A Billionaire for Christmas (15 page)

Why had she ever thought she could return home?

There were too many painful memories in New York for her to attempt to build a future here. And she’d come back too soon. Her sponsor Alex had been right. Even her great-aunt Patty had thought six months sober wasn’t long enough to confront the pain of the past.

She rummaged through her purse and pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. “Guess no one around here will mind a little secondhand smoke.” A crooked smile twisted her lips. Vinnie would have appreciated that joke. Sure it was macabre and inappropriate, but he would’ve gotten it. Hadn’t he always gotten her jokes that were a little too…too much? Irreverent? Tasteless? What the hell. When Mom had ditched them and then Dad died, they’d only had each other and Nonna. They’d needed their jokes to get by. The jokes, no matter how edgy, made the pain feel less, dug you out of the muck. Hell, yes, Vinnie would have appreciated the joke. Who knew, he might be laughing right now.

“Those things will kill you.”

Shelly trembled at the sound of the voice at her back. She took a long defiant drag on her cigarette and exhaled in response. She didn’t turn.

“If I haven’t died yet from all the shit I’ve done, I’m not worried about the nicotine.” She ashed to the side of her brother’s grave. Her ass was frozen. How long had she been sitting on the ground? A half hour? An hour? For a long friggin’ time. “How many places did you look before you found me?”

“A few.”

“What tipped you off?”

“The promise I made.”

She knew about the promise. She’d made a few herself. One to Vinnie. One to Anthony. A couple to Nonna. None that she cared to think too much about. Hell, she didn’t have such a great record for keeping promises.

“Why’d you leave?” Barely contained fury edged his voice. He’d gotten better at reining in that Travati temper, but she could feel his anger. If she looked, his face would still be serene, like stone, because that’s where he’d gotten better about hiding his feelings, but his eyes? Tony’s eyes would be clouded with rage.

“Today or before?”

“Both.”

Fuck. She took a deep breath and pulled her knees in tighter. Like she wanted to rehash the past and drag all that old bullshit out into the light. It’d only been in the last three months that she’d really started to examine those decisions. Picking each one up and scrutinizing it, trying to think back to what’d been going on in her head.

“Vinnie, the oxy I took so I wouldn’t think about Vinnie…” She turned her head and looked up to meet his gaze. “You.”

He didn’t like that answer. His lips thinned. Nope. This wasn’t happy Tony. This was the ice king, self-righteous and angry, with all his barriers up.

“I’m here because I promised Vinnie I’d take care of you and your grandmother. Treat you both like family. I’m here because of how much he meant to me.”

Yeah, she got it. It was spelled out in all the words Anthony wasn’t saying. He wasn’t here for her, the ex-addict/whore. He was here for Vinnie, his friend. When it came right down to it, so was she.

He didn’t reach for her, didn’t wrap her in his arms, didn’t tell her she shouldn’t be out here because she’d get cold. He didn’t offer to take her home and make hot chocolate to warm her up. Nope. Had he talked to Ted in the jewelry store? If he had, intimacy between her and Tony was truly history.

“You met someone from my past.”

Silence greeted her words.

Her heart careened to the side, her belly hollow with dread, as her fears were confirmed.

“I wish…Shelly…I wish…” His words drifted away on the cold breeze. “I don’t know what I wish.”

Shelly knew exactly what she wished. She wished that she’d never left. That she’d never hopped the Greyhound for Texas with a pill bottle full of oxy, thinking that her heart would magically unbreak if only she could be somewhere other than where all the memories of Vinnie lived. But the place wasn’t the problem. The memories of her brother, her destroyed family, her dead father, all of them went with her to Texas. So she relied on the oxy, the H, to keep them at bay. The oxy got easier to take and the needle wasn’t so tough to stick in her arm, until they became deep dark overwhelming needs sinking hooks deep into her. The need to get away from the memories and the pain turned into a physical need for the drugs. Then she would to do anything to get the drugs, to avoid the the pain of withdrawing, remembering.
Anything.

She’d done a lot of things for drugs.

“You remember the time when Vinnie saved my ass at that construction site?” Anthony’s feet crunched over the snow. “What were we? Nine?”

“I’d just finished kindergarten at Saint Bernard’s, so yeah, you two were nine.”

“Climbed up to the motherfucking top of a cement foundation with rebar sticking out all over the place. Broken glass. Nails. Don’t know how many times my dad had told all of us to stay away from that site. He was going to blister my ass if he caught me there.”

Shelly put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled a lungful of smoke. The memory was there, in her head. She could still feel her little legs pumping her bike pedals as fast as she could to get to Vinnie to tell him that Tony was stuck.

“Why were we together without Vinnie? I don’t remember.” She twisted around and looked at Anthony. Tall and strong and successful and good, he stood with his large frame blocking the wind, his hands in his pockets.

“That was when he was always in trouble. Remember how the first two weeks of that summer your grandma had him scrubbing floors for hiding Sister Beatrice’s rosary?”

“She made him do it with a plastic dish brush.” Shelly shivered in the cold and took a final drag on her cigarette. “Never got in trouble at school again.”

“Never got caught again,” Anthony clarified. “That day he saved me. Got a ladder and got Leo, because Justin would have told Dad. They managed to get me down without breaking my neck or theirs. Damn, that was some scary shit. Felt like I was forty feet high in the sky.”

“It was probably six foot.”

“Guess everything looks huge when you’re that little. Vinnie would’ve done anything for me or for you or for your grandma, because that’s the type of guy he was. No matter what, he was going to help the people he loved.” Anthony squatted on his heels beside her. “And that’s what I promised to do. Promised him I’d look after you and your grandma. When I failed down there in Texas—”

“You didn’t fail. I disappeared.”

“I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve looked longer. I should’ve made it so you never had to let those men—” He shook his head and his lips thinned. “So none of that ever became a part of your life.”

“You couldn’t have stopped me,” she whispered. “I needed the high so bad, nothing but dying could have stopped me.” She looked at Vinnie’s headstone. Vinnie, the best guy in the world, a great brother and friend, a guy who had served his country, had died. And here she sat next to his grave, still alive, and what was she? A recovering drug addict and former prostitute. Damn, nothing in life seemed fair.

“Temperature’s dropping.” Anthony stood. “I’ll take you home.”

Shelly rose to her feet. Anthony didn’t reach out his hand. He couldn’t even touch her. Could she blame him? Not really. There’d been days, when she was first sober, when she could barely look at her own eyes in the mirror. Bad nights. Vicious dreams. Wretched memories. When her sobriety was raw, brand new, and the world grated on her nerves, the only escape was to fall to her knees and ask God to take the wheel.

But she discovered that she couldn’t ignore her past. She had to come to peace and forgive herself for what she’d done. If she couldn’t forgive herself, she’d go back to the pills and the needle and eventually the men. Yeah, she had to forgive herself to stay sober, but she didn’t expect anyone else to. She watched Anthony. His hands hung at his sides. Fists clenching and unclenching in the cold. His face stoic and nearly unreadable. He’d barricaded his heart again.

An ache tore through her. Love. She’d been blessed with love, and the pain of Vinnie’s death had blinded her. She’d turned her back on Anthony, thinking of him as just another painful reminder of the world without Vinnie, and run to a life that ripped her to shreds. And now… Anthony stared at Vinnie’s tombstone, eyes red and shoulders stiff. Now, she’d never know this man’s love again.

He turned toward his car. His feet crunched frozen snow and his body hunched forward against the increasing wind as he walked. She took one more look at Vinnie’s headstone. Pressed her hand to the icy rock. Yeah, she had to forgive herself to survive, but Anthony didn’t have to. She didn’t think he ever would.

*

“You coming in?” Shelly reached for the passenger side door handle as his car stopped at the curb. Hope lingered in her gaze as she looked at him.

If he were a better person, a bigger person, maybe a person who could forgive Shelly for her past, then he would go into Mrs. Bello’s home. But he couldn’t. He’d managed to tame the anger that raged through him on the way to the cemetery, managed to talk himself into the idea that what he did today was for Vinnie. He wouldn’t be cruel, but he couldn’t be loving. He might always be in love with Shelly, but he couldn’t be with her, couldn’t sleep with her, couldn’t hold her in his arms. There were too damned many ghosts between them now.

“No.” He’d rather not tell her, not say anything, let his cool distance convey that whatever had been between them was over. But she deserved better than his silence, because she was Vinnie’s sister and because he loved her.

“I can’t”—his teeth ground together and his jaw muscle clenched—“I can’t be with you anymore.”

Her lips compressed. A resigned stare replaced the hopeful look.

“Got it. Not surprised. I guess I knew I wasn’t the right woman for you anymore.” One corner of her mouth hitched up into a sad sort of smile.

“I’m sorry. I’m just not…I can’t get around the past. Around what happened.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to love you now.”

He swallowed. The words hurt to say. His heart burned in his chest with a fierce love and a furious anger, and he couldn’t figure out a way to get past either.

“What we had was once in a lifetime.” Shelly reached out. Her fingertips skimmed his cheekbone. “Lucky we both got that for a while, I guess.”

Anthony inhaled and closed his eyes. Her touch. He would forever crave her touch. He fought the urge to clasp her hand, to turn his face and press her fingers to his lips. Instead he remained silent, immobile. Shelly climbed out of the car, let herself into Mrs. Bello’s home. She flipped the lights off and on, and Anthony drove away into the deep, cold, still winter night.

“Shelly! Thank goodness.” Aubrey, with arms outstretched and her baby belly leading the way, carefully stepped around where her sister sat amid piles of wrapping paper, giant boxes, ribbons, and bows to walk toward Shelly.

“What’s going on here?” Shelly dropped her purse into a chair. Santa’s workshop had exploded in the middle of Aubrey’s living room. Aubrey and Justin’s housekeeper took Shelly’s coat from her hands before she could even turn to look for the closet.

Aubrey hugged her close. She vibrated like a live wire, excited energy surrounding her. “Well,” Aubrey sighed, “with my pregnancy brain, I forgot completely about a whole closet of gifts.” She waved her hands toward the carpet. Nina looked up from the rectangular box between her spread legs, which she had covered with red and white-striped wrapping paper, brandishing a pair of scissors.

“Merry Christmas,” Nina said and winked.

“I tried to find a wrapping service, but at ten a.m. on Christmas Eve day, you can imagine how that went.”

Shelly planted her hands on her hips. A five-foot pile of boxes to be wrapped waited in the far corner of the room. After the pain of yesterday, standing beside Anthony’s pregnant sister-in-law wrapping gifts for the Travati family was, perhaps, the absolute last place Shelly wanted to be, but Nonna had answered the phone and offered up Shelly’s services as associate elf before Shelly could object. And no matter how things stood between her and Anthony, Shelly couldn’t repay Aubrey’s kindness with rejection.

“I’m so happy you can help. Ramona is making lunch, Max is out doing his own shopping, and I’ve convinced Justin not to come home early.” Aubrey tucked a stray curl back into her ponytail. “There’s cider and cookies and hot chocolate—”

“And lots of presents to wrap,” Nina mumbled from the floor. She looked up toward Shelly. “She’s plying us with food and drink.”

“I got that.” Shelly picked up a roll of red foil wrap stamped with green trees. She grabbed a roll of tape and some scissors and found a spot on the floor not far from the coffee table.

“Here’s one.” Aubrey smiled and lifted a rectangular box. “It’s for Anthony. Let me show you.”

A lump filled Shelly’s throat. Anthony. Anthony’s present. She ground her teeth and sucked in her cheeks.

She could do this. She could pretend that her heart wasn’t broken, get through the holiday, and get back to her new life in San Francisco. She’d spoken to her sponsor, she’d gone to her meeting, she’d forgiven herself again today, damn, she could do this.

Heat blurred her eyes. Aubrey opened the box and pulled out a picture frame. She turned it over and slipped the cool metal into Shelly’s hands. “Do you think he’ll like it?” she asked.

The breath shot from Shelly’s lungs. She clasped her hand over her mouth. Her gaze darted from Aubrey’s face back to the picture. The photo showed the Travati and Bello kids, six of them…all of them, together and well. Justin, Leo, Anthony, Devon, and even Vinnie, with her in the middle of the group. Anthony held one of Shelly’s hands and Vinnie held the other.

“It’s…I…” Her gaze searched the photo and the prickle of impending tears stung her eyes. God…here it was, that time before life took Vinnie, and she disappeared, and Justin and Anthony’s relationship had become nearly unrecognizable. Every one of them had had their entire future before them, and yet all they wanted was to be together, to ride their bikes and play tag and sit on the curb eating dripping chocolate and vanilla cones from the ice cream truck.