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Las Vegas

‘Angela Silvers! Just as pretty as I remember, hey, Don?’

Carmine Zenetti, casino boss and hotel magnate extraordinaire, greeted them in his palatial office above the Parisian. Angela remembered him from her childhood—a squat, stout man with a black monobrow and hands like bear paws. She knew her father hated being called Don. Her father knew she hated every minute of being here.

‘No need to remind me,’ Donald said amiably, as he accepted a cognac and they were encouraged to sit. The panorama looked out on the dazzling Strip, where in the spring sunshine tourists milled amid the peaks and spires of the replica city. Giant billboards screamed news of the hottest show in town while glittering hotels ushered through the next bout of spenders. The air was charged with the sharp tang of money.

Angela refused her drink. She had no appetite. Since her father’s revelation in Boston, she had barely let a thing pass her lips.

‘I gotta say, I’m glad you finally came around.’ Carmine smiled fatly. ‘All these years there I was thinkin’ we were meant to be, but you had me wondering there for a time …’ Carmine waggled a heavily jewelled finger at her father, one of a handful of people in the world who was permitted to do so, and chuckled. ‘But now you see it makes the best kind of sense. Zenetti and Silvers, united for the future.’

Angela clenched her fists in her lap.

‘But hey,’ went on Carmine, eagerly rubbing his palms, ‘what are we waiting for? I know the guy you’ve really come to see.’

Another, younger, man stepped into the room.

‘Meet Dino, my eldest.’ Carmine clapped him on the back. ‘Dino, you remember Don Silvers … and this, of course, is the gorgeous Angela.’

There was a long silence.

Dino was like something out of a catalogue—coffee hair, twinkling eyes, and a stacked body that was suited to perfection. He was an ad for mob fashion, gold rings glinting on his fingers, collar crisp, jacket pressed. Angela guessed he was in his thirties, indisputably handsome but so far from her type that even in a radically different context she could never have considered him a match.

It didn’t matter who Dino Zenetti was. He wasn’t Noah.

Her heart sank. How am I going to tell him?

She played out her defence, each claim more ridiculous than the last.

We can still see each other; it won’t change a thing. Dino means nothing to me. I’m doing it for the business, a transaction, no emotions, I swear …

Even Noah Lawson’s boundless patience wouldn’t stretch that far.

‘Aren’t you kids gonna say hello?’ Carmine boomed, breaking the tension with a guffaw. ‘I tell ya, Donnie, this is like being back in the sixth grade!’

‘Good to meet you,’ said Dino, in a gravelly husk. He put out his hand. Angela shook it. She said nothing. Every instinct recoiled. It wasn’t too late, she could still back out of this; she could still change her mind.

‘I guess you two’re gonna want to get t’know each other, huh?’ Carmine thrust a glass into his son’s hand and supplied a wink. Their conspiracy filled her with horror. She wanted to run, never stop and never look back, until she reached his arms.

If only that was all there was to it …

‘I want you to listen carefully,’ her father had said that night in his office, ‘for if you choose to accept, our empire is yours. Everything. You take over.’

The words Angela had waited her whole life to hear.

Her father’s confidence, his respect, his finally recognising what she was capable of, a bond between them of trust and belief, nothing to do with her brothers.

But she could never have guessed at what cost.

‘The business is dying,’ Donald had explained. ‘I’ve been shielding you from it. I haven’t told Orlando, or Luca, or any of the board. I haven’t even told your mother. I’m telling you, Angela, because you’re the one I am counting on to help. We’re in bad shape. Real bad shape.’ He had wiped a hand across his face and she’d heard him swallow, a dry, sickening sound, coarse with regret. ‘Twelve months ago I put money into a sideline I believed was a dead cert. I was wrong.’

Donald Silvers was never wrong. He had made a fortune on those grounds.

‘But—’

‘Let me finish. That’s only the start.’

And then he had confessed the awful truth.

Her father had been diagnosed weeks ago. The doctors had given him mere months to live. Isabella had been protected from that blow as well.

‘No,’ Angela had spoken with someone else’s voice, tinny and strange in an upturned world, ‘you won’t,’ she fumbled for sense, ‘you can’t—’

‘I am.’

‘They’re wrong. You’ll get through it—’

‘The Zenettis can pull us out,’ said Donald, matter-of-fact, no time for weakness. ‘They’re our last hope. They can give us back our future. Your future, Angela, should you decide to commit.’

Her chest tightened. ‘Commit to what?’

He had laid it out in basic terms. The proposed marriage to Dino, the combined fortunes bailing them out of debt, the mutual interests to both parties as they embarked on a super-empire merging the last word in leisure and retail.

The Silvers would take a cut, thirty per cent against the Zenettis’ seventy, but the brand would survive. Given time, it might even grow.

And she would be there to rebuild it. Her business. Her chance.

Her chance.

Carmine Zenetti wanted to make it official, cement the allegiance via a union with his son. Angela was the key. Donald hadn’t been in a position to negotiate.

Her heart in exchange for her family—not just the dying wish of her father but her own wish, too: to step out from the wings and inherit the trophy.

She couldn’t. She must. She wouldn’t. She had to …

‘Wanna take a walk?’

Dino lifted an eyebrow. Everything about him was suggestive. His knuckles were peppered with hair and he wore a signet on his pinkie. His nails were clean, his hands smooth, as if he had done nothing more in his life than to change a light bulb.

Angela stood. She could feel her father’s gaze drilling into her but she could not return it. She could not look at him. Any other disclosure she would have welcomed, but not this. Never this. She was running on autopilot, ignoring Noah’s attempts to make contact, cancelling his calls for fear she would lose control as soon as she heard his voice, trying to find some space while she figured out what on earth she was going to do. Every way she looked at it, there was an impossible penalty to pay. Refusing her father was unthinkable.

So was sacrificing Noah.

Selfish as it was, it came to this: Angela did want the title. She did want the job. She did want to claim what was hers because she had earned it.

‘C’mon,’ encouraged Dino. ‘Let me give you a tour of our little hotel,’ he put the emphasis on our, ‘see if you like it.’

Angela followed. She could hear Carmine preparing to pop the champagne, the murmur of approval that passed between him and her father. She felt trapped in a nineteenth-century drawing room; engaged to be married against every belief her heart held true. Her head told her different. Her head told her this was a done deal.

Perhaps Noah would understand. Perhaps he would let her explain and then he would see that this was the only way. They could still be together—they were already forced to meet in secret, what real difference would it make?

One promise she could make him utterly: that she would never be with Dino Zenetti in the proper way. Their partnership was for show; that was all.

Noah would understand. She would make him.

Dino led the way. It reminded Angela of a walk she had taken a long time ago.

A boy she had fallen for, and nine years later still unable to set him free.

Boston 2005

‘ Noah, oh yes, right there, that’s it! ’

Noah Lawson obliged, driving deep into the woman who was lying spread-eagled across her expensively upholstered sunlounger. He was sixteen, nailing his boss’s wife in the pool house he was meant to be cleaning, and what’s more he was getting paid for it. Getting paid for getting laid … What boy wouldn’t?

Mrs Mason wasn’t bad either, tall and buxom with the greatest pair of tits this side of Vermont. Noah dipped his head to them, licking and grazing as she arched beneath him, grabbing tufts of his corn-blond hair and raking her scarlet manicure down his back. He tucked one hand behind her knee, pushing his cock harder and harder until she screamed. Mrs Mason’s lipstick was smudged, her mouth parted in ecstasy.

‘You make me so hot,’ she moaned. ‘Where’d you learn how to do this stuff?’

As if to reinforce the point, Noah drew out, hovering his dick millimetres from Mrs Mason’s sweet spot. She groaned, thrashing her head from side to side.

‘Now! Take me now!’

He rested his thumb on her swollen clitoris, wondering when Mr Mason with his bald head and stuffy suits and perspiring brow had last done this, and began to tease, dipping his thumb inside her, drawing out her wetness.

‘Noah! Please! Take me!’ She was delirious, her hands reaching up to maul his chest before sliding down to clasp his proud, rock-solid erection. Noah rode through her fingers, his balls ready to burst. Mrs Mason’s pussy was pink and glistening, her dark bush trimmed in anticipation of their weekly meetings.

Noah Lawson looked older than sixteen. Mrs Mason would have a heart attack if she knew. Truth was, he had bedded dozens of women and none of them had a clue. He had lost his virginity to a friend’s older sister when he was twelve, a quick and strange fumble in the back seat of a vintage Cadillac, where he had panicked and pulled out and spunked all over her hand. He had come a long way since then.

‘You asked for it,’ he breathed, and in a single stroke he plunged into her, collapsing onto her tits. Mrs Mason was yelping, rocking so hard beneath him that he had to grab her wrists to hold her down and she was pulsing and writhing and biting his neck and only then did he let himself come, a series of white-hot electric spasms.

Noah rolled off, panting hard, his bronzed stomach rising and falling. He gazed up at the whirring ceiling fan. Mr Mason would be back soon.

‘I gotta split.’

‘Don’t—’ She sat up, starry-eyed. ‘When can I see you again?’

‘Soon.’

‘When?’

‘Keep this place dirty.’ He grinned. ‘Gives me more to do.’

As he exited the Masons’ estate, summer sun shining on his back, it was panning out like any ordinary Friday: a couple hours at the Masons’ and then on to Hank’s Hardware for the rest of the day. Noah had quit school the year before—more accurately, he’d been expelled—and there was no one at home who gave enough of a shit to place him elsewhere: his mom was a waster and his dad had walked out on them years ago. Life was down to him. There was only one way to escape this neighbourhood and that was with a shedload of cash in his back pocket.

Soon as he could, he was getting as far from this town as possible.

He grabbed a hot dog, ravenous after the morning’s exertions. Mrs Mason had slipped him an extra fifty bucks, which he could have taken offence at but didn’t. There was enough money floating about this joint and since he hadn’t seen a dime of it since the day he was born, it was high time he cut a piece. The Lawsons were the embarrassment of Bourton. Everyone knew they had nothing. Everyone knew his mom was a bum and his dad had drunk himself to death in a ditch somewhere.

Everyone knew Noah had gone the way they’d expected him to, bailing on school and drifting the streets: a loser, a troublemaker, a failure, a lost cause …

And yeah, maybe they were right. Maybe all he’d end up doing with his life was fucking married women in their pool houses while their husbands went out to work. He’d be hauling crates for Hank the rest of his days, earning six dollars an hour and trying to remember the name of the last girl he’d slept with.

Noah lost his appetite for the hot dog and tossed it in the trash.

A van pulled up outside Hank’s and began unloading a delivery. Noah grabbed a couple of crates and headed through the door, colliding almost instantly with the most incredible-looking girl he had ever seen in his life.

The crates went smashing to the floor.

‘I’m sorry!’ The girl dropped to her knees, attempting to gather the mess.

‘Don’t , ’ he knelt, ‘it’s glass.’

‘Ow!’

A prickle of blood flowered on her index finger. She sucked it.

For the first time in all his sixteen years, Noah Lawson was tongue-tied. The girl looked up at him, her eyes a deeper shade of green than he had known existed. Her skin was pale except for a flash of colour at the cheekbones.

‘I’m Noah,’ he blurted.

She took the finger from her mouth and inspected it. ‘It’s just a graze.’

‘It was my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

I was looking at you, he thought. Why haven’t I been looking at you for every second of every minute of every hour of my life?

‘Angela,’ she said, with a tentative smile. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Me too.’

She stood. He joined her. They couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

‘Can I walk you home?’ he asked.

‘Aren’t you meant to be working?’

‘I can come back.’ He didn’t care. ‘Let me.’

That shy smile again. ‘OK.’

The exit chimed just as Hank, the store’s owner, came through.

‘What the hell’s just happened out here—?’

But the door was already swinging shut behind them.

Noah Lawson did walk Angela home, that day and the whole summer after. He could have walked her to the ends of the earth and back, and still never tired. He knew from that very first day that he would never be able to share her with anyone.