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

by Michelle Smart

  ‘How can you miss something you never had? I knew they loved me and that all their hard work was for my benefit. That was enough for me. I dreamed of the day I was old enough to join them. It will be the same for Dom.’

  He heard shuffling behind him and turned his head to find Beth sat upright, cross-legged, under the covers.

  ‘You have no idea how things will be for Dom and, please, none of that “guidance” rubbish. Your brother had the same guidance as you but it didn’t change who he was.’

  Beth saw the grimace cross Alessio’s face at this latest mention of his detested brother.

  Frustration had her grabbing her pillow onto her lap and thumping it. ‘Can you stop being so ruddy superior for a minute?’

  ‘I’m not being—’

  ‘Yes you are.’ She punched the pillow again, wishing for a moment that it was Alessio’s face. ‘You judge everything by your own standards and experiences, but they’re your experiences, no one else’s, and maybe I’m guilty of the same thing, because I can’t bear the thought of Dom waking in the night, needing me, but not being able to reach me. I’ve been there.’ She brushed away a hot tear that spilled out from nowhere. ‘I know what it’s like to miss someone so much your heart feels punched and bruised from the pain. I won’t put Dom through that.’

  There was a moment of silence before he cautiously said, ‘You are speaking of your parents?’

  She wiped another tear and nodded.

  He shifted his position to face her properly. His anger had been replaced by a look she couldn’t determine. ‘What happened to them?’

  She blew out a puff of air. The last time she’d spoken of their death had been with Caroline, fourteen years ago. ‘A faulty boiler.’

  His brow creased in confusion.

  She blew out more air. ‘We had a faulty boiler. Dad tried to fix it himself.’

  She covered her mouth as an image of her smiling father—he was always smiling—floated in her mind: a skinny man, barely older than Beth was now when he died, as daft as a brush but with a heart filled with love for his wife and princess daughter. Time had faded the image in her mind but it had never faded the hole his and her mother’s deaths had left in her heart.

  ‘My parents were young when they had me. Teenagers. They never had much money. That’s why he tried to fix it himself—there wasn’t enough money to pay for a professional. Whatever he did to the boiler caused it. They died in their sleep. Carbon monoxide poisoning.’

  Alessio’s jaw had clenched while she spoke. She could read nothing in his expression. ‘Why weren’t you affected by it?’

  ‘I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house.’

  She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block the memory of waiting for them to collect her, the concern in her friend’s mother’s eyes when they hadn’t answered her calls, the increasingly frantic banging on the unanswered locked front door after she’d driven Beth home, the flash of lights, the noise of the sirens, getting closer to their home... The desperate fear that had clutched at her and the chill she had felt down into the marrow of her bones.

  ‘They said I was lucky,’ she whispered. She pulled the pillow to her chest and hugged it tightly. ‘I didn’t feel lucky. I spent the first year with my foster family praying every night not to wake up so I could be with them.’

  The silence that followed this could have been broken by a falling feather.

  ‘Accidenti,’ he muttered, before blowing out his own long puff of air. ‘I’m sorry. That is a terrible thing.’

  There was nothing she could say to counter that. Her life had been destroyed.

  ‘Why did you go into foster care?’ he asked. ‘Was there no family to take you?’

  ‘No one deemed suitable to care for a nine-year-old girl.’ Both her parents had been only children from violent, chaotic households. From the little she remembered having learned before their deaths, they’d been determined to give their daughter a different life from the one they’d endured.

  The ache in Alessio’s guts made him feel as if he’d been punched by a heavyweight.

  His brain burned, a furnace raging through it, his palms clammy.

  His relationship with his parents was very different from the one he suspected Beth had had with hers but his mother’s death had still hit like a blow. He could barely imagine what it would have been like to lose both his parents together, and at such a young age and in such circumstances.

  ‘It was in your foster home you met Caroline?’ he asked in a voice that sounded to his ringing ears as if it were coming from a distance.

  Her fingers tightened on the pillow. ‘She was fostered a year after me. Her mum died of cancer. She never knew her father. She was the same age as me.’ She swallowed. ‘She was the best friend I ever had. Foster placements rarely last longer than a couple of years but our foster parents let us live with them until we were both eighteen. They could see what we meant to each other and didn’t want to split us up.’

  ‘Are you still in contact with them?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really. When we moved out new kids came in that needed their care, and we were too busy enjoying the London life to keep in touch.’ She cleared her throat and turned her head to look at him.

  The sadness he saw in her eyes landed like another punch in his guts.

  ‘I haven’t told you this to manipulate you. I just want you to understand. I couldn’t live with myself if Dom was sent away and I let it happen without a fight.’

  He reached out and touched her hair, wishing he had the words to take away the pain she had lived through.

  ‘I understand,’ he said heavily but his words were a lie.

  Alessio had lived thirty-five years without feeling an ounce of the emotion Beth carried in her heart. He’d been taught to be strong, to be detached, to be focussed, and he understood why. Emotions messed with thinking. They made people take paths that were not logical.

  Drawing her to him, he closed his eyes at the sigh that escaped her when she rested her head on his chest.

  This woman, who’d already lost so much, had been the one to pick up the broken pieces from his brother’s death. She’d put her life on hold to care for his brother’s child when her heart would have been breaking to lose the woman who’d been more of a sister to her than he and Domenico had ever been as brothers to each other.

  And, though he knew it was unfamiliar emotions making him say the words to give Beth comfort, he said them anyway. ‘I will put Dom’s name on the waiting list so we’re guaranteed a place but I’ll make a deal with you. When the time comes, the three of us will visit the school. If you and Dom are both happy for him to be sent there, then he goes. If he’s not happy to go, then we find another school for him closer to home.’

  She tilted her head to look at him, the tiniest furrow in her brow. ‘You would do that?’

  ‘All I ask is when we visit it, you keep an open mind.’

  The relief that spread across her face pushed out the discomfort in his chest that he was going against all tradition for Beth’s peace of mind.

  And when she pressed her lips to his, kissed him and wrapped her arms tightly around him, he welcomed the familiar ache that filled him and pushed out the cramping, unfamiliar ache in his chest.

  * * *

  The sick feeling Alessio had woken with the morning before still churned hard in his guts on this, his nephew’s first birthday.

  He’d taken the day off for it. The surprise and gratitude in Beth’s eyes when she’d realised he intended to spend the whole day at home with them had cut through him.

  It had to be a lingering echo from listening to her relate the horror of her parents’ death.

  Her story was no worse than he’d imagined. He’d assumed a car crash or something similar, but it was the pain in her voice at the telling that had crushed his chest.

&
nbsp; His beautiful, loving wife had lost everyone she’d cared for.

  He recalled their conversation in Club Giroud about his brother’s relationship with Caroline and her envy of the love they’d shared.

  He looked around the sunny garden. The early autumn sun blazed over the tables spread out and laden with food, and the play equipment that had been installed—the soft ball pits, the sand pits, the huge paddling pools—all things that would ruin the lawn, all things Beth had arranged so their son and his infant cousins could play to their hearts’ content.

  Their son?

  Since when had he thought of Dom as anything but his nephew?

  He watched one of his cousin’s daughters, a toddler called Chiara, waddle to Dom and throw her arms around him, wrestling him to the ground with the force of her clumsy embrace. He watched Beth and Chiara’s nanny help them to their unsteady feet. Chiara’s parents were too busy chatting with other family members—probably discussing business—to notice.

  With eyes that felt as if a filter were being pulled from them, Alessio took the whole scene in.

  Small children playing together, watched over by paid staff and a few grandparents.

  No older children. They were at boarding school.

  The parents of the children in attendance were ignoring their offspring, drinking wine and discussing business. Most of them would head back to the office when the party was over.

  The only parent interacting and playing with the children... Beth.

  His beautiful, loving Beth.

  For the first time he wondered—really wondered—if the Palvetti way was the right way.

  Gina and Marcello suddenly appeared in the garden, arms laden with presents, their own small children trailing behind them holding their nanny’s hand. Alessio’s instinct was not to stride over, greet them and thank them for Dom’s birthday gifts but to shield Beth from Gina’s cold stare.

  He’d come to a truce with his cousin after she’d apologised to him and assured him of her full support. He had a feeling Marcello had talked her into seeing reason, but the gesture had loosened some of the angst that seemed constantly to be clawing at him.

  The gesture did not stop his instinct to gather his wife close to him and protect her.

  She didn’t need his protection, he thought, watching her smile drop when she spotted Gina. Her shoulders rose before she scooped Dom into her arms and carried him to her. Beth could hold her own.

  He hadn’t told her about the argument in the boardroom. He’d got his own way, no one had resigned, so what had there been to tell? Beth had thrown herself into the arrangements with all the gusto he remembered from when she’d been organising the ball and he didn’t want her to have cause to doubt herself.

  Those doubts were on his head.

  What if Gina was right? What if opening the doors to their facility led to their ruin?

  But, even if she gave him categorical proof that that would be the case, he didn’t know if he could stop the wheels that were now in motion. Beth was the happiest he’d ever known her. He couldn’t take that from her. He’d taken everything else.

  In his arrogance, he’d thought she should be grateful for the chance he was taking by marrying her. He was giving her everything!

  But that everything was nothing she wanted.

  In his arrogance he’d made her quit the job she loved and give up her flat, and had had the nerve to say and think that she was coming into their marriage with nothing when that nothing was what she’d worked hard for.

  She’d had to work hard. She’d never had the back-up he’d taken for granted his whole life. No family to turn to if times got hard.

  No wonder his family had long ago deduced that marrying for love caused nothing but problems.

  And that was his problem. He could deny it no longer. He might as well deny his eyes were green.

  He’d fallen in love with his wife.

  There was nothing he would not do to make her happy.

  And the knowledge of what it would take to give Beth the happiness he wanted for her felt like a spiked fist twisting in his guts.

  He had to let her go.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALESSIO ENTERED THE nursery and found Miranda preparing to read a bedtime story to a freshly bathed and fed Dom.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘Come back in fifteen minutes.’

  Alone with his nephew, he sat him on his lap and opened the tractor book.

  Dom immediately snatched it from his hands and shoved as much of it as he could fit into his mouth.

  Alessio laughed even though his heart wasn’t in it.

  It was hard to feel anything but despair.

  He would be leaving with Beth soon for the party at the workshop. This would be the last time he would read his nephew’s favourite book to him.

  Dom then thrust the book at Alessio’s face. ‘Ook.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ook.’

  He gazed into the bright-blue eyes that were so like his dead brother’s and wanted to weep.

  ‘Book?’ he managed to ask.

  Dom beamed, clambered up his uncle’s chest and pressed his open mouth to Alessio’s cheek in the way he’d seen him do to Beth.

  An emotion of such intense purity filled him that, suddenly, Alessio found himself holding Dom tightly in his arms and brushing kisses on the fragile head covered in soft, fluffy blond hair.

  He loved this little boy. Loved him so much it hurt his heart.

  As soon as he loosened his hold, Dom wriggled and smothered Alessio’s face with sloppy kisses, giggling manically.

  Dom’s needs were as simple as Beth’s, he realised with a sharp pain in his chest. Other than the basic necessities, all he needed was love.

  It didn’t make what he had to do any easier but it fortified his belief that it was the right path to take.

  It was the only path to take.

  * * *

  ‘Are you sure, I look okay?’ Beth asked anxiously.

  It was the third time she’d asked in as many minutes.

  Sensing her nerves were eating at her, and wanting to cut them off before they could come to a head, Alessio left the shoe he was about to put his foot into, strode over and cupped her cheeks in his hands.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said quietly. ‘You look beautiful. Your dress is perfect. Your hair is perfect. Nothing is going to go wrong.’

  Chocolate eyes gleamed at him before a small smile curved her lips.

  In truth, she looked stunning. The long, white off-the-shoulder dress she’d chosen with the deep red roses embellished on its skirt managed to be conservative, sexy and sophisticated all in one. She’d spent the afternoon at a salon and now her hair gleamed and fell in waves around her bare shoulders. The only obvious cosmetics she wore were a deep red lipstick that matched the roses on her dress and the colour painted on her nails. On her feet were dusky pink shoes with gold high heels.

  Not wanting to smudge her lipstick and give her something else to worry about, he settled for rubbing his nose to hers. ‘Go and say goodnight to Dom.’

  The moment the door closed behind her, he shut his eyes, took a long breath and swallowed hard to dislodge the pain in his throat.

  What had started as an ache in his heart had steadily turned into a pain that wracked his entire being.

  But, whatever pain he had to live with, nothing was worse than the alternative, the selfish alternative, of keeping his wife tied to his side when he knew she could never be truly happy with him, the man who had threatened and blackmailed her into this life.

  Sometimes he would look at her and wonder how she could bear his touch, never mind welcome it.

  She would welcome her freedom more. That was the conclusion he’d been forced to accept. Mind-blowing sex did not make happiness. Freedom did.


  Alessio had always been free to choose his own path. That the path he’d chosen had been preordained had never bothered him at all. He’d had a lifelong goal and in achieving it he’d thrived.

  He’d thrived because he’d never had to feel, not on anything but a superficial level. He’d shed a few tears at his mother’s funeral but, as awful as it was to admit it to himself, he’d felt detached from the mourning. He missed her glamorous presence in his life and her often wicked sense of humour but he didn’t miss her in the fundamental way Beth still missed her parents fifteen years after their deaths.

  His brother had felt. Domenico had felt things deeply. And, rather than try and accept his brother for what he was, Alessio had sneered at him and condemned him for his choices.

  He’d been a patronising bastard, he thought painfully. Because Alessio was feeling now. All the things he’d thought he would never feel in his meticulously planned life were there, slicing into his skin and ripping into his heart.

  Was it any wonder his brother had turned his back on them?

  Beth would never turn her back on them because she would never leave Dom. What kind of freedom was that? What kind of life was that? What did riches matter when the heart yearned to be somewhere else?

  Beth deserved happiness more than anyone he knew.

  Ultimately, he knew that could only come if he set her free. Free to choose her own path. Free to raise Dom as she saw fit. Free to forge a life where she didn’t feel like an outsider or judged, disliked or have to mould herself to fit in.

  Domenico and Caroline had chosen Beth to raise their child because they had known that, in her care, their child would always be loved and protected. How right they had been.

  And now it was Alessio’s turn to do the right thing.

  The bedroom door burst open and she appeared in the doorway, her brow creased. ‘I thought we had to go?’

  Muttering an apology, he put on his shoes.

  When he got to his feet she’d come close to him and was looking at him intently.