LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Fourteen

      ERASMO BAVARO WAS as cagey as his son Marc and as animated as Diego, a fearsome combination in a silver-haired fox who reminded Lorenzo of his father.

      It would have been fascinating to see the two titans face off in their heyday, but on a brilliantly sunny afternoon in Miami, with the Bavaro scion’s palatial poolside terrace the backdrop for the negotiations, his focus was on pulling Erasmo into the twenty-first century.

      Erasmo, for his part, looked content to stay right where he was. Flanked by his lawyers at the long, olive wood table, coolly dressed in a flamboyant short-sleeved shirt and trousers, he swept a palm over his neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper goatee and eyed Lorenzo. “Let me tell you a story,” he said in a deeply accented voice. “Perhaps it will help you to understand where I’m coming from.

      “The night we opened the Belmont in South Beach in 1950, we had the most popular blues singer on the planet, Natalie Constantine, lined up to play. Near the end of her set, Arturo Martinez walked onto the stage and joined her for the last two songs.”

      Arturo Martinez. The Spanish megastar who had sold more albums in those days than any singer alive.

      “They closed out the night in the piano bar. Two legends. Such was the mystique of the Belmont legacy. You could not have paid to be there that night.”

      “They were great days,” Lorenzo acknowledged. “I wish I had been there that night. But that time has come and gone, Erasmo. It’s time for the mantle to be passed on. All good things must come to an end.”

      “Speaks the man who puts money above meaning.” The Bavaro patriarch lifted a brow. “Can I share something with you, Ricci? Money will not give your life meaning when you are my age. Money will not keep you warm at night. Money won’t nourish your soul when you’ve spent fifty years in this business and every boardroom table looks like the rest. Meaning will. Your legacy will.”

      “Speaks a man perhaps lost in his own sentimentality…”

      Erasmo dipped his head. “Perhaps. But I would prefer to be remembered as a man who built things rather than tore down the work of others.”

      The rebuke stung his skin. Lorenzo lifted the glass of potent, exotic rum his host had unearthed from his cellar to his lips and took a sip. It burned a slow path through his insides, but it didn’t take the sting out of the old man’s words. Nor did the fact that his wife, who’d walked out on him again, felt the same way.

      Angelina thought he’d sold his soul for his success. Bartered it for an escape from the guilt he refused to acknowledge—the feelings he refused to address. The ironic thing was, in that moment, as the cast of lawyers digressed into legalese he couldn’t be bothered to follow, he couldn’t remember why this deal had ever been so important to him. Why he was sitting here haggling over a name when the most important thing in his life was back in New York. Refusing to take his calls.

      And why would she? Regret sat like a stone in his stomach. He’d threatened to withdraw his funding of Carmichael Company if she left…to drag their divorce out for all eternity. Had he really thought that would make her stay?

      His insides coiled tight. What the hell was wrong with him? He had no idea what he was doing anymore. Hadn’t since Angelina had laid all his truths out for him and challenged him to do the same. Since a phone call in the middle of a meeting in Shanghai had obliterated the life he’d known and had him planning a funeral rather than the family he and Lucia had envisioned.

      He rubbed a palm across his forehead, a low throb sitting just below his skin. He’d told Angelina he wasn’t capable of loving again. Had meant it. But watching her walk out on him a second time, watching her lay her heart on the line about how she felt about him had done something to him. If his wife, who’d been hurt so many times it was a scar on her soul, could be that courageous, what did that make him? A coward?

      The tightness in his chest deepened. He’d allowed her to walk away, continued to pretend he didn’t feel the things he did for her because then he wouldn’t have to face the truth. That he loved her. Had loved her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her. That he was so afraid of losing someone else, so afraid of losing her, so angry at her still for leaving him, he didn’t have the guts to put himself out there. To tell her how he felt.

      His heart punched through his chest. Blaming yourself for Lucia’s death is easier than making yourself vulnerable again.

      He curled his fingers into his thighs, waiting for the shame, the guilt, to dig its claws into him, to claim him as it always did when he allowed himself to think of that night. But it didn’t come. His fear was greater—his fear of losing his wife, the woman who

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