Arcadia Burns

BLOOD RELATIONS


“LILIA,” SAID ROSA, LOUD enough to be heard above the music. “Lilia Carnevare.”

The club owner leaned forward as if to smell her breath. She felt beads of perspiration break out on her forehead, but down here in the club everyone was sweating.

“Lilia,” he repeated. “Forgive me, but have we met before?”

She tried a random shot, knowing how horribly wide of the target it might go. “At a birthday party for the baron…Uncle Massimo. I was very young then. Seven or eight.”

“Then you must forgive me for failing to remember you.” He even succeeded in sounding like a gentleman as he said that.

“I wasn’t very…well developed at the time.” That got a smile out of the doorman but left his boss cold. She had to pull herself together. Under no circumstances should she underestimate this man.

He was taller than Alessandro and looked equally athletic, but he was attractive more in the way she remembered of Tano and Cesare. His shirtsleeves were pushed to his elbows, not rolled up, and his muscular forearms were hairy. He seemed used to having his orders followed. When he smiled, his lips revealed two perfect rows of snow-white teeth. His sparkling brown eyes unsettled her. She could imagine how many women must have fallen for the promise in his gaze, but she had no doubt that the passion in it was mainly for his own well-being. All the same, she had to admit that she liked his voice.

She could have left and called Alessandro, asked him to have a word with his relative for her. But that was exactly what she didn’t want to do. She’d had to cope with her problems on her own for years. Alessandro would certainly have backed her up in this case, but she didn’t want to rely on him too much or have him try to stop her.

“Sorry to turn up like this. I’m au pairing in Millbrook. They gave me three days off, and I thought I’d—”

“Visit your family in this city.”

She smiled. “I really wanted to buy some shoes.”

He looked down at her steel-toed boots.

“Oh, not these!” she added in pretended indignation. “My new ones are at my hotel.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Parker Meridien.” She knew the place because the best burgers in town were sold in the restaurant in the lobby.

“Good address. Not cheap.”

“The family’s paying for everything.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Corrado Carnevare.” A name that Alessandro had once mentioned.

“Never met him.”

“Cesare’s cousin.” She batted her eyelashes in the direction of the doorman. “I thought we were a little more closely related than it seems we are. Sorry about that.”

He was still inspecting her, but she had an uncomfortable feeling that he trusted his instinct more than what he saw before him: a pale girl with glacier-blue eyes, a mane of blond hair, and the gleam of nervous sweat on her forehead.

“So how can I help you?” he inquired. Help her. If that was his idea of her, okay. “You didn’t come here just to say hello.”

She looked around as if to locate the source of the noise in the club. “It’s so loud in here,” she shouted against the beat.

“Michele,” said the bouncer, turning the microphone of his headset aside to speak to his boss, “we’ll have to leave in half an hour. The others are there. Everything’s almost ready.” He listened to a voice in his earphone again, then whispered something to Michele. Michele’s expression didn’t change; he simply nodded.

Rosa waited until he turned to her again and then said, “Can you give me five minutes?”

Michele Carnevare smiled. “Come with me.”

She followed him behind the bar and down a narrow staff corridor. At the end of it, a flight of steps led up to a gallery of wrought-iron latticework just under the layer of mist. It was closed to the public. Apart from the two of them, there were only a few security guards up here, black-clad and also wearing headsets. They were watching what went on down below.

Rosa’s glance fell on Danai Thanassis moving toward the exit on the other side of the hall under the protection of her bodyguard. “She’s beautiful,” she said, impressed.

“So everyone here thinks.” He didn’t say whether that included him. “She lives on a cruise ship belonging to her father. Whenever the Stabat Mater docks in New York, she comes here. Every evening for a week or so, then she’s gone again for a few months.”

“The Stabat Mater?”

He shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject. “Well then, Lilia Carnevare. What exactly can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a girlfriend,” she said. “More of an online friendship, really. She told me to visit when I was in Manhattan, said that we’d, well, go out together.”

He nodded as gravely as if she had just been explaining his taxes to him.

“And now she doesn’t answer when I call her.” Rosa hoped she wasn’t laying the naiveté on too thick.

“So?”

“I think it’s mean of her.”

“And what’s that to do with me?” His tone of voice was still calm.

“She and I are friends. Or I thought so, anyway. And now she’s just disappeared on me. There I am in my stupid expensive hotel, going on tours around the city instead of hanging out with her.”

He sighed quietly. “Look, you’re cute and all that, but I’m in a hurry. A club like this doesn’t run itself. If I can help you, then—”

“She works here, she said. But that was quite a while ago.”

“If she works here, then she has her hands full right now.”

“I just want a quick word with her. I won’t take her away from her job.”

He was still looking at her intently, not offensively, as she had half expected, but with curiosity. As if the way she was taking up his time with trivialities intrigued him.

“What’s her name?”

“Valerie.”

“And what else?”

“Valerie Paige.”

If this was a name that he linked with anything more than a paycheck, he didn’t show it. “Yes, she worked here two or three years ago. Not since then.”

“F*ck.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you any further.”

She looked at her shoes. “Sorry. You’re in a hurry, and I’ve been wasting your time with this garbage.”

He touched the tip of her nose with his finger and smiled. He was alarmingly attractive, and for the first time she really did see a resemblance to Alessandro. “But after all, we’re blood relations, right?”

She cleared her throat and tore her eyes away from his face. The layer of mist hovered just above their heads. Here and there dream catchers hung down through the swathes of vapor.

“What do those do?” she asked.

“They catch the dreams of everyone dancing down there and then throw them back down, arranged and sorted. Better than any drug.”

Now she did turn back to him, to see whether he was making fun of her. But his smile and his nut-brown eyes still seemed perfectly honest.

Naively she asked, “What, right now?”

Michele leaned on the balustrade of the gallery. Even his damn hands looked good. “Anyone who comes to the Dream Room sees things you don’t see anywhere else. Or that are invisible anywhere else.”

“You should put that in your ads.”

“We do.”

“Oops.” She smiled. “Looks like you know how to run your business.”

It was the dimples. They were just like Alessandro’s. They were there even when he wasn’t smiling. Blood relations, yes—only the relationship wasn’t with her.

She leaned over and dropped a light kiss on his cheek. “Thanks,” she said. “And again, I’m sorry to have been a nuisance.” He smelled of aftershave.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Eighteen.”

“You look younger.”

“A lot of people say that.”

“I’m sure those guys at the entrance asked to see your ID.” Now he sounded almost sorry about something. But the dimples were still there. “If not, I’ll have to fire them.”

She was boiling hot all of a sudden. “Oh,” she said quietly.

“Don’t let it bother you. You couldn’t have known who owned this place.”

“They saw my name.”

“They recognized it. And they have their instructions. Some names mean trouble for us here. Obama. Bin Laden.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Alcantara.”

She didn’t have to look around to know that she wasn’t going to get back down from this gallery. He was standing in her way, and here came his security men. She heard footsteps on the iron latticework. Very close.

“That was a lie,” she whispered. “You’re not in any hurry.”

“Oh, but I am.”

“Then why didn’t you say right away that—”

“I wanted to find out what it is that Alessandro likes about you.” That charming smile again. “Apart from the obvious.”

She tried to spin around, but a powerful arm grabbed her from behind and held her. She heard distorted voices from a headset very close to her ear.

The worst of it was that she couldn’t avoid his eyes anymore.

“Shit,” she murmured.

With his fingertip, he touched his cheek where her lips had touched it. “I know what you did.”