Читать книгу Playing Dead - Jessie Keane - Страница 9

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.