dark curls piled up in a clip, glasses pushed on her head.

She carried a white bakery box tied with string.

"Bruna Bastiani," she said, shaking my father's hand. "His sister and his lawyer, which is worse for him than it sounds."

"These are sfogliatelle. Nobody negotiates hungry."

She set the box on my father's desk, on top of his creditors' letters.

My stepmother looked at it like it might bite her.

Damiano took an envelope from his jacket and laid it beside the box.

My father opened it and went still.

A cashier's check, made out to Kinnear Shipping, for sixty million dollars.

"No loan," Damiano said. "No interest. No seat on your board."

"And in exchange?" my father said hoarsely.

"Your daughter marries me Monday."

"She keeps her name," I said.

Damiano nodded.

"I keep my own room."

"For as long as you want it."

Bruna was writing on a legal pad and eating a pastry at the same time.

"Anything else?" she asked me. "He's in a giving mood. It won't last."

I looked at Damiano across my father's desk.

He was watching me.

I had chosen him for a reason I would never say out loud.

Now he stood in my father's study with powdered sugar on his cuff, and that reason turned my stomach.

Men like him didn't vanish by accident.

Somebody was going to make him vanish, and I had just tied my name to his.

"One more term," I said. "Stay alive."

Bruna stopped chewing.

Damiano laughed, low and surprised, and it changed his whole face.

"That's the one thing nobody's ever asked me for," he said. "Done."

My father signed with a hand that shook.

On my way upstairs to pack, Danielle was waiting on the landing in her robe, her makeup still smudged from last night.

She leaned close and spoke softly, the sweet voice she saved for when no one else could hear.

"Rhett says you'll be a widow by spring."

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