Sicilian Nights Omnibus (2 page)

On the day of his seventh birthday party, after some childish quarrel with his half-brother during which Antonio had started mimicking their father, taunting him by telling him their father loved him the best, he had retaliated by saying that he was the second eldest.

Their father had told spoken to him coldly. ‘You are a second son—conceived so that if necessary you can take your elder brother’s place. You as yourself have and are nothing. A second son is of no account whilst there is a first-born. Think about that in future, when you attempt to place yourself above your youngest brother, for God knows I wish with all my heart that he might have been my only son.’

Strange the powerful effect that words could have. His father had meant to humiliate and shame him for daring to stand against the favouritism he showed to his youngest son; he had wanted to cow him and make him feel inferior. But his cruelty had had exactly the opposite effect, burning into Alessandro a determination to forge a life for himself that had no reliance on the Leopardi name or his father’s influence.

Instead of becoming a part of the old feudal world of his father and family history, Alessandro had turned towards the new, modern world, where a man was judged on his business acumen and his personal achievements. He had adopted his mother’s family name instead of using his own, and that name was still proudly displayed on the fleet of aircraft that had earned him his billionaire status—even though these days he was secure enough in what and who he was to answer to both Leopardi and Avanti.

He had proved beyond any kind of doubt that he had no need of his father’s help or his father’s name, and in fact it now amused him to see the frustrated lack of understanding in his father’s expression when he adapted so easily to being addressed as Leopardi, instead of reacting angrily and rejecting its usage as he had once done.

But then his father never had understood him and never would. It was easy for Alessandro to accept the name now, because he no longer needed it to identify himself. In his estimation he was now a first amongst equals—more than an heir-in-waiting, and certainly more than any poor second son.

And yet, as Falcon had so succinctly reminded him when he had discussed the coming celebrations with him, he was still a Leopardi, and so far as Falcon was concerned that meant he still had a duty to the family.

Alessandro bore a grudging respect for his elder brother, but their relationship was shadowed by their childhood, by their father—and by the memory of Sofia.

But it was over a decade now since he had deliberately challenged Falcon in every way he could, engaging his elder brother in a power struggle, a battle to prove himself, which had ultimately resulted in them pitted against one another for the same woman—a struggle which Falcon had ultimately won.

Alessandro’s frown deepened. He was not an insecure twenty-six-year-old desperate to prove himself any more. He was an adult, successful and confident, with no need to prove anything to his elder brother. Or to himself.

But wasn’t it the truth that part of the reason he was so reluctant to attend tomorrow night’s celebrations was because of those two words on the invitation: ‘and guest’?

His pride insisted that he could not attend the celebratory ball without a partner, a fact his father would see as a sign of failure, and yet at the same time he knew that if there
had
been anyone in his life at the moment, sharing his bed, he would not have wanted to take her. Because he was afraid of a repeat of the humiliation he had experienced with Sofia. Alessandro knew that his reaction was irrational.

He knew too that by letting that irrationality take hold he was creating a self-perpetuating ogre within his own psyche. Perhaps his father had been right after all, he derided himself contemptuously. Perhaps he was a coward, and second rate.

At twenty-six he had been so proud to show Sofia, a model he’d met in Milan at a PR event—off to his elder brother, driven in those days by a single-minded determination to prove that far from being second best he could come first.

He had been flattered when Sofia had flirted with him. She had been older than him, twenty-eight to his twenty-six, and although he hadn’t realised it then she had already been past the prime of her modelling career, and searching for a rich husband. Any rich husband, just so long as he was gullible.

It was easy for him to recognise now that what he had mistaken for love on his own part had merely been lust, and he knew too that he had much to be grateful to Falcon for. He had shown him just what Sofia had been—after all she was on her third husband now. Falcon had told him afterwards that the reason he had seduced Sofia away from him had been to show him exactly what she was, to protect him as it was his duty as the elder brother to do.

Without their father’s love and protection it had been on Falcon’s shoulders that the duty of protection for his younger siblings had fallen, and Falcon had taken that responsibility very seriously. Alessandro knew that. But the manner of his elder’s brother’s intervention had, in Alessandro’s eyes, been humiliating—reinforcing the fact that he was second best—and it had left him with a cynical belief that all women would make themselves available to the most successful man they could find, no matter what kind of commitment they had already made to someone else, and could therefore not be trusted. Especially around his charismatic elder brother.

That belief had marked a changing point in his life, Alessandro acknowledged. Aside from the fact that he had taken care to ensure that his future mistresses did not get to meet his elder brother, he had also come to recognise that if he did not want to spend the rest of his life fighting to prove that he was worthy of more than being labelled a second son, and thus second best, then it was up to him to break free of the shackles that fastened him into that unwanted prison.

He had left Sicily for Milan, where he’d started up a small air freight business—ironically initially transporting the products of the city’s designers to international shows. He had gone on from there to passenger flights and the separate luxury of first-class-only flights, so that now he had every aspect of the modern airline business covered.

He had even learned to use his second-son status to his own advantage. Membership of a titled family was something he used as cynically and deliberately as he used the powerful streak of sensuality he had discovered he possessed in the self-indulgent hedonistic months that had followed Sofia’s defection.

The shell of the personality he had constructed for himself as Alessandro Leopardi was simply an image he projected for business purposes—an outer garment he could remove at will. Only he knew that somewhere deep inside himself there was still a vulnerable part of him that was the ‘spare heir’—conceived only to fill that role, and of no value to anyone outside of that.

Alessandro could hardly remember their mother—she had died shortly after his younger brother Rocco’s birth, when he had been only two years old himself. Everyone who had known her said that she had been a saint. Too saintly by far for her husband, who had spurned her and humiliated her publicly, turning instead to his mistress.

Did that same dark tide from his father’s veins run within his own? Alessandro had no idea. He was merely thankful that, unlike his elder brother, he would never need to find out—because his own duty to the Leopardi name stopped well short of having to provide it with a future heir.

He removed a bottle of water from the suite’s well-stocked bar and poured some into a glass. He could feel the stiff, unyielding thickness of the formal invitation jabbing his flesh in exactly the same way in which Falcon’s stiff, unyielding determination that his brothers should pay their dues to their Leopardi blood jabbed his own conscience.

He and Rocco both owed Falcon a great deal. He had taught them and guided them, and he had protected them. Those were heavy duties for a young boy to have taken on, and it was perhaps no wonder that he had always imposed his own sense of duty on them—that he still did so now.

Alessandro didn’t need to remove Falcon’s letter from his pocket to remember what it said. Falcon never wasted words.

‘Alessandro Leopardi,’ he had written on the invitation, ‘and guest’.

A challenge to him? Alessandro shrugged away the sharp pinprick of angry pride.

He would have to go, of course.

He was never comfortable when he had to return to the castle in Sicily where he had grown up. It held far too many unhappy memories. If he had to visit the island he preferred to stay in the family villa in town. Home for him now was wherever he happened to be—although he had an apartment in Milan and another in Florence, and a villa in a secluded and exclusive enclave close to Positano.

He looked at his watch, a one-off made especially for him. He would be leaving by helicopter from City Airport soon, for his own private jet and the onward flight to Florence, where he would stay at his apartment in the exclusive renovated
palazzo
that had originally belonged to his mother’s family.

* * *

‘Look, Leonora, I really don’t think this is a good idea.’

Leonora gave her younger brother a scathing look.

‘Well, I do—and you promised.’

Leo groaned. ‘That was when I was halfway down one of Dad’s best reds, and you’d tricked me.’ He stood up, his brown hair tousled. He might be six foot three in his socks, but right now he still managed to have the frustrated look of a younger brother who had just been outwitted by his older and smarter sister, Leonora decided triumphantly.

‘You agreed that the next time you flew your boss into London in the private jet I could fly him back.’

‘Why? He hates women pilots.’

‘I know. After all, he’s turned my job applications down often enough.’

Leo’s expression changed. ‘Look, you aren’t going to do anything silly, are you? Like barging into his office, telling him you flew the plane and asking him for a job? You’d have as much chance of succeeding as you would have of getting into his bed,’ Leo told her forthrightly.

Leonora knew all about the stunning beauties the Sicilian billionaire who owned the airline her younger brother worked for dated, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow Leo to guess how much his comment hurt—as though somehow it was a given that she wasn’t woman enough to attract the interest of a man like Alessandro Leopardi. Not, of course, that she
wanted
to be one of Alessandro Leopardi’s women, but she certainly did want to be one of his pilots.

‘No, of course I’m not going to ask him for a job.’

Leonora crossed her fingers behind her back. She was in full jokey can-do Leonora mode now—even in the privacy of her own thoughts. It just wasn’t fair. She was every bit as good a pilot as her younger brother, if not better, and she just knew that if she proved that to Alessandro Leopardi he
would
offer her a job. His exclusive first-class service flew passengers all over the world, and she wanted to be one of that elite group even more than she had once wanted to work for someone like Alessandro himself as a private pilot.

‘You can’t possibly think you’ll really get away with this,’ Leo protested.

‘No, I don’t think it. I know it,’ Leonora told him promptly, going on firmly, ‘Since you let me fly the new jet when you were sent to collect it I’ve been having extra lessons in one, and I’ve probably racked up more flying hours than you have.’ She didn’t even want to think about how much it had cost her to get those flying miles in such an expensive craft, or how many lessons in Mandarin she had had to teach to earn the money.

‘Okay, so you can fly the plane. But you haven’t got a uniform.’

‘Ta-dah!’ Leonora said, opening her trench coat to reveal the uniform, and then producing her cap from the supermarket bag in which she had been carrying it.

Leo’s face was a picture. ‘You know if you get found out that
I’ll
be the one losing my job.’

‘Only wimps get found out,’ Leonora replied as she slipped off her coat and swept up her hair before cramming it under the cap

‘Captain Leo Thaxton at your service.’

Leo groaned again. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve stolen my uniform without stealing my name as well?’

‘No,’ Leonora told him. ‘It’s my name too. I’ve never had cause until now to be glad our parents thought it a good idea to give us practically the same name. Now, come on.’

‘What about the co-pilot?’

‘What about him? It’s Paul Watson, isn’t it? The one who breaks Alessandro Leopardi’s rule about his pilots not partying with the stewardesses? I’m sure I shall be able to persuade him that it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to say anything.’

‘I knew I should never have told you about Paul. He’s going to kill me.’

Ignoring him, Leonora demanded, ‘Come on. I need you to drive me to the airport and get me through all the security stuff.’

‘I do not know why you’re doing this.’ Leo groaned again, and then corrected himself. ‘That’s not true, of course. I do know why you’re doing it. You are doing it because you are the most stubborn and determined female ever.’

‘That’s right,’ Leonora agreed breezily. But inwardly she was thinking,
I’m doing it because I hate, hate, hate not getting what I want, and I want that job with Avanti Airlines more than I want anything else in the world.

Yes, all of that was true—and when she was working full-pelt in her ‘I’m up for anything’ tomboy mode in front of an audience it was easy to pretend that the other Leonora—the one who longed for love and commitment, and to be allowed to be that other self she dreamed of—simply did not exist. At least for the length of her ‘performance’.

She
did
want her dream job, of course, and she certainly wanted the opportunity to challenge Alessandro Leopardi, to demand that he explain to her just why her sex weighed so heavily against her when she had such excellent qualifications. It was, after all, against the law to disqualify an applicant for a job on the grounds of their sex. There was no point in telling Leo about her plans, though. He would only worry. Better to let him think she was trying to make a point to him rather than planning to make Alessandro Leopardi agree that she was a good pilot and worthy of being given the job she craved so much.