Then Came You (The Gamblers #1)(51)

Giuseppe reached out and pushed Lily’s hood back, revealing her resolute face. “Buona sera,” he said in his rich voice, his fingertip extending to stroke her cheek. She knocked his hand away, making him chuckle. “Ah, still with the claws, my darling cat. I come for the money, cara. You come for news of Nicoletta. Now give to me, and I do the same.”

“Not anymore.” Lily drew in a trembling breath. “You oily bastard. Why should I give you more money when I don’t even know if she’s alive?”

“I promise you, she is safe, ’appy—”

“How can she be happy with no mother?”

“Such a beautiful little girl we ’ave, Lily. With the smile all the time, and the pretty ’air…” He touched his own ebony curls. “Pretty like mine. She call me Papà. Sometime she ask me where is Mama.”

That broke her as nothing else could. Lily stared at him without blinking. She swallowed against a lump of pain, and tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m her mother,” she said wretchedly. “She needs me, and I want her back, Giuseppe. You know she belongs with me!”

He regarded her with a faintly pitying smile. “Maybe I return Nicoletta before now, bella, but you make too many times mistake. You have men looking, asking question in the city. You do tricks on me, ’ave them follow me after we meet. You make me angry. Now I think for more years I keep Nicoletta.”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about that,” Lily cried. It was a lie, of course. She was well aware that Derek had men searching for Nicole. Derek had informants in every part of the city, including porters, clerks, dealers, whores, butchers, and pawnbrokers. Over the past year he had summoned Lily four different times to take a look at dark-haired girls matching Nicole’s description. None of them were her daughter. She couldn’t afford to take them in. What Derek did with them afterward, she didn’t ask and had no desire to know.

She looked at Guiseppe with hate-filled eyes. “I’ve given you a fortune,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t have anything left. Have you heard the expression ‘blood from a turnip,’ Guiseppe? It means I can’t give you any more, because I don’t have it!”

“Then you look to find more,” came his soft reply. “Or from somewhere I take the money—there is many men asking to buy a pretty girl as Nicoletta.”

“What?” Lily put a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry of agony. “How could you do that to your own child? You wouldn’t sell her like that—it would kill her—and me—oh, God, you haven’t already, have you?”

“Not yet. But I come close maybe, cara.” He held out his empty palm. “You pay the money now.”

“How long will this go on?” she whispered. “When is it going to be enough?”

He ignored the question and shoved his open hand toward her. “Now.”

Tears slid down her face. “I don’t have it.”

“I give you three days, Lily. You come to bring five thousand pound…or Nicoletta is gone forever.”

She lowered her head, listening to the sound of his retreating footsteps, the raucous noise of Covent Garden, the soft nicker of her horse. She shook with wild desperation—it took all her strength to keep it inside. Money. Her accounts had never been so depleted. This past month she hadn’t turned her usual profit at Craven’s. Well, her luck would have to change, and fast. She’d have to play deep. If she couldn’t win five thousand in three days…God, what would she do?

She could ask Derek for a loan…No. She’d made that mistake once before, a year and a half ago. She’d thought that with his stupendous fortune, he wouldn’t mind loaning her a thousand or two, especially at her promise to return it with interest. To her surprise, Derek had turned coldly cruel, and made her swear she’d never ask him for money again. It had taken weeks to get back in his good graces. Lily didn’t understand why he had been so angry. It wasn’t as if he were a miserly man—just the opposite. He was generous in countless ways—giving her presents, the use of his vast properties, allowing her to pilfer from his kitchens and liquor supply, helping her search for Nicole…but he’d never given her a farthing. Now she knew better than to ask.

She considered some of the rich old men she knew, men with whom she had gambled and flirted and maintained friendships with. Lord Harrington, she thought numbly, with his fat belly and cheerful red face and limp powdered wigs. Or Arthur Longman, a respected barrister. His face was rather unattractive—large nose, no chin, sagging cheeks—but his eyes were kind, and he was an honorable man. Both of them had hinted in gentlemanly ways about their attraction to her. She could accept one of them as a protector. There was no doubt she would be well treated and generously provided for. But it would change her life forever. Certain doors that were yet open to her would be closed for good. She would become an expensive whore—and that was only if she were lucky. If her experience with Giuseppe was anything to judge by, she might prove so unsatisfactory in bed that no one would want to keep her.

Lily went to the horse and rested her forehead on its warm, dusty neck. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. Tired and cynical. She had so little reason to hope for Nicole’s return. Her life had become nothing but endless grubbing for money. She should never have wasted so much time with this business about Penny, Zach, and Alex Raiford. It may have cost her Nicole. But if not for the distraction of the past week, she thought she might have lost her sanity.