Playing Dead. Jessie Keane

putting his arms around her.

      Annie nodded. He had wanted to tell the family at twelve weeks, when they could be sure the baby was safe, that it was truly there. And now here they were. Time up. ‘Yeah. Twelve weeks.’

      She wasn’t overjoyed at the thought. She had loved it when the baby was their secret, just hers and his alone. Now it would be public knowledge; now things would get tricky.

      More and more lately, she found herself thinking of her old London life. She missed her friends, Dolly and Ellie in particular. She hadn’t even told them about the baby yet during their occasional phone conversations. Soon, she would.

      She thought of Dolly there, running the three Carter clubs and swanning around town in a chauffeur-driven Jag. Even the thought of it made her smile. Once Dolly had been the roughest of all Aunt Celia’s in-house prostitutes; now she was like the Queen. Wistfully, Annie thought of how good it had been, having her pals around her; but this was her life now, here with Constantine. Sometimes she did get a twinge of homesickness, but she always suppressed it.

      ‘We could call him Vito after my father, if it’s a boy.’

      Constantine’s father had been killed in a hit from a rival family in Sicily. Although he rarely talked about it, she knew that he had lost his mother and brother the same way. It was said that Constantine’s hair had turned from black to white overnight with the shock of losing his mother and brother in so brutal a fashion.

      ‘What makes you think it’ll be a boy?’ she teased.

      ‘Fifty-fifty chance.’

      ‘Ha.’

      ‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, kissing her dark brown hair. ‘Okay?’

      ‘Okay.’ That was the deal. The family had to know sometime, after all. Annie expected ructions, nevertheless. She knew that – apart from Alberto – all Constantine’s grown-up kids and even his sister Gina resented her.

      Right now, Gina was babysitting Layla, Annie’s daughter by her first husband Max Carter – not to please her, but to ingratiate herself with Constantine, as always. Alberto would be collecting Layla and bringing her home in an hour or so – because he liked her and Layla.

      ‘There was something else I’d been meaning to talk to you about,’ said Constantine.

      ‘Yeah? What?’ Annie cuddled in close to him, watching him with her serious dark green eyes.

      ‘My will.’

      ‘What?’ Annie raised her head, stared anxiously at his face. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’

      He gave a smile. ‘Perfectly. But I have you to consider now. And our child.’ He leaned in and kissed her. ‘I just want you to know that it’s all in there. That this apartment’s your home for keeps, and the Holland Park place in London . . .’

      ‘Stop,’ she said, shaking her head, feeling a nervous shudder, as if someone was walking over her grave. She didn’t want to talk about this.

      ‘. . . and if anything happens to me, then my forty-nine per cent share of the Times Square club passes in its entirety to you . . .’

      ‘Stop it,’ she said, and quickly silenced him with a kiss. His words were raising memories, fearful memories – because once there had been another man she loved, and she had lost him. ‘Just stop it right there,’ she murmured against his lips.

      ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Stopping.’ He kissed her deeper, harder.

      Annie clung to him. What was he doing, talking about wills? She didn’t want to hear it.

      When he made the necessary calls to the family, she decided she didn’t want to hear those, either. She left the room.

      Chapter 2

      It was mid-afternoon and Lucco Barolli was lying in the super-king-sized bed in his chic, ultra-modern Upper East Side condo with its red-lacquered walls and black Oriental furnishings when he took the call from his father. He put the phone down and lay there, staring into space.

      ‘Wassup, sweetie?’ asked Sophie, her lovely nakedness tangled up in the red silk sheets after their marathon love-making session.

      Lucco stared absently at her. Sophie was as fair as he was dark. Unlike his father, Lucco truly looked Sicilian, with straight black hair, nearly black deep-set eyes and olive skin as fine as any woman’s.

      ‘My father’s puttana of a new wife is expecting a child,’ he said.

      ‘Oh!’ The girl propped herself up on her elbow, her delectable tits swinging in his face. She was an English model and beautiful – he could afford the best and Sophie Thomson was renowned. He had pulled strings, got her the plum jobs using his connections. Nobody said no to a caporegime of the family. Now, with her tall athletic body and the face of an insatiable fallen angel, she could command ridiculous fees worldwide.

      ‘Well that’s good news.’ She smiled engagingly. What the fuck’s a puttana? she wondered. ‘You’ll have a new brother or sister.’

      Lucco looked at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses.

      ‘The child will not be my brother or sister,’ he said coldly.

      ‘But . . . the kid’ll be your father’s, like you,’ she said.

      Lucco suddenly sprang up and struck her hard across the face. Sophie fell back amid the tangled sheets. Lucco pinned her down there. He glared into her shocked eyes from inches away.

      ‘The child is not my brother or sister,’ he roared.

      ‘All right, okay,’ said Sophie hurriedly, tears of pain spilling out from her eyes. He’d slapped her once or twice before, just love play, but this time he was frightening her. She knew all about his connections, she knew he’d used them to help her up the ladder of fame, and she liked that. Or at least, she had. But now . . . her face hurt from the blow. She hoped he hadn’t marked her. She had work tomorrow.

      ‘You understand me? This kid is nothing to do with me.’

      ‘Yeah. Got it,’ said Sophie, and suddenly he released her and lay back.

      She looked at him warily. She reviewed all that she had been about to say, and decided against saying any of it. Silently, she watched him. He had a big erection jutting up from between his thighs; hitting her always seemed to turn him on. She adored Lucco, but she was coming to realize – not to put too fine a point on it – that he was a bit of a shit.

      Lucco saw her looking, and glanced down his impressive body. ‘Mount me,’ he ordered.

      Would he hit her again if she refused? Sophie decided not to risk it.

      Lucco lay back, sighing restlessly as Sophie straddled him and guided him smoothly inside her.

      Everything he had feared since the day Annie Carter had come into his father’s life was coming to fruition. He tried to consider it all logically, furious though it made him feel. Constantine was forty-seven while his new English wife was twenty-seven – twenty years his junior.

      The Carter woman – Lucco couldn’t bear to think of her any other way – was closer in age to him, his brother Alberto and his sister Cara than to their father. It was obscene. And now the worst had happened. Marrying the whore had been bad enough, but now his father had impregnated her; there would be a baby.

      Why hadn’t his father just had her if he wanted to – she was just a cheap English gold-digger after all; she’d have been grateful to receive the attentions of a man like him. He didn’t have to go and marry her.

      Lucco thought of Annie, his father’s new wife. Her glossy, cocoa-brown hair, her dark green eyes, her intriguing body, always discreetly hidden, but . . . oh yes, guessed at by Lucco. He didn’t doubt that she was hot between the sheets, to have snared his father so easily.