Read Online Loving Gigi by Ruth Cardello - Free Book Online Page B

everything she could to set them against each other. I’m not defending what you heard Gio say that day, but I can make a good guess why he said it. He was a messenger, Gigi, and a young one. Don’t hold that day against him.”
    Gigi looked across at Kane tentatively. “What did he say when you told him I was coming?”
    “He said, ‘Good.’”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s Gio.”
    “You said his wife, Julia, is a nice woman?”
    “The nicest. So sweet you’ll wonder if it’s an act, but after you spend enough time with her you’ll see she is completely genuine.”
    Gigi looked at, then hid, her chewed nail beneath her other hand. “She seemed to be a good match for him when I saw them together.”
    “She is. They bring out the best in each other.”
    “Are you close to all of them—my brothers? What are they like?”
    She asked the question with such yearning his heart went out to her. He wanted to gather her into his arms and reassure her everything would be fine, her brothers would love her, and that coming was indeed the right decision. He wanted to swear he’d stay with her to ensure it all worked out. He couldn’t. Being so close to her would be its own sweet torture. After he handed her off to Gio, he needed to put as much distance as he could between them. What had initially been a purely physical attraction was deepening. Watching Gigi with her mother had shown him another side of her. She wasn’t childishly defiant, as he’d originally thought. She felt hurt and rejected by her brothers and dealt with those feelings by isolating herself. She needed a bridge back to her brothers. “Gio is the oldest. As I said, he takes his role very seriously. Luke is the second oldest. At first, you’ll probably like him the best. I’ve never met a person who didn’t get along with Luke. He has an easy way about him. He was a surgeon in New York, but now he practices in Ohio. He and his wife, Cassie have a two-and-a-half-year-old. She’s a hoot. I joke that she has a lot of Nick in her, and if that’s true she’s going to give her parents a run for their money. Nick married my sister, Rena. They don’t have any children yet, thank God. I’m not sure the world is ready for their offspring. Nick is . . . irreverent. He was a hard one to like until my sister fell in love with him. Don’t take anything he says seriously. He has a sense of humor that can take a while to get used to. The youngest is Max. He married Tara. Max has always done his own thing, so of the four I know him the least, but he’s been spending a lot more time with his family since he and his wife had their first child last Christmas.”
    “You make them sound like regular people.”
    “What do you think they are?”
    Gigi’s eyes were wide with emotion. “I’m not like them. I wasn’t raised with money. I’m proud of what I do, but I didn’t grow up like this.” She referenced the jet with a wave of her hand.
    “What exactly do you do?”
    “I connect people who have something to sell with either an auction house or a private buyer. It’s a business my friend Annelise and I sort of fell into after college. I knew my mother had sold off items to pay for my schooling, but it wasn’t until I heard her speaking to a friend about the process that I realized how often she’d been taken advantage of. Her friend, Doris Sneddon, was looking to sell off some estate items to stop her family home from going into foreclosure. Doris lived just outside of Edinburgh. Annelise was from that area, so I asked her to help me help Doris. We catalogued her estate and helped her sell the least number of items for the most amount of money. Word of mouth is a powerful thing. Money was tight in the beginning, but we’ve had a constant stream of clients since. We compare it to running a funeral home. No one wants to come to us, but we make the best of difficult situations, and people are grateful for that.” As Gigi spoke about her life in