9

If Jack had his choice of any locale in Manhattan in which to live, he’d choose Sutton Square, the half block of ultra-high-priced real estate standing at the eastern tip of Fifty-eighth Street off Sutton Place, dead-ending at a low stone wall overlooking a sunken brick terrace with an unobstructed view of the East River. No high-rises, condos, or office buildings there, just neat four-story townhouses standing flush to the sidewalk, all brick-fronted, some with the brick bare, others painted pastel colors. Wooden shutters flanked the windows and the recessed front doors. Some of them even had backyards. A neighborhood of Bentleys and Rolls Royces, liveried chauffeurs and white-uniformed nannies. And two blocks to the north, looming over it all like some towering guardian, stood the graceful, surprisingly delicate-looking span of the Queensboro Bridge.

He remembered the place well. He had been here before. Last year when he had been doing that job for the U.K. Mission, he had met Gia’s aunts. They had invited him to a small gathering at their home. He hadn’t wanted to go, but Burkes had talked him into it. The evening had changed his life. He had met Gia.

He heard a child’s voice shouting as he crossed Sutton Place.

Dark braids flying and arms outstretched, a little slip of a girl with wide blue eyes and a missing front tooth came dashing out the front door and down the sidewalk. She leaped into the air with the reckless abandon of a seven-year-old who had not the slightest doubt she would be caught and lifted and swung around.

Which is exactly what Jack did. Then he hugged her against his chest as she clamped her spindly arms around his neck.

“Where you been, Jack?” she said into his ear. “Where you been all this time?”

Jack’s answer was blocked by a lump in his throat the size of an apple. Shocked by the intensity of feeling welling up in him, he could only squeeze her tighter. Vicky! All the time he had spent missing Gia, never realizing how much he had missed the little one. For the better part of the year he and Gia had been together, Jack had seen Vicky almost every day, becoming a prime focus of her boundless store of affection. Losing Vicky had contributed much more than he had ever imagined to the emptiness inside him these past two months. Love you, little girl.

He had not truly known how much until this very instant. Over Vicky’s shoulder he could see Gia standing in the doorway of the house, her face grim. He spun away to hide the tears that had sprung into his eyes. “You’re squeezing me awful tight, Jack.” He put her down. “Yeah. Sorry, Vicks.” He cleared his throat, pulled himself together, then grasped her hand and walked up to the front door and Gia.

She looked good. Hell, she looked great in that light blue T-shirt and jeans. Short blond hair—to call it blond was to say the sun was sort of bright: It gleamed, it glowed. Blue eyes like winter sky after all the snow clouds have blown east. A strong, full mouth. High shoulders, high breasts, fair skin with high coloring along the cheeks. He still found it almost impossible to believe she was Italian.