Unraveled (Guzzi Duet Book 1)(66)

He offered her a tentative smile that Cara returned. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not, Cara. I am sorry.”

She nodded quickly. “Thank you.”

“How are you?” he asked, posing the question with a careful tone. “Don’t feel like you have to tell me, if you don’t want to. You certainly don’t owe me anything, but in a way, I feel like I might know you. She talked about you often, even though we tried to be casual and keep the personal shit out of it all.”

“She’s doing well,” came a deep voice from behind Frankie.

Cara’s gaze flew to Gian, who had clearly come looking for her, and she smiled a bit wider. “I am. I’m doing a lot better now.”

Frankie murmured something fast in Italian to Gian, who shrugged in response, as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

“All is fine,” he assured Frankie. “As long as she says so.”

“It is,” Cara said. “Thank you again, Frankie.”

Gian side-stepped the man as Frankie headed down the hall toward the men’s bathroom. “I need to make a call, Cara. Can you find your way back to the table without running into someone else?”

She laughed at his teasing. “I’m sure I can.”

“All right, get going. The food is waiting.”

He dropped a kiss to her forehead before he headed down the hallway, bypassing the bathrooms altogether and exiting through a back door into what looked like an alleyway.

Cara wasn’t all that interested in sharing a table with her cousin and Stephan while Gian was gone, but she sat back down with a smile and surveyed the pasta and salad dish that had been set out for her.

“What the hell took so long?” Constantino asked.

“And where’s Gian?” Stephan added.

“I had a conversation with someone,” Cara replied, “and Gian is making a phone call.”

“Who?”

Cara glanced at her cousin. “Pardon?”

“Who were you talking to?”

Jesus.

Why were people so nosy?

“I ran into Frankie coming out of the back,” she said, offering little else. Constantino should know enough to know who Frankie was—or had been—to Lea.

Constantino made a noise that sounded unpleasant under his breath.

Stephan shot his friend a look. “Relax, man.”

“These donnas make it fucking hard,” Constantino muttered. “First the one, now the other. It’s a damn shame, like they don’t even care how they look or how they’re making the rest of us look.”

“I beg your pardon?” Cara asked sharply.

Constantino paid her no mind, still going on to Stephan in his way. “You know what I mean, Stephan. You’re not quiet about what you do running around with that girl of yours, but at least Lea had the fucking decency to keep out of sight when she was with Frankie, for the most part. This isn’t any different, no matter what anybody says.”

“Constantino,” Cara snapped.

Her cousin’s gaze cut to hers. “What?”

She wasn’t entirely sure what Constantino was going on about, but she certainly didn’t fucking like it. She definitely wasn’t going to sit back and let him compare her relationship with Gian to the one Lea had been involved with, where Frankie was concerned. She didn’t see how the two could possibly compare. It was like apples and oranges.

“If you have something to say to me, then say it,” she told her cousin. “But keep in mind, your opinion of me, my business, and what or who I choose to do are none of your fucking concern.”

Constantino rolled his eyes. “That’s exactly the fucking problem. You don’t care that everyone else is looking at what you’re doing, and seeing it for exactly what it is, Cara. Playing a man’s whore, nothing else. It’s shameful.”

Cara felt like he had slapped her. “Why am I playing any man’s whore? Because I’m not like every other principessa della mafia, getting married the first chance I can, and making sure every little fucking thing I do is approved by a man in my family? Is that why? You know what, don’t bother answering.”

She stood from the table, already done and wanting to get the hell out of there. She could take a fucking cab home, for all she cared. She wouldn’t, however, be sitting there for another second longer.

“Go fuck yourself,” she told Constantino before leaving.





The first thing Gian noticed when he returned to the table was that Cara was absent. Right off the bat, that put him on edge. Constantino ate his food with heavy forkfuls, as though he didn’t have a problem, while Stephan picked at his plate and chatted away on his cell phone.

“Where’s Cara?” Gian asked.

He didn’t even bother to sit down.

Constantino shrugged. “She left.”

“Say that again.”

It didn’t even come out as a question.

His friend let out a heavy sigh, dropping his fork to his plate with a loud clatter. “I said, she left, Gian.”

Gian reached for the cell phone in his suit jacket, but hesitated before pulling it out. “And why the hell would she leave, exactly?”

Constantino made a dismissive noise under his breath, going back to his meal. “She didn’t like what she was told, I suppose.”