by Lynne Graham
Seemingly he could afford it. Who was Raffaele Manzini? She looked him up on her phone and broke out in goosebumps when she found out. He was so rich he belonged to the tribe of the super-rich. What her family owed would barely be pocket change for him. In fact, in asking her to marry him he was scraping the bottom of the barrel because he was a man who appeared to inhabit an exclusive world featuring crowned heads and oil-rich billionaires. But then he was only asking her because her mother had been born a Parisi. Who she was, what she was, were immaterial facts to him because it wasn’t personal to him, it was simply business.
And he had put her in a quandary because she was clever enough to accept that he had given her the only choice she was likely to be given. It was a choice between marrying Raffaele Manzini and her family being made bankrupt and homeless. There was no compassion in him. He wanted what he wanted and to hell with who else got hurt in the process, she reasoned angrily, momentarily overpowered by the idea of having to deal with someone that far removed from her in moral outlook.
Women had had to do worse things in tight corners than marry and reproduce, she told herself fiercely. Oh, how she hated the reality that he had foreseen that she would change her mind! How could she marry someone she didn’t even like or admire? How could she go to bed with him? Give him a child? In a rush she suppressed those reactions, which now felt embarrassingly weak and sentimental. Best not to think about those things, she told herself firmly, determined to reclaim her peace of mind and take a rational view of the situation. It would be much wiser to take it all one step at a time and handle events as they happened.
Raffaele Manzini was offering her family an escape route into a new way of life, a safer, more stable life such as they had never enjoyed before. After all, the crash of the very first business her father had started up was still following him with debts twenty years later. It would take so much stress off her parents; best of all it would protect her little brother, Matt, from the consequences of bankruptcy and homelessness. And Raffaele might think it was stupid for her to love her family as much as she did but what did that matter to her? There were no loving grandparents or any other relatives for her family to turn to in a crisis. Izzy, her twin, always tried to help but there wasn’t much more she could do. There was only Maya and, like it or not, her family needed her. And if she could give them that one perfect chance to start afresh with a clean sheet, wouldn’t that be the most wonderful gift for the whole family?
It wasn’t as though she didn’t like babies either. She adored babies but she couldn’t even imagine having a child with Raffaele Manzini. You’re not allowed to think about the mechanics of the production project, she reminded herself fiercely. Panic would plunge her back into emotional mode and that got her nowhere. Although he was a cold-blooded, callous, four-letter word of a guy to have confronted her as he had, both in the club and in that office.
Don’t think about that either, she told herself firmly. If she had to say yes, it was more sensible not to dwell on any of it except in so far as she would have to protect herself in every way possible, she reasoned, tugging out a notebook and beginning to make rapid notes of certain non-negotiable demands she would have to make on her own behalf.
An hour after that Maya was walking back into Manzini Finance. Although she felt cool and in control, she knew it wouldn’t last once she was exposed to him again. He put her on edge, he outraged her, he continually hogged the drivers’ seat. Well, not this time around, she decided, wearing a steely expression that none of her family would have recognised.
CHAPTER THREE
‘IT TOOK YOU a little longer to get up to speed than I expected,’ Raffaele drawled cuttingly, surveying Maya with the complacent look of a cat with a cornered mouse. ‘But here we are again.’
‘Yes, here we are,’ Maya agreed flat in tone, head held high, fingernails biting into her palms viciously because he hadn’t been able to resist needling her even though he had won and that told her a lot about Raffaele Manzini. Resistance inflamed him because he wasn’t accustomed to having to handle it, but he was going to have to learn because intelligence warned her that she and Raffaele were oil and water and would fight every step of the way.
‘Take a seat,’ he intoned smoothly.
‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Maya settled back into the seat she had vacated in her rage earlier. ‘I’ll get straight to the point. I don’t like you. I don’t like anything I’ve so far seen in you but, as you said, you’re the only game in town. If I want to help my family out of a crisis, I don’t have a choice.’
‘Oh, don’t come over all martyr on me, Maya, because it’s untrue,’ Raffaele sliced in icily, wondering if anyone had ever dared to tell him that they didn’t like him before, knowing they hadn’t while wondering why that single tiny opinion should sting. ‘If you do this, you do it by your own choice, not anyone else’s.’
Hatred lashed through Maya like a storm unfurling inside her chest and that quickly she wanted to assault him again, because it was as if she were Eve in the Garden of Eden and he wouldn’t even allow her a fig leaf to hide behind, no, not even the smallest excuse. ‘Right, I do it by my own choice,’ she gritted. ‘But there are conditions.’
‘I set the conditions.’
‘No, you can’t set all of them,’ Maya countered steadily. ‘I’m entitled to certain safeguards. The first is exclusivity. You stay out of other women’s beds while you’re with me.’
Raffaele’s head flung up and back in surprise, luxuriant tousled black hair tumbling back from his cliff-edge cheekbones, dark eyes awash with gold rebellion. ‘No.’
‘I am not sleeping with you while you also sleep with other women,’ Maya told him curtly. ‘That is non-negotiable. If you can’t commit to that, then we’ll have to use artificial insemination as our method of conception.’
For a split second, Raffaele could not credit that she had said that to him because, in response, hell no flared straight through his every skin cell like an alarm bell, firing up his tension because he already knew that he wanted her. No, artificial insemination wasn’t an acceptable alternative for him...even though he felt as though it should’ve been? That he shouldn’t be so sexually invested in her in what was basically a business deal? So, he was human, after all, he reminded himself wryly.
‘That’s a yes to exclusivity but, once you’re pregnant, all bets are off,’ Raffaele conceded, choosing to be reasonable when he himself least felt like being reasonable because there was something about her that continually scratched him the wrong way and made him feel ridiculously like a rebellious teenager.
‘That will do...’ Almost imperceptibly, Maya’s slender body lost some of its tension.
‘Fidelity means that much to you?’ Raffaele shot at her in surprise. ‘I’ve never been faithful to anyone, but then I’ve never had anyone close enough to be faithful to.’
‘As far as I’m concerned fidelity is the bedrock of any relationship.’
‘I haven’t had a relationship with a woman before,’ Raffaele clarified without the smallest hint of discomfiture in making that admission. ‘I have sexual affairs that rarely last longer than a couple of weeks.’
‘That kind of shallow is just a touch adolescent at your age,’ Maya remarked.
Raffaele was incredulous when he felt the hit of heat striking his cheekbones. He could not recall when anyone had last embarrassed him. His dark eyes flared bright as gold ingots with anger. ‘I’ve always preferred to steer clear of serious relationships,’ he told her.
‘I read your profile online. That was kind of obvious. Right, moving on,’ Maya continued with an air of efficiency that exasperated him. ‘Health screening. That has to be done.’
‘I don’t have unprotected sex.’
‘But you will be having it with me and if I agree to getting tested, you can too,’ Maya cut in.
Raffaele spoke through gritted teeth. ‘A
nything else you feel as though you must air?’
‘Yes, what do we do if a pregnancy doesn’t happen? It can take up to a year even for a healthy couple to conceive. Were you aware of that?’
No, actually he hadn’t been, but he would have preferred flogging to admitting that salient fact to her! Raffaele knew absolutely nothing about conception or pregnancy, only how best to avoid that development, which was why he had never taken the tiniest risk in that field.
‘We can only deal with that situation if it occurs,’ Raffaele fielded impatiently.
‘I want full custody of any child we may have,’ Maya informed him next.
‘I won’t agree to anything other than joint custody. For all I know you’ll be a terrible mother,’ Raffaele responded. ‘I will maintain access rights to any child we have for that reason. It’s my duty to protect my child too.’
Maya blinked in surprise, disconcerted by his attitude because she had fully expected him to be willing to sign over any rights to that prospective child whom he only wanted in the first place to fulfil a business purpose. That he should actually care about the child’s welfare was a plus in his favour, the only plus he had shown her so far, she acknowledged grudgingly.
‘Where is all this conception stuff to take place?’ she enquired, pleased by her calmness.
‘Italy, where we’ll get married. I’m already putting the arrangements in order,’ Raffaele volunteered.
Maya stiffened. ‘You do like to put the cart before the horse, don’t you?’
‘But then I knew you’d come down off your high horse and agree,’ Raffaele replied, setting her teeth on edge again.
‘We’ll be living in Italy?’ she questioned. ‘What am I supposed to tell my family?’
Raffaele shrugged a broad shoulder with magnificent disdain. ‘Tell them we’re getting married? You don’t need to tell the whole truth. You could spin a love-at-first-sight story.’
‘I don’t like telling lies,’ Maya said icily. ‘I’ll tell them you’ve offered me a job in Italy and that because of that famously compassionate streak of yours—’ her lip curled at that provocative phrase and his teeth clenched again ‘—you’ve decided to erase their debts because of the connection that once existed between our families.’
‘The hate connection, you mean?’ A rough-edged laugh parted Raffaele’s perfect masculine lips. ‘Tell them whatever you like. It’s not my business.’
‘But you made it your business. You own all their debts, don’t you? It’s too big a coincidence that all their debts came home to roost on the same day,’ Maya opined in disgust.
Raffaele jerked his chin in unashamed acknowledgement.
‘So, you set up me up for this...literally,’ Maya accused.
‘No, you can thank my great-grandfather, Aldo, rather than me for that move. I didn’t know you existed until he made me aware of it before informing me that he owned your family lock, stock and barrel,’ Raffaele recounted drily. ‘If I hadn’t been willing to play ball and go for the deal he offered me, he would have happily bankrupted your parents and made them homeless because he has no reason to like your family.’
An angry smile tilted Maya’s lush pink mouth. ‘Are you implying that I should be grateful for you and the marriage proposal?’
‘Sì...’ Raffaele confirmed, golden flames dancing in his arrogant challenging gaze. ‘Without me, where would you and your family be?’
Incensed afresh, Maya jumped up. ‘You just couldn’t be kind for even ten minutes, could you be?’ she snapped back at him, her furious voice shaking. ‘You want me on my knees in gratitude...don’t you?’
A sudden disturbing grin flashed across his lean, devastatingly handsome features as he vaulted upright, towering over her with his superior height. ‘Now you’re talking my language...what I wouldn’t give at this moment to have you there!’
The explicit image she assumed he intended struck her like a mortifying, humiliating blow as she belatedly realised what she had said, and it was too much on top of everything else she had already endured from him. Her hand flashed up and he caught her wrist between long brown fingers before the slap could connect, his reflexes far faster than her own. ‘No, don’t you dare!’ he breathed in a raw, wrathful undertone. ‘Nobody hits me now.’
Nobody hits me now? What on earth did he mean? For an instant, Maya froze in shock and bewilderment at what he had said and what she had almost done. She was on the very brink of apologising as she moved away in a blindly direct line with the corner of the coffee table when he simply stretched down his long arms and scooped her up from the other side of the table separating them and lifted her bodily into the air. ‘I’m sorry...put me down!’ she gasped.
‘I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t hurt women. You were about to trip over the table,’ Raffaele bit out, almost breathless as he stared down into her bright green eyes and his scorching gaze trailed down her heart-shaped face to the pillowy invitation of her pink lips. A raging beast of sexual hunger was clawing at him, disorientating him. Nobody hits me now? Why the hell had he let that slip out? He never, ever referred to the abuse he had suffered as a child.
‘That’s good, and thanks...now put me down,’ Maya repeated urgently, her heart hammering so hard inside her chest she thought it might jump right out.
After an instant of hesitation during which she believed he was not about to listen to her at all, Raffaele slowly lowered her back to the floor a safe distance from the table and she snatched in a gasping breath. ‘I didn’t intend to frighten you,’ he said flatly.
‘I wasn’t frightened, not exactly,’ Maya framed, all out of breath and inspiration because, for the count of the ten seconds he had held her, she had experienced panic and then the strangest inner pulse of excitement that had left her quivering and embarrassed and all over the place. ‘I’m sorry I went for you like that. You made me very angry. That’s not an excuse...well, it is, isn’t it? But I have never tried to hit another person before in my life and it won’t happen again, I assure you.’
‘Forget it,’ Raffaele advised carelessly, fighting to suppress the sexual arousal she induced, willing away the desire pushing against his zipper, yes, the thought of her on her knees half-naked, yes, that really pressed every one of his sexual triggers and filled him with lust. ‘But, as it looks like we’re going to have a confrontational relationship, it makes sense to start working on that problem now.’
‘Now?’ Still a little dazed from dealing with him, simply being trapped in his energising, maddening radius, Maya looked up at him, her face feeling as flushed as though she had a fever.
‘Yes, now. Time you started adapting to me and I start adapting to you because we’re going to have to live together, potentially for months,’ Raffaele pointed out levelly. ‘We’ll go and get you some clothes and we’ll go out tonight.’
‘Get me clothes?’ she echoed in bewilderment.
‘I hate that rag of a suit. I’ll pick clothing for you and we’ll go out,’ Raffaele repeated, shooting her an assessing appraisal. ‘This is your new life, Maya. Show me that you can handle it.’
Maya swallowed hard and just nodded, wondering what was wrong with her brain because it seemed to have gone to sleep. He wanted proof that she could act normally and fit into his world and she couldn’t blame him for that. Was buying women clothes something he was used to doing?
Half an hour later, she was in a beauty salon, having her hair done and her nails painted, and her face made up. It was like a television makeover except with Raffaele in charge, his opinions sought, rather than hers. And she let him do it, reminding herself of what he would do for her family. He would take the nightmare of debt away. Surely it was a small enough sacrifice in return for her to surrender her independence and her strong will? But she’d never done the feminine stuff before, had never really cared what she wore or how she looked as long as she was decen
tly covered.
Two hours later still, she was standing on a dais in a designer salon, clad in garments she wouldn’t have been caught dead in and congratulating herself on her self-discipline in not fighting him. It disconcerted her, though, that Raffaele could be so determined to transform her at what she imagined to be enormous expense into the kind of woman he obviously preferred.
‘That’ll do,’ he eventually conceded, beautiful wilful mouth still down-turning even after about the twentieth outfit that had been tried on for his perusal.
Raffaele didn’t know why he was still so dissatisfied with Maya’s appearance. Logically, she looked beautiful, hair like a pale shimmering veil loose to her waist, face enhanced with subtle cosmetics, glorious legs exposed in a brocade skirt that was the sort of thing he had seen other women wear. The leather and lace corset top exposed her delicate shoulders and slender arms, her pale, smooth, flawless skin exercising the most weird allure for him—he wanted to see his own hands on that skin with a hunger that was beginning to seriously annoy him because it wasn’t cool. But she still didn’t look right and why would she, he asked himself sarcastically, when he had never in his life before taken it upon himself to choose clothing for a woman?
And why had he done it? The power trip? He couldn’t deny the appeal of that aspect. She brought out a bone-deep dominant urge he hadn’t known he even possessed. But one look at her had also warned him that she didn’t have a clue how to dress and surely he could not do worse with that challenge than she already had? In fact, he didn’t think she had the slightest interest in what she put on her body because not once...and he had been watching carefully...had she demonstrated even a spark of pleasure at the vast choice of clothing now open to her. And he had watched her grimace at her make-up–enhanced features in the mirror, seemingly indifferent to how beautiful she looked. Didn’t she have any normal female traits? Where was her vanity? Her drive to look her best? To impress? Even if it was only to impress other women?