Page 33 of 4 Weddings and a Feud

“Whose family?” The door slid open, and she stepped into the lobby. “Oh! You mean the mafia?”

Too loud, the word echoed off the marble floors and wood paneling. The receptionist looked up with wide eyes.

“I mean…organized crime?” Mary whispered.

“He owned the Paradise on paper, but it was the Family—yes, the mafia—who actually owned it. He paid them for security, for casino workers, for produce in the restaurant, and even for toilet paper. And when he ran short of cash, it wasn’t good.” He cracked the knuckles on his left hand before he scanned his card one final time, and they stepped back into the mostly empty parking garage.

“Shit!” he said. “I forgot about my car.”

“It’s okay.” She held out her hand for the keys. “I’ll drive you home.”

“Not happening. I’ll drive you home. Then I can take the limo back.”

“No can do. The lot’s covered in security cameras. Michael would blow a gasket if I gave you the gate code.”

“Then we’ll return the limo together, and I’ll drive you home,” he said. Stubborn man.

“I could get a rideshare home,” she argued.

He only raised his eyebrows.

“Fine.” She clicked the lock on the limo but circled to the passenger side. “Though if I don’t watch it, I’ll get used to riding in a limo instead of driving it.”

He opened the driver’s side door. “Would that be so terrible?”

She snorted. “You’re the riding-in-limos type, Alex. Not me.” Though that was dangerously close to bringing up senior prom. So once he settled into the driver’s seat, she said, “Why are you afraid of your dad’s maf—Family contacts coming after your mother? She doesn’t still do business with them, does she?”

He crumpled into the leather seat. “No. And my father didn’t, either. Not at the end. There was an incident, and after that, my mother and I begged him to sever those ties. And he did. He bought the Paradise from the Family. But the problem was how he did it.”

She let him drive for a few blocks in silence, but when the Forza Elite Motors sign came into view, she asked, “What did he do?”

“He had a reputation as a savvy businessperson. People came to him for financial advice. And that’s how he got into trouble. You see, he was not a good man.” Alex slowed and stopped at a flashing red traffic light, carefully looked both ways, then proceeded through the intersection.

“I’m sure he was good in his way. He raised you.”

Alex only tightened his lips. “He ran a pyramid scheme. He paid out to the initial investors to give people an inflated sense of what their investments could do. But the later investors got nothing. All their money went to buying the Family out of the Paradise.”

“What?” How could he have hidden that from her? “When did this happen?”

“He started it when I was in high school. I didn’t know about it. Not until later. Mama thought he’d gone legit. We didn’t find out what he was doing until the federal investigators came to arrest him one night.”

In high school? But they’d been friends then. Surely, he’d have told her if something that big had happened in his life. “When, Alex?”

He slowed to make the turn into the entrance and stopped at the metal gate. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and stared through the windshield. “End of senior year.”

“End of…do you mean prom night?”

“I think I need the code now,” he said.

“Answer me first. Is that what happened on prom night?”

Pain tightened his pretty eyes. “They came that night and stayed for hours, questioning all of us. They confiscated my phone as evidence and wouldn’t let me leave.”

“Why didn’t you tell me after?” She’d cried buckets of tears into her pillow all weekend, humiliated at how Alex had played her when she’d thought there could be something between them.

He stared at the gate. “I didn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t because of the investigation. And then Mama had to sell the house and the Paradise to pay back the investors. We lost everything, Mary, down to the clothes on our backs. I was ashamed.”

She wanted to give him a hug, but Michael’s security camera pointed right at them from behind the keypad. She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned across Alex to enter the code. He sat, stiff as a board, until she scooted back into her seat.

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