A Baby To Bind His Innocent (Mills & Boon Modern) (The Sicilian Marriage Pact, Book 1)

by Michelle Smart

  Ciro got to his feet and walked nonchalantly back to the bottle of bourbon. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you last night,’ he said, his voice as steady as the hand that poured himself another measure. ‘I tried to be gentle.’

  ‘I’m not talking about sex.’ She managed a small laugh while inside her heart wept to remember how wonderful his lovemaking had been. What she’d thought of as the most beautiful experience of her life had been tainted for ever. ‘Although remembering that hurts me too.’ She swallowed. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  His throat moved before he downed the measure. ‘I am ashamed. I should have remembered to use a—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Ciro closed his eyes. Claudia hadn’t raised her voice but those two words were delivered with a punch that landed right in his stomach. Every curse he knew flew through his head as the nagging worry that had played in his gut all day rose to the surface. She knew.

  ‘I heard you. Last night. When you crept out on the balcony.’

  ‘What do you think you heard?’

  ‘Don’t bother trying to gaslight me. I know what I heard.’ Her eyes flashed as she casually mimicked, ‘“Vicenzu, it’s me. I can’t do this for much longer. I’ve fulfilled my part. She’s going to sign the house over to me today. You need to get your side done, and quickly. Whatever it takes to get the business back, do it, because I don’t know how much longer I can keep the pretence up.”’

  His mouth dropped open. Ciro couldn’t remember the exact words he’d said in the message he’d left for his brother but was pretty sure she’d just recited them verbatim.

  She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her thighs. ‘Why?’

  He stared at her, head spinning, wrong-footed and taken completely off guard.

  ‘Let’s not waste time with more lies,’ she said into the dumbstruck silence. ‘I’ve spent the day hiding my feelings and I don’t think I can bear to breathe the same air as you a minute longer. You disgust me. But before I go, I want to know why you went to all this trouble. You married me to get your family home back, your brother is planning to get your family business back from my sister... Why? If you didn’t want your father to sell them, why not buy them yourself? It’s not as if you can’t afford it.’

  ‘Claudia...’

  ‘Don’t Claudia me.’ Her voice was like ice. ‘Either you tell me this minute why you’ve married me for a house, of all things, or I’m going to call my father and ask him.’

  Ciro shook off the stupor that had caught him in its net and hardened himself. Claudia might have been a virgin in the bedroom but no child of Cesare Buscetta could be called an innocent. ‘Cut the act, Princess, and stop pretending you don’t know exactly what your father did.’

  Her brow knotted.

  ‘Let me refresh your memory.’ He stepped casually towards her, his words slow and deliberate. ‘Your father approached my father in January with an offer to buy the business and the family estate. Papà said no. He didn’t want to sell. The business had been in the Trapani family for generations and he wanted it to stay that way, and he wanted to grow old with my mamma in the house where they’d raised their children. Your father wouldn’t accept no for an answer and resorted to sabotage to get what he wanted.’

  ‘Liar.’ Her denial came out as a whisper.

  He crouched down to look into the dark eyes ringing with an excellent attempt at confusion. ‘Your father was the puppeteer in the background pulling the strings that entangled my father so tightly he couldn’t escape. Papà was on the verge of losing everything, and then your father swooped back in like a black-hearted knight with his derisory, his insulting, new cash offer. It was barely enough for my father to pay off the debts your father’s sabotage had heaped on him. Papà had no choice but to sell the business that had been in the family for generations and the home he’d spent his entire married life in just so you and your precious sister could have a property and a business that was legal.’

  He laughed loudly, right in her face. ‘Because, Princess, that’s the kicker. The business and property sale were both legal. Your father made very sure not to get his hands dirty on this particular deal but only because he didn’t want the stain to reach his precious princesses. He had no need to use guns or threats to get his way when good old-fashioned sabotage followed by a heroic rescue act worked so well. When I visited your father the day I met you, do you know what he said?’ He moved his face close enough to see the flecks of gold in the darkness of her eyes. ‘He said nothing about it. To him, it was insignificant. To your father it was just business. If ruining my parents’ lives meant anything to him he would have refused me entry into his home and quadrupled the guards he posted on you and your sister. But it didn’t mean anything to him. He wanted a nice clean home and a nice clean business for his precious princesses. He got what he wanted and moved on. But I can’t move on.’

  The colour on Claudia’s golden skin had drained from her face. Her eyes were wide and dazed, her mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out.

  Straightening, he cast her a look of pure disdain. ‘Look at you, sitting there, pretending to be shocked at all this. You signed those deeds transferring the ownership of the house to you, you signed them, you saw the pathetically low sale figure that had been placed on it, you saw the state my father was in and still you signed it. A day later he was dead.’

  He walked back to the bar but at the last moment resisted pouring himself another drink. He needed to keep his head clear while he considered the best way to handle this situation.

  What the hell had he been thinking making that call to Vicenzu? All he’d had to do was keep up the happy and in-love act for a few more months at most. Idiot! Claudia hadn’t signed the house over to him yet. His twilight call of guilt-laced desperation to his brother had ruined everything.

  Leaning against the wall, he folded his arms across his chest as he faced her. He would not allow himself to soften at the shock that had seemingly enveloped her. He would not allow himself to feel guilt for the woman whose actions had contributed towards his father’s death. ‘Cat got your tongue, Princess? Must be hard for you, finding yourself on the receiving end of the fraudulent, immoral behaviour your family’s so famous for.’

  Long dark lashes shadowed her face as she blinked slowly. A solitary tear ran down her cheek but when she spoke, her voice was calm. ‘I never met your father. I signed my part of the deeds with my father’s lawyer. I knew nothing of...’ She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled deeply through her nose. ‘What’s the point? You won’t believe me.’ Her eyes snapped back open and fixed on him like lasers. ‘Actually, I don’t care if you believe me. What you have done to me is sick.’

  She jumped to her feet and hurried to the bedroom where she grabbed her overnight case and threw it onto the bed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ If she thought she could leave and go running back to Daddy she had another think coming. Ciro had no idea how he could prevent it but he would try...

  ‘You want the house so much, you can have it.’ Her fingers struggled to co-operate but finally Claudia managed to unzip the case and remove the deeds that had been prepared for her by Ciro’s lawyer.

  The nausea crashing in her stomach was so strong she feared she might vomit right here and now.

  Dear heaven, she believed him. All day her mind had whirled with questions. As Imma had pointed out, Ciro could have bought the house and the business with the daily interest he received. Why marry her for it? It had to be about more than bricks and mortar. In the back of her mind had been the terrible, disloyal thought that it was connected to her father.

  He had no need to use guns or threats to get his way when good old-fashioned sabotage followed by a heroic rescue act worked so well...

  Once, when Claudia had been very young, she’d run out of drawing paper. On a whim, she’d gone into her father’s office look
ing for a fresh supply, a room she was expressly forbidden from entering. But her father had been away on business, the nanny busy doing something with Imma, the rest of the staff doing their chores, and Claudia had been too keen to get her little hands on more paper and draw more pretty pictures for a concept like consequences to deter her. She’d blithely rifled through the contents of his desk drawer but her short bout of rule-breaking had been brought to an abrupt halt when she’d touched something cold and metallic.

  As young as Claudia had been, she knew a gun when she saw one. She remembered lifting it out of the drawer, remembered the heavy weight of it in her tiny hands and remembered the fear that had clutched her chest. The fear had been as cold and had tasted as metallic as the gun in her hand. She’d put it back where she’d found it and fled from the office, too frightened to tell anyone, even her sister, what she’d found. Did her father have a gun because he needed it for protection? If so, did that mean Claudia and Imma were in danger? Or did he have it because he was the bad guy? She didn’t know and was too frightened to ask but the bubble she’d lived in up to that point had burst. She started paying attention. She listened. Hard. And she never disobeyed her father again.

  Holding the envelope containing the deeds tightly to her chest, she stared at the hateful face of the man she’d stupidly believed herself in love with and plucked a figure from thin air. ‘I want twenty thousand euros.’

  ‘Claudia...’

  ‘Twenty thousand euros and I’ll sign the deeds.’

  Disbelief shadowed his face. ‘You’re offering to give me the house? Still?’

  She never wanted to set foot in it again. ‘I want cash.’

  ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘You think I’m so stupid I don’t know what day it is?’ she snarled. ‘Get me the cash. You have half an hour.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She opened the door without looking back at him. ‘To get the signing of the deeds witnessed. Half an hour, Ciro. Get me the cash.’

  Fuelled by so much rage and humiliation that the pain in her heart was nothing but a numb throb, Claudia took the stairs all the way down to the lobby. After telling one of the receptionists what she wanted, the duty manager was summoned and agreed to be the witness. ‘Where do you want me to sign?’ he asked.

  Thankfully, Ciro’s lawyer had placed sticky fluorescent arrows on the pages that needed signing.

  ‘You need to sign first,’ the duty manager said, handing a pen to her.

  There were two blank boxes with the arrows pointed at them. She peered at them cautiously, recognised her own name in the space next to the top one and placed the pen by it before hesitating. Embarrassment flushed over her face. ‘Do I sign here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She signed it carefully, using the same signature she’d used only months before when the same property had been transferred into her name. It sickened her to know she’d swallowed her father’s lies so readily. Because they had been lies. She knew it in her heart.

  But now was not the time to think too hard about it all. She needed to hold herself together a little bit longer and stay strong.

  ‘Do you have my money?’ she asked when she stepped back into the suite.

  Ciro, who’d been sending messages by all different media to his brother to warn him that Claudia knew, working on the presumption that if Claudia hadn’t told Immacolata yet then she would soon, shoved his phone into his back pocket. ‘It’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘Good.’ Walking purposefully to the bedroom, she zipped her case back together and carried it to the door, the deeds still tucked under her arm. Her eyes narrowed as she noticed him looking at it. ‘You’ll get this when I get my cash.’

  He didn’t like this hard side to her. It was the side he’d spent two months waiting to be revealed but now it was here in the open, all he could think was how little it suited her. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘You mean, am I going to tell my father.’ Her face contorted. She opened her mouth to continue but a loud rap on the door cut her words off.

  ‘That will be my man with the cash for you.’

  She stepped aside to allow Ciro to open the door. He took the briefcase with a terse nod of thanks. Placing it on the table, he opened it, then stepped back so Claudia could look.

  She stared at it for a long time. ‘That looks like more than twenty thousand.’

  ‘It’s a hundred thousand.’

  ‘Trying to buy my silence?’ The look she cast him could have stripped paint. ‘Count twenty thousand out for me. I don’t want a cent more.’

  ‘I’m not trying to buy your silence.’

  ‘Just count the money.’

  He complied, wrapping the crisp notes in a band. She snatched it from him and placed it in the handbag she had secured around her chest. When she next met his stare, the expression blazing at him could have dissolved the walls never mind stripped them. ‘I have a cab waiting for me so I will make this quick,’ she said. ‘You are going to leave Sicily as we planned. Go to Antigua if you want, go to America, go to Mars, wherever you like, just keep away from Sicily. I don’t want my father to know that you married me on a lie.’

  ‘You want to protect his feelings?’

  ‘No,’ she spat. ‘I’m not ready to face him yet with what he’s done. I want to get away from all the lies and deceit because between the two of you, I don’t know who I hate the most. If he knows I’ve left you, he’ll want me to go back to him, so consider this a quid pro quo—you get the deeds...’ she shoved them into his chest before sharply stepping back ‘...and I get the cash to disappear for a while. I will send him regular messages about how much I’m enjoying our honeymoon and the start of our married life so he doesn’t worry that I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, so you need to keep your head down and keep away from Sicily. Got it?’

  Ciro kneaded his temples. His head pounded. He was not a man used to being bested at anything but, in this, Claudia had turned the tables on him with meticulous precision. ‘How can I trust you’ll keep your word?’

  Angry colour flared over her cheeks. ‘How dare you? I’m the victim here. You told me you loved me, you married me, you made love to me and all along it was all a sick lie. If you’d told me from the start what my father had done, I would have signed the house straight back over to your mother.’

  He gave a bitter laugh. ‘You expect me to believe that, Princess?’

  ‘Haven’t I just signed it over to you? Look at the deeds—the house belongs to you now. Give it back to your mamma, do whatever the heck you want with it. I don’t want it. It should never have been given to me in the first place.’

  She picked up her travel case and opened the door. The speed with which she’d executed her plan was astounding. Ciro found himself in the rare position of being on the back foot of a game which he’d designed. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’ The door slammed shut behind her, only to fly back open again. ‘If my father contacts you, you tell him we’re delirious with happiness, got it? They’re the kind of lies you’re a pro at so I don’t imagine it’ll be a problem for you.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘For as long as I decide necessary. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready. Goodbye.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CIRO STOOD ON the balcony of his New York penthouse apartment and replied to his brother’s vague message with an equally vague one of his own. The wind was picking up, bringing with it a chill. After the inhuman heatwave the city had lived through in recent weeks, the coming storm was a welcome respite. He doubted the storm in his stomach would receive any respite soon.

  Five weeks ago, he’d been certain Claudia had told her sister about their plot but, with Vicenzu and Imma having since married too, he accepted he’d been wrong.

  He’d relived their confront
ation many times, remembering her facial expressions and body language, dissecting her words and actions. There was no getting around it: she’d been horrified to learn what her father had done to his. And she’d been horrified at what Ciro had done to her. The guilt he felt at this fought with the bitter knowledge that, innocent as she might have been of her father’s evil games, she was still a Buscetta. She’d spent twenty-one years living with and learning from the monster. It would be impossible for his malevolence not to have seeped into her.

  He’d had his lawyer check over the deeds. That had been no game or gimmick. She really had signed the house over to him. In theory, Ciro had achieved everything he’d set out to achieve. Vicenzu was also inching closer to getting the family business back—why hadn’t Claudia told her sister? That was another thing he was no nearer to making sense of—but there was no satisfaction to be felt and no wish to celebrate. Not when Claudia had vanished off the face of the earth.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about her. Before their wedding his thoughts had been consumed with her father and his own planned vengeance. Now his thoughts were consumed only with her.

  Where was she?

  He felt as if he’d fallen into limbo, waiting for Claudia to surface so he could resume his life. He’d done as she’d ordered and kept his head down, quietly getting on with the running of his business. She’d stuck to her part too. If Cesare had any clue as to what had happened between them, Ciro would know about it. He would already have a bounty on his head.

  He’d tried to call her but it hadn’t connected. She’d blocked him.

  After a fortnight the waiting had become intolerable and he’d set a crack team of private detectives onto finding her. They’d come up with precisely nothing. She could be anywhere.

  Claudia sat in companionable silence with Sister Bernadette on the old stone bench. Around them, the nuns and volunteers who worked the convent gardens were picking fruit.