An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,119

quickly. "That's what made me so mad. He was hurting you without good reason."

Hurting Bianca. And that was what had bothered her father, Rachele figured out. With her mother gone, her father had found himself another woman to love. Bianca Caruso. Rachele had always suspected it was more than mere concern he felt for his best friend's widow.

He'd loved her sixteen years ago.

Perhaps he loved her still. She wondered if he realized.

"I talked to him about it that night," her father said. "I told him he shouldn't be so foolish. I told him maybe you'd get angry and fed up enough to file for divorce and take the girls away from him."

"What he'd say to that?" Tea asked. She was still standing near Johnny, but she'd put a bigger distance between them and was hugging herself.

"He got angry. If there was one thing that Sal cared about more than a good time, it was you three little girls. When I said your mother might take you away from him, he went a little crazy. He swore at me, and when I said it again, he came after me."

Rachele's father shifted his gaze to Bianca and Cosimo. "You know what a hothead he was. I was only trying to defend myself. I was standing by the wheelbarrow, stirring the cement with a hoe, when he went for me. I held the hoe across my body." He pantomimed the scene, showing how he gripped the handle of the tool chest-high.

"Sal ran into it and then stumbled back. He tripped over the rocks I had piled up and he fell, his head slamming against the section of the ledge I'd just finished. He was gone. It only took a few seconds for the whole thing to happen. But he died the instant his head hit. The instant. I swear that on Maria's grave."

"But why didn't you call an ambulance - or at least the police?" Tea asked.

Rachele's father blinked. "I couldn't risk it. What if they didn't believe me? Who would take care of my little girl? She didn't have a mother, so how could I possibly put her in a position of losing her father too?"

What? Had Rachele heard right? He'd hidden the accident because of her?

Rachele felt the freaky numbness that had overtaken her begin to wear off, pins and needles pricking her skin and then her heart. Perhaps her father had confronted Salvatore Caruso because he'd loved Bianca, but afterward he'd kept quiet about what happened out of his concern for Rachele.

Oh, Papa.

"So you buried him here, Beppe," Cosimo said. "And his car?"

"I drove it home and put it in my garage. A few days later, I took it out to a desert wash I know about and torched it."

"So that's what happened to the damned Loanshark book," Eve murmured. "Up in flames."

"I felt sick when someone else got the blame," Rachele's father went on, looking over at Johnny. "But I didn't know he had a son. Giovanni Martelli's murder only made me more determined to keep my mouth shut."

There was a long moment of stunned quiet.

"I'm sorry," Beppo said again, and his shoulders bowed as he aged before Rachele's eyes. "I'm so very sorry."

It was Joey who next found her voice. "What now?"

"Now..." Cosimo Caruso inhaled a long breath. Then he looked around the small group. "Now I put some men to stand guard down here and we go back to the party. We've been away too long already."

"Back to the party?" Joey started to protest. "But - "

The old man cut her off by holding up his hand. "We'll deal with this tomorrow. Tonight, there's too much at stake. We need to show happy faces. Happy, strong, united faces. Avete capita? Do you understand?"

Rachele shivered at the steel beneath the words. This was the Mafia don in control, the CEO of crime who had ruled California for decades. Tonight they had a reprieve, some time for these new facts to sink in. But tomorrow, her father's fate would be in the mob boss's hands.

Rachele moved to her father and slipped her arm through his. He didn't pull away this time. "Papa, let me drive you home now."

He let her take the lead. When she stopped in front of Cosimo Caruso, her father seemed not to notice. "He's a good man, Mr. Caruso," Rachele said, remembering her promise to her mother and pinning the old man with her gaze. Her heart pounded and the spit in her mouth dried