“I do.” I got off the bench. It was going to be a late night. Then again, most nights were.
“A quickie then.” Rom snapped at me with a towel. “Enjoy it while you can. Once Mrs. Ferraro moves in, I doubt she’ll be happy with Rosa coming around.”
I wrapped my palm around the door handle. “Good thing Mrs. Ferraro’s happiness is the least of my concerns.”
Rosa satin one of the two leather chairs across from my desk, her profile bathed in dim-yellow light from the corner lamp Irarely used. She didn’t look up as I came in, she was too busy typing something on her phone.
“You couldn’t wait?” I said as I walked past her. “I was with my brothers.”
“I’ve got a plane to catch in six hours,” she mumbled, still typing. “I’m checking in right now. Lucy and I are staying at the Ritz in Mykonos, and I’m not risking missing the flight because of you.”
I leaned over, swiped her phone out of her hand, and dropped it face down on the desk. “Cancel your trip. Fabiana just returned to New York, and I need you to start digging.”
“You want me to cancel my vacation,” she said in a flat tone. “Are you insane?”
“I need you here.” In my position, there were always problems to deal with, which meant until something was both urgent and important, it sat on the back burner. The engagement had always been an important problem to deal with, but it hadn’t been urgent until now. “You knew what you signed up for when you took the job. I never promised you work-life balance.”
Rosa pinched the bridge of her nose, doing a piss-poor job at hiding the fact that she wanted to strangle me. “Lucy will dump me on the spot. She’s already so very close to being over my shit.”
I waited for her to come to terms with it. We both knew she wasn’t going to refuse my order.
Rosa could be a pain in the ass, but she was useful and loyal to a fault. I’d met her at a poker game where a marked-deck con had gone catastrophically wrong. The Albanian drug trafficker she’dbeen fleecing finally caught on, and if I hadn’t shot him first, she would’ve ended the night with a bullet in her skull.
I saw potential in her. She was quick, fearless, and very good at making people underestimate her, so I gave her a choice—work for me, or wait for one of the Albanian's associates to come looking for revenge. She took the job.
At last, Rosa sighed. “What’s the plan?”
“I can’t back out of the arrangement. That means the only option I have is to convince her to back out.”
My father had made it clear he wanted the marriage to happen, but if it was Fabiana who pulled out? There’d be nothing my parents could do.
Unlike my parents, I suspected Rafe wouldn’t force his sister into a marriage she didn’t want.
The problem was that right now, she appeared to be committed to it. I needed her to uncommit.
“And how do you intend to do that?” Rosa asked.
“I need to know everything there is to know about her so I can figure out what levers I can pull. I want you to dig into her life in Geneva. Friends. Coworkers. Prior boyfriends. If she’s got any skeletons in her closet, I want to know about them.”
Rosa let out a humorless laugh. “Geneva? Cosimo, it’s one thing to play your fake girlfriend so I can waltz into the right rooms and eavesdrop on people who think I’m too pretty to be paying attention. But finding dirt on your fiancée who lived in another country most of her life, a country where I have no established contacts? I’m good, but I’m notthatgood. For all we know, there are no skeletons to dig up.”
“We won’t know until we try to find them.” Sure, it was possible Fabiana was completely clean, but I didn’t buy it. I knew my mother. She always liked to have something she could use if the situation demanded it.
“If the goal is to get her to call it off, why not just parade me in front of her?”
I shook my head. “Too obvious. It can’t look like I’m trying to sabotage the match on purpose. The situation is delicate.”
Rosa sighed and dug her car keys out of her purse. “I’m booking a five-star hotel in Geneva and ordering room service every night. Every last cent is going on your card.”
“Send me the receipts. And don’t test me by slipping in extras.”
She had the gall to look offended. “If we were really together, you’d be buying me a lot more than those tiny diamond earrings I had to buy myself.”
“You have a very inflated idea of my generosity.”
Rosa huffed. “That poor girl has no idea what she’s getting herself into. If I do find something and it convinces her to cancel the engagement, I’ll be doing her a favor.”
My gaze narrowed. “Careful.” We might have developed a certain rapport over the years, but we weren’t friends. I didn’t have friends. My brothers were family, and even they didn’t know about the arrangement between Rosa and me. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them. I just liked to keep my life compartmentalized. No one person was allowed the full picture.
