He was certainly “high-profile,” especially right now.
She already had access to some “new and unusual” facts about him.
As an interview subject, he could prove to be a lot more intriguing than the pope or the president.
She studied his solemn smile as he held out both hands to Leigh and said, “I’ve been worried about you.”
His voice gave Courtney a jolt. He had an amazing voice, deep and distinctive. If he hadn’t chosen to be a criminal, he could have used that voice to great advantage on the radio or television.
She stepped out of O’Hara’s way, her gaze shifting to the large flat white box that Valente had handed him when he walked in. Tucked under O’Hara’s arm was a brown bag, twisted at the top, which Courtney assumed contained a bottle of something with an alcohol content.
“You still here?” Joe asked her in surprise.
“I’m leaving, but I wanted to get a look at Valente in person,” she replied, following him into the kitchen. “What’s in the box?”
“I don’t know,” he said, putting it on the island. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a pizza.”
“He brought her a pizza?” Courtney exclaimed with a muffled laugh. “A pizza? He owns a helicopter and entire blocks of buildings in New York City—I’d have figured him for a seven-course take-out meal from Le Cirque, with maybe a gaudy diamond bracelet as a napkin ring.”
“Really? I guess you know more about him than I do.”
“I don’t know much of anything about him, but I’m going to do some research.” She lifted the cover of the flat white box and shuddered with revulsion. “Oh, yuk!”
In the midst of trying to figure out how to turn one of the ovens on, O’Hara looked over his shoulder to see what her exclamation was about.
“It’s an uncooked pizza,” she said, pointing accusingly at the item, “covered with huge shrimp.” She shuddered again. “How Italian is that?”
“I dunno. Me, I like pepperoni.”
“I hate shrimp in all its disguises.” She opened the brown paper bag, extracted the bottle of red wine inside it, and scrutinized the label. “This guy is really twisted. He drinks three-hundred-dollars-a-bottle red wine with shrimp pizza.”
O’Hara’s mind was on the task at hand. “Valente told me to put that in the oven. Normally, I’d tell him to mind his own business, but Mrs. Manning hasn’t eaten a cup of food in days. Do you know how to turn this oven on?”
“How hard can it be?” Courtney replied, changing places with O’Hara, who began uncorking the wine at the center island. For a brief moment, she studied the array of dials and buttons above the four stainless steel ovens built into the brick wall, her agile mind quickly calculating probabilities. “This one,” she said emphatically. And changed the time on the clock.
Chapter 27
* * *
“I don’t know where Logan keeps anything in here,” Leigh explained to Michael Valente as she switched on the lights in Logan’s office. She walked over to his desk and sat down on his leather chair. Logan’s office was so uniquely, poignantly, his that it felt all wrong for her to be sitting at his eighteenth-century carved desk.
Trying not to dwell on that, she reached for the handle on the center drawer. The drawer was locked. She tried the drawers on the right side. They were locked. So were the drawers on the left. Embarrassed, she looked up. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know they’d be locked.” Leigh nodded toward a wall of built-in, oak-fronted file cabinets and got up. “Maybe the file you’re looking for is in one of these.”
“Take your time; I’m in no hurry,” he said politely, but she could feel him watching her as she crossed the room, and it made her distinctly uneasy. His voice made Leigh uneasy. Or maybe what made her uneasy was having him there when she realized, for the first time, that her husband had started keeping everything under lock and key, in his own home.
The file cabinets were all locked, too.
“I think Brenna—my secretary—may know where Logan keeps a key.” She sat back down at Logan’s desk and called Brenna from his phone. Brenna was home, and she knew Logan kept his desk and files locked, but she had no idea where Leigh might find a key.
“I’m very embarrassed that you have to leave here empty-handed a second time,” Leigh said, pausing to turn off the office lights.
“Don’t be. I can wait for the documents I need until you find the keys.”
Leigh walked back into the living room and paused at the sofas, intending to either invite him to sit down for a few minutes or show him to the door if he was ready to leave. “I don’t remember if I ever thanked you for letting me use your helicopter last week, and for carrying me back and forth through the snow.”
Brushing back the sides of his sport jacket, he shoved his hands into his pants pockets. “Actually, there’s a way you can thank me for all that. When is the last time you ate?”
“I haven’t been very hungry.”
“I had a feeling that might be the case. As a way of thanking me, I’d like you to have dinner with me tonight.”
“No, I—”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” he interrupted. “I brought dinner with me. Which way is the kitchen?”
Leigh gaped at him, amazed and annoyed at his highhandedness. His expensive haircut, tailor-made jacket, and three-hundred-dollar tie gave him a veneer of prosperous, well-bred elegance, but nothing could offset the granite strength in his features, the harsh defiance in his tough jaw, or the cold, predatory gleam she’d glimpsed in his amber eyes when Harwell insulted him. Logan had mistaken Michael Valente for a tame, predictable businessman, but he wasn’t that. He wasn’t that at all.
On the other hand, he had gone to a great deal of trouble for her last week, so she led the way into the kitchen.
The big room was empty, but all four of the ovens were glowing, and there were two glasses of wine on the island next to plates, napkins, and a large knife. Valente shrugged off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair; then he handed her one of the wineglasses. “Drink some,” he ordered when she shook her head and started to put it down. “It will help things.”
Leigh wasn’t certain what things he thought it would help, but she took a swallow because she was simply too worn down to put up much opposition to anything, particularly something inconsequential. She felt the effect of the potent wine within moments.
“Have a little more. Do it for me.”
She took another sip. “Mr. Valente, this is very nice of you, but I’m not very hungry or thirsty.”
He gazed at her in speculative silence, a glass of wine in his right hand, his left hand shoved deep into his trouser pocket. “Under the circumstances, I think it would be more suitable if you called me by my first name.”
A knot of nervous tension tightened Leigh’s stomach. His voice . . . his eyes . . . his attitude. “I’m actually a rather formal person.”
Instead of responding, he turned and walked over to the ovens. Bending down slightly, he studied whatever was in there through the glass in one oven door. “I’m curious about something,” he said with his back to her.
“What’s that?”
“I sent you a basket of pears in the hospital. Did you get them?”
Shocked and embarrassed, Leigh stared at his back. “Yes, I did, only there was no card with them. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you who sent them.”
“That explains it,” he said.
“I love pears—” Leigh began, intending to thank him for them now.
“I know you do.”
Her uneasiness began to escalate. “How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things about you. Have some more wine, Leigh.”
Alarm bells began screaming in Leigh’s brain. That voice. She knew that voice! She replayed his clipped commands along with others like them: Wear this for me . . . Drink this . . . Love Me . . . Have a little more . . . Do it for me . . .
“I know you
like pears, you love shrimp pizza, and you hate most vegetables,” he continued, his back still to her. “I know you sunburn easily, and you dislike any soap with a strong scent. I also know you aren’t ‘a rather formal’ person.” He paused to pick up two pot holders lying beside the ovens.
Behind him, Leigh picked up the big knife lying on the island, her heart pounding with fear and rage. She could hear faint sounds of a television set—the stock car races—coming from O’Hara’s room down the hall and around a corner. She didn’t think Joe would hear her if she screamed.
“The truth is,” Valente continued as he removed the pizza and juggled it onto the granite countertop, “you are innately kind and unaffected. You will take time to talk to anyone who you think is lonely or in need of cheering up, you can’t stand to hurt anyone’s feelings, and you will go out of your way to find something to like in almost anyone. Including me.”
He turned around and saw the knife in her hand.
“Get out of here!” Leigh whispered savagely. “Get out of my house before I scream for help and call the police.”
“Put that knife down! What the hell is wrong?”
“You’ve been stalking me! It was you! I know your voice. You’re the one who sends the flowers, and the presents—”
“I am not your stalker—”
Leigh began backing toward the telephone on the wall near the hallway, and he moved forward, matching her step for step. “Pears,” she ranted accusingly. “Pears and pizza and soap!”
“Groceries—I used to watch you buy them.”
“You’ve watched me buy them while you stalk me!”
“Put the damn knife down!” he said just as she bumped into the wall.
“I’m calling the police.” She whirled around and grabbed for the telephone.
“You’re not doing anything of the kind!” He slammed the receiver back into place, covered it with his hand, and flattened his body against hers, imprisoning her, and her knife, between the wall and his own body. “Now drop the goddamned knife,” he ordered in a low, awful voice against her ear. “Don’t make me hurt you to get it away from you.”
Instead of dropping it, Leigh clutched the handle harder. Fate had already done everything it could to torment her. She wasn’t afraid of anything he could do to her. “Go to hell,” she whimpered.
To her utter disbelief, that made him chuckle. “I’m glad to see you no longer freeze up when you’re in danger, but I’m too old to show off my combat skills for you again, and besides that, I’m afraid if I let you go, you’ll skewer me with that damned knife before I can tell you who I am.”
“I know who you are, you bastard!”
“Will you just listen to me for a moment!”
Leigh was mashed against the wall, her right cheek flattened to it. “Do I have a choice?”
That question amused him thoroughly. “You’re the one holding the knife. The guy with the knife always gets first choice about what happens next. That’s the rule.”
“Did you learn that in prison?” she snapped, but she was beginning to feel almost as foolish as she was angry.
“No, I knew it long before then,” he replied blandly. “And I remembered it fourteen years ago when you left Angelinas Market late at night with some pears and a shrimp pizza. Two punks threatened you on the street. I walked you home afterward.”
Her entire body stiffened. “Falco?” she uttered after a stunned moment. “You’re Falco?”
He stepped back so she could turn around, and Leigh gazed in wide-eyed wonder at his face. He held out his hand. “Could I have the knife now—not the pointy end,” he joked.
Leigh gave it to him, but she couldn’t stop looking at him. He was a part of her past, and she felt a rush of sentimentality because he’d reentered her life at its lowest point and had been trying to “rescue” her again in whatever small way he could—and with very little appreciation from her. Unconsciously she held out her hands to him, feeling almost maternal when he took them in his. “I can’t believe it’s you! I can’t believe you were hiding a face like this under that awful beard. And you changed your name. How is your mother?”
He smiled at her barrage of comments, a quick, startlingly glamorous smile that transformed his features and shocked Leigh into remembering they were holding hands. “You thought my beard was awful?”
She withdrew her hands quickly, but made no attempt to withdraw from the warm sentimentality of the moment. “I assumed you were hiding something terrible behind it.”
“A weak chin?” he suggested. He retrieved the pizza from the counter beside the ovens and transferred it to the island. There he began slicing it with the same knife she’d threatened him with moments before.
Leigh clung to this brief respite from her anguish over Logan and reached for the wineglass on the counter to help her sustain it. “The possibility of a weak chin never occurred to me. I thought it could be scars from . . .”
He looked up, waiting.
“From being in fights—from being in prison.”
“That’s good,” he replied dryly. “Just so you didn’t think I might have had a weak chin.”
“How is your mother?”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry. I liked her very much. When did it happen?”
“When I was ten.”
“What?”
“My mother and father died when I was ten.”
“Then . . . who is Mrs. Angelini?”
“My mother’s sister.” He picked up their plates, and Leigh carried the wineglasses and napkins over to the table. “The Angelinis took me in after my parents died and raised me with their own sons.”
“Oh, I see. Then how is your aunt?”
“She’s very well. She made this pizza for you herself, and asked me to tell you hello for her.”
“This is so thoughtful—of both of you,” Leigh said.
He dismissed that without comment and reached for the light switch, dimming the bright overhead lights a little before he sat down across from her. “Eat,” he ordered, but he picked up his wineglass, Leigh noted, not his pizza. He wasn’t hungry as he’d claimed earlier. That had been a ruse to make sure she ate something. She was so touched that she tried to do it, and tried not to think of the reason all this seemed necessary to him.
“You changed your name from Falco Nipote to Michael Valente?”
He shook his head. “You have that backwards.”
“You mean your name was Nipote Falco?”
“No, I mean I haven’t changed my name, you’ve changed it.”
“But those are the names Mrs. Angelini called you.”
“Nipote is Italian for ‘nephew.’ Falco means ‘hawk’ in Italian. In the old neighborhood, we all had nicknames. My cousin Angelo was called ‘Dante’ because he hated being called Angel, and because he definitely wasn’t one. Dominick was ‘Sonny,’ because he was—” He paused to think about that and wryly shook his head. “—because he was always called Sonny, even by my uncle.” He looked around for the wine bottle, realized it was still on the island, and got up to get it.
“Why were you called Hawk?” Leigh asked him as he added more wine to their glasses.
“Angelo started calling me that when we were little kids. He was three years older than I was, but I wanted to tag along with him on his exploits. To keep me out of the way, he convinced me I had especially good eyes—eyes like a hawk—and that his pals needed me to be their ‘lookout.’ I functioned in that capacity until I realized they were having all the fun and I wasn’t.”
“What kind of fun were they having?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She sobered. He was right—she did not want to know that. “Thank you for all the kind things you’ve done—Friday and tonight. It’s almost impossible to believe you’ve gone to so much trouble for me.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, fourteen years ago, you barely bothered to answer me when I spoke to you.?
??
“I was working up to it.”
“What got in the way?”
Logan got in the way, Michael Valente thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to spoil her mood by mentioning the husband she was never going to see alive again. “Maybe I was shy.”
She overruled that with a single, emphatic shake of her head. “I wondered about that back then, but shy people aren’t deliberately rude. The nicer I was to you, the more curt and rude you became. After a while, it was perfectly obvious that you couldn’t stand me.”
“That was perfectly obvious?”
Leigh heard the amused irony in his tone, but she was preoccupied with more pressing questions. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were last Saturday night at the party?” At the mention of the festive party, Leigh could no longer keep the gruesome reality of the present from crashing into her thoughts. She forgot the question she’d asked him and gazed out the window beside her, fighting back tears.
As if he sensed what had just happened to her, he skipped the discussion of the party. “I told you who I was in the note I sent with the pears.”
Leigh tried to refocus on that issue only. “You must have thought I was incredibly rude not to mention it when you took me to the mountains, or when I phoned you yesterday, or even tonight, for that matter.”
“I assumed you either hadn’t read the note, or that you read it and preferred not to acknowledge any prior acquaintance with me, of any kind.”
Leigh looked at him steadily. “I would never do that.”
He held her gaze. “Unless, in the last fourteen years, you had become ‘a rather formal person.’ ”
She acknowledged the gentle “gibe” with a slight smile; then she had to bite her lip to keep from crying. Tears were so close to the surface, every minute of every day, that anything—nice things, humorous things—could make her feel like crying without warning.