A Cinderella To Secure His Heir (Cinderella Seductions Book 1)

by Michelle Smart

  Her lips still tingled in anticipation of a kiss that had never come.

  That he could speak of the attraction in such a matter-of-fact way cut through her. He had played her in so many different ways but this one cut the deepest.

  The man who had stolen into her dreams had been the man from whom she had sworn to protect her ward.

  How could she ever forgive herself?

  ‘I gave you the chance to prove yourself to me and you exceeded my expectations,’ he said into the silence. ‘I could have taken Domenico at any point today. Instead I am giving you the opportunity to be a permanent part of his life.’

  She felt as if she could cry all over again at the wretchedness of it all. ‘How can you call it an opportunity when I’m his legal guardian?’ But she knew he could overcome that legality in a heartbeat, especially now that he had her out of her home country. ‘Don’t your brother and sister-in-law’s wishes and feelings count for anything?’

  There was the barest flicker of a pulse in his jaw. ‘I am respecting their wishes by making this offer to you. If he had lived, my brother would have returned to the fold, because he would have seen it was in Domenico’s best interests. He died a poor man. Neither he nor his wife made financial provision for their son and you have suffered for it. Domenico is a Palvetti, and he deserves to be raised as one, and enjoy the wealth and privilege that’s his by right.’

  ‘Your brother would never have come back to the family fold,’ she whispered. ‘He despised the lot of you.’

  ‘I wish I could say my opinions on him were any different.’ He tipped the remaining Scotch down his throat. ‘My brother was a leech but I will not allow his son to suffer for the mistakes his father made. Domenico is a Palvetti heir. If he has the aptitude, one day he will run the business as I do. He will not live in poverty and if you accept my proposal you can be saved from it too.’

  ‘I don’t need to be saved,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve always supported myself.’

  His cynically raised brow at this assertion infuriated her. He’d had an investigator dig into her life and now thought he was an expert on her?

  If he’d dug that little bit further into her history, he would know she’d had no choice but to support herself.

  Beth had no family to go cap-in-hand to if times got hard. Her foster parents had been good people, and had kept her under their roof far longer than most foster placements, but she’d always known that the moment she turned eighteen she would be on her own.

  Other than Caroline, she’d never had anyone to fall back on and now, with Caroline’s death, her only emotional crutch had gone.

  ‘I’m only skint at the moment because I’ve been on unpaid leave for eleven months. I’m perfectly capable of supporting Dom and myself.’

  ‘In my care, Domenico will be more than supported—he will have the best of everything. You can have that too. All you have to do is say yes.’ Expectation now gleamed in his eyes.

  Desperation tore at her throat. ‘You can’t honestly expect me to give you an answer right now? I need time—’

  ‘If your feelings for Domenico run as deep as you say they do then what do you need to think about? Do you want to be a continuing influence in his life or not? Everything is out in the open between us, and in the morning I shall return to Milan with Domenico. You need to decide, now, if you’re going to be with us.’

  * * *

  Beth settled Dom in his carry-cot and, limbs and heart heavy, sat on the sofa in her suite.

  While she waited for the knock on the door that would signal their departure from the palace, she switched her phone on and messaged her boss Lucinda to let her know she wouldn’t be flying back with the rest of the White’s Events staff. She couldn’t bring herself to speak to her. She felt too sick to talk to anyone. The most she’d got her vocal cords to do since she’d given up on sleep was hum to Dom when she’d given him an early-morning bath. She’d been desperate for something to do, anything to take her away from her terrified thoughts.

  She was going to marry Alessio Palvetti.

  When it came down to it, what choice did she have? Either she married him or she lost Dom for good.

  Restless, she swiped through her phone’s photo album until she found one of Domenico and Caroline. It had been taken at a music festival the weekend after they’d married when Caroline had been three months pregnant.

  They’d been so excited about the pregnancy, blissfully unaware that only two months later their happiness would be torn apart by Caroline’s diagnosis. That diagnosis had been the spur that had forced them into writing their wills and nominating Beth as their unborn child’s guardian.

  Caroline had had no blood family left. Domenico had plenty of relatives but he’d hated the lot of them. He’d hated everything about his childhood and the straitjacket it had put him in and vowed his own children would never suffer as he had. His children would be raised to value decency and kindness and encouraged to follow their dreams. They would not worship at the altar of the almighty money tree. They would not be raised by strangers and starved of affection by their parents. They would not be indoctrinated into believing that the family’s business and reputation was worth more than them. They would never be thrown out and cut off for the crime of being different.

  In Domenico’s eyes, Alessio had been worse than the rest of the Palvettis put together. And Beth would have to marry him.

  For all that Beth adored her job, the world she’d entered as an eighteen-year-old virgin had left her as jaded about love and relationships as it had made her distrustful of rich men. As far as she could see, relationships didn’t exist, only sexual conquests. She’d been so envious of the love Caroline and Domenico had found with each other but witnessing it first-hand had also given her hope. If they could find that kind of love in this disposable world then she could find it with someone too. Mr Right was out there somewhere, a kind, decent man she could trust and give her heart to and create a future with.

  She would never meet Mr Right now. Her future was tied to a monster, a man who encompassed everything she’d spent her adult life avoiding. Her future would be spent trapped in a loveless marriage with a man who saw her as a business associate and future carrier for his heirs.

  Her brain burned to imagine sharing a bed with him to create those heirs, and burned even harder to remember how amazing it had felt to be spun in his arms when she had believed him to be someone else. And that dream she’d had...

  She hated him for that. His pretence had opened her up to an attraction she had never felt before, a desire that would never have sprung to life had she known who he really was.

  She stared at the picture again and rubbed her finger lightly over Caroline’s happy face. ‘I’m sorry. I underestimated him.’

  Maybe this really was for the best, she told herself, valiantly trying to find the positives. Dom would grow up with unimaginable wealth and have all the advantages that came with it, all the things that Beth couldn’t give to him as a single parent. Marriage to Alessio meant Dom would still have her there by his side, loving him and instilling the values his parents had wanted him to grow up with.

  Caroline had made the ultimate sacrifice to protect Dom and enable him to have a long, healthy life. She’d given her life. Compared to that, Beth sacrificing her future to ensure that protection continued was nothing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALESSIO’S HOME TURNED out to be a seventeenth-century baroque villa set in a huge estate complete with its own lake on the outskirts of Milan.

  Beth tried hard not to look impressed when the huge iron gates opened and the villa was revealed in all its glory but she was unable to stop her jaw dropping in stunned awe. It was L-shaped and three storeys high, topped with a terracotta roof. The ground floor was ringed by a magnificent colonnade of intricately carved stone pillars.

  This was going to be her home? />
  ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked when she’d got out of the car and had removed Dom’s car seat. After having screamed the entire journey on Alessio’s private jet—watching Alessio shove plugs into his ears and his face grimace as he’d tried to work over the racket had given Beth a perverse sense of enjoyment—the baby had fallen asleep the moment their car had set into motion. She didn’t want to risk waking him.

  ‘All my life. My parents transferred it into my name four years ago when they retired and I took over the running of Palvetti.’

  ‘Where do they live now?’

  ‘When he’s not travelling the world, my father lives in a villa by Lake Como. My mother died six months ago.’

  She blinked. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.’

  He took his briefcase from his driver with a nod of thanks. ‘Her death is the reason I tried to find my brother. I thought he deserved to know. If only someone had shown us the same courtesy when Domenico died, I wouldn’t have had to find out through a private investigator.’

  He then lifted Dom’s car seat with the sleeping baby still in it and strode to the front door, his subtle rebuke slicing through her chest.

  She remembered asking Caroline if she was going to notify Domenico’s Italian family about his death and the violent shake of her head as she’d refused. She’d been terrified that they’d try and take his body from her and have him buried in Milan. With all the heartbreak and devastation they’d been coping with, Beth had soon forgotten all about the Palvetti family’s ignorance of their son’s and brother’s death.

  She wished she hadn’t forgotten. Monster or not, no one should have to learn about the death of a family member the way Alessio had, and at a time when he must already have been reeling from his mother’s death.

  ‘I really am sorry,’ she called, hurrying to his side before he could open the door.

  She prevented her hand from instinctively touching his arm in comfort by the skin of her teeth.

  Hard emerald eyes met hers.

  ‘About your mother,’ she clarified. ‘I know what it’s like to lose a parent. It’s hard.’

  ‘You have lost a parent?’ The softening of the emeralds as he asked this made her realise he’d spoken the truth about having had his investigators only dig into the past five years of her life.

  ‘Mine died a long time ago.’

  His brow furrowed slightly. ‘Both of them?’

  She nodded.

  He held her gaze for the longest time. ‘I’m sorry.’

  But then the door they were standing at was opened for them and the brief softening between them gone.

  All Beth’s morbid thoughts were swept away the moment she stepped into the reception room.

  The interior of Alessio’s home was even more impressive than the exterior and Beth was taken back to the time she had first stepped into the Viennese palace and had imagined herself a princess.

  Had it really been only a day ago she’d had that feeling?

  If the palace was the place where a princess had experienced her first ball, this was the place the princess would call home.

  Her awe slowly transformed into terror as the richness of her surroundings became even clearer.

  History seeped through the frescoed walls of the rooms Alessio led her through and, with the uniformed staff lined up to greet her arrival, she had the surreal feeling that she’d slipped back to a time when men duelled for a woman’s honour.

  A fish out of water would have felt more at home here than she ever could.

  What would it be like to grow up in such a place?

  Beth’s early childhood home with her parents had been a small terraced house. After their death when she was nine she’d lived with her foster parents in a house only marginally bigger. It was in that home she had met Caroline.

  What fun they would have had in this villa that should really be called a castle. She imagined them as they’d been then, zooming around on roller-skates, trashing the buffed stone flooring, careering into the original sculptures, paintings and highly polished furniture lining the rooms.

  From what Domenico had told her, she doubted either he or Alessio had been allowed such freedom. Her childhood might have had its heartbreak but at least she’d had a childhood. Palvetti children spent theirs being indoctrinated into the family business.

  Once all the staff introductions had been done with, she followed Alessio up the wide stairs to the first floor.

  ‘This will be your room until our wedding,’ he informed her as he opened a door.

  If her heart hadn’t made such a thud at what he’d left unsaid, that come their wedding night she would share a room with him, she would have gasped at the first sight of the room.

  The bed was huge and covered in a beautifully embroidered golden bedspread. All the furniture, from the bedside tables to the dressing table to the chaise longue spread beneath the huge window, was carved from a gorgeous deep reddish wood she’d never seen before. The walls were skimmed a cream colour but the ceiling was frescoed with ancient cherubs.

  ‘Domenico’s room adjoins it.’ He briskly opened a connecting door to reveal a room with the same proportions as hers but furnished and decorated for an infant. He placed the sleeping baby’s car seat on the floor by the cot.

  ‘Did you get this done for him?’ she asked, suddenly desperate to talk about anything so as not to think that at some point in her near future she would have to share a bed with Alessio.

  He’d made it very clear that he wanted a real marriage and equally clear that that entailed sharing a bed.

  It was a thought that sent awareness firing through her, making her veins heat like molasses.

  ‘It’s always been a nursery. That door...’ he pointed ‘...adjoins the nanny’s room. Miranda will arrive in the morning.’

  ‘She was your spy?’

  ‘No, but I have offered her a permanent position.’

  ‘When do you expect me to start work for you?’ If Miranda was coming here tomorrow he must want her to start soon.

  The thought made her head swim.

  A lot of things were making her head spin. Everything had happened so quickly the night before that it was only as the day went on that the ramifications of what she’d agreed to had really hit home.

  Palvetti was one of the most iconic and exclusive brands in the world. The family behind it was one of the richest and most elusive. How could Alessio expect her to fit into the business or with his family? She knew nothing about jewellery or fragrances. She didn’t speak their language. She didn’t believe in packing small children away to boarding school.

  Yes, a fish out of water would fit in better.

  ‘I will introduce you to the business after our wedding.’ He made it sound like a living, breathing entity.

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘On Wednesday. Everything is arranged. I think it is best if Domenico remain with Miranda during the service.’

  She nodded her agreement and stared down at her ward, oblivious in his slumber to the huge changes happening to his world. She would be his only constant.

  She rubbed her arms and decided it was good they were marrying so quickly. The sooner, the better. Get the wedding over with before Alessio realised what a terrible fit for him she was, changed his mind and sent her packing.

  ‘Can you please stop calling him “Domenico”?’ she asked. This was one thing she couldn’t wait until their wedding day to resolve. Every time he called him that, it grated. ‘His name is Dom.’

  ‘His birth certificate has him named as Domenico.’

  ‘That was your brother’s name. Caroline named him that to honour him but she wanted him to be known as Dom.’

  Alessio stared hard into the chocolate eyes that, on the dance floor of the palace only the evening before, had been as
soft as warmed caramel.

  He had never met his sister-in-law. She had thought so badly of the Palvettis that not only had she failed to tell them of her husband’s death but she’d failed to give her son their family name, choosing instead to give him her maiden name.

  If his brother had been alive he would have pinned him against a wall and shaken him until his teeth rattled for all the heinous lies he must have told about them.

  But his brother was dead and his sister-in-law had met her death only six months later. She was not here to fight for her right to insist her son be called the name she wished.

  Going against his every inclination, Alessio jerked a nod. ‘I will try to remember.’

  Beth’s shoulders lowered. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I will have the chef prepare some lunch for us and then my lawyer is coming here so we can get the pre-nuptial agreement signed.’ He placed his briefcase on her dresser and opened it. ‘Here’s the draft copy for you to read. Would you like me to give you the basic points of it?’

  She stared at the document in his hands with suspicion then gave a sharp nod.

  He paused a moment before speaking again. The situation at the palace had been far more emotional than Alessio had anticipated and he’d been aware Beth had agreed to their marriage under duress. This was the moment, when emotions were calmer, when the final cards would be laid on the table and the deal between them would be either sewn up or broken irrevocably.

  ‘The contract states in black and white that in the event of a divorce I get full custody rights over Domenico... Dom. It also prevents you from speaking about any aspect of our marriage or the business.’

  A flash of angry colour stained her cheeks. ‘That’s hardly fair.’

  ‘Only if you divorce me.’

  The colour deepened and her brow furrowed. ‘If I sign it, then you can divorce me and get automatic custody of Dom without any protracted legal battle?’

  ‘I would already have custody of him if that was all I wanted.’