Page 14 of Conning the Billionaire
Arancini were balls of risotto rice stuffed with cheese, rolled in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. Kylie broke off a chunk and dabbed it into the red ragu sauce.
It melted in her mouth, cheese and crunch and red Sunday gravy. Her eyes rolled in her head, and she muttered a moan.
The guy smiled a little more. “It’s good?”
“Just like Nonna used to make. Well, almost.”
“Did you spend a lot of time with your grandmother?”
“Oh, yeah. Nonna and Papa, everything was about the Familia, and her arancini tasted just like this. Maybe hers were a little more balanced with the cheese in the middle. Restaurants want you to think you’re getting more for your money, so they pack a big cube of cheese in the middle so you see the gooey strings of mozzarella. With my nonna’s, the risotto was food, and the cheese was a little prize in the middle.”
The guy was watching her and smiling. “Yeah.” He seemed to recover himself and said, “That sounds wonderful.”
“My Nonna loved to cook, like it was her art,” Kylie said. “She made everything. Sunday was red gravy day, of course, but every other day was a free-for-all.”
“You miss her,” he said.
“Yeah, I do. She passed away when I was ten, so she never knew my dad was going to pass two years later. I think God was being kind. She couldn’t have survived one of her kids dying before her.”
Tiny wrinkles gathered around the man’s eyes, like pain. “Perhaps that was the case.”
Hey, maybe Kylie was making inroads with her sob story. Her usual rule of never telling the marks anything true might have to be rethought if she got a lot out of this guy. Kylie had guessed her life was a sob story, even though other people had it way worse.
“So, I’ve been surviving. And I’m okay.” She tilted her head to the side. “But you’re not okay. Every time I talk about my parents being gone, you wince. There’s a lot happening behind your eyes. What happened to you?”
6
MISSED
MICAH
Listening to Kylie Miller talk about her parents’ deaths was excruciating, but Micah didn’t twitch a muscle.
He hadn’t known her parents were dead.
How the hell had Micah missed that her parents were dead? It didn’t sound recent, and it was odd that it had been hushed up so fast. Maybe it was a car accident or something. Something mundane that happened to regular people.
Dammit, Micah didn’t miss things. He watched everyone and knew what everyone was up to all the time.
His soul, however, was stricken, and he mourned for Kylie.
Both her parents, gone.
Orphaned.
Alone in the world.
Micah didn’t allow even a tremor of that horror to reach his face.
He could tamp any emotion down deep in his stomach and not make a sound. It wasn’t just that he’d attended a boarding school for the richest kids in the world, and those exceedingly wealthy kids had no reason to be polite or even cordial to the few kids who’d clawed their way in with a scholarship. The things they’d said to him and his scholarship friends had been breathtakingly cruel, and the scholarship kids had been the targets when the rich kids’ testosterone had slammed them during puberty and they’d wanted to fight.
If he responded to the taunts or attacks, most teachers assumed that it was one of those scholarship kids making trouble again.
Micah had tagged their group of four as the Scholarship Mafia because they had to stick together and form a mutual defense society, which was exactly how the Cosa Nostra had begun back in Italy.
While Kylie spoke wistfully about her Nonna’s arancini and her grandparents’ devotion to their Familia, her longing for family and connection swept through Micah.
But he didn’t show it.
