Italian Mountain Man (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 93) Read online

  Luxottica is the world’s largest eyewear company, owning such brands as Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. It even makes prescription glasses for companies ranging from Target Stores to Chanel, Prada, and Armani.

  And how appropriate because it’s time to open Lucia’s eyes to the truth.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “About?”

  “The truth.”

  I see her swallow hard and then she nods. “Okay.”

  I breathe in deep and exhale hard. There’s no easy way to do this. “What do you know about your father?”

  “More than you think I know.”

  More than I thinks she knows? “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s your dime. You first,” she says, referencing an old American slang term. I’m both impressed and confused she would know that.

  “What do you know about Giuseppe Morabito?”

  “I know he killed my real father and told me he was my father, raising me as his own.”

  As much respect and admiration I had for this young woman I realize I just underestimated her.

  “How did you know that?”

  “He keeps me locked up in that fucking house. Not only that, but I don’t look like him. At some point, with all that time on your hands, your mind starts to wander. You get on Google and next thing you know you’ve joined a few of those ancestry sites, done a ton of digging and you find the truth.”

  Unbelievable.

  “Just like that?”

  “It took years to piece it all together, but I managed to. The lucky part is he’s old so he doesn’t know much about technology and as a mafia boss he barely uses a phone, as would be expected. The guys around him are mostly thugs and meatheads so they have no idea what I’m looking at on my computer. A simple VPN purchase for a few dollars a month and they think I’m just spending all day on shoe shopping sites when in reality I’ve got another ten or twenty browser windows open doing all my research trying to figure out what in the hell is going on.”

  “So you know?”

  “Of course I know…and that’s not all I know.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “I assume you mean about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you’re backstory is true, at least most of it. You’re a good man, a noble man, and one who really does live up in the mountains after spending time in Afghanistan serving with NATO troops. You saw things and did things that no human should ever have to. You lost friends and you never had a family to start with, just like me…the real me. You were an orphan, or are an orphan I should say…again just like me. Except the difference is that absolute asshole that killed my father had the balls to tell me that he was my father, and I believed it for the entirety of my formative years. You, on the other hand, started from zero. The government took notice of you, your anger, your size, and recruited you for the military. It’s a common move across all governments.”

  Unbelievable.

  “So when you got back from Afghanistan, the Americans you’d worked with knew you were disillusioned with a lot of things. They singled you out and reported you to their bosses who checked into you and saw you’d started working with 'Ndrangheta. You were the perfect entry point. You’d had a lot of experience, both in armed conflicts and with the American way of doing things. When one of your old buddies from Afghanistan, an American special ops operator, approached you about working with the F.B.I., it was a chance to get back to what you loved…working for the good guys, and putting this life behind you…the same thing I want…to put this all behind me.”

  “You found this out all online?”

  “I found the trail, it was up to me to piece it all together. It didn’t make sense at first and I couldn’t believe it, but there was no other logical solution.”

  “Is this even real then? For you at least?” I ask.

  Her hand comes off the seat and she slaps me across the face. “Don’t you ever question my love, especially when I gave you all of it. I put my fucking heart on a silver platter for you because I knew you were the man I wanted to be with, before I even knew who you really were. I was always yours, and when I found out more and more about you it only reaffirmed what I already knew…you were a good man, and you would become my man one day.”

  The shock of her action is quickly washed away by the seriousness of her words.

  “I know you were running cocaine to wealthy skiers from all over the world as they visited Italy and Switzerland for the winter. I knew that, but I was the only one who knew that wasn’t the real you. That’s not who you are on the inside. I knew you were doing that for some government organization. That’s why when the Interpol officer contacted me I told them to spare you as part of my agreement.”

  “Interpol?

  “Of course. Did you think I was just going to walk away from the mob? Are you crazy?”

  “You have a deal with Interpol?”

  “Not much different than your deal with the F.B.I. I’m assuming.”

  I sit there on the bench seat of the van, frozen. I have no idea what to say. This woman literally took the words right out of my mouth.

  Here I was thinking I was all smart and tough and had this all figured out and that now it was finally the time to break the news to the woman I truly loved.

  Only to find out she was a full step ahead of me. Hell, not just a step. She’d already run the entire race and was waiting at the finish line with a big smile on her face as I stood there in the starting block, still waiting to take off.

  “So if we’re going back to Calabria then that means you’ve probably alerted your F.B.I. handler that you and I were out of town and they started their operation, and now you think it’s safe to go back. Let me be the first to tell you…it’s never safe to go back there again, no matter what some Americans tell you. This isn’t their turf. They know nothing. Sure, they can take down the figurehead and some of the top guys, but all that does is creates a power struggle and make room for another group of men to take their place. So, I ask you again. Are you heading back towards Calabria, because I won’t allow it. It’s a death sentence for you and me both, and more importantly the baby inside me…if that’s what you really wanted in the first place.”

  I grab her face, squeezing tight but she shows no signs of fear. I kiss her hard, showing her that’s exactly what the fuck I want. Her and only her. That’s all I ever wanted and all I’ll ever will want.

  And I’m all she wants, even knowing my history and every fucked up thing about me.

  Here I was thinking I chose her, but in reality she was always the one in the driver’s seat. She was the one, just like me, who’s been ready for this for four years.

  But she was much more prepared than I was, much more cerebral and apparently a hell of a lot more feisty.

  Italian women are known for their passion and feistiness and she’s no exception in that regard, but she’s the exception in every other…the exception to every woman in the world.

  There could only be one woman like her, and somehow I was lucky enough to find her.

  I pull my face back from hers, keeping my grip on her chin as I fire up the van again, staring deep into her eyes.

  I flip the van around and head back in the direction we started.

  She’s right. Heading south is a death sentence, and there’s no way in hell I’m risking that.

  I already rolled the dice once, risking it all by standing up to her “father” to get her out of there. I won the game.

  As Kenny Rogers said, “You've got to know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run.”

  It’s time to run far away from this place so I can hold her in my arms forever.

  And that starts right fucking now.

  CHAPTER 12

  Lorenzo

  “What do you mean you’re working on it?”

  “It takes time, Lorenzo. There are phone calls to mak
e…you understand I’m sure,” the F.B.I. agent says into the phone receiver at a different motel we’ve pulled over and checked into.

  “No I don’t fucking understand! I was on my way back to Calabria where my woman and our unborn child would have gotten lit the fuck up. Are you kidding me? I gave you everything you wanted. I risked my life. I risked her life. I risked our lives. And I risked our child’s life you prick!”

  “I’m sorry, Lorenzo. We’re doing the best we can.”

  I shake my head ready to pound the receiver against the wall until it breaks when suddenly I feel the tender touch of my woman’s fingertips on my shoulder.

  Damn, it’s amazing how much just her touch can calm me. I’m still furious as hell, but at least my mind wanders from how I can put a bullet in this guy’s skull back to what’s really important…finding a way to keep my family safe.

  “Hang up?” she mouths as she rolls her shoulders.

  She’s right…again. I thought I was a pretty smart guy but damn, she’s one step ahead of me like always. Plus it’s my job to protect my family, not another man’s. Relying on someone else is always a recipe for disaster…except when it comes to me, because she can always count on me. Always. I’m going to wake up every day of the rest of my life with the privilege of the opportunity to prove it to her over and over again, even though she never even asked. It’s because I want to, because I want her to be happy more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

  I set the phone down and stand from my seat, taking her face in my hands.

  “How do you always know what the right thing to do is?”

  “Because I know the only thing that matters is us.”

  I kiss her lips hard, reminding her just how much I love her.

  Then it hits me. I’ve never actually said those words.

  “We’ve got everything we need. We’ve got enough money where we can start somewhere far far away from here. Just me and you. We can live on the one thing we have that no one can ever take away.”

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “Our love for each other.”

  She melts into my arms and we kiss deeply, holding my lips pressed to hers. There’s no tongue, no grouping, no moving. Just that tight squeeze of two people who are perfect for each other joined at the lips.

  No talking. No noises. Just feeling.

  And what I feel for her can’t be put into words anyways. It’s in my heart.

  What seems like a second passes, but I know it must be a few minutes, and our lips finally separate.

  “I’m in. I’m always all in when it comes to you.” she says.

  “I’ve got some money in Switzerland. We can go there, get the money, and get on a plane from Zurich to anywhere in the world we want. We’ll just disappear forever, and I know just the place.”

  “The mountains or the beach?”

  “Both, beautiful. I’m gonna give you both and I’d rip the clouds right out of the sky if I could too. You just tell me and watch me reach for them.”

  “No need. My head’s already in the clouds. I’m in heaven.”

  “Me too,” I say, putting my hand on her belly. “I can’t wait to love this little bugger just like I love you.”

  Our lips quickly find each other’s again and we hold each other tight, excited about our future and ready to put the past exactly where the past belongs…behind us forever.

  I reach around and grab her behind, picking her up off the ground as her legs wrap around my waist.

  Carrying her into the bedroom it’s a race to get undressed first.

  We’ve done hot and heavy, slow and sensual, and everything in-between.

  The rest of today and into tonight I’m going to give her everything, in every position possible.

  And when we wake up in the morning we’ll be gone…forever.

  EPILOGUE

  Lucia

  One week later

  One good thing about the F.B.I. and Interpol moving so slowly is that they were too slow in finding out that my father had additional bank accounts in Zurich.

  As expected, he put them in my name in case anything ever happened…without telling me of course.

  The only problem with that is the money is mine, and I’m of legal age. So all I had to do was walk into a bunch of banks in Zurich and ask to access my accounts.

  There were exactly twenty banks in all and in seventeen of the occasions I looked like a complete fool.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Morabito, but it seems we can’t locate your account,” was heard in seventeen instances.

  But in the other three?

  “We’ll need some time to prepare everything considering the size of the withdrawal.”

  “Certainly,” I said, with a devious smile as Lorenzo just shook his head at my ingenuity.

  I have to admit, I could have been totally wrong, looking like a fool on every occasion.

  But what I loved most?

  Even though I completely struck out on my first six attempts, Lorenzo never once questioned me, doubted me, or made fun of me. He had my back the entire time, and when things went our way at the seventh bank, the embarrassment we’d experienced more than a handful of times became water under the bridge.

  Lorenzo gave me a kiss and then went to clear out his account and find us a hotel…a very nice hotel considering our new financial status.

  I finished up early at the bank and quickly sought out a pawnshop, where I pawned the watch my “dad” had given me for my birthday. I looked at the inscription on the back one last time, feeling my stomach turn.

  My Lucia, always and forever.

  Knowing the truth, the words made me sick.

  He was never my dad and never will be. The worst part is he was the one who killed my parents and then basically kidnapped me, raising me to think I was his own.

  Never.

  And although it took twenty-two years, justice had finally been served.

  Don Morabito, or dad as I’d known him for so many years, had refused to go quietly when the police arrived the day before.

  All the better.

  The story of his death in the ensuing shootout was on the front page of the morning’s newspaper. Good.

  The man at the pawnshop took a look at the watch and then at me. At first I thought he might realize who I was, but then I realized I was just being paranoid...a relic of my former life that I looked forward to putting behind me.

  The pawn shop jeweler wasn’t shocked because the daughter of the man who was on the front page of the papers was standing in his shop...he didn’t even know who I was or where the watch came from. He was shocked because of the value of the watch, and he knew I knew its value as well.

  He made a few calls and we settled on a price. I was excited. The money from the sale could be used to purchase a gift for the man I really belonged to always and forever...Lorenzo.

  His commitment to me was unparalleled. He never returned to his cabin in the Dolomites, saying there was no way he’d risk going there only to find people waiting to kill us.

  He told me his past no longer mattered anyway. The only thing he cared about was the future. Maybe some hikers or hunters would find the cabin and give the place a new beginning, just like we’d given each other.

  We stayed in Zurich a few days, enjoying the beautiful town before boarding a plane to Santiago, Chile, where we are now.

  “Go slow, baby. This is a steep descent,” Lorenzo calls out from up ahead of me on the bike trail in our new hometown of Valle Nevado, just outside of Santiago.

  You can take the mountain man out of Italy, but you can’t take the Italian out of the man…or apparently the love for the mountains either.

  Valle Nevado is a posh ski town, but it’s out of season right now, seeing that we traded in the Northern Hemisphere for the Southern Hemisphere.

  Just the way we like it. We’ve got the place all to ourselves to get used to our new home, and that starts with a little mountain biking date for today…and Lorenzo�
��s backpack full of focaccia, Italian cheeses and bread, a Thermos full of Lavazza rossa, and of course prosciutto.

  I slowly let out on the brake and my bike slides down the mountain path. I can’t wait to ski for the first time in my life, here this winter.

  A fresh breeze blows through the mountains as I squeeze the handlebar break as my bike approaches his.