Bella Rosa Proposals: Star-Crossed Sweethearts

“No, I’ve had enough.”

“I believe the word they use here is basta,” he told her.

“That’s right.” She nodded. “It’s a handy word to know.”

“Just be careful,” he warned. “If you use it too often you’re likely to miss out on a lot of…adventure.”

Angelo expected Atlanta to say she wasn’t up for any more adventure in her life. He wouldn’t blame her for feeling that way, especially with a new scandal brewing over the photos that had been snapped of the two of them in Rome’s airport. Instead, she studied him in the soft light that cascaded from the patio’s scattered lanterns.

“I guess I’ll have to use my best judgment, then.”

“You do that.”

Angelo finished his Chianti and leaned back in his chair on a contented sigh that morphed into a yelp of pain when he tried to stack his hands behind his head. He lowered his arms immediately and reached for his shoulder before he could think better of it.

Atlanta’s eyes were wide with concern.

“Don’t say it.” His words held more of a plea than a warning.

“Fine. I won’t ask about surgery or rehabilitation or quality of life,” she promised. “But I am curious.”

The pain was abating. He squinted at her. “About what?”

“What do you plan to do after baseball?”

After? The word hit him with the force of a fastball to the chest. There was no after. Just as he’d convinced himself over the years that there had been no before. Baseball was both his alpha and omega.

“I’m not going anywhere.” Even before she raised her eyebrows, he knew he sounded belligerent. That didn’t stop him from adding, “The Rogues still need me. I’ll be suiting up next season, make no mistake.”

“I’m not talking about next season. Or even the season after that. You can’t play ball forever, Angelo.”

It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard from other people, including younger players speculating on what the future held for them post-career. Usually, Angelo deflected the conversation with a witty comeback. This time, seated next to Atlanta in the cool evening air, he not only accepted reality, he met it head-on.

Gazing up at the stars, he admitted, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You have lots of options.”

He did. He could branch off into coaching. One of the farm teams had already approached him with an offer. He could buy one of the existing franchises when it came up for sale. Ownership certainly held appeal. Money wasn’t an object. The endorsement well showed no signs of drying up, despite his latest injury. But…

“Baseball is everything.”

“Not everything,” Atlanta replied softly.

“To me it is. It saved me. Literally. Baseball and Alex, they were what kept me from becoming a statistic.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

This wasn’t something he talked about freely, let alone with a beautiful woman who had her own set of problems. But the timing, the woman who was willing to listen, they both seemed right.

“I was bound for trouble and taking the express train to get there. I was too young and too stupid to care about consequences. And I was just plain ticked off,” he could admit now.

“At your father,” she guessed.

“Him, yeah. And my mom.” Angelo snorted. “Hell, I was angry at everyone.” The sky held a million stars. He concentrated on one of them and continued. “No one seemed to give a damn about my brother and me. Our mom came home drunk most nights. She worked in public relations as a consultant. She kept a roof over our heads and, when she remembered to go grocery shopping, food in the pantry. But, honestly, I don’t know how she managed to keep a job.”

“Not all alcoholics are falling-down drunks. Some are quite capable of leading dual lives, at least for a while.”

“That was Cindy. She wasn’t a mean person, just disinterested in motherhood and, I think, angry with Luca that their marriage hadn’t worked out. From what little she said on the subject, they’d met while she was vacationing here, she got pregnant and they got married. They barely knew one another. Not exactly the recipe for long-term success.”

“No.”

“Anyway, I think she was desperate to stay young and free of responsibility.”

“That’s pretty hard to do when you have twins,” Atlanta inserted.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t stop her. She spent more time out partying at trendy nightclubs than she did at home with Alex and me.”

Maybe, Angelo realized now, that was why he’d never cared for the fun-loving party girls who hung around outside the stadium after games hoping to hook up with the players. They were a little too reminiscent of Cindy and her irresponsible ways for his taste.

The star he was staring at winked as if urging him on.

“Some of our teachers tried to help, but they could only do so much without state intervention. Cindy was good at avoiding that. Whenever she was called in for a parent-teacher conference or visited by a social worker, she would ramp up the tears and promise to change her ways. They believed her. Hell, Alex and I believed her.”

“Those kinds of promises are impossible not to believe coming from someone you need and love,” Atlanta said in a voice that sounded both sad and knowing.

“Things would be good for a while, but then she’d start going out again.”

The stars blurred out of focus. Angelo swallowed. His mother had abandoned her sons, too. Not physically, but emotionally.

“Didn’t your father at least help out financially?”

He shook his head. “According to her, the reason Alex and I wound up in the States to begin with was that Luca was broke and couldn’t provide for us. He was selling food from a roadside stand at that point.” Angelo’s tone turned frosty. “Eventually things turned around. He managed to open a restaurant, remarry and support a second family.”

“He never contacted you and Alex?”

“Once. We were eighteen and already living in New York. He managed to track us down through some shirttail relative of our mother’s. I was so ticked off at him that I hung up the telephone a few minutes into the conversation. Busted the receiver in two.” He snorted out a laugh that held no humor.

“You had a right to be angry.”

Hearing her say it opened the floodgate. During the past twenty years, he’d shared his private pain with no one except his twin. He found it surprisingly easy to tell Atlanta, “Luca forgot all about Alex and me. When you come right down to it, he abandoned us!”

His words echoed down the hillside.

“I’m sorry, Angelo.” Atlanta reached across the table to lay one of her hands over his.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not so long that it doesn’t still hurt.”