Rising Fire. William W. Johnstone

make no promises. The day of reckoning may be postponed, but the debt must still be settled. You know this, Malatesta. And the next time . . . there will be no woman for you to hide behind.”

      Giovanni growled and started to move forward, but he stopped himself and with a visible effort controlled his rage. “Go,” he told the men. “Run away like the craven dogs you are.”

      For a second, Denny thought the insult was going to be more than the men could stand. She was ready to pull the trigger if she needed to. She didn’t figure she could gun down all four of the men before any of them reached her, especially with the small-caliber weapon. If her father had been here with a Colt .45 . . . with Smoke Jensen’s deadly speed and accuracy . . .

      But Smoke wasn’t here, she reminded herself again. She was the lone Jensen, so it was up to her to uphold the family name. The Jensen brand was on her, just like it was on all those cattle roaming the lushly grassed meadows of the Sugarloaf.

      Without saying anything else, the leader turned and motioned for the men with him to go back up the steps. He trailed them, pausing at the top to cast one last hostile look over his shoulder at the man and woman on the landing. Then he was gone like the others, vanishing into the shadows.

      “Denise, I am so sorry. This . . . this is terrible—” Giovanni began.

      Denny lowered the gun slightly but didn’t put it away. “Maybe you should see if you can attract the attention of another gondolier. I don’t think I want to go back up there, and we need to get somewhere we can talk.”

      CHAPTER 9

      “I never meant for my difficulty to involve you, cara mia,” Giovanni said as he poured wine from a bottle into glasses on the sideboard in his apartment. “A signorina as beautiful as yourself should never have to trouble herself over something as ugly and sordid as gambling debts.”

      “That’s what you owe to this man Tomasi?” Denny asked. “Gambling debts?”

      “Salvatore Tomasi makes a business of buying debts from gambling houses and individuals alike. I had a run of terrible luck.” Giovanni shrugged. “I would have recouped my losses sooner or later, but Tomasi is not a patient man. He demands payment now.”

      “And you don’t have the money,” Denny guessed. It wasn’t really a question.

      “I have experienced . . . financial reverses. Much as it pains me to admit it, I lack the funds to satisfy Tomasi’s demands.”

      “Can’t you get your family in Sicily to advance some money to you?”

      Giovanni laughed, but there was no humor in the sound.

      “I am, what do you call it, the black sheep of the Malatesta family. My family cannot strip me of my title, but neither are they inclined to share their riches with me. I have my own money, of course, but much of it is tied up in investments and is not actually available to me at present.”

      “You could borrow on it,” Denny suggested.

      “A well I have gone to before, on occasion, to live in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed,” Giovanni said with a slight grimace. “Not a viable alternative at the moment, unfortunately.”

      She finally took the glass of wine he held out to her and downed a healthy swallow. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. “How much do you need to get Tomasi to leave you alone?”

      “No! Take money from a woman, from my beloved? No, I say, a thousand times no!”

      With anybody else, she might have thought he was being too dramatic. But such flamboyance was just who Giovanni Malatesta was, Denny told herself.

      “There’s nothing wrong with letting someone who cares about you help you out of a problem,” she argued. “My grandparents are wealthy, and my father’s ranch is one of the biggest and most lucrative in Colorado. All I need to do is send a few telegrams, and I can have the money wired to a bank here in Venice. Just give me the details of where it should go and how much you need, and we can take care of this first thing in the morning.”

      Stubbornly, Giovanni shook his head and said, “I cannot do this. Bad enough that I had to hide behind your skirts . . . and your gun . . . when Tomasi’s men cornered us.”

      “They were threatening me, too, you know,” she reminded him. “And I’m sure they’ll continue to do so, now that they know I’m someone important to you. Men like that are no different than the outlaws my father has dealt with back home. They’ll use any leverage they have to get what they want.”

      “This is true,” Giovanni admitted. “Salvatore Tomasi and the men who work for him are ruthless.”

      “So it’s in my interest to help you with this, too,” Denny said. “Please, Giovanni, let me help. Tell me how much you need.”

      For a long moment, he stood there, glaring, then he abruptly lifted his glass and drank down all the wine in it.

      “All right. I don’t like it. This still seems wrong. But I will pay you back, every bit.” He named an amount that sounded enormous to Denny and must have seen the look of surprise on her face, because he added hastily, “That is in lire. In American money, a bit more than ten thousand of your dollars.”

      That was still an awful lot of money, Denny thought, especially to have lost it gambling. But she said, “I can get that much. My grandparents may not be happy about it, but when I tell them it’s important, they’ll do it.”

      “They are in London?”

      “They have an estate not far from there where they spend time every year, but their home is in America, like mine.” She had explained to him about Louis’s medical condition and why they had spent so much time in Europe, as well as mentioning that she considered herself an American and that her true home was in Colorado, where her parents lived. “Right now they’re in Boston, but I’ll wire their bank in London as well as sending them a telegram directly. It may take a few days to arrange everything, but you’ll get the money to settle your debt with Tomasi. Will he wait that long?”

      “Sì, I believe so, once he knows the funds will be forthcoming.” Giovanni put his hands on her shoulders. “You must promise me that once the debt between the two of us is settled, we will never speak of this matter again. It is too humiliating to contemplate.”

      Denny smiled. “There’s no need for you to feel like that, Giovanni. I’m glad to help . . . when it’s someone I care deeply about.”

      A moment later, they were wrapped up in each other’s arms again, and Denny didn’t think anymore about gambling debts.

      For a while, anyway.

      * * *

      Louis was opposed to the idea when she told him about it, but Denny expected that. And she didn’t really blame him, either. He didn’t know Giovanni as well as she did. She didn’t believe he would ever allow himself to get tangled up in such a situation again.

      She spent all the next day burning up the telegraph wires between Venice, London, and Boston, and by the time she was finished, she had overcome her grandparents’ reluctance to wire the money to the bank in Venice. She met Giovanni in the Hotel Metropole’s lounge that evening to give him the good news.

      “The money will be in your account sometime tomorrow,” she told him over glasses of wine. “I’d like to know one thing, Giovanni.”

      “Ask me anything, my dear,” he said. “My life, like my heart, is completely open to you.”

      “Those men who attacked us that night on the Bridge of Roses . . . were they working for Tomasi?”

      He shook his head. “No, they were thieves, plain and simple, just as we thought at the time.”

      “You’re sure?”

      “Of course. I’m not acquainted with all of Tomasi’s