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GUNNER POURED THREE coffees. Black for him, black with a splash of rum for Anton and a he-didn’t-really-give-a-shit-what-princess-took-in-hers for Izzy. He couldn’t believe Marc thought this arrangement would work. He also couldn’t believe that Marc had allowed him to handcuff Izzy to the chair. He inwardly snickered with an amusement he hadn’t felt in years. After her threatening to cuff him and hand him over to the authorities, he’d turned the tables and cuffed her. The irony.
He set the mug down in front of her, but her attention was locked on the staircase.
She planned on making a run for it.
Try it, dolcissima. He chuckled internally at the Italian word for sweetheart, which was the total opposite of Izzy. He wasn’t sure what gave him more entertainment: the irony of the name or the fact that she didn’t understand the foreign word.
He set Anton’s coffee a good distance away from his stacks of paperwork, knowing how absorbed the man often became in his work sometimes incoherent to the rest of his surroundings. The mug was still within arm’s reach though. Gunner knew better than to get in the way of the old man’s caffeine addiction.
Gunner slanted his head, subtly checking on his prisoner.
She didn’t stand a chance of escape. Compared to him, she was the size of a twig. His body heated in all the places her pesky hands had caused havoc earlier by the pool. The little shoves and pushes had him scrounging up every last inch of self control not to push her back in the water. Had Marc not been standing there he would have given her a light shove...and he would’ve enjoyed it. Still, the aftermath of her touch heated his body.
He wondered what would possess her to try running and put herself through the humiliation of failing...again. She’d likely injure herself in the process. Besides, with the magnitude of files to be read, her time could be better utilized assisting with the paperwork. But spoiled Caliendo women lacked respect and their ignorance burned his core with disgust. Izzy fell directly into that category.
In comparison, the Caliendo men were tough, like Anton, and most of them untrustworthy and deadly dangerous if you ended up on their bad side. If Anton hadn’t helped Gunner break free from the ties that bound him to the Caliendos back home, he would’ve never spoken to another Caliendo for the rest of his life, much less agreed to sort through top-secret files. But, then again, without Anton, he’d be dead.
Gunner swallowed a mouthful of coffee, the hot liquid burning a blazing path down his throat. A reminder to focus on the work at hand. He picked up his pen, zeroing in on the words of treachery and deceit spewed across every page.
Resting one elbow on the table, he rubbed his forehead, inwardly rolling his eyes at the foolishness of this family’s way of thinking. It was one thing to help the locals out of their debt, or return to them whatever Robert had taken, but these documents weren’t so easy or straightforward. The family should forget these people altogether, burn the evidence and count their blessings that since Robert’s death no one had come looking to settle unpaid debts.
Anton had briefed him before arriving about Robert being as knee deep in the online gambling ring as they were back home. On top of that, from what he’d read so far, Robert had been in regular contact with the rest of his family in Italy, up until his death. If his immediate family were truly blind to his activities, they better pray he’d tied up his loose ends before his passing.
However, that could be why he and Anton were here, too: to make sure all had been settled, giving them the freedom to move on with their lives. Hopefully, they wouldn’t find any details to incriminate them or face any repercussions for Robert’s actions...but there were a lot of files ahead of them. They’d only just tasted the icing on the top of this five-tier cake, leaving lots of layers of possibility for dues unpaid. The sooner he and Anton gave Marc what he wanted from these files and got the hell out of here, the better.
Gunner shot a quick glance at Anton, unable to help the mixture of sour bitterness and relief trickling through his veins. On one hand, this deal would give him his freedom. On the other hand, being holed up in a basement with Miss Designer Perfume grated on his nerves. And, just like that, his attention turned back to Izzy.
Designer this and designer that.
Lord, he was thankful to be away from the materialistic shit that forced people to do the very things in these files: lie, scheme, scam, and even kill people.
Gunner scrubbed his hands over his face and dug the tips of his fingers into his closed eyes. He needed to stop judging and do what he’d come here to do. Inhaling deeply, he opened his eyes.
But his eyes didn’t land on the papers. They landed on Izzy instead. Her big, brown eyes were accessing the distance from her chair to the staircase, to Anton...and back to him.
If she wasn’t a girl, he would smack the stupid right out of her.
“How much is my brother paying you?” she asked.
Why wasn’t he surprised? When all else fails, pull out Daddy’s money.
“He’s not,” Gunner said.
“Someone is. Anton?” she shouted across the table. “How much is Marc paying you?”
Gunner held back the amusement creeping up inside him. She might boss her family around, but Anton was not a man who took orders, nor a man to be bothered when consumed in a project.
Through the old man’s thinning grey eyelashes, he blinked up at her. His head remained tilted in the direction of the pages from which he’d been interrupted. Gunner could see irritation raise the old man’s shoulders, tighten his jaw and narrow his eyes.
Gunner flipped an unread page, feigning attention, but couldn’t tear his eyes away from Izzy, not wanting to miss a second of Anton giving this hoity-toity dolcissima her first reality check.
“Not everything can be bought,” Anton said.
“Try me,” Izzy said, missing the “conversation over” tone in the old man’s voice. ”Everything can be bought. Set your price.”
Without breaking eye contact, Anton lifted his plaid scarf from the table. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of summer, he always wore a dress scarf. A strange accessory, but his staple non the less. “Don’t make me muzzle you, child.”
A glare shadowed Izzy’s eyes. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Says the girl handcuffed to a chair.” Anton snickered. “Do you honestly want to find out what I’m capable of, my child? In this dark basement, where the walls don’t talk and no one would hear your screams?”
Izzy’s eyes practically popped out of her sockets, but to Gunner’s suprise, he didn’t see the layers of fear expected from Anton’s clear threat. She was worse than spoiled—she lacked apprehension.
“Things are different in my world...” Anton’s stone-cold realism reverberated against the walls. “...and trust me, Miss. Caliendo, you don’t want to discover what it is I’m referring to.”
“Is that a threat?” Izzy’s snarl gave her an edge.
“Do you really have to ask?” Anton’s lips curled into a wickedly villainous sneer, as his thick, hairy eyebrows creased together. Most people would take a step back or run the opposite direction, but, of course, not Izzy. Well, technically, in her situation she couldn’t run, but maybe roll her chair back with fear.
“Such a big man when your victim is contained.” She jerked her wrist and the handfuls rattled. “Let’s try this again later, when I’m not tied up.” If she held fear inside, she certainly wasn’t letting either of the men know it.
Anton slammed his files together and tossed the scarf at Gunner. “I cannot deal with her. You wanted a Caliendo to supervise, so you deal with her.”
Gunner’s fingers lightly touched the wool scarf, not daring to point out the old man had requested a Caliendo present. He stalked off before Gunner had a chance to nod his understanding.
Stopping at one of the doors, he turned back and said, “If I were you, I would tie that scarf over her mouth, unbutton her blouse and give her good reason to panic.”
Izzy stood abruptly with a furious gasp. The short chain tugged her off-balance, but she somewhat recovered, pointing her free hand at Anton. “Listen here you miserable old son of a—”
The door slammed shut with an echoing thud. Izzy’s mouth snapped closed without finishing her sentence. The tight lines around her mouth were less than appealing and, for a brief moment, Gunner envisioned his mouth softening the area around her lips.
Izzy stared at him. “If you put that scarf anywhere near me, or undo a single button on my blouse, or even slip the material off of my shoulder, I will remove the parts of you that make you a man.”
Now would be the moment to point out she was only wearing a bathing suit cover-up, but he bit his tongue.
“And that is a threat.”
Skillfully, she eased her body back onto the chair, her eyes trained on him. Was she daring him to muzzle her? Lord knew he wanted to. She’d been nothing but a pain in the ass since sitting her tight little rear on that chair. Plus, his reaction to her irritated the shit out of him. Equal parts in his head were annoyed and turned-on at the same time.
Gunner had spent so many years away from women, it terrified him that he envisioned plopping her derrière on the edge of the table and slipping every last inch of material off her body.
Even just a minuscule thought of involving himself with another Caliendo woman threatened far worse than anything either her or Anton could say. He would never do it again.
“I can see you have fantastic concentration,” Izzy said and Gunner had to blink back to reality, finding himself still staring at her. “My breasts appreciate your recognition, but at your rate, my day just turned into a week.”
Had he been staring at her breasts? He’d been thinking about her breasts, so he wouldn’t have been shocked if his eyes traveled to the round mounds pressing against the thin material of her swimsuit.
Gunner cleared his throat. “Stop talking, or I use the scarf.”
Izzy rolled her eyes and turned away from him, defeating the purpose of her presence, but giving him the silence he needed to start back into the files.