Free The Scarlet Thread by Evelyn Anthony Page B

with women. He doesn’t gamble. You know my son—no vices.”
    â€œNo vices,” Aldo Fabrizzi agreed. “Except he likes to work all the time. But my Clara will teach him how to play. He’s going to be a lucky man.”
    â€œTalking of luck, and talking of gambling,” Falconi said, “what did you think about my proposal? You know, for opening a new casino in Nevada?”
    â€œMusso runs the gambling there, you know that.” Fabrizzi had a habit of pulling at his lower lip when he was thinking about business.
    â€œTogether,” Lucca suggested, “we are bigger than Musso. Why the fuck should he have all the cake? Think about it. He’s not so young, and that son of his is eyeballed on dope. He wouldn’t give us trouble.”
    â€œI’ll think about it.” Fabrizzi nodded. “We’ll talk tomorrow, maybe. I better dance with my wife.”
    Fabrizzi’s plump little wife had only managed to give him the one daughter. If she knew about his passion for big-breasted blondes, she never said anything.
    Falconi took some champagne. Pity he hadn’t had a chance to try out the idea on Steven. Gambling was very big money and getting bigger. It was time to give Tony Musso a push and see what happened. He might just take a fall.
    â€œI’m so happy,” Clara whispered to Steven as they circled. “You love me, don’t you, Steven?” She had beautiful eyes, and they were limpid with her love for him.
    â€œYou know I do,” he answered, and drew her closer to him. She was everything a man could want. There was passion in her. It had smoldered during their courtship. Steven was the one who drew back. They would have children.
    He had bought a magnificent brownstone on East Fifty-second Street. His father was building them a vacation house at Palm Beach as his wedding present. And together the two families would enlarge their business interests.
    Clara was an educated girl—that was important to him. He couldn’t have married a girl with no interest beyond her home and the bambinos. Clara liked going to concerts and the theater. She had an eye for modern art, which he couldn’t understand, but if she wanted pictures, that was okay by him. He desired her. No man could help but want her, and he pressed her closer still until the waltz blended into one of Sinatra’s popular romantic songs. There’d been no significant woman in his life since he came back from the war. Nothing had filled the void in his life, not even the devotion to business that occupied every moment of his days. The empty space was there inside him. He had tried to get himself killed in battle because the pain of losing Angela and his child was driving him mad. When he came home, he couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. It was his private grief, a secret anguish he carried inside. He still dreamed of that dreadful dust-filled wasteland, with the smell of burning corpses in the air, and woke up sweating.
    He held his new bride tight against him and believed that love for her would grow and fill the emptiness.
    They had rented a house at Boca Raton for the first part of their honeymoon. The staff was hand-picked. They were Falconi’s people, and the house was guarded day and night. The family had enemies along that coast. Later, the couple would fly off to Europe, where the bodyguards weren’t necessary. Clara had grown up with armed men watching her father and dogging her wherever she went. It was part of the life-style of a Mafia chief’s family. It had made her feel important as a child.
    That first night, they had dinner on the terrace, with the moon rising like a silver medal in the sky and the sound of the waves whispering against the shore. Steven raised his glass to her.
    â€œ Carissima . How hungry are you?”
    â€œI’m hungry for you,” she said. “And I’ve no shame about it. I don’t want food, my