Prologue

      CLAUDIO LANCIONE WAS the last person who would normally attract Gia Trainello. She’d known him for most of her life and he’d always been a part of the family. A fixture, really. Handsome, yes. But she’d never so much as shared a suggestive smile with him, much less a kiss and promise of something more. But grief, it was said, made people do strange things.

      And Gia was definitely grieving.

      The four-star hotel-room sheets chafed Gia’s bare legs as she curled into a ball. Had it really only been four days since her father and younger brother, Mario, had been gunned down in broad daylight? A day since she’d said her final good- byes at a burial service attended by hundreds she hadn’t wanted to face? Twenty-four hours since she’d watched her older brother, Lorenzo, being pushed away in a wheelchair, barely conscious of what had happened because his private nurse had given him enough sedatives to make a bull lie down before a matador during his brief excursion from the hospital?

      A few hours since she’d slipped Claudio a note asking him to meet her, desperately wanting, needing to feel something other than the pain crowding her chest, making it almost impossible for her to breathe, and then virtually ripping off his clothes the instant he’d entered the hotel suite?

      Oh, she’d managed to throw herself into the physical sexual activity. Had even achieved a shallow climax or two. But always, always there were the images of her father’s and brother’s closed caskets. Always, always there was the memory of the line of nonstop visitors milling through her father’s house to offer their condolences and to drink wine from his carefully stocked cellar. Always, always there was the feeling that she no longer belonged in the house where she had grown up and which she had long since left, even though she felt obligated to receive the visitors—especially with Lorenzo— the third victim of the tragedy—still hospitalized.

      Always, always there was the gaping hole in her life that she feared might never be filled again.

      The image of Luca Paretti claimed her mind’s eye. Striking Luca Paretti, standing