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grinned. “Great drive. Great car. Want to come down and help with the groceries?”
    Eli hit the ground so fast the casts on his foot and arm might have been imaginary.
    Rafe followed, looking grim and trying to smile at the same time.
    His brothers wanted their wives to feel safe, and at the same time, they feared for them so much.
    Noah shook his head. He couldn’t stand to watch; his big brothers, Eli and Rafe, stripped of confidence by the love of a woman.
    But Noah had never loved a woman as much as his brothers loved their wives.
    He enjoyed women, of course. He enjoyed everything about them: their scents, their smiles, the curves of their bodies, the way they moaned as they moved beneath him in bed. Or on top of him. The first time, the last time… it was all good.
    But once he realized death would follow him at every turn, he also realized he could never settle down, marry, have children. He could never grow old with that one special woman he had imagined he would someday find. Because a man who loved a woman, knowing that in his untimely dying he would cruelly desert her, knowing that his disgrace would haunt her and their children forever… he deserved to burn in hell.
    So his relationships were fun, joyous, short-term, and trivial. He fell a little in love with each woman. He thought they all fell a little in love with him. But his loversknew the score, and they were never surprised when he smiled and kissed them good-bye.
    He had broken his own rule only once.
    Now, as he watched his brothers, he envied them fiercely. They had what he would never have.
    Eli, always solemn, always mature, laughed and tried to wrap Chloë in his sweaty, dirty arms while she edged away, screaming, “No! No! You’re yucky!”
    But she didn’t scamper very fast, and when he caught her, she didn’t seem worried about his yuck.
    Rafe willingly made a fool of himself by flexing his muscles while Brooke made cooing noises and ran her fingertips over his pecs.
    Nonna laughed aloud.
    And an image rose unbidden in Noah’s brain. Penelope Alonso, her heavy, long black hair hanging in a braid down her back, her exotic brown eyes peeking from beneath the sweep of long, thick, dark lashes, her full lips smiling as she watched him make a fool of himself… for her…
    He told himself it wasn’t surprising he had broken his rule for Penelope. He had been almost twenty, and still grieving over his broken future and the inevitable loss of his own life.
    More important, she had been everything he’d ever wanted: tough, proud, joyous, ambitious, hardworking, smart, and brash. He supposed she hadn’t been technically beautiful: a little short, very curvy, a quarter white, a quarter Hispanic, and half something else—she didn’t know who her father was. Not that she’d cared. Nor had Noah. Because he’d seen her, and he’d loved her, and she’d loved him back.
    At the end of that summer, he’d realized what a bastardhe’d been to start a relationship with her, and he’d sent her away.
    Noah promptly put the image out of his mind.
    He saw no point in remembering her. In a moment of weakness three years ago, he’d looked her up on the Internet and come across photos of her wedding.
    He was glad she’d moved on. Because no woman deserved a man who kept secrets, a man doomed to die for his misdeeds.
    Thank God Penelope Alonso was the only woman who had ever tempted him, and thank God she had moved forever beyond his reach.…

Chapter 5
    P enelope arrived at Joseph Bianchin’s estate at precisely nine a.m. Thursday morning—late enough that she couldn’t possibly be rude, but early enough to catch Bianchin before he left to run errands, or go to work, or go golfing, whatever eighty-one-year-old extremely wealthy men did with their time.
    But no matter how many times she rang the electronic buzzer placed outside the closed gates, no one answered.
    Stone lions glared down at her from atop limestone pillars, their claws raised and