Someone to Watch Over Me

“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.