ONE
It began like every other day in Vegas.
Luca Rizzoli had rolled out of bed just before noon, showered, shaved and groomed. There was nothing more important for a Mafia capo than la bella figura—looking good in the eyes of society. Once his knives were strapped to his body, he dressed in a new Italian wool suit, crisp white shirt, and red silk tie. He holstered two Glocks across his chest, an S&W500 and a Ruger GP100 around his waist, and a Walther P22 beside the knife on his ankle, just above his Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. After meticulously checking his appearance, he walked back into the bedroom, ready to start his day.
That’s when things had started to go wrong.
First, the woman in his bed didn’t want to leave. When his usual charm and soft smiles failed to encourage her departure, he had to yank the covers off the bed and toss her money on the dresser, shattering the illusion that she was anything other than the high-class escort she pretended not to be. Luca always tipped well so her feigned indignation lasted only as long as it took her to count the cash and wobble her way out of his penthouse suite on her four-inch stilettos.
After that, it had been one broken leg after another as he called in a few business loans from scumbags who didn’t want to pay up. As a senior caporegime in the Toscani crime family, he could have delegated the job to his crew of soldiers, but he had welcomed the opportunity for a little stress release.
Unfortunately, his day had continued its downward slide when he visited a new convenience store down the street to offer them his “protection”, only to discover that the Albanians had muscled in on his territory.
Whacking Albanians was never a good way to break in a new suit, but the Toscani crime family didn’t waste time when there were lessons to be learned.
Luca had called up Frankie De Lucchi, a top-level enforcer. Together, they sent the Albanians back to their home country via the fiery pit of Hell.
And wearing cement shoes.
Shoes were Frankie’s specialty. He was a mean SOB who had once dabbled in the concrete-pouring business. He never gave up the opportunity to practice his trade, and the depths of Lake Mead boasted many examples of his handiwork.
After Luca had changed his clothes, washed off the blood, and dropped off his suit at the dry cleaners, his day had gone from bad to worse.
He got cocky.
And cocky had led him here. To this hospital bed. With a bullet in his chest.
It was his own damn fault. Luca knew better. He had let overconfidence blind him once before, and it had almost destroyed his life. His hand clenched on the bed rail as memories flooded through him, adding an emotional bite to his physical pain.
When Gina got pregnant after their one-night stand, he hadn’t hesitated to do the right thing. After all, Gina ticked all the boxes for a desirable Mafia wife. She was pure Italian, well versed in the culture, easy on the eye, and a good cook. Love wasn’t part of the Mafia marriage equation, so he had felt no guilt about spending Friday nights between the sheets with his sexy goomah, Marta, engaged in the extra-curricular activities expected of a senior Mafia capo. A wife was a symbol of status. A mistress was a symbol of power. Gina understood how things worked and as long as the money rolled in, she had no complaints. Life was good.
And then one afternoon he came home too early.
Too early for Gina’s lover to escape.
Too early for Gina to hide the needles and packages of white powder her lover brought her every week.
Too early to clean up their son, Matteo, so Luca didn’t find him crying and hungry in a shit-covered crib.
Too early to avoid having his heart ripped out of his chest by the devastating revelation Gina made before he kicked her out of the house, and her death by overdose late that night in a bathtub in the Golden Dreams Hotel.
Luca had been totally unprepared for the emotional trauma of Gina’s death. Sure he cared for her, enjoyed spending some time with her, and they had a two-year-old son together. But he hadn’t loved her—had never pretended to love her—and her accusations that their empty marriage had turned her to drugs and other men had almost destroyed him.
Almost.
It was her parting shot that had done the real damage. His cocky overconfidence had blinded him to what was going on right under his nose.
Reeling from shock, and unable to share the depths of Gina’s betrayal with even his closest friend, Nico Toscani, now self-appointed boss of the Toscani crime family, he’d gone off the rails. He sent Matteo to live with his mother, and dedicated himself to numbing the pain. He lived fierce. He lived large. He lived for the moment. Women. Fights. Booze. Craps. He took on the most dangerous jobs, and set up the most daring rackets. His attitude to risk became almost cavalier as he dedicated himself to his lifelong quest of restoring the family honor—destroyed by his father many years ago—by proving himself the most loyal of Nico’s caporegimes.
Hence the mistake, which had led him to his current confinement.
Gritting his teeth, he shifted in the uncomfortable hospital bed. Pain sliced through his chest, and he bit back a groan. When he’d thrown himself in front of the bullet meant for Nico’s heart, Luca could have saved himself a whole lot of pain if he’d worn a bulletproof vest. But sometimes, in the pit of despair, down was a hell of a lot more attractive than up.
A pale-yellow glow flickered in the doorway, and his pulse kicked up a notch, pulling him out of the sea of regret.
Nurse Rachel visited him every night to give him pain relief of another kind. Even bruised and broken, his dignity ruffled by the continual poking and prodding of his person, his life at rock bottom, he hadn’t had to put much effort into convincing the young nurse to get down on her knees and wrap her plump lips around the only part of his body that didn’t ache.
Luca had a gift for seducing women. Sweet words flowed easily off his tongue. His smile could sink one thousand ships. He was a lean, mean, fighting machine, but it was his dick that always brought them back for more.
When the door opened, he smoothed down his blue shirt and adjusted his belt. With a constant stream of family and crew coming to his room, he had made it clear to the medical staff that he would not suffer the indignity of a hospital gown. Every morning, he washed, shaved and dressed with the assistance of his sister, Angela, before greeting visitors from his hospital bed. His mother brought food every day to ensure he didn’t “succumb to starvation”. As with most Italian mothers he knew, there was her food or there was no food. That was her way.
“Rachel, sweetheart.” His smile faded when an orderly followed Rachel into the room pushing a hospital gurney in front of him. Luca’s gaze narrowed on the sleeping woman in the bed. Her long, blonde hair tumbled over the pillow, gleaming reddish-gold like the first autumn leaves. Her skin was pale in the harsh light, and her hospital gown gaped open at the collar, revealing the beautiful curve of her neck and the gentle slope of her shoulder.
Rachel gave him an apologetic smile, and he watched as they settled the woman in the cubicle near the window, wondering what the hell had happened to the wad of cash he had slipped the head nurse to ensure he had a private room.
After the orderly left, Rachel leaned down and brushed a soft kiss over Luca’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rizzoli. I know you like your privacy, but there was a big shootout in the Naked City, and the ER is swamped. We don’t have enough staff or rooms to accommodate everyone, so the head nurse ordered us to ensure these double rooms were filled. She put you two together because you’ve got the same kind of injury.”
Despite his irritation at losing his privacy, he graced her with a smile. He liked Rachel. She was a sweet girl, willing and compliant, and very skilled with her mouth. There was no point taking out his frustration on her. The Toscani crime family had friends everywhere. No doubt a few more bills and a word in the right ear in the morning would restore the status quo with a minimum of fuss. In the meantime, he’d have the company of a beautiful woman who had, apparently, like him, been shot in the chest.
After Rachel left, Luca’s gaze drifted over his new companion. She had turned to face him in her sleep and the thin blanket dipped into her narrow waist and up over the curve of her hip. Her features were delicate, her cheekbones high, and her nose slightly turned-up at the tip. She was the opposite of everything that attracted him to a woman: blonde instead of brunette, curvy instead of slim, soft instead of hardened by the years of rough living that made it easy for him to limit his encounters with his escort companions to just one night.
Angelo. For the last four years, he had been lost. Now, he was found.
“You’re staring.”
Her warm, rich voice slid through him like a smooth Canadian whiskey that finished the palate with a whisper of heat.
“I was just wondering, bella.” He lifted his gaze to soft blue eyes framed in thick golden lashes. “Who would shoot an angel?”
* * *
Gabrielle couldn’t remember the last time a man had looked at her with such open admiration.
Well, except for David. But David was gone.
Her hand drifted to her neck where she usually wore a locket containing the last picture of her and David together. But the nurse had removed it when she went into surgery, and now it was buried somewhere in the plastic bag that held all her clothes.
Miss you.
Her heart squeezed in her chest, and she focused her gaze on the smartly-dressed man who sat on a hospital bed across the room. His eyes were the color of sunlight streaming through the pond behind her childhood home in Colorado. He had thick, blond hair, neatly cut, and rugged features that suggested Nordic descent.
But bella was an Italian word.
He’d called her an angel.
It was the kind of line she heard in the bars her bestie and roommate, Nicole, dragged her to on the weekends, hoping to pull her back into the world of dating so she could find another “happily ever after.” But coming home at the end of her patrol one night to find her husband of only one year brutally murdered in their new home had ended Gabrielle’s belief in fairy tales. And since they were definitely not in a bar or anywhere that remotely resembled a place where two people might hook up, the man across the room couldn’t possibly be trying to seduce her. Although he was wearing street clothes, he was hooked up to the monitors just like her, and his bedside table held the kind of personal items one expected to see in a hospital room—shaving bag, magazines, flowers, and, disconcertingly, a holster.
“I’ve made you uncomfortable.” His warm, sensual voice wrapped around her like a thick velvet blanket and she felt a flicker of awareness deep in her chest.
“I’m no angel.” Her male colleagues in the Las Vegas Police Department (LVPD) Narcotics Bureau had other names for the most junior and only female detective in their squad, none of them flattering. She was a poor replacement for David, who had worked his way through the bureau from officer to detective, and from sergeant to lieutenant. Even after two years proving herself in an investigation into the rise of the Fuentes drug cartel in the city, she received little respect.
Not that she cared. She had pulled every string she could to get into the bureau and assigned to the Fuentes case with the sole goal of avenging David and bringing his killer to justice.
The Mexican-based Fuentes cartel had been traced to the supply of heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine that came through Death Valley from Arizona and California. The drugs were stored and used in Las Vegas, and transitioned to other cities across the country by a vast network of smugglers extending from Canada to Mexico. Gabrielle’s squad had been tasked with dismantling the Las Vegas cell of the cartel and capturing the man in charge, José Gomez Garcia, one of the biggest drug lords on the West Coast. And the man who had killed David.
“You look very angelic to me.” His eyes dropped, slid slowly from her face to the embarrassing white-and-blue hospital gown with its gender-neutral graphic pattern. With the gaping neckline, and her semi-reclined position, it exposed just enough to make her flush as he perused her body. She tugged on the gown, but the instant his gaze flicked to hers she knew he’d had a close and personal view.
And for some reason, that made her tremble. Men like him didn’t give heated looks to women like her. At least not now. Two years after David’s death, she didn’t recognize the woman she saw in the mirror every day. Revenge might have pulled her out of a year-long depression and given her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, but it hadn’t done anything to put the spark back into her eyes or fill the black hole in her chest that got bigger every day that Garcia walked a free man.
She studied him as he studied her. Seated, his legs almost reached the end of the bed. She guessed he was taller than David who had dwarfed her five-foot five-inch frame by a good seven inches. Her roommate’s shoulders were broad beneath his fine shirt, unmistakably powerful. He was the kind of man who would walk into a bar and instantly attract attention. She couldn’t imagine a woman who wouldn’t be swayed by his rich, soothing voice, soft lips, or the wicked sensuality that oozed from every pore of his taut, toned body. Even the scars along the curve of his chiseled jaw just added to his rugged charm. From the pressed pants he wore, to the wrinkle-free shirt, and the perfectly trimmed hair, he was breathtakingly gorgeous, and utterly magnetic.
“Luca Rizzoli,” he said into the silence. “And you are…?”
“Gabrielle Fawkes.”
The faintest hint of a smile spread across his face. “Suits you. Gabriel was one of the archangels. And you remind me of Carlo Dolci’s Angelo dell’annunciazione that now hangs in the Louvre. Emotional intensity translated into physical beauty…” He sighed. “Such a tragedy. Italian paintings should remain in Italy. Don’t you agree?”
Gabrielle didn’t know anything about art. She’d spent her first nine years in a small town in Colorado, and when her mother died, she and her older brother, Patrick, had been dragged to Nevada to live with her father’s new wife in a lower-class suburb of Vegas. She also didn’t know how to talk to handsome men who knew about art, dressed in expensive suits in the hospital, and spoke in a language that was so beautiful, musical, and vivid it made her knees weak. No wonder they called it the language of love. And in that deep, liquid voice … For a moment, she almost forgot the pain.
But movement reminded her. She grimaced as she tried to push herself up on the pillow, tugging the bandages that covered her chest.
His brow furrowed. “You’re hurting.”
“I’m fine,” she lied. The physical pain from the gunshot wound was nothing compared to the utter despair of knowing she’d not only failed to catch Garcia tonight, but she’d compromised a two-year investigation into the cartel. If her stupid mistake got her kicked out of Narcotics, or even the LVPD, she would never have the chance to catch the man who killed her husband.
No. Not just David. Garcia was responsible for taking two lights out of her life. Not just one. Her stomach clenched at the memory, and she fisted the covers. She’d thought nothing could be worse than losing the man she loved. She’d been wrong.
“I’ll call Nurse Rachel,” Luca said, frowning.
“You don’t need to call her. It only hurts when I move.”
“Don’t move,” he commanded, jabbing his finger on the call button. “Rachel will be able to do something for the pain.”
“It was a joke,” she said lamely. “I mean, it hurts, but it’s not unbearable.”
“A joke?” His beautiful eyes narrowed, their rich hazel depths hidden beneath a thicket of lashes.
She laughed at his puzzled expression, startling herself with the sound. When was the last time she had laughed out loud? Even the perpetually upbeat Nicole hadn’t been able to drag a spontaneous laugh out of her in a long time. “I guess being shot isn’t something to joke about. I turned down the painkillers. I don’t like drugs, especially if they fuzz up my brain.”
He gave a soft grunt of approval. “We have that in common,” he said. “As well as the bullet wounds we share. Pain is the body’s way of guiding us how to heal.”
She wished that were true and that there was some purpose or end to the relentless emotional pain of loss, a new universe on the other side of the black hole in the center of her chest. Revenge was all that sustained her now, and she didn’t know what would happen when revenge was gone.
“You were a shooting victim, too?” She cut herself off when he glowered at her, sending a chill down her spine. How could he be so attractive and so terrifying at the same time? She’d dealt with criminals every day on the beat, the kind of men he likely never encountered in his life. Now that she was a detective, she dealt with criminals of another sort—ruthless, violent drug lords who followed no laws, respected no boundaries, and wouldn’t let anyone stand in their way of spreading their poison as far and as fast as possible. They didn’t scare her, but something about this man made her shiver.
“I’m sorry. If it’s difficult to talk about…”
He stiffened his spine, puffed his chest. “I got in the way of the bullet by choice.”
“Ah.” She wanted to know more, but his tight expression made her wary of prying. “Well, we differ in that respect. I didn’t put myself in front of my bullet. In fact, I didn’t even see it coming. I was ambushed. It went right through me, but missed my internal organs. The doctor said I was the luckiest person he’d ever met.”
“It was a good day for luck.” He tapped his chest, and Gabrielle forced a smile. She didn’t feel lucky. When the bullet hit her chest, she’d felt a profound sense of relief, knowing that there would finally be an end to the pain, and she would find peace and be with David again. Waking up in the hospital, realizing it wasn’t over, had almost destroyed her.
Luca must have seen something in her expression, because his brow creased in a frown. “Who shot you, bella? You don’t look like the kind of woman who should be on the wrong side of a gun.” He winced ever so slightly as he turned to her and she wondered how he’d managed to convince the hospital staff to let him wear his regular clothes. Except for the wires protruding from the neck of his shirt, he didn’t look like he’d been shot at all. She admired him for his refusal to accept not only the label and the gown, but also the pain. A rebel after her own heart.
“Wrong place at the wrong time.” She didn’t know if the botched drug bust had hit the news, or if the top brass had tried to keep it quiet. It had been the largest investigation in the department’s history, involving officers and detectives from multiple bureaus including the SWAT team, Homicide, and even Organized Crime. What they had thought was a small-time drug operation, turned out to be a massive drug cartel crossing state and country lines, and the day of reckoning had turned into a PR nightmare when a junior detective hell bent on revenge had inadvertently allowed the drug lord to escape.
“How about you?” she asked, to deflect any further questions. “Are you in law enforcement?”
“I’m in the restaurant business.” He pulled a card from his wallet and gingerly reached over to place it on the table beside her bed. “If you ever want a good meal, come to Il Tavolino. Ask for me. You won’t find better Italian food in the city. Even my mother has eaten there, and that’s saying something.”
She was in too much pain to reach for the card, but she managed a smile. “I didn’t realize the restaurant business was so dangerous.”
“Life is dangerous. Where was your man to protect you?”
God, not another one. Twenty percent of the sworn officers in the LVPD were women, and yet she had to deal with this kind of traditional attitude every day. Although the younger officers gave her professional respect, most of her more established colleagues struggled to accept the concept of a woman with a gun. “The men I was with didn’t need to protect me. I can protect myself.” Although in this case she hadn’t done a very good job.
“Then they are not real men.”
The door opened and the nurse came in. She checked Gabrielle’s vital signs, made sure she was comfortable, and then pulled the curtain separating the two cubicles.
Gabrielle heard murmurs from the other side of the curtain, the lilt of flirtatious laughter, and the rumble of Luca’s deep voice as he bid the nurse goodnight before she left the room.
She sighed, stared out the window at the city lights twinkling in the distance. Luca was very obviously a real man—and one who loved his women young, slim, and pretty.
It was definitely not a lucky day. But then, luck had never been on her side.
Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Castille
