Beauty & the Blue Angel. Maureen Child

customer. But even she didn’t believe it.

      There was just something about this man…

      “I was raised here,” he was saying.

      One of the other men spoke up, but his voice was like a buzz in her ears. All she heard, all she could see was this man watching her through the darkest, warmest eyes she’d ever seen.

      “You have family here?”

      A slow, wicked smile curved one side of his mouth, and her stomach jittered. “Yeah, I come from a big family. I’m the fifth of eight kids.”

      She dropped one hand to the mound of her belly. “Eight. That must be nice.”

      “Not when I was a kid,” he admitted. “Too many people fighting over the TV and cookies.”

      Daisy smiled at the mental image of a houseful of children, laughing, happy. Then, sadly, she let it go. It was something she’d never known, and now her baby, too, would grow up alone.

      No. Not alone. Her baby would always have her.

      Alex’s friends eased out of the booth and headed for the front of the restaurant. He watched them go, nodded, then reached into his wallet for a few bills. He handed her the money and the check and said, “Keep the change.”

      “Thanks. I mean—” He was leaving. Probably just as well, she told herself. And yet she felt oddly reluctant to let him walk away.

      “What are you doing in my restaurant?”

      Daisy spun around to watch in amazement as Salvatore Conti, her boss, came rushing out of the kitchen, flapping a pristine white dish towel like some crazed matador looking for a bull.

      Two

      “Damn it.” Alex stiffened and braced for a confrontation. He’d hoped to make it out of Antonio’s without incident. But it looked as if Sal had other plans.

      The older man hurried toward him, still shouting, mindless of the other customers or his employees’ fascinated attention. Sal Conti was sixty-two, but he was still pretty spry. About five feet eleven inches tall, he was a little shorter than Alex, and slender. His brown eyes were flashing and his cheeks were filled with furious color.

      “What are you doing here?” Sal demanded. “Spying? This is what the Barones have come to now?”

      Okay, fine. Alex hadn’t wanted a scene, but he’d be damned if he’d stand here and let his family be insulted.

      “Spying?” he retorted, standing his ground. “Are all of you Contis paranoid? Or is it just you?”

      “Paranoid?” Sal waved that towel furiously, shaking his other fist in the air. “You can talk of paranoid? After what your family’s done to mine?”

      “What we’ve done? You know damn well it was the Contis behind that gelato fiasco.”

      “Ridiculous,” Sal snapped.

      “And as long as we’re at it,” Alex added, meeting the older man’s narrowed gaze with a glare of his own, “I still think your family was behind the arson.”

      Sal huffed in a breath until his narrow chest swelled. “Slander.” He shot a quick look around at his customers and waved that towel again. “You all heard him. That’s slander. The Contis were cleared by the police. That’s a vicious lie the Barones toss around to make us look bad.”

      Alex snorted in laughter. “Believe it or not, we don’t sit around thinking about the Contis. Besides, you do a great job of looking bad all on your own.”

      “The Contis have done nothing. We don’t need to bring bad fortune onto the Barones.” He waved a hand toward the ceiling and the night sky beyond. “It’s in the stars. You’re all ill-fated.”

      Ill-fated. Bad fortune. This whole Italian curse thing had been rattling around between their two families for years, and Alex, for one, was tired of it.

      “No such thing as fate,” he said.

      “Sal…” Daisy moved toward her boss. Taking his arm, she gave it a tug, as if she was used to dealing with the older man’s flash temper. Which, Alex thought, she probably was.

      But Sal shook her off, and Daisy sighed.

      “Stay out of this, Daisy,” Alex muttered, and took her arm to pull her back beside him.

      Sal noticed the move and his features darkened with fury. “You leave her alone. She’s a nice girl and she doesn’t need a Barone in her life.”

      “You’re nuts, you know that?” Alex retorted. Hell, for that matter, so was he. He was standing here having a shouting match with a man more than twice his age. Swiping one hand across his face, he got a grip and swallowed back the rest of the anger churning inside him.

      Damn it, this was one of the reasons he’d joined the military. No one in the navy cared who his family was. No one was impressed that he came from wealth. He’d joined the service right out of college, with one thought in mind: to get away from Boston and the never-ending feud between the Barones and the Contis. It had been going on for years and showed no sign of ending. If anything, the troubles between the families had picked up recently. What with the fire and the disaster involving the new flavor gelato, the Barones were on red alert at all times and looking for Contis under every rock.

      Alex was tired of the potshots and anger. But he was also a Barone and he owed the family his loyalty, even though he thought the adults on both sides were idiots.

      Now what he had to do was find a way out of here, fast. He shot a quick glance around the restaurant. Curious stares pinned him in place, but his friends were nowhere to be seen. They’d already gone outside by the time Sal Conti had lost his mind. Alex glanced at Daisy, saw her confusion and wished he could explain all of this to her. But who’d believe him?

      In this day and age, who would expect two completely respectable, intelligent families to be so involved in a vendetta?

      “You get out of my place,” Sal told him hotly.

      “Hey, I was just going.”

      “And you don’t pay for your meal. We don’t need Barone money.”

      Disgusted, Alex said, “I’m not taking anything from the Contis.”

      “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Daisy muttered, stepping between the two men, only to be pushed gently aside by Sal. You couldn’t work at Antonio’s without learning about Sal Conti’s quick, volcanic temper. But Daisy was also well aware that the man didn’t have a violent bone in his body and that his temper disappeared as swiftly as it erupted.

      But in this case she was pretty sure both men were nuts. Standing in the middle of a nice restaurant yelling at each other about ill fortune and curses was just crazy, no matter how you looked at it.

      “You go sit down, Daisy,” the older man said absently. “Get off your feet for a while.”

      She groaned, winced a bit and whispered, “I think it’s too late for that.”

      A heartbeat or two passed before both men turned as one to look at her. At any other moment, she would have thought their twin expressions of sheer terror were funny. However, at the moment she had other things on her mind.

      Daisy felt the contraction grab hold of the middle of her back and twist her spine into a pretzel. Every square inch of her suddenly erupted with a deep, throbbing pain that seemed to blossom and grow with every passing second. This was nothing like the annoying little twinges she’d been experiencing.

      This was the kind of labor pain they wrote books about.

      “I think I need to go home. Call the midwife,” she whispered.

      “Oh boy,” Sal muttered, reaching for her left arm just as Alex grabbed her right. “You’re okay, honey,” her boss continued. Then