Star-Crossed Sweethearts / Secret Prince, Instant Daddy!. Jackie Braun

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СКАЧАТЬ was as at home roping steer as Angelo was snapping up grounders in a major league ballpark. God knew their chaotic childhood hadn’t lent itself to either profession. For that matter, it was amazing either of them had amounted to much of anything.

      “So, is your shoulder as bad as the sportscasters are saying?” Alex wanted to know.

      Angelo made a dismissive sound. “You know how those vultures are. They’re milking the story to boost their sagging ratings.”

      His brother wasn’t fooled. “You won’t be back in uniform this season.”

      “No.”

      “And next year?”

      “Sure. After surgery and some rehab I’ll be as good as new.” Angelo’s shoulder throbbed, seemingly in contradiction. He silenced it with a gulp of beer and settled back into the leather recliner. “I’m too damned young to retire.”

      It was a lie and they both knew it. Thirty-eight wasn’t old by most standards, but in baseball it was damned near ancient. Before the injury, Angelo had remained a powerhouse, but his legs weren’t what they used to be. Things like that didn’t escape the notice of the guys in the dugout, much less the guys in management. This injury didn’t help. It was his second serious one in three years, and pulled tendons had taken him out for several games in June. No ball club wanted to pay top dollar for a player who’d ride the pine. Even his agent was getting antsy that when Angelo’s multimillion-dollar contract expired in a couple months the team would cut him loose.

      “Well, it sounds like you’ll have some time on your hands.”

      “Yeah.” He studied the label on his beer and scraped at the edge with his thumbnail. “Maybe I’ll mosey on down to Texas and pay you a visit. I could get better acquainted with your bride-to-be and her little girl.”

      It still came as a surprise that the pretty single mom had knocked his brooding brother off his feet when she’d shown up at the ranch with her disabled daughter a few months earlier. Alex wasn’t the sort to fall fast or hard. Yet he’d done both.

      “I’d like that.” Alex paused then. “But what I’d like even more is for you to use the time to go to Italy.”

      Angelo closed his eyes. “Not this again,” he muttered after an oath.

      For weeks his twin had been urging on him to reconnect with their estranged father and meet the rest of the Casali clan in Monta Correnti, the place of their birth.

      “Go and make your peace. You won’t regret it,” Alex said.

      “I have no peace to make. I’m fine with things just the way they are.”

      “Fine? You’re ticked off, Angelo.”

      “That too,” he agreed after a long pull on his beer. “Where were they when we were stealing to eat or getting dumped into yet another foster home? Where was Luca?” he demanded, referring to their father. “No one was inviting us to Italy to visit then.”

      The way he saw it, the old man had washed his hands of his sons when he had sent them to Boston to live with their American mother, who was more suited to partying than parenting. They’d been three years old then. By the time the twins were fourteen, Cindy had drunk herself to death and the boys had been made wards of the state. Not long after, they’d made their way to New York. His skin still crawled when he thought about how close they’d come to winding up statistics.

      “They didn’t know, Angelo. None of them, including Luca, knew that Mom was gone or that we were in and out of the foster system.”

      “They didn’t know because they didn’t care enough to find out,” he shot back.

      In Angelo’s mind, it was all very cut and dried. In the past, when it could have made a real difference, his family had wanted nothing to do with him. Well, he wanted nothing to do with them now, regardless of how many olive branches they extended.

      He’d already ignored the surprise e-mail from his half-sister, Isabella, which had kicked off this whole reunion quest. Talk about a curveball. He certainly hadn’t expected to learn via the Internet that he had additional siblings in Monta Correnti, three of them born to Luca’s second wife after Angelo and Alex’s exile. He’d also passed on a wedding invitation from a cousin who’d grown up in Australia.

      Family had been falling out of the rafters for the past several months, but it was all too little and coming far too late.

      “Don’t think Luca doesn’t regret his choices,” Alex said quietly. “He does. But he can’t go back and change the past. He can only try to change the future. Go to Italy, Angelo. Spend a week in Monta Correnti. In fact, spend two. You could use a vacation. I’ve already booked you a flight and found you a place to stay. I’ll e-mail you the information. You can pay me back later.”

      “I’ll drop a check in the mail first thing in the morning, bro. But I’m not going.”

      Alex was quiet a moment before he pulled out his ace. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me. I’m asking you to go.”

      “That’s low.” And it was. His level-headed and older-by-mere-minutes brother knew he was the only person who could get Angelo to do something he didn’t want to do.

      Far from sounding insulted, Alex’s voice held a smile when he replied, “Sure it’s low, but it’s also effective. You’ll thank me later.”

      “Thank you? Right. Don’t hold your breath,” Angelo snapped before hanging up.

      Chapter One

      ATLANTA JACKSON expelled a gusty sigh as she studied herself in the hotel suite’s full-length mirror. Was the pale, hollowed-eyed woman staring back really her?

      The hair was right, a long cascade of nearly white-blonde curls. But her skin was pasty and her body a tad too angular to carry off the bombshell label that was routinely applied to it. She was a good half-dozen pounds thinner than she’d been just a month earlier, and ten pounds thinner than she’d been the month before that. Forget the low-carb fad that was all the rage among Hollywood A-listers. She’d gone on the high-stress diet, guaranteed to melt off the pounds quicker than butter on Louisiana asphalt in August.

      At least her dress, a simple navy sheath made of cotton, hid some of her new angles.

      A smile bowed her lips. Zeke would hate this dress, which was precisely why she’d purchased it the day before at a pricy Fifth Avenue boutique, outside of which she had been mobbed by paparazzi and actually booed by a couple of passersby. Buying it and now wearing it out in public were acts of defiance.

      Zeke Compton—her manager, mentor and, according to him, her messiah—hadn’t allowed her to wear navy. It was too close to black, he claimed. Black being another forbidden color since it reminded him of mourning.

      “What does America’s favorite actress have to be sad about?” he’d asked the one time Atlanta’s stylist had suggested a vintage Oscar de la Renta gown the color of onyx for a red-carpet event.

      Wouldn’t the public like to know? she’d thought at the time. Now she knew better. The public didn’t want the truth, unvarnished or otherwise. They wanted romantic, rags-to-riches fairy tales СКАЧАТЬ