For a short time, she’d had the real thing. Sir Hissalot. She hadn’t even said goodbye. Just left a note warning Marcus she’d take out more swinger ads in every senior magazine on the racks if he so much as thought about regifting the one-eyed menace. Her condo didn’t allow pets, but that didn’t stop guilt from sinking its claws in.
She sank into her chair and reached in again. This time she pulled out her wallet. The same one Marcus had forced her to use the night he’d made her buy her own popcorn. Back then, it had seemed odd. A grown man without a wallet. Now she understood it had been punishment for her supposed sins toward Lola. “Damn asshole still owes me popcorn money.I should send him a bill.”
Something crinkled at the bottom of the bag. She drew it out carefully. A folded newspaper clipping.
Curiosity flared, hot and sharp as she slowly unfolded it. Headlines didn’t usually scare her, but this one shouted back at her: MOB BOSS ARRESTED IN VILLA FIRE THAT KILLED AMERICAN-BORN WOMAN
Frankie’s breath hitched. Had Marcus slipped this into her purse? If so, why? Who was this mob-connected family to him?
She began to read out loud.
“‘In a dramatic turn in one of Sicily’s most notorious mafia cases, prosecutors charged Salvatore Romano, reputed head of the Romano crime family, with ordering the villa fire that killed American-born ElizabethDeLuca and left her husband, Massimo, and their five sons missing. Investigators believe the family was kidnapped and executed, their bodies never found.
“‘Prosecutors allege the blaze was retaliation for the murder of Romano’s only son, Salvatore Jr., gunned down three years earlier in a hit widely attributed to the DeLuca syndicate.
“‘During arraignment proceedings, Romano sneered at prosecutors and delivered a chilling remark: ‘If I have no heirs, why should he? No DeLuca son will grow to be a man.’ Whether confession or threat remained unclear, but prosecutors argue it proves the fire was not an accident. It was a vendetta meant to erase an entire bloodline.’”
Frankie lowered the clipping, her head spinning. Mafia wars. Children missing and assumed dead. Bloodlines erased. Why the hell would Marcus want her to see this?
She shoved her hand back into the Birkin, searching for anything—context, explanation, sanity. Her fingers brushed something small, wedged into the zipper compartment. A scrap of paper with a single pencil-scrawled sentence.
I’m just a boy offering the woman who stole my heart a grand gesture. ~M
Frankie’s throat closed. Mr. Uptight had remembered her confession about wanting a grand gesture and had given her one. Granted, she didn’t understand what made it grand. If it was the content of the article,well…there was nothing grand about that. At best it was a Grim Gesture.
“A for effort. F for execution,” she said, ignoring the butterflies in her stomach at the thought of the asshole giving her a grand gesture.
She glanced again at the love note. Could it be that this was the part he considered grand? If so, he clearly did not understand the assignment. AnI love youdeclaration was not original material.
She scratched her forehead, trying to make sense of it.
Marcus must have placed the article and the note in her purse the night he had dropped it on her front porch. The night he’d abandoned her at the festival and then later revealed himself as Mr. Uptight.
What she had viewed as his cold proclamation that he was cutting her loose, he had apparently seen differently.
It hadn’t been rejection. It had been his attempt at a grand gesture. Complete with a love note.
He’d dropped it off, and then he’d gone back to the manor and waited for her to come to acknowledge his effort.
And she’d been a no-show, which he would have interpreted as a fuck you.
And yet, he’d followed her to the town square the next day, where he’d proceeded to declare his love publicly. This, even though he’d no doubt presumed she had found the article, read every word, and decided hiseffort was not only laughable but so puny that it hadn’t warranted her dropping her revenge plans.
What was she missing? Unless… Goosebumps formed on her arms.
Was it possible he and his brothers were the missing children? That they’d somehow survived and ended up in America?
Was that what he’d meant when he’d said, right before he’d walked back to the damn golf cart and driven away, “Thanks for not telling my secret?”
She’d assumed he’d meant thanks for not telling everyone about his connection to Gi Gi.
If the article was about his family, then his choosing to ghost her during the ambush interview hadn’t been about him prioritizing his ego-fueled preference for privacy above her needs.
It had been about survival. He and his brothers’.
She recalled that on the first day they’d met, he had told her his middle initial stood for Dick. Was it really for DeLuca?
“Am I reaching?” she asked the Birkin. “Am I trying to turn a sales rack asshole into a couture hero?”
