“He talked with you?”
“In between blows.”
“What exactly was the message?”
“To quote the muscleman, I’m supposed to ‘get my ass back to Boston and get the company back on track.’ ” Daniel pulled out into the road and accelerated. “Some of our stockholders, having learned we’re in Nassau, believe we’re on vacation down here.”
“Are we going back to the hotel?”
“Seeing as I’ve lost my enthusiasm for shopping, I want to get some ice on this eye of mine.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t go to a doctor? Your eye looks pretty bad.”
“It will probably come as a surprise if I remind you that I’m a doctor myself.”
“I’m talking about a real, practicing doctor.”
“Very funny, but excuse me if I don’t laugh!”
They drove in silence the short distance back to the hotel. Daniel parked the car in the parking lot. They got out. Stephanie collected her parcels from the backseat. She didn’t quite know what to say.
“The Castigliano brothers are acquaintances of my brother, Tony,” Stephanie finally admitted, as they walked toward their building.
“How come I’m not surprised?”
“Other than that, I don’t know them, nor have I ever met them.”
They keyed open the door to their suite. Stephanie tossed her shopping bags to the side. As guilty as she felt, she didn’t know how to handle Daniel’s rightful anger. “Why don’t you go in and sit down,” she offered solicitously. “I’ll get the ice.”
Daniel stretched out on the couch in the sitting room but quickly sat upright again. Lying down made his head throb. Stephanie came in with a towel, which she wrapped around a handful of ice cubes she got from the ice bucket on the counter over the minibar. She handed a makeshift ice pack to Daniel, who gingerly placed it against his swollen eye.
“How about some ibuprofen?” Stephanie asked.
Daniel nodded, and Stephanie got several tablets, along with a glass of water.
While Daniel took the pain reliever, Stephanie sat on the couch and tucked her feet underneath herself. She then told Daniel the details of her conversation with Tony the afternoon of the day they left for Turin. She concluded by abjectly apologizing for not having mentioned it. She explained that with everything else that was happening at the time, it seemed to be of minor importance. “I was going to tell you when we got back from Nassau and when the second-round financing came through, because I want to treat the two hundred thousand from my brother as a loan and return it with interest. I don’t want him or any of his associates involved with CURE in the future.”
“Well, at least we agree on something.”
“Are you going to accept my apology?”
“I suppose,” Daniel said, without a lot of enthusiasm. “So, your brother warned you about coming here?”
“He did,” Stephanie admitted, “because I couldn’t tell him why. But it was just a generic warning, and certainly without threats. I have to say, it’s still hard for me to believe he’s involved with your assault.”
“Oh, really?” Daniel said sarcastically. “Start believing it, because he has to have been involved! I mean, other than your brother telling these Castiglianos, how would they know we are here in Nassau? It can’t be a coincidence this thug appeared here the day after we arrived. Obviously, after you called your mom last evening, she called your brother, and he called his pals. And I don’t suppose I have to remind you how mad you got when I brought up the issue of possible violence when dealing with people involved in racketeering?”
Stephanie blushed at the recollection. It was true; she’d been furious. With sudden determination, she reached for her cell phone, flipped it open, and began dialing. Daniel grabbed her arm. “Who are you calling?”
“My brother,” Stephanie said hotly. She sat back with the phone against her ear. Her lips were pressed together in angered determination.
Daniel leaned toward Stephanie and took the phone. Despite Stephanie’s flash of anger and apparent resolve, she didn’t offer any resistance. Daniel closed the phone and tossed it onto the coffee table. “At the moment, calling your brother is the last thing we should do.” He sat back upright, keeping the ice pack pressed against his eye.
“But I want to confront him. If he was truly involved, I’m not going to let him get away with it. I feel betrayed by my own family.”
“You’re angry?”
“Of course I’m angry,” Stephanie retorted.
“So am I,” Daniel snapped. “But I’m the one who got beat up, not you.”
She lowered her eyes. “You’re right. You’re the one who deserves to be a lot more upset than I.”
“I need to ask you a question,” Daniel said. He adjusted his ice pack. “An hour or so ago, you said you’d been thinking about possibly going home to appease your conscience about working with the likes of Paul Saunders and Spencer Wingate. With this new development, I have to know now if you intend to or not.”
Stephanie glanced back up at Daniel. She shook her head and gave a short, embarrassed laugh. “After what’s happened, and as guilty as I feel about it, there’s no way I could leave.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Daniel commented. “Maybe there’s good in everything, even getting beaten to a pulp.”
“I really am sorry you were hurt,” Stephanie said. “I truly am. More than you know.”
“All right, all right,” Daniel repeated. He gave Stephanie’s knee a reassuring squeeze. “Now that I know you are staying, here’s what I think we should do. I think we should pretend this little episode of me being pummeled never happened, meaning no nasty calls to your brother or even your mother, for that matter. Future calls to your mother will emphasize that you and I are not vacationing here but rather hard at work on a job to save CURE. Tell her it’s going to take three weeks and then we’ll be home.”
“What about this hooligan who attacked you? Don’t we have to worry about him coming back?”
“That’s a concern but apparently a risk we have to take. He’s not from the Bahamas, and my educated guess is that he’s already on his way home. He said that if he had to fly the hell back down here from Boston again, he’d, and I quote, hurt me bad, which leads me to believe that New England is his usual hangout. At the same time, he said he didn’t want to hurt me so bad that I couldn’t get the company back on its feet, meaning they have a vested interest in my well-being, despite how I feel at the moment. But most importantly, I’m hoping your phone conversations with your mother, which will undoubtedly get communicated to your brother, will convince the Castiglianos it’s worth waiting three weeks.”
“Should we change hotels, since I told my mother we’re staying here?”
“I thought about that while I was sitting in the car, waiting for you to come out of the store. I even thought about taking Paul up on his offer to stay out at the Wingate Clinic.”
“Oh, God! That would be like going from the frying pan into the fire.”
“I wouldn’t want to stay there either. It’s going to be bad enough putting up with those charlatans during the day. So I think we should just stay here, unless it’s going to drive you crazy. I don’t want a repeat of our night in Turin. My feeling is that we should stay put but not leave the hotel, except to go to the Wingate Clinic, which, starting tomorrow, is where we are going to be most of the time anyway. Agreed?”
Stephanie nodded a few times as she absorbed everything Daniel had said.
“Do you agree or what?” Daniel asked. “You’re not saying anything.”
Stephanie suddenly threw up her hands in a burst of emotional frustration. “Gosh, I don’t know what to think. You getting attacked just adds to my uneasiness about this whole Butler affair. From day one, we’ve been forced to make assumptions about people we know little or nothing about.”