Chapter 1 - The Weight of Cashmere
The first thing Gia Parker ever said to Dante Moretti was rude enough to get most people fired, thrown out, or quietly erased from a very expensive guest list.
“Are you going to help me, or are you just standing there being expensive?”
The entire sidewalk outside the private Manhattan auction house on Madison Avenue went deathly silent. The hum of evening traffic on Seventieth Street seemed to mute itself, swallowed by the sudden, suffocating tension that dropped over the stone steps like a wool vault blanket.
Gia realized her mistake exactly two seconds too late.
At thirty-eight, she had survived collapsing floral walls, drunk groomsmen, billionaire brides, union disputes, impossible mothers-of-the-bride, and one champagne fountain that had flooded a museum ballroom twelve minutes before the governor arrived. She was not easily intimidated. She had spent fifteen years running Parker Event Design with an iron grip, a tool belt strapped to her waist, and a pair of steel-toed flats hidden beneath tailored black trousers.
But the tall man staring down at her was not a florist, a catering vendor, or a rich guest offended by the wrong shade of ivory linen.
He was Dante Moretti.
Even Gia, a woman who paid zero attention to organized crime tabloids and spent her seventy-hour workweeks calculating square footage and rigging trussing, knew the name. People called him an international logistics consultant and real estate developer when microphones were nearby. They used much darker, quieter words when they were standing in dark alleyways or sitting in federal courtrooms.
The two men standing a half-step behind him had already shifted their weight, their right hands disappearing inside the tailored folds of their dark wool coats with a synchronization that screamed military precision.
Gia looked down at the disaster scattered across the damp granite of Madison Avenue. Her heavy rolling aluminum equipment case had struck a broken patch of city pavement, snapped its double latches open, and spilled steel trussing, brass display poles, velvet mounting blocks, industrial clips, wire, and twenty-two yards of custom-dyed, fire-treated silk directly at Dante Moretti’s polished leather shoes.
A heavy steel curtain support rod had rolled to a halt less than an inch from his left toe.
Gia pointed a gloved finger at the two men behind him. “Before anybody gets dramatic, those are curtain supports.”
One of the men—a wall of a human with a broken nose and a faint scar running along his jawline—stared at her without blinking. “I know what they are.”
“Great. Then don't bend them. They cost four hundred dollars a piece and they're structural.”
Dante Moretti said nothing.
That was somehow vastly worse.
He was perhaps forty-five, dark-haired with clean threads of silver beginning at his temples, dressed in a charcoal cashmere coat so perfectly cut to his broad shoulders that it looked less purchased off a rack than negotiated into existence by a master tailor. He had a stillness about him—an absolute, unshakeable center of gravity—that made everyone else on the sidewalk seem frantic and nervous by comparison.
Gia crouched on the wet pavement and began gathering brass clips, her breath fogging in the cool October air. “Wonderful,” she muttered under her breath. “An absolutely stellar start to the evening.”
“You're bleeding,” Dante said. His voice was low, smooth, and possessed the deep, resonant timbre of expensive scotch pouring over carved ice.
She looked up, pausing with a handful of velvet blocks.
Dante nodded toward her left hand. A broken latch on the aluminum case had sliced cleanly through her leather work glove and into the fleshy side of her thumb.
Gia pulled the glove off with her teeth and wiped the thin, bright streak of blood against her copper knit sweater without missing a beat. “It's nothing.”
“It is not nothing.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“Then we're both guessing.”
For the first time since the case had exploded, something subtle shifted at the right corner of his mouth.
Gia froze in her crouch. Was Dante Moretti—a man rumored to control half the waterfront distribution networks between Boston and Baltimore—actually trying not to smile?
The bodyguard with the broken nose looked deeply, profoundly concerned by the possibility.
Gia returned to her equipment, shoving clips back into the open tray. Then, to her complete astonishment, Dante crouched. A man wearing a coat that cost more than her first automobile actually bent his knees on a public Manhattan sidewalk and picked up one of her heavy black velvet risers.
Gia stared at him, her dark eyebrows knitting together. “You know that's not a bomb, right?”
“I had assumed,” he replied smoothly, turning the block over in his long, powerful hands.
“Your friends don't look convinced.”
“My friends are dramatic.”
“They look armed.”
“They are also armed.”
“That explains the drama.”
His mouth moved again. Definitely a smile this time—faint, razor-sharp, and entirely unexpected.
Gia accepted the velvet block from his hand, setting it carefully into the aluminum case. When he reached down toward a roll of imported, hand-dyed silk gauze, her event-planner instincts overrode her survival instincts. She caught his wrist automatically.
Every person within twenty feet on Madison Avenue stopped breathing. The bodyguard's hand cleared his coat by two full inches.
“Don't,” Gia said firmly.
Dante's dark eyes dropped to her bare hand wrapped around his stiff white shirt cuff and cashmere sleeve. Behind him, both guards took a sharp half-step forward.
Dante lifted his left hand slightly, fingers outstretched. The guards froze instantly, sinking back into the shadows like trained dogs pulled back by an invisible leash.
Gia released his wrist, stepping back onto her heels. “Sorry. The fabric's clean. Your hands have been outside.”
Dante looked at his own palm, then looked back up at her. “You think my hands are dirty?”
“I think you're Dante Moretti.”
Something dark, deep, and deeply amused entered his eyes. “And you still grabbed my wrist.”
“You were about to touch imported, fire-treated silk with sidewalk hands. Do you know how long it takes to steam twenty yards of silk?”
“Unforgivable?” he asked softly.
“Finally, you understand the hierarchy of design.”
Dante reached into his inner breast pocket, pulled out a folded white handkerchief made of high-thread-count linen, and held it out to her. It was monogrammed with tiny, elegant silver initials: D.V.M.
Gia frowned, looking at the cloth as if it were a tactical trap. “I don't accept gifts from men who bring armed escorts to private art auctions.”
“It is not a gift.”
“It literally has your initials embroidered on it.”
“You are bleeding,” he said, his tone turning crisp and practical. “It solves an immediate problem.”
She hesitated for two seconds, looking at the bright crimson bead pooling on her thumb, then took it. “You don't get a favor later.”
“You owe me nothing, Miss...?”
“Parker. Gia Parker.”
“You owe me nothing, Miss Parker.”
That stopped her more effectively than an explicit threat would have. Most powerful men Gia encountered—especially the Wall Street hedge-fund executives and real estate magnates whose lavish weddings she executed—treated every minor courtesy like an invisible invoice to be collected later with interest. Dante had made the gesture, heard her sharp boundary, and stepped back without an ounce of bruised ego.
Interesting. Dangerous, but interesting.
She wrapped the linen handkerchief tightly around her cut, securing it with a piece of clear floral tape from her apron pocket.
“What brings Parker Event Design to the Vance Auction House tonight?” Dante asked, standing up in one fluid, effortless motion and offering her a hand to help her up.
Gia ignored the hand, pushing herself up from the pavement. “The Vance Foundation is auctioning off forty pieces of mid-century Italian sculpture tonight. My client wants the main hall to look like a private villa in Lake Como, which means I have forty minutes to suspend two hundred pounds of greenery and silk from ceiling joists that haven't been inspected since 1952.”
Dante turned his gaze toward the heavy brass doors of the auction house. A strange, fleeting shadow passed over his features—so fast Gia almost thought she had imagined it.
“The Vance family,” Dante murmured, his voice dropping an octave. “A very old name in New York.”
“And a very difficult one,” Gia muttered, latching her repaired case. “The matriarch, Eleanor Vance, rejected three different floral schemes before agreeing to white hydrangeas. If one leaf is wilted, she’ll probably try to have me impounded.”
Dante looked back at her, his dark eyes locking onto hers with a sudden, intense focus that made her skin prickle beneath her copper sweater. “If Eleanor Vance gives you trouble tonight, Miss Parker, tell her that Dante Moretti suggested she exercise restraint.”
Gia picked up the heavy handle of her equipment case. “I don't use other people's names to fight my battles, Mr. Moretti.”
“I suspect you don't,” he said quietly.
He stepped aside, opening a clear path toward the service entrance for her. As Gia pulled her rolling case past him, the faint scent of cedar, dark tobacco, and cold rain clung to his coat. She took three steps toward the doors before his voice halted her again.
“Miss Parker?”
She turned, her hand resting on the brass door handle. “Yes?”
May you like
Dante was looking at the handkerchief wrapped around her hand, the bright red stain soaking through his silver initials. “Keep the linen. Consider it a deposit on a future conversation.”
Before she could respond, Dante turned and walked up the grand front marble steps of the auction house, his two bodyguards falling into position behind him like twin shadows, leaving Gia alone on the cold sidewalk with a bleeding hand and a feeling that her carefully controlled night was about to fall apart.
