by Lynne Graham
He hoped it would work for Maya Campbell as well because he wanted those companies. He would take them and, whatever it took, he would whip them into shape again, restoring both business enterprises to fresh growth and profitability.
‘I’m getting tired,’ Aldo was forced to admit, his head starting to droop. ‘Will I call in my lawyer?’
Raffaele smiled his very rare smile. ‘Thank you for an entertaining experience, Aldo. And the prospect of even more entertainment on the horizon.’
‘She is a beauty.’
‘Not the woman, the businesses!’ his great-grandson contradicted in impatient rebuttal.
The papers for the handover of Aldo’s estate were already prepared for signature. The lawyer appeared, accompanied by two witnesses, both of whom were doctors.
Only on exiting the mansion did Raffaele learn what had driven Aldo Manzini to his decision to sign over his empire before he passed away.
‘Dementia,’ one of the doctors told him with a shake of his head. ‘In a few months, who knows what he will still be capable of doing? At his age, the degeneration can be rapid, and he knows that.’
And an utterly unexpected pang of regret stung Raffaele and he knew he would visit again, whether he married to acquire the second company or not.
* * *
‘Oh, my word, I’ve never seen a more beautiful man!’ Nicola, the bride-to-be, carolled at Maya’s side.
‘Where?’ One of Maya’s other companions demanded to know.
‘Over by the bar...isn’t he just dreamy?’ Nicola sighed in a languishing tone.
Maya flicked an instinctive glance over to the bar and saw him. Man whore, her brain labelled instantly. There he was, at least six feet four inches tall, powerfully built but somehow lean and lithe at the same time, lounging back against the bar of the VIP section of the club with a glittering confidence that blazed like an angel’s halo. A man supremely comfortable with being the cynosure of every female eye in the room, coolly accustomed to attention and appreciation in spite of the fact that he was dressed down in ripped jeans, a black tee shirt and what looked like motorcycle boots. It was a certainty that he got admired every place he went.
And it showed. He knew exactly how gorgeous he was.
Luxuriant black hair brushed his shoulders, a dark shadow of stubble accentuating his strong jaw line and perfect mouth, throwing his swoon-worthy high cheekbones into prominence. Without the stubble, the muscular development and the tousled hair, he might have looked too pretty or clean-cut as some male supermodels did. Nice wallpaper, she categorised him, but very probably highly promiscuous and definitely not her type. That fast, she dismissed him from her interest and glanced away.
But then she didn’t ‘do’ men in the same way as her university friends did. Maya didn’t have time to date, and sleeping around for the sake of a quick physical thrill had never appealed to her either. Life was too short to waste on a man. Her soft mouth curled at the thought and she wondered if her utterly hopeless nice guy of a father had ruined her for all other men and embittered her to a certain extent.
After all, her father was a lovely man, loving, good-natured and caring, but when he went into business, he was a disaster and that truth, matched with the debts he had accrued, had dominated Maya’s life for far longer than she cared to recall. Her teenaged years had been a blur of bailiffs, debt collectors and threatening letters and the constant worry of how to keep her family fed and safe. She had her parents, her twin sister, Izzy, and Matt, her eleven-year-old brother in a wheelchair, to look after. Izzy never seemed to resent the harsher realities of their lives and the part their feckless parents had played in depriving their daughters of a normal youth. But Maya had often wondered what it would be like to have ordinary self-sufficient parents, who did the caring, rather than relying on their kids to look after them.
And then, just as quickly, she felt like a bad person for even thinking that way, for being mean and selfish and resentful.
It wasn’t her parents’ fault that they had always been poor. Neither of them had the desirable talents or educational achievements required by employers and, in any case, her mother had only ever been able to work part-time hours with a disabled son to look after. Indeed, Maya had never contrived to work out how any of her father’s car-crash businesses could ever have done well enough to enable her parents to buy a house in London, but they had had the house before she and Izzy were born and that small property was the only stable element in their catastrophic financial world. It was the one plus they had as a family.
Maya had completed two doctorates in mathematics at university after first graduating at eighteen. Being a prodigy from an early age had only two benefits that she recognised. Firstly, academic brilliance had enabled her to finance her studies by allowing her to win scholarships and prizes and, secondly, it had given her higher earning powers in part-time jobs and projects that required a maths whizz. Extra work had always been available to Maya but had she had a choice she would have gone into academic research because, aside of her family’s needs, money didn’t mean that much to her. There were so many more important, lasting things than cash, she thought ruefully on the dance floor, wondering why Nicole was giving her meaningful glances until a hand lightly touched her shoulder to attract her attention.
Maya spun round and, even in her very high heels which took her to five feet eleven, she had the unfamiliar experience of having to tip her head back to see the man who had approached her. And it was him, the guy from the bar, and she was stunned because she was not a good bet and she would have assumed such a man would have already worked that out for himself. Her outfit was conservative, her demeanour quiet and she didn’t drink, all of which should have loudly signalled her unavailability in the ‘fun for a night’ stakes.
‘Join me for a drink,’ he told her. He definitely didn’t ask; it was a command.
Maya simply laughed, plucking an explanatory hand at the silly pink sash she had been forced to wear. ‘Sorry, I’m on a girls’ night. No men allowed.’
He had dark deep-set eyes as hard as black granite with little gold highlights and he couldn’t hide the fact that the rejection had disconcerted him because for a split second those eyes flared like fireworks against a night sky. And she forgave him because close up he was even more devastatingly gorgeous than he had looked at a distance and she assumed that he had little experience of meeting with female dismissal. He emanated an aura of golden vibrancy comprised of bronzed skin, vital good health and leashed masculine energy. And like all men, he had an ego and she had briefly dented it.
‘Are you crazy?’ Nicole hissed in her ear, grabbing her arm to march her back to their table and tell the rest of the hens what Maya had done.
And there was a whole chorus of voluble protests. The mood did not go in the direction Maya expected. Indeed, her companions were ready to gift-wrap her for him and hand her over. A bunch of arguments in that line came her way unasked for: she was single, allowed to stray from the hen party, should grab male opportunity when it beckoned and was far too much of a nerd to appreciate that a man like that only came along once in a lifetime.
‘He said, “Join me for a drink.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ Maya told them defensively when she could finally get a word in. ‘He’s an arrogant bastard.’
‘Got to expect some flaws in all that perfection,’ someone gibed, unimpressed.
‘Are you seriously telling me that a guy like that isn’t worth more than sitting in swotting prissily every night over your computer like you do?’ someone else piped up.
And Maya’s polite smile froze a little because there was envy in those comments and she was, sadly, used to dealing with that, after being horribly bullied at school for her scholastic attainments. Her peers preferred to believe that she had to swot from dawn to dusk to gain the results she did, and she let them believe that even if it was a lie
. Evidently a nerdy swot was more acceptable than someone gifted at birth with a photographic memory and an IQ that ran into the highest possible triple figures. Maya had been doing algebra at the age of three; she didn’t need to swot.
Raffaele returned to the bar, seriously unsettled. He had wanted to meet her on level ground on his own terms but from the first glimpse she had not met his expectations. She dressed badly: there was no avoiding that obvious flaw. The high-necked black dress she wore had as much shape as a sack but still couldn’t hide the length of her show-stopping long legs or the delicacy of her curves at breast and hip. As for her face, she was, unbelievably to Raffaele, a cosmetics-free zone. Her face was bare, not even liner or mascara applied. Lucky for her that her porcelain-pale skin was smooth and faultless, he mused irritably, and her green eyes so arresting that she could get away without artificial definition. But she had turned him away. Ordering up a rare second drink, Raffaele gritted his perfect white teeth.
Women didn’t walk away from Raffaele Manzini. It didn’t happen. He was as bemused as if a tame dog had suddenly bitten the hand off him. Other guys got blown off by women, Raffaele didn’t. She had barely glanced at him, dismissing him instantly, he reasoned, his jaw line clenching even harder. He ordered her a fancy cocktail and sent it over to the table. She waved a bottle of sparkling water in an apologetic gesture in his direction and passed the cocktail over to another woman at the table. By that point Raffaele was ready to strangle her because she wasn’t the pushover he had assumed she would be. It annoyed him when those around him refused to fit the frame he had set them in. He departed from the club in a brooding mood, raging frustration bubbling only an inch beneath it as he stole a last lingering glance at her.
Madre di Cristo... For some peculiar reason she looked even more beautiful now, light blonde hair shimmering in a veil down her back as she shimmied her curvy little bottom to the music beat with one of the other women, long perfect legs flashing, that determined little chin at an upward angle, signalling that she didn’t give a damn about anything, anyone. Well, she would learn different, Raffaele swore to himself soothingly, denying the all too ready pulse at his groin that had a mind of its own; she would learn not to tangle with Raffaele Manzini and expect to walk away free and undamaged.
‘I think she’s a nice girl...didn’t mean any harm.’ Sal broke into speech unexpectedly on the pavement as the limo door was flipped open for Raffaele’s entry. ‘Not your usual hook-up. Nothing flirtatious about her, nothing suggestive in her dress, just not your usual type.’
Raffaele bit out a curse in Italian, enraged by that comforting assurance from a man who was probably closer to a father than any he had ever known.
‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a nice girl.’
‘Most of us marry the nice ones,’ Sal riposted cheerfully.
Of course, Sal knew she was a Parisi from the investigation agency he had employed to track her down for Raffaele to meet. And yet they hadn’t officially met as yet. Maya Parisi... Raffaele savoured the name. It suited her better than Campbell, which was too ordinary for a blonde that could catch his eye garbed in a dress like a sack and without make-up or silicone or Botox or, indeed, any of the artificial enhancements that Raffaele was more accustomed to finding featured in the women he bedded.
But if he married Maya, it wouldn’t be to keep her as Sal implied. It would be to bed her and get her pregnant, Raffaele reflected coldly, and strangely enough that idea no longer repulsed him in the way it had only a week earlier. In fact, he discovered it was more of a turn-on for his jaded libido because it was something new, something different. But only for a short time until the task was accomplished. And no, he wouldn’t be keeping her, he would be corrupting her with pleasure and then discarding her again, which was pretty much the norm for him. After all, the window of his attention span for a woman was notoriously short.
CHAPTER TWO
MAYA WAS TREMBLING and struggling to hide it as she watched her little brother being boarded on the bus that took him to his special school every morning. Matt was grinning as a friend with a similar disability shouted something out to him, an eleven-year-old boy, still wonderfully innocent about the world he and his parents lived in. A world of debt and disaster, she acknowledged wretchedly, as if Matt hadn’t already endured enough in life after losing the use of his legs at the age of four following a fall from the ladder of a playground slide.
The bus pulled away and she closed the front door again. In her mind’s eye, every word of the letter that had been delivered and the papers that had been served first thing that morning were still etched inside her pounding head. Official documents containing a court summons and a threatening letter had disclosed alarming facts she had not known about her family’s financial history.
And that her parents should have left her in ignorance was unacceptable. That shouldn’t have been possible when she had spent years borrowing from one loan company to pay another, performing mathematical acrobatics to stave off her parents’ bankruptcy and the loss of the home her little brother needed for security! Her twin, Izzy, had made so many sacrifices too, working in low-paid jobs to earn every extra penny she could and bring it home. Maya was so angry she wanted to scream. A legal summons to court had been served on her parents, threatening them with bankruptcy.
‘Don’t look at us like that!’ Her mother, Lucia gasped, an attractive brunette in her forties, her brown eyes crumpling as she broke down into sobs. ‘We c-couldn’t face telling you the truth!’
‘All these years you’ve allowed me to believe that you owned this house and, because I believed you, now I could be in trouble for fraudulently helping you to borrow money against an asset that doesn’t belong to you!’ Maya condemned, out of all patience with her parents, watching stony-faced as her father closed a supportive arm round his sobbing wife’s shoulders.
‘Maya...please,’ her father, Rory, begged with tears shining in his own eyes.
Scolding her parents was like kicking newborn puppies. And not for the first time, as she turned away in a mixture of guilt and angry discomfiture she wondered if she was a changeling, because she had nothing whatsoever in common with either her mother or her father. She loved them but she couldn’t comprehend the way their minds worked or the dreadful decisions they made, or the half-lies they would employ to evade any nasty truth. But she had, naturally, worked out certain things. Neither of them was particularly bright, neither of them capable of planning or saving or budgeting, so where had her sharp calculating brain come from? One of those gene anomalies, she thought with an inner sigh, knowing such rambling reflections were getting her precisely nowhere in the midst of a crisis.
It was also, by far, the worst crisis they had ever faced as a family and she felt sick and shaky and scared, knowing that no matter what she did she could not possibly drag them out of trouble this time around. There was far too much money owed and, even worse, they had not made a single payment on the private loan that had purchased the house they now stood in.
‘Not one single repayment in over twenty years,’ Maya reminded her parents out loud. ‘That means, you don’t own this house, the person who gave you this loan owns this house and now they want the money back or you have to move out.’
‘Tommaso wouldn’t do that to me,’ Lucia protested. ‘His family’s too rich and he’s too kind.’
Maya slapped the letter that had arrived in the post down on the table. ‘They’re demanding that the loan be repaid immediately and in full or they will take the house and sell it. Whoever Tommaso is, he is no longer prepared to wait for his money.’
‘Tommaso is a Manzini,’ Lucia informed her in an awed tone, as if that surname alone belonged to some godlike clan. ‘The man I was supposed to marry, but he didn’t want to marry me either. He helped your dad and I to leave Italy and buy a home here.’
‘He gave you a loan,’ Maya contradicted. ‘The money wasn�
��t a gift.’
‘Well, we certainly thought it was a gift,’ her father, Rory, confided in a long-suffering tone.
‘It doesn’t matter what you thought because you were wrong. You signed a loan agreement.’
‘But that was only a sham to cover the paperwork for his grandfather’s benefit!’ her mother piped up. ‘Tommaso promised that he would never ask for any of it back.’
‘He lied.’ Maya slapped the letter again and pushed it across for her mother to see the Manzini Finance logo at the top. ‘Although I’ve got to give the guy his due. He did wait for over twenty years to raise the subject and, if we could afford it, I would take this to court to see how it played out because I’m pretty sure it’s not legal to wait this long to demand a repayment. But we don’t have a penny to bless ourselves with, so we won’t be going to court on that score.’
‘Never mind, we’ve got an appointment with Manzini Finance,’ Lucia objected with a sudden insanely inappropriate smile, as if she were pulling a rabbit out of the hat that would magically save them all. ‘We’ll just explain and it will all be fixed. This is just a misunderstanding, that’s all. You’re such a worrier. You’re getting all worked up over nothing, Maya.’
‘You’ve been summoned to a bankruptcy court as well,’ Maya delivered with clarity. ‘Nothing is going to protect you from that. Your debts have caught up with you and we don’t have the money to repay them. I hate to say it because I’m not a quitter, but this is the end of the road as far as the debts go. Whoever had the bankruptcy summons served probably assumes they can sell the house to cover the debts.’
‘If it wasn’t for Matt, we could,’ her mother burbled as if the earlier conversation had not taken place.