by Lynne Graham
“Why? Why did you marry me? Why not just seduce me and walk away? I made it so easy for you anyway. I begged you to take me to bed. I chased you for the entire week after you showed up in Bali. I…you could have just walked away after we slept together. You could have dumped me—told me I had been nothing but a toy to play with.”
“I do not treat women like toys. That’s a Brunetti specialty.”
“Then why?”
“You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re a treasure any man would love to possess. For a man who grew up with nothing, who would always remain a bastard, who built his empire by trampling all the people in his way, you’re the real prize, Alessandra.
“I married you because for the first time in my life, I saw something I wanted outside of revenge and everything it stood for. Outside of a campaign that has consumed me for the last twenty-odd years.
“I married you because taking you for myself was the final icing on the cake. Because taking you from that old woman makes it all complete.”
Alessandra nodded, her stomach falling. “I don’t know what to say to a man who thinks he can take me from the woman who gave me a home, who thinks I’ll support the total destruction of my family. Who thinks possessing me somehow…improves his standing in the world. I will not…”
God, she wasn’t going to be used again in a battle between people she cared for.
She’d done that and had the scars to show for it.
She wasn’t going to be anyone’s weakness. Or anyone’s weapon. “I’m not a prize. To be won. To be possessed. To be snatched from someone’s hands. To be used as a weapon against someone else.” Alex forced herself to meet his gaze. “I want you to leave. Leave this house. I can’t deal with this now… Please, leave, V.”
He stood there, unmoving, unaffected, like a bloody big boulder that not even a gale of wind could budge.
After what felt like an eternity, he nodded. And left.
Alex stood there at the window, her throat dry. Her chest empty.
Of course, he hadn’t married her for herself.
She wasn’t a princess and this wasn’t a fairy tale where she could magically wave a wand or press a kiss to Vincenzo’s mouth and her frog would transform into a prince.
* * *
“She’s gone.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Vincenzo barked the question at the carelessly lounging figure of Massimo Brunetti.
He tucked his hands into his pockets and stared down at the two men relaxing in their chairs on the balcony on this unseasonably cold early June afternoon.
The drive up to the villa had been just as spectacular as it had been the first time around. He looked at it with the objective eye of a man who meant to cut it all up to pieces and scatter it into the wind.
But as much as he relished the idea of destroying the very symbol and stronghold of the Brunettis’ centuries-long power and privilege, other concerns rode him harder right then.
Alessandra hadn’t returned his calls in five days, forcing him to visit the ancestral home again.
His patience, always on thin ice these days, was spiraling into a monster of a temper after this latest stunt from his sweet wife.
Cristo, it had been the worst week of his professional and personal life.
Beginning with a huge crisis in the finance department of his company, followed by Alessandra jumping on a flight out of Bali to Milan without informing him. Then his own long flight to catch up to her, their ill-timed confrontation that had quickly spiraled out of control thanks to the Brunettis bringing her up-to-date with all his supposedly Machiavellian motivations, followed by an urgent call from the twenty-four nurses that looked after his mother demanding his immediate presence at his estate in Tuscany.
Which meant he’d been forced to leave Alessandra alone for too long, letting the doubts he’d seen in her eyes fester and harden. He had loathed giving her that time apart from him, especially when it was spent around the Brunettis, who were more than happy to fill her ears with poison against him.
But he’d had no choice but to go to his mother. Usually, he didn’t mind dropping everything in his empire to look after her.
“You shouldn’t have left her like that…” Leonardo offered in an almost polite voice, his expression thoughtful. “Not so soon after she found out your true colors. The least you could have done was let her rage at you, maybe even let her throw one of her powerful punches at you. Anything would have been better than to leave her alone to stew in your betrayal.”
“I didn’t betray her—” Vincenzo bit out and then calmed himself with a discipline that was hanging by its last thread.
He had not betrayed Alessandra. He had simply left out a chunk of truth that he’d hoped to explain in full later on. He’d hoped to appeal to her strong sense of justice and fair play. He’d totally miscalculated the depth of her attachment to this group of privileged, spoiled Brunettis. “I had obligations I had to meet. Now, how about you tell me where the hell she is?”
“We don’t know where Alex is,” Massimo said. “After you left, she locked herself in her room, and when Natalie went to check on her the next morning, she was gone.”
“You expect me to believe Alessandra didn’t ask you for help to hide from me? That you didn’t happily join in this childish game to thwart me?”
“You’re right,” Leo added. Still no rancor in his voice. Only a mild curiosity. “We’d have happily joined in. You went after the one person who had nothing to do with all this. But you’re forgetting that Alex has connections in high places, all over the world.
“There’s no shortage of people that will happily help her out, to save her from an untenable situation.
“She’s the most loyal person I know, even if the person getting it is questionable.
“Knowing how much you despise even our name, she’ll twist herself around to not give you any more ammunition against us. She knew you’d demand to know where she is. Keeping it a secret is her way of protecting us.”
“She fought with me like a lioness because she thinks she needs to protect you from me. And you didn’t come to her aid?”
“You’re not listening, Cavalli. Alex’s long gone. No one here knows when she’ll return or even if she will.”
For the first time in a week, Vincenzo felt the sure ground under his feet shift. There was no gratification in Massimo’s voice or Leonardo’s gaze crowing over the fact that Alex had trumped him. Only worry for her. “She can’t escape from her life. She has obligations, a global career,” he protested.
“A career she’s been slowly decoupling herself from. If you knew her at all, you’d have known she’s been finishing up all her contracted work and not signing up to anything new,” Massimo said. “Cristo, you really did a number on her at an already rough time, when she’s been questioning everything about herself, her career, her life.”
“What are you talking about?” Leo asked his brother the question that Vincenzo wanted to.
“She broke it off with that photographer boyfriend of hers—Javier Diaz—a few months ago. She plans to quit modeling altogether. I’ve been wondering why she’d marry a practical stranger after—”
“Alessandra and I have known each other for a few weeks,” Vincenzo put in. But he was slowly losing ground. Losing his belief in her.
Had her vows to him meant nothing at all? Damn it, why hadn’t she fought with him? Demanded an explanation? Given him the chance to convince her his motives were sound?
“It still makes you a stranger. But now I think I see it.” Massimo’s gaze bored into him. “You were a rebound from Javier. An escape. A temporary madness.”
Vincenzo was more than tempted to knock the smirk off the tech genius’s face but it went against everything he believed in. “Watch your words, Massimo.”
“Walk away, Cavalli.” The you
nger man stood up. “It hasn’t dawned on you yet, has it? Alex has gone. It’s what she does when the pain gets too much for her.”
Vincenzo had no retort. No words, even.
This wasn’t the Alessandra he knew. The sophisticated and yet vulnerable minx that had demolished his self-control with one genuine smile. This was not the woman who’d seduced him by giving away pieces of herself. The woman that had distracted him from twenty years’ worth of strategizing in a mere few weeks.
But then how much did he truly know Alessandra beyond the report a PI had provided him with, beyond the picture the media painted of her?
“I’m supposed to believe that this complicated woman…is the woman I married?”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe us or not. We’ve known Alex for a long time,” Massimo pointed out, satisfaction pouring out of every word. “You betrayed her trust. Learning about how Greta treated you was a double betrayal for her to have to deal with. And if I know your convoluted, labyrinthine mind—and I’m beginning to—you had every intention of using her against us,” he said with a shrewd gleam in his eyes that for Vincenzo was far too much like looking in the mirror. “And I’m guessing she knew that. But then Alessandra has always known her own weaknesses,” he finished cryptically.
Vincenzo had had enough. “If this is her way of telling me to pick between her and my original intentions, then she—”
“If she’d thought she could convince you to abandon this crazy revenge you’re bent upon—” Leonardo’s dark gaze held the first stirrings of anger in it “—she wouldn’t have left her own home in the middle of the night without telling even us, would she? Which means you did nothing to reassure her. Nothing to prove to her that she wasn’t just another pawn in your game.”
“My plans for the Brunettis have nothing to do with her.”
“Then you truly do not understand what family means to Alex. What family means at all.” Vincenzo looked away, despising even the hint of sympathy in Leo Brunetti’s eyes. “Accept she’s gone, Cavalli. And that she’s not returning anytime soon.”
Vincenzo tensed, reeling under the other man’s words, fury and frustration building inside him. A future he hadn’t wanted but had gotten used to looking forward to for the last few weeks was slipping through his fingers.
Was this the depth of Alessandra’s commitment? To run away at the first sign of difficulty? To abandon their marriage because things had got tougher than she’d like?
Massimo gave him a pitying look. “I bet you anything she’s gone running back into Javier’s arms. Can’t really blame her, can we, when her prince actually turned out to be a frog. And for all your scheming steel trap of a mind, I bet she won’t be found until she wants to be.”
CHAPTER THREE
Nine weeks later
THERE WAS GOING to be the devil to pay.
The very devil.
Alessandra stood near the bank of elevators, her feet rooted to the ground, staring across the vast white marbled lobby to the dark oak door that should bear the warning “Beware all you who enter here” or some such.
Everything in her wanted to run away from this. From him. But she was done running.
Her reflections in the metallic shine of the elevators—all six of them—had her second-guessing her direct arrival here at BFI’s towers in Milan’s financial district straight from the airport after her long flight from San Francisco.
She felt grungy in clothes that she’d worn for the last forty-eight hours. Her eyes felt permanently gritty from all the different time zones her body had had to endure in the past fortnight. But the one upside to her disheveled appearance was that no one had recognized her on either side of the Atlantic.
The last thing she’d had, after the initial hearing with the family court in the States and the subsequent meetings with her lawyers, was any energy left to charter a private jet to bring her over to Italy. And seeing that she’d already annoyed her agent; her two assistants, and Greta and Leo; Massimo—though at least he had sympathized with her actions and warned her she was just postponing the final reckoning—Javier; and the man sitting behind the oak door in front of her, she hadn’t felt she could reach out to any of them and ask for a favor.
God, it felt like she’d been traveling forever, jumping from one painful situation to another, never stopping and thinking, never standing still.
Because if she did, if she stood in one place for more than a moment and allowed herself to look inward she’d have to listen to her heart. Her pathetic, bruised, still-foolish heart.
She’d have to face the fact that her mother was gone and the last time Alex had seen her, she’d said hateful words to her, that all the memories she had now were stilted, sterile meetings of the last few years. She’d have to swallow the bitterness she’d nursed when she’d realized her mother loved her little half brother, Charlie, far more than she’d ever loved her.
She’d have to face the fact that she had let that same, soul-sucking desperate need to be wanted, to be loved push her into a disastrous marriage with a man she didn’t even truly know, that she’d given her heart to a man who didn’t even understand what that meant.
The image of Charlie’s small, scrunched-up face, determined to look strong in front of Alex as she’d said goodbye to him, rose in front of her eyes, and she pushed away all the fears that could shake her resolve to do the right thing for him. For all her estrangement with her mother, she had fallen in love with Charlie from the first moment she’d set eyes on him as a newborn baby seven years ago.
Whatever the nature of her complex relationship with her mother, whatever insecurities she’d felt for years, whatever bitterness she’d nursed after Charlie’s birth, she had to put all that away now. This was not the time for guilt or grief or regrets.
This was the time to take action. To make sure Charlie wasn’t lost in the shuffle of adults’ mistakes like she’d been as a child.
She had to stop running. She had to be strong for that innocent boy. She had to face the one man she never wanted see again in her life.
In the nine weeks that she’d been hiding, the world had exploded with all kinds of speculation about the mysterious billionaire Vincenzo Cavalli, who headed up Cavalli Enterprises, a finance shark that had its fingers in myriad industrial sectors.
That he was battling with Leonardo Brunetti for the position of CEO of BFI, although they didn’t know why.
That he was a mathematical genius who’d made his first billion on the stock market.
That he was ruthless when it came to his opposition.
All the things Alex had been blissfully unaware of when she’d said yes to his sudden proposal.
She still couldn’t assimilate the man she’d known in Bali—tender, funny and kind—with the man who’d been raining hell on the Brunettis with not a hint of conscience. And now she had to beg him to cooperate with her after hiding from him for nine weeks.
No, she wasn’t going to beg. She was going to demand that he do this for her. She couldn’t show weakness in front of a man who didn’t understand the meaning of family.
“Mrs. Cavalli?”
“Don’t call me that,” Alex snapped.
“I’m sorry. You look…quite unlike yourself,” came the tentative response from one of the receptionists hovering behind the huge swathe of gleaming white marble designed to intimidate anyone who dared assume they could approach the mighty Vincenzo Cavalli.
But not her.
She squared her shoulders. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Shall I get one of the Mr. Brunettis for you? They’re both in the building,” a different woman asked, her perceptive eyes taking in Alex’s state.
“No, thanks.” Leo and Massimo, as powerful as they were, couldn’t help her now. Only the devil she’d tangled with would do. “I was told on the ground floor that Mr. Cavalli has taken over
this floor. Is that right?”
“Yes, he has. He’s already made many changes—”
“Is he in there now?” Alex interrupted.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks, Miriam,” she added, looking down at the shiny plaque sitting in front of the woman. “I’ll just… Don’t announce me.”
The woman nodded, sympathy shining in her eyes.
Alex looked away. The chance to get a quick, quiet divorce had come and gone. Now she needed this marriage to work. And, oh God, Vincenzo was going to love that, wasn’t he?
But only temporarily, she promised herself.
Whatever deal she made with Vincenzo, it only needed to last for as long as she needed him. After that, she would walk away forever. From his charming words, his penetrating eyes and him. Far away from him. From her own naive heart and its foolish hopes.
* * *
Vincenzo wondered if going so long without regular sleep was making him hallucinate. If his sanity was truly hanging by its last thread. Alessandra’s continued absence—with not even a leaked rumor in the last nine weeks about where she was—had stripped away any semblance of civility from his demeanor.
Even his own team—people who’d been with him for more than a decade—were giving him a wide berth for fear of having their heads bitten off. He hated admitting it, but the ease with which Alessandra had walked out on their far-too-brief marriage rankled like a festering sore.
And still, he wasn’t ready to give up. The creak of his door had him barking out a command to be left undisturbed.
His words stuck in his throat as the tall, lithe form of his runaway wife stood inside his office, her back plastered to the door, her white-knuckle fingers clutching the strap of her cross-body bag, neatly delineating the globes of her high breasts in a way he was sure she didn’t realize.
“Hello, Vincenzo,” she said, and then he knew she was real.
That soft, lilting voice, with its strange mix of American and Italian accents—he’d know it in his sleep. He’d had it whispered in his ear while he’d moved inside her body, finding refuge in it at long last, after never knowing it. Refuge that had been denied him for more years than he cared to count. Peace that he hadn’t been able to afford however many millions he had made.