Five years ago, when the year-long course in Italy had ended, they had agreed to form a partnership, seek out investors among Bobby’s financial contacts and open a restaurant in New York. It had taken another year to put the deal together, but it had been worth all of the scrimping and sacrifice, all of the long nights scraping paint and sanding floors. Café Tuscany had been a dream for both of them.
Apparently, it had also been Bobby’s personal get-rich-quick scheme.
According to the summons she’d been handed an hour ago, Bobby had not only embezzled restaurant funds, but stolen from their backers, as well. A check of the café’s account, made just minutes ago, confirmed the worst—the coffers were empty. And the rent was due, as were payments on invoices from most of their vendors.
Gina had no one to blame but herself for this disaster. She had allowed Bobby to keep track of their finances, because she was more interested in cooking and marketing than calculating. The fact that an outsider—an attorney representing the supposedly swindled backers—knew more about the state of the business’s finances than she did was humiliating. It didn’t seem to matter that she had done her part to make the business thrive. She was as much at fault as the man who’d run off with the money. At least, that was the implication in the summons.
Gina thought of all she had sacrificed to put Café Tuscany on the map, including a personal life. But it had been worth it. With a promotional push by one of her old high school classmates, superstar Lauren Winters, Gina had launched Café Tuscany as the hottest restaurant in a town where five-star dining and excellent neighborhood eateries were a dime a dozen. Prime tables were booked weeks in advance, and special events were sold out. Celebrities liked to be seen here, their presence always noted in the next day’s papers. In the past year, their brand-new catering division had been booked for a dozen of society’s most important charity events. With each success had come new bookings that kept her on the go morning till night.
So where had all that money gone? To finance some new scheme of Bobby’s, no doubt. Or perhaps to freshen his designer wardrobe of Italian suits. Or maybe to buy diamonds for his latest lover. All Gina knew for certain was that none of it was in the bank, and that second notices for unpaid bills were stuffed into a drawer of the desk that Bobby had kept under lock and key. She’d broken into it an hour ago, right after she’d read through the damning words in the summons.
When she’d called Bobby’s home—an expensive brownstone on the Upper East Side—she’d discovered that the line had been disconnected. His cell phone had gone unanswered. The man was gone.
The man was slime!
And because of him, this lawyer—she glanced at the summons again—this Rafe O’Donnell was on her trail, apparently convinced that she was in on the scheme, rather than another one of its victims.
Sitting there, stunned, Gina realized that her dream was not just ending, but crash landing. Unless she could come up with money—a lot of money—she would have to declare bankruptcy and close Café Tuscany within months, if not weeks. She might be able to stave off creditors for a while, but not indefinitely.
“I have to think,” she muttered.
And she wasn’t going to get the job done sitting in this closet. She needed fresh air and wide-open spaces. She needed to go home to Winding River, Wyoming.
She could leave the restaurant in the capable hands of her assistant manager for a week or so. She could call this O’Donnell person and postpone the deposition until, say, sometime in the next century.
With her high school class reunion in a few days, the timing couldn’t be better. Her friends—the indomitable Calamity Janes—would be there to bolster her spirits. If she decided to ask, they would offer advice. Lauren would write a check on the spot to bail her out. Emma would give her expert legal counsel. And Karen and Cassie would find some way to make her laugh.
Gina sighed. They would do all of that and more if she decided to tell them just how badly she’d messed up.
In fact, she thought with the first bit of optimism she’d felt all day, they might even offer her a shotgun she could use if she ever spotted Roberto Rinaldi again.
Chapter One
“Gina Petrillo has gone where?” Rafe O’Donnell’s head snapped up at his secretary’s casual announcement.
“Wyoming. She called an hour ago and rescheduled the deposition,” Lydia Allen repeated, looking entirely too cheerful.
If Rafe didn’t know better he’d think she was glad that this Gina had escaped his clutches. He scowled at the woman who had been assigned to him when he’d first joined the firm, Whitfield, Mason and Lockhart, seven years earlier. At the time, she’d been with the firm for twenty years and claimed that she was always assigned to new recruits to make sure they were broken in properly. She was still with him because she swore that, to this day, he was too impossible to foist off on a less-seasoned secretary.
“Did I say it was okay to reschedule?” he inquired irritably.
“You’ve been in court all day,” she said, clearly un-intimidated by his sharp tone. “We reschedule these things all the time.”
“Not so some crook can go gallivanting off to Wyoming,” he snapped.
“You don’t know that Gina Petrillo is a crook,” Lydia chided. “Innocent until proven guilty, remember?”
Rafe held on to his temper by a thread. “I do not need to be lectured on the principles of law by a grandmother,” he said, deliberately minimizing whatever legal expertise she might legitimately consider her due.
Typically, she ignored the insult. “Maybe not, but you could
