Playing Dead (3 page)

‘Yeah. Got it,’ said Sophie, and suddenly he released her and lay back.

She looked at him warily. She reviewed all that she had been about to say, and decided against saying any of it. Silently, she watched him. He had a big erection jutting up from between his thighs; hitting her always seemed to turn him on. She adored Lucco, but she was coming to realize – not to put too fine a point on it – that he was a bit of a shit.

Lucco saw her looking, and glanced down his impressive body. ‘Mount me,’ he ordered.

Would he hit her again if she refused? Sophie decided not to risk it.

Lucco lay back, sighing restlessly as Sophie straddled him and guided him smoothly inside her.

Everything he had feared since the day Annie Carter had come into his father’s life was coming to fruition. He tried to consider it all logically, furious though it made him feel. Constantine was forty-seven while his new English wife was twenty-seven – twenty years his junior.

The Carter woman – Lucco couldn’t bear to think of her any other way – was closer in age to him, his brother Alberto and his sister Cara than to their father. It was
obscene.
And now the worst had happened. Marrying the whore had been bad enough, but now his father had impregnated her; there would be a baby.

Why hadn’t his father just had her if he wanted to – she was just a cheap English gold-digger after all; she’d have been grateful to receive the attentions of a man like him. He didn’t have to go and
marry
her.

Lucco thought of Annie, his father’s new wife. Her glossy, cocoa-brown hair, her dark green eyes, her intriguing body, always discreetly hidden, but . . . oh yes, guessed at by Lucco. He didn’t doubt that she was
hot
between the sheets, to have snared his father so easily. And now she was going to give him a child; a new child who would supplant his grown-up children in his affections. He felt sick at the thought, furious.

‘You know what? My father’s right. It
is
time I got married,’ he said aloud. It was all arranged, anyway – not that he’d confided that to Sophie. Why the hell should he? The wedding was only two months away now. Of course it was expected of him, part of the process that would see him assuming control of his father’s empire one day. Already he was
caporegime
like Alberto, joint second-in-command beneath their father; but he, Lucco, was the eldest son, the rightful heir. It was good to appear settled, married,
respectable
; there would be children, his
own
children; family life.

Sophie stopped bouncing up and down on Lucco’s cock and raised her head. She looked at his face, her blue eyes wide with surprise and a sliver of hope; all right, sometimes he lost it, but so what? She adored him, and she was excited by his powerful family with its dubious links to the underworld. Was he proposing . . .?

‘Not married to
you
, obviously,’ said Lucco, correctly interpreting her gaze.

His marriage had been arranged ever since he was eighteen. He was going to wed his dull little second cousin Daniella. He’d been reluctant before, dreading the day, but now he could see it might be a good thing. Now he appreciated the need to get some kids off Daniella at the earliest opportunity. If anyone was going to inherit his father’s considerable fortune, he would make sure that it was
his
line,
his
sons – not hers. And not Alberto’s, either.

‘Harder,’ he said, and Sophie obeyed while Lucco closed his eyes and thought of Annie, his father’s wife.

Chapter 3

Cara Barolli Mancini, Constantine’s daughter, got the news just as she was finishing lunch with her girlfriends and her second cousin, who was fresh off the boat from Sicily. They were in the plush uptown apartment that Cara shared with her husband Rocco.

The second cousin, Daniella, was her brother Lucco’s intended, a laughably rough-around-the-edges girl with long frizzy black hair, big frightened eyes, lamentable dress sense and nothing of any interest to say for herself. She had been sitting there like wood all through the meal, her hands folded in her lap, her head bowed, the conversation of the assembled Park Avenue princesses buzzing around her.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked one of Cara’s friends, looking at her face when she came back into the room.

Cara shrugged and sat down again. Her pretty mouth twisted. ‘Apparently, my father’s wife is going to have a baby,’ she said.

‘Oh! Well . . . congratulations, darling,’ said the friend, looking at Cara’s stormy face with uncertainty.

Even Cara’s closest friends knew you had to treat her with kid gloves. The dreamy-eyed quality Cara possessed was a thin veneer. She was very beautiful, with her tumbling blonde hair, her heavy-lidded blue eyes and her voluptuous mouth, always half open, pouting, inviting. But she could be touchy and arrogant. Daddy was an important man in this city, and she never tired of letting everyone around her know it.

Cara couldn’t trust herself to speak, not yet. She was crazed with rage. How dare he get that
tramp
pregnant; how dare he foist a filthy half-sibling on his three truly legitimate children?

‘When . . . is the baby due?’ asked Daniella in her stumbling English.

Cara looked across at her with irritation. Poor stupid sacrificial lamb, shipped over here to marry elegant, arrogant Lucco with the razor-sharp tongue. Lucco would demolish the girl, Cara didn’t doubt that.

‘I don’t know that yet,’ she said.

‘She’ll have a baby shower, won’t she?’ another friend asked as the maid cleared their plates away.

‘She’s English,’ said Cara. ‘I doubt she even knows what that
means
.’

The friends were silent for a long, awkward moment. Cara’s own marriage had so far proved fruitless, and they all knew she wanted a child. It was whispered covertly among them that Rocco might even have some problems in the bedroom department. Which wasn’t surprising, really; Cara had a strong, vocal character, but Rocco was quieter – too quiet to put her in her place sometimes, which was what they all secretly thought she really needed in a man.

Cara was staring at Daniella. Lucco had met Daniella at the age of eighteen when he visited Sicily with Constantine. She had been sixteen then, virginal and shy, socially inept. She still was. The marriage had been agreed between Constantine and her father, and there had been celebrations, countless bottles of fiery yellow Strega consumed and many a tarantella danced because it was a huge honour for any daughter to receive a proposal from the son of a great Don.

Now Cara watched Daniella sourly.
Lucco is going to eat her alive
, thought Cara. She knew her brother.

Not that she much cared about the fate of this little
paisan
from the old country. She had her own problems.

Chapter 4

Alberto, the youngest son of Constantine Barolli, received the news when he went to collect Layla, his stepmother Annie’s bright and adorable five-year-old from her first marriage, from his Aunt Gina’s that afternoon.

Layla ran to him; she loved her big brother Alberto. He swept the giggling child up into his arms while Gina looked on sourly. She was putting the phone back on the cradle and she looked as if someone had just told her something really, really bad.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alberto in concern.

‘Your father’s wife,’ said Gina, her mouth pursing even as she uttered the words.

Alberto knew that Gina despised Annie. Gina would have despised
any
woman who came close to her brother. She had hated Alberto’s own mother, Maria – and after Maria’s death, he knew very well that Gina had hoped there would be no more women; but then along had come Annie Carter with her ‘whore’s tricks’, bewitching his father – according to Aunt Gina.

Privately, Alberto believed that his aunt was too possessive, clinging to Constantine in a way that was both selfish and faintly perverted. He for one was delighted that his father had found happiness with his second wife.

‘Annie? What about her?’ Alberto glanced at Layla.

‘Your father tells me she’s expecting a child,’ said Gina. She didn’t look overjoyed about it.

Alberto’s attention sharpened. ‘And it’s fine? She’s fine?’

Gina nodded tensely.

‘Well, that’s good news.’

‘Good? How can it be good?’

Alberto stifled a sigh. He knew Gina would never soften towards Annie, and he knew she thought him a fool for liking his father’s second wife so much. But, to him, Annie was family now. He could be the hard man, the tough
caporegime
when it was required of him, but at heart he was a family man, and both more reserved and more reflective than his elder brother Lucco.

Sometimes, he had to do bad things,
difficult
things, for the family good. Quiet and polite though he was, he had been responsible for many deaths while carrying out his father’s orders. But he could never delight in the pain and suffering of others, as Lucco did.

‘You hear that, Layla?’ Alberto bounced the little girl in his arms, smiled into her dark eyes. ‘You’re going to have a new little brother or sister to spoil, how about
that
?’

‘Yay!’ said Layla.

Gina watched her nephew with a glacial eye. Alberto was a good boy, but he was too amiable, too soft. Couldn’t he see how this would affect his own standing in the family; how it could affect them all? Constantine’s English wife had up until this point been an unwanted, isolated interloper with little say in the running of things. Now her status would radically change. She would be the mother of the Don’s baby; her position would be assured.

‘Are we going to go home and see Mommy now?’ asked Layla, watching her big stepbrother’s handsome face and not seeing the expression on Gina’s.

Alberto smiled.
Mommy.
Layla was sounding more American every day. ‘We sure are. And we’ll stop off on the way and get her some flowers, okay?’

Gina watched them, her expression surly.
Flowers
, for the love of God. She turned away, irritated. Personally, she would rather see flowers laid on the Englishwoman’s
grave.

Chapter 5

‘Well,’ said Rocco Mancini reluctantly, signalling to the waitress for the check, ‘I must go.’

‘So soon?’ his dining companion pouted. They were tucked into a corner table beside the window at a seedy little diner on Lexington and Third, where neither of them would be known. It was a cheap place, tacky, charmless; full of losers and fat, contented mothers with shrieking infants. It wasn’t what either of them would have chosen, but that was simply the way it had to be. Snatched moments in random places.

‘Yeah, Cara’s got plans for this evening.’

Cara
always
had plans for the evening. Dinner with the Vanderbilts; the Nixons’ charity ball in aid of the Third World; the invitation – which had filled Cara with wild-eyed joy – to fly to Washington for the September opening of the Kennedy Arts Center, with the premiere of Bernstein’s
mass
for the late president.

There was always
something –
some silly social engagement they just
had
to be seen at. Rocco was not interested in any of it, but still he had to go.

The waitress came over, chewing gum and wearing a grubby white apron. Rocco paid, his aesthetic face pinched with distaste. The waitress withdrew. Rocco stood up, shrugging into his jacket. He was tall and very thin, with dark curly hair, bright lime-green eyes and a big sensuous mouth. He looked at his dining companion’s expression and sat down again, sharply.

‘Look, you know it has to be this way,’ he said, grasping the pale hand on the table.

‘I hate her,’ said his companion. ‘Cara has you all the time, at her beck and call. And what do I have? Just the dregs.’

There was nothing Rocco could say to this. It was true. But he knew he couldn’t afford to make waves. He had the lifestyle he had always craved, the cars, the apartments, everything. He summered in the Hamptons, wintered in Aspen, lived a life of ease and plenty. And that was all thanks to his marriage to Cara Barolli. If he tried for separation, or – God forbid –
divorce
, then all that would be over.

And he had no wish to make so powerful an enemy as the Don. Would Constantine Barolli just accept his daughter being dumped like so much excess baggage? Rocco didn’t think so. Already, Rocco was aware that he had been tested and found wanting by the Don. He wasn’t a made man, he wasn’t even a
capo
in his father-in-law’s organization yet, and he resented that. But he knew he had a lot still to prove.

And what about his own father, Enrico? He would be exceedingly angry if Rocco made waves. Constantine and Enrico Mancini went way back. There would be hell to pay.

‘My darling,’ said Rocco, ‘you know it’s you I love.’

‘But you’re with her.’

Rocco stood up. They’d had this same conversation many times; it never got them anywhere. ‘I’ll see you here on Friday. We’ll take the boat out on the Sound, how’s that?’ he said hopefully.

His companion was hard-eyed for a moment. ‘What, and you’ll screw me again in the cabin, where no one can see?’ Then the look faded to a faint smile, remembering . . . ‘Ah, all right. You got me, you know you have.’

Smiling, Rocco moved out of the booth. He looked around and then dropped a quick kiss onto Frances Ducane’s almost effeminately smooth cheek.

‘It’s you I love,’ Rocco repeated, against Frances’s skin. ‘Goodbye, my darling.’

And then he was gone, leaving the young man sitting alone at the table, wondering why he always,
always
had to play second fiddle in life. Now it was to his lover’s wife, but before that he had lived in the long shadow cast by his father, Rick Ducane.

Chapter 6

1938

Before Rick Ducane became a big Hollywood star and household name, he’d been Lionel Driver, a struggling British actor. Frances had inherited his russet hair; he had the identical penetrating grey eyes. Lionel had looked like an aristocrat. He had his own father to thank for that, a good-looking chancer who had married and then cheerfully abandoned his mother with her bad nerves and her whining little voice.