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Payback. Jasmine Cresswell
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“There was no point in talking to you about Kate. It wasn’t serious and we didn’t date all that long.” Eight months wasn’t very long, he soothed his conscience, so he wasn’t exactly lying. Luke hurried on, dodging more sisterly questions. “The thing is, I do know Kate and her mother well enough to be fairly sure that if Ron Raven is alive, they would want to hear about it.”
A gruff, rumbling voice greeted them from across the room, saving him from further cross-examination. Thank you, Jesus.
“Anna, mia piccola, come stai, carina?”
“Bruno! Che sorpresa piacevole! Sto bene, grazie. E tu?”
“Eh, cosi, cosi. No, no, don’t get up, Anna.” Cousin Bruno squeezed her shoulder. “What a treat to find you here! I’m glad I decided to stop by the restaurant after my daughter dragged me to the movies. We saw this horrible, boring movie about blowing up cars. If there was anything more to the plot, I must have missed those two lines of dialogue.”
Anna laughed and stood up to hug him, ignoring his command. “Bruno, stop complaining. You know you love movies with lots of car chases.”
“Yes, providing there’s a plot squeezed in between the chases.” He patted her shoulder. “You should have told me you planned to eat here tonight. I would have skipped the movie and been here to welcome you both.”
“I wasn’t sure what our plans would be. Luke’s only in town for twenty-four hours. By the way, do you remember my brother, Luke?”
“We never met.” Bruno shook hands. “But I ate at your restaurant last year when I was in Chicago. Luciano’s on Chestnut. I inquired after you, Luke, but the sous-chef told me you were at one of your other places that night. You can be very proud of what you’ve achieved with Luciano’s. The meal my brother and I ate was spectacular.”
“Thank you. It’s a relief to know you were there on a night when we didn’t screw up.”
“Somehow, I get the impression that you and your team don’t screw up very often.” Bruno pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, I can’t compete with Luciano’s—we don’t even try to cater to that level of sophistication—but I’m proud of the desserts we make here. What can I get the two of you? Our tiramisu is made from an old family recipe handed down by my grandmother, and it’s the best ever, if I do say so myself. The panna cotta with caramel sauce is mighty fine, as well. We use buttermilk in addition to the cream and it’s not as bland as the traditional recipe.”
“I love your amaretto ice cream,” Anna said. “It’s my personal favorite.”
“Then amaretto ice cream it shall be for you, cara.” Bruno gave her hand a fatherly squeeze. “Luke, how about you?”
“The panna cotta would be great,” he said. “I’ve never made it with buttermilk and it sounds interesting.”
Their desserts arrived along with tiny cups of aromatic espresso and Luke chatted politely with his cousin, who seemed both a kindly man and an experienced chef. Maybe the ravioli has just been an unfortunate exception to generally good food, Luke mused. The panna cotta was certainly first-rate, and the buttermilk made for an intriguing variation on an old standby.
Bruno excused himself to have a word with his staff, and Anna worked hard to keep Luke from reverting to their previous conversation about Ron Raven. Since Luke was working equally hard to prevent her picking up their conversation about Kate, the atmosphere around the table was unusually strained. They were both relieved when Bruno returned after a few minutes and sat down across from Luke.
“Merrie, one of our servers, asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Luke a thin, crumpled credit card receipt. “She said you were inquiring about a couple that was seated at one of her tables. Apparently, they left this behind.”
Luke picked up the flimsy slip of paper. “I appreciate Merrie thinking of me. But she told me that couple paid their bill in cash.”
“They did. This isn’t one of our charge slips,” Bruno said. “If it was, I couldn’t pass it on. But Merrie found it tucked in among the stash of twenties they left behind to pay their bill. She was about to toss it away when she saw me ordering your desserts and realized you really are my cousin. Since this charge slip is nothing to do with us or the meal they ate here, and there’s no way to return it to the couple, I figure there’s no harm in handing it over to you. Merrie says you were interested in this man.”
There was a definite question in his cousin’s voice and Luke repeated his story about seeing an old friend he’d lost touch with. “I’m not sure if I’m enthusiastic enough to track him down through a credit card bill, but I appreciate Merrie’s gesture. Tell her thanks from me, will you?” He deliberately downplayed his interest, since he could only imagine how Bruno would react if Luke repeated his claim to have seen a supposed murder victim eating dinner on the other side of the dining room.
Bruno seemed satisfied with Luke’s explanation, and left to go back to the kitchen after another profuse round of good wishes and goodbyes.
Luke smoothed out the charge slip, scrutinizing the scanty information as he and Anna made their way back to her car. The charge of forty-three dollars and change had been made earlier in the day at an establishment called Sunrise. There was no indication of what sort of establishment Sunrise might be.
“What’s the name on the charge slip?” Anna asked, clicking her key to spring the locks on her car.
Luke held the slip up to the light. “Stewart M. Jones.”
“You see!” Anna looked relieved. “I told you the man you saw wasn’t Ron Raven. Now you can relax and stop obsessing about seeing dead people. I feel as if I spent the past hour living in an outtake from The Sixth Sense.”
The fact that the name on the charge slip read Stewart Jones proved nothing at all about the identity of the man Luke had seen in Bruno’s, as his sister must realize. If Ron had faked his own death, he wouldn’t be opening charge accounts under the identity he’d just been at great pains to get rid of.
Anna must be afraid that he was seeing visions of Ron because he was hung up on his failed relationship with Kate, Luke decided. As it happened, his sister was way off the mark. He wasn’t fixated on Kate—far from it. Their affair had ended in nothing less than misery and he sure as hell wasn’t wasting any time regretting its end. Kate might be beautiful and sexy and have the same career interests as he did, but their personalities were polar opposites. Not to mention the fact that her concept of faithfulness bore no relationship to his.
He realized now that their character differences had mattered almost as much as the betrayals. As their affair started to unravel, their differences worked to the surface, causing unbearable friction. His frustrations had boiled over into the sort of noisy Italian explosiveness he’d spent most of his adult life learning to control. Kate had reacted to each of his displays of temperament with a deeper and deeper retreat into icily silent WASP disapproval.
Even the memory of those last few weeks was enough to make Luke feel slightly sick, quite apart from the horrors of the final denouement. Allowing his sister’s comments about the real identity of Stewart M. Jones to slide past unchallenged, Luke tucked the charge slip into his billfold and took his seat next to Anna in the car. He returned the conversation to family, food and the imminent birth of their youngest sister’s first baby and made sure he kept it there.
For all his silence, Luke’s conviction that he’d seen Ron Raven remained strong. But six months had already passed since Ron disappeared, and Luke decided he could afford to wait until he got back to Chicago before notifying the authorities that, far