The three of us looked at each other and grinned.
“Granny Hot Legs here!” Georgia laughed.
Georgia had started calling Kitty “Granny Hot Legs” after she found out who she was. Kitty ate it up. After I brought her to Dynamic to meet all the girls, she seemed to adopt them, and they adopted her. She was known as everyone’s Granny, even though it seemed like everyone had a special name for her. She irritated Vinny to no end, but we all knew he secretly loved it. Deep down, we all expected Vinny was a masochist, and Kitty had proved it.
Rocky whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “I’d love to knowherstory!”
“Oooh,” Georgia sounded just as conspiratorial. “The story of how Diamond Legs seemed to have a torrid past—with two of the biggest gangsters in Vegas.”
That did seem like a juicy story, but a story people only speculated about. Even Big and Gio didn’t seem to know what had truly happened between the three of them. Only Kitty and Gio’s grandfather were left, and I wasn’t sure if either of them would ever come clean. Whenever I hinted to Kitty about it, she’d say,that’s a story for another day. Big said she’d been saying that for as long as he could remember. He didn’t even want to know what had happened between the three of them.
Ameep meepechoed through the air as Kitty cut the corner in her bejeweled motorized scooter and came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the three of us. She flung herGolden Girlstyle eyeglasses from her face and grinned at us.
“Now that the main attraction has arrived—me—let’s get this story started!”
Here we go…
CHAPTER17
Mrs. Big
The plane rideto Italy was my first, and besides all the things that could go wrong with the aircraft itself—a bird getting wedged in the motor, a wing catching fire, both pilots going out at once—I breathed easier than I had in months while high up in the sky, sailing over thousands of miles of water below.
Unless Big’s enemies had sabotaged the plane, which apparently they hadn’t, no one could try to kill him. I almost wished we could stay airborne for the rest of our lives. Being in the air felt safe to me. Safer than I’d felt in months. Since we took a night flight out, and I couldn’t really see anything anyway, I’d slept—or gotten broken sleep. It didn’t really help the dark circles underneath my eyes, but I looked less sleep-deprived than I did before, at least.
I took a heavy breath when my foot touched the ground for the first time in hours. My chest suddenly felt tight, and my heart raced inside of it. Being back on the ground reminded me of the anxiety I’d promised Georgia I’d leave in Vegas.
My eyes focused on Big as he spoke to a man who had met us at the private airport. I clutched my over-sized wicker purse in my hands, trying to get rid of some of the panic in my chest.
The new man was from the hotel Big and Gio owned. Big told me it belonged to Kitty, but since she didn’t want anything to do with the business part of it, she relied on her grandsons to manage it. A car came flying onto the tarmac. It was red and vintage—that much I could tell—and the top was down. Big and the man he was talking to didn’t pay the new arrival any attention—they were expecting the the car. The driver put the car in park and stepped out, waiting by the driver’s door. Like Big, and like the man talking to Big, the driver seemed to have stepped out of a fashion magazine.
Instead of hyper-focusing on my husband, I looked down and breathed a sigh of relief at the way the thin white material of the summer dress I wore allowed my skin to breathe in the muggy weather. But the heat in Portofino felt different from Vegas. Not less or more, just…different. Like my skin recognized I was somewhere I’d never been before. I just hoped the message made it to my brain, and it would bring me back to a normal state of mind. Or an elevated one. I’d never dreamt that when I finally made it to Italy, the fear that was planted inside of me back in Nevada would be sprouting a dark tree in a place that was so bright.
Big finished his conversation and looked up, a grin coming to his face. Despite how I was feeling, I grinned back. He’d left me at the top of the steps, and in a few of them, he met me. He took my hand, then my purse, and led me to the waiting vintage car. The driver greeted him in Italian, then left us to meet the man Big had been talking to. Big dug through my purse, pulled out a silk scarf, and showed me how to tie it around my head. He leaned in and kissed me, and it took me a second to open my eyes once he was done.
Like the heat, Big seemed different here too. I didn’t know—exactly—how yet, but I could feel an energy running through him, an energy I’d never felt before. Maybe it was complete freedom? He was away from Vegas and the hold it had on him. I could almost feel his bones sigh and his entire body relax. As if this washisplace. The ground where he was free to race without rules or boundaries. No one to tell him to stop or slow down.
He’d taken off for Italy when he’d turned eighteen, at the time not planning on running the family business, instead saying yes to an offer from the Fausti family to become a racer for their F1 team. He’d become one of the team’s best racers. I could almost feel the same freedom that had urged him to do it coming off him like a manly, musky cologne.
Big lifted my hand, placed a warm kiss on it, then opened the door for me. He gestured as if the fast car was my waiting chariot. I laughed a little and took my seat. Big’s infectious energy was starting to knock on my bones.
As we flew through the streets, my eyes could barely keep up with all the beauty. The bright pastel colors of the villas. The unbelievable blue of the Ligurian Sea. I’d heard Italy was stunning and had seen pictures, but being there in the flesh, feeling the hot sun on my face and the tepid wind whip against my skin—trying to place all the smells, free to reach out and touch the actual land and my husband, the person who I’d want to experience this with the most…it left me breathless.
So did his driving.
He was racing to get to the resort he and Gio shared, but instead of feeling rushed, the way he took every turn and controlled every dip and rise felt as natural as the rocking of the sea. I wasn’t paying attention to the time, so before I knew it, we were turning down a road lined with thick foliage to the hotel.
Hotel Tre was built sometime in the late 1800s, I remembered Kitty telling me, and was the color of a sun-touched apricot with black iron details. It seemed like a jewel planted in the middle of a wild jungle, except for the front, which was manicured and welcomed guests under the shading of waving palm trees. Behind the hotel, I could see sparkles off the sea, which stretched out for miles. The hotel looked out over a steep hill, and way down below, boats rocked against the shore—another arrival and departure point.
The place reminded me of Kitty—a 1920s-era jewel that was guarded but had lived a glamorous life. Big had told me the hotel had seen dignitaries from way back to its beginning, even though Kitty had told me the hotel had hit its prime in the 1920s. I could almost feel that about it. Like the place had fallen in love with that era and refused to budge, even if the world around it did.
It felt almost…magical.
I smiled at the music playing. Cocki Mazzetti’s, “Tango Italiano.”
Big’s voice broke through the spell as he talked to a man in Italian, and they shook hands. The man seemed to be an employee of the hotel. He wore a uniform and a name tag. After he darted back inside, Big circled the car and opened my door, lending me a hand as I stepped out.
He twirled me around, then started moving in perfect rhythm to the beat of the song. My sudden lack of breath wasn’t from the unexpected action. It was because whenever he looked at me—like he might just go crazy if he didn’t touch me—it did insane things to my heart and body.
