Real Italian Charm: A BWWM Billionaire Romance

by Lacey Legend

He cracked a smile in return. “No, I’m not. And, please…call me Fed.”

  His smile had unleashed a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, and I responded to him with them practically rioting.

  “All right, Fed. I’ll go to Georgiou’s with you. Just give me a second to get my drawer all cleaned out here before Ted and Genevieve get the chance to come out and make any rude comments to me.”

  Looking like he’d just recalled something very unpleasant, Fed straightened up from his casual lean against the tall front part of the front desk. “Ted and Genevieve may be your bosses, but don’t forget, I’m theirs. And I’m not going to tolerate them making any rude comments to you. Not to mention that I’m not going to tolerate them making you feel unwelcome here if you decide that you want to stay on.”

  Hesitating in putting the last item from my drawer into my bag, I said I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I was going to do. “Maybe I just need to think about things for a second.”

  I was still thinking about what my mom’s reaction to me quitting my job was going to be.

  Fed told me that I was free to take all the time I needed. “But, for right now, let’s go get some lunch. Then, if you want to, why don’t you take the rest of the day off, with full pay. You won’t have to use a sick day or a vacation day or anything like that, either. Just take the rest of the day off with full pay.”

  “Thank you. I might take you up on the ‘rest of the day off’ part of that…but I can’t accept pay for time that I’m not at work, unless it’s one of my allotted paid sick days or vacation days. That would be like stealing from the company.”

  With his beautiful, dark-lashed gray eyes twinkling with just a glimmer of what I thought might be surprise or amusement, or maybe both, Fed just looked at me for a long moment. “Well, since I own the company, you really wouldn’t be ‘stealing,’ since I’m the one who offered to give you full pay for taking the rest of the day off.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. I appreciate the offer, but I still can’t accept payment from my employer for work that I didn’t do, or at least ‘earn’ by way of a paid sick day or vacation day. That’s just how my mom raised me. So, I’ll just use one of my vacation days if I end up taking the rest of the day off.”

  Again, Fed looked at me for a long moment with his eyes just kind of twinkling. “I like you, Jasmine.”

  With heat suddenly rising to my cheeks, I began tucking a few strands of my shoulder-length curly hair behind one ear, finding it difficult to maintain eye contact with him. “Well, maybe you won’t like me so much once I run up a large bill at Georgiou’s. See, accepting payment for work not performed is one thing, but allowing someone to treat me to lunch is completely different…and I plan on getting a gyro plate, a baklava sundae, and a large raspberry iced tea.”

  Fed gave me a slow half-grin that was devastating in its sexiness. “Treating you to lunch will be my complete pleasure. Now, let me just cancel the meeting, and then we’ll go.”

  I said all right, and he began striding away, still wearing a sexy half-grin, leaving me standing at the front desk feeling like I myself was a baklava sundae that was melting.

  Chapter3

  Since Georgiou’s was only two blocks away, and the late April day was sunny and warm, we decided to just walk there. Also, although I didn’t say it, I was eager for the sun to finish drying the front of my pants. After I’d used paper towel to blot them, they’d nearly dried all the way in the office, leaving only a faint, barely-damp outline as evidence of my “accident.”

  During the walk, Fed and I pretty much made small talk, discussing things like the weather, the climate of Michigan, and how the Tigers had been faring during the first few weeks of the season. Surprising me a little, maybe just because of his European background, Fed actually knew a lot about baseball, saying that it had always been his favorite sport.

  “Which made me come off as a little odd to some people during my childhood, to tell you the truth. During the times when my family lived in the States, I’d eat, breathe, and sleep baseball with my friends; but then when my family would go back to live in Italy for a time, none of the other kids even understood what sport I was trying to play with them. They thought that anyone who didn’t love soccer was strange, so eventually I started playing that, too.”

  “And were you good at it?”

  “Well, I’ll just say that I was so ‘good’ that for some reason, my youth league coach never saw fit to put me in a game unless our team was up by at least ten points.”

  I laughed. “Sounds a lot like my experience being in gymnastics as a kid. I loved the sport, but around age twelve, I realized that I was spending more time getting back up on the balance beam after falling than actually doing gymnastics on it. It was around this time that I switched my focus to running and joined the junior high cross-country team, where I had more success than with gymnastics.”

  “And do you still like to run?”

  “I love it, actually. There’s a decent-sized city park by my apartment, and I usually run there a few times a week.”

  Fed said he usually tried to run a few times a week, too. “So, maybe we could take a run together sometime.”

  I glanced over at him with a little smile. “Okay…maybe. If you think you can keep up with me.”

  Because I was a little on the shorter side, and because Fed was definitely on the taller side, I was pretty sure he could not only keep up with me but probably lap me. With a devilish little glint in his eyes, he seemed pretty confident about this, too.

  “I’ll tell you what, Jasmine. I challenge you to a Saturday morning running race tomorrow at nine. If you beat me, I’ll treat you to dinner. If I beat you, you treat me to dinner.”

  I laughed. “So, basically, either way, me agreeing to the running race guarantees that we go out on a dinner date tomorrow night.”

  Fed glanced over at me with his full lips twitching with mirth. “Exactly. So, no matter how the race turns out, I feel like I’ve already won.”

  Fighting a smile, I glanced over at him. “You’re quite the smooth-talker, Fed. You’re very charming.”

  “We’ll see how ‘charming’ you still think I am tomorrow morning, when you’re eating my dust at the park.”

  “Now, the only way I’ll be ‘eating your dust’ is after I’ve lapped you, when I’m coming up from behind to do it again.”

  “Hmm, I’m not so sure about that. To tell you the truth, I’m already looking forward to you treating me to dinner. I’m thinking I might like to order a filet mignon.”

  We continued on with our friendly, joking banter, and by the time we arrived at the Georgiou’s, I’d completely forgotten about all the earlier drama back at the office. I’d completely forgotten about Fed being a billionaire, too, not finding him in any way pretentious like I might have expected a man with his kind of money to be. In fact, I was quickly starting to see him as “just Fed,” and not “Federico Balducci, all-powerful Italian billionaire CEO,” like how the media always portrayed him.

  Once inside the restaurant with our gyro plates in front of us, our conversation turned a little more personal, when Fed asked if I’d been born and raised in Detroit.

  I said yes. “In the suburbs, anyway…Farmington, specifically. Although growing up, I did spend a lot of time with my grandparents out on their farm in a little town called Hastings, about fifty miles west of here. I always spent summers with them as a kid, and I even lived with them full-time for my first few years.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Well, my mom had me pretty young. She was a junior in college when I kind of unexpectedly came into her life. She wanted to raise me herself, but it turned out that it was best for me to live with my grandparents until my mom could finish school, get a job, and save up some money. When I was about ten, she went back to school again and got her law degree.”

  “And do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  Dipping a pita triangle into a little cup of tzatziki, I sa
id no. “My mom has always been very, very career-focused. Very driven. I think she thought more kids would just slow her down. She never got married, either, for the same reason.”

  “And what about your father? Do you have a relationship with him?”

  Now we were really in tricky territory, and I chose my next words carefully.

  “Well…I was conceived from a very brief, one-night only sort of thing. My mom apparently liked to party a bit during college, and she and her friends had gone a party at another university about an hour away. Long story short, things happened, and my mom went back home without even getting the name of the man that she spent a little time with.

  So, being that no one at the party even remembered the guy later, and being that this was before the days of the internet so you really couldn’t do any detective work to track anyone down…well, my mom decided to just have me on her own. Not that she really had much choice about that.” With my gaze on my food, I took a little bite of my pita and chewed and swallowed quickly before speaking again. “Anyway, though…I did eventually meet my dad, funnily enough, when I was twenty-four.”

  Fed looked more than a bit surprised. “How did that happen?”

  “Well, being that I have kind of frizzy, curly hair and my mom has extremely kinky hair, and being that my skin is a little lighter than hers, I always wondered about my genetic background. She always told me that my dad was black, but I always had friends telling me that I looked biracial, with black mixed with something else. Some friends said Hispanic; other friends said white; and my best friend in high school was convinced that I was part-Native American.

  So, one day when I was twenty-four, I got so curious about my heritage that I had my DNA tested by this company that specializes in telling people what part of the globe their ancestors originally came from. And when the results came back, I had a bit of a surprise. Not only did I find out that I’m about three-quarters of African descent and one-quarter European, I also found out that I had a few distant cousins on my dad’s side in the DNA company’s genealogy website.”

  “And that’s how you eventually found him?”

  Spearing a halved cherry tomato from my salad, I nodded. “Yup. Eventually. And it’s kind of a very long story how it all happened, but just to sum it all up, I made contact with the man I was pretty sure was my dad, and he expressed interest in having a paternity DNA test done without us meeting each other. So, we got that done, and when the test proved that he was indeed my dad, he sent me an email saying that he was stunned that he had a child and that he wanted to meet.”

  Looking engrossed in my story, Fed took a sip of his iced tea before responding. “And how did that go?”

  I took my time chewing and swallowing my bite of salad, just thinking back to that emotional meeting. “Well, all I can say was that my dad and I spent about the first hour of our first meeting both just crying. There was no awkwardness or resentful feelings, or anything like that…just regret that we hadn’t been able to meet sooner. We both understood, though, that that just wasn’t possible. We knew that if my mom had known his name, or knew how to find him, things would have been a lot different.

  See, my dad had always wanted kids, but he got cancer in his twenties, and chemotherapy made it so that he couldn’t have biological kids of his own after that. He always figured he might adopt if he ever got married, but that didn’t happen, either. So, when he found out he had a daughter, my dad was just over the moon. I was, too. It was like we instantly became best friends because we just wanted to make up for lost time.”

  Fed said that was wonderful. “And are the two of you still close today?”

  Dropping my gaze from Fed’s face to my plate, I picked at my sliced beef for a moment or two before responding. “My dad’s cancer came back two weeks after we met. And three months later, he was gone.”

  With his neutral expression changing to one of clear shock and sympathy, Fed froze with a bite of food halfway to his mouth. “I’m so very sorry, Jasmine.”

  Afraid that the compassion present in his eyes might make my own eyes begin to fill with tears, I shifted my gaze down to my plate. “Thanks. We made so many wonderful memories while he was still here, though. He taught me how to fish; we spent a day at an amusement park riding all the roller coasters together; and he introduced me to his sister Tammy and her husband and kids, and we all went camping together in upstate New York, where my dad lived. The final two months were mostly spent in the hospital, but….”

  Trying to smile, I returned my gaze to Fed’s handsome face. “We even made some great memories in the hospital. My dad liked to order pizza for us and have a movie night at least once a week while he was still able to eat. We always watched the movies holding hands together.” Recalling those times, I suddenly felt my eyes becoming just a bit prickly, and I attempted another smile. “Anyway. It wasn’t for very long, but I’m so grateful for the time that I got to spend with my dad. Some people never even get to meet their dads.”

  Fed said that was true. “I’m so glad you got to meet yours and make some wonderful memories in the time the two of you had together.”

  Effectively changing the subject, a casual friend of mine entered the restaurant right then and came over to our booth to say hello, giving Fed what I thought was a pretty thorough once-over while she did so. Just by the look in her eyes, I could tell that she found him just as attractive as I did, and toward the end of our conversation, she told Fed that he looked familiar.

  “Have we met somewhere before?”

  Smiling politely, Fed said he didn’t think so. “Some people say I just have one of those familiar faces.”

  Or, she’s just seen you in some magazine before, I thought, which seemed more likely, although I certainly wasn’t about to “out” Fed if he wanted to keep a low profile.

  Once my friend had left to rejoin her co-workers at the ordering counter, I asked Fed to tell me a little about his family. “if you don’t mind sharing, that is.”

  He said he didn’t at all. “I guess to start with, I’m an only child, like you. My dad worked in banking and in other various ventures while I was growing up, and my mom was a homemaker who also did some fashion design on and off over the years. They’re both retired now, and split their time between Rome, Spain, and the French Riviera. They come over here to the States at least once a year, too, usually when they feel I’ve been a little negligent in visiting them. See, if my mom had her way, I’d probably still be living with them. She’s a typical Italian mom who dearly misses her ‘baby’ boy, even though her ‘baby’ boy is all grown up now and runs his own company.”

  Fed cracked a wry sort of grin, and I smiled in return.

  “Can’t say I can relate much to that. My mom practically kicked me out of the next when it was time for me to go off to college. She wanted me to get my degree as quickly as possible so that I could get on the career track, just like her.”

  “And is that what you wanted, too?”

  Picking up a pita triangle, I sighed. “I honestly wasn’t sure what I wanted out of life at that age…and sometimes I’m still not. No matter what, though, I’m becoming increasingly certain that I don’t want a high-stress career like my mom’s. She works literally eighty hours a week sometimes, because she’s just on the verge of making partner at the law firm where she works, so she’s always eager to impress the bosses. ‘If I hadn’t had a child to raise alone, I probably would have made partner five years ago,’ she said to me a few weeks ago. Sometimes she says things when she’s impatient or frustrated, and I don’t even think she’s necessarily meaning to be hurtful, but….”

  “She still is.”

  Looking up from my plate, I gave Fed a little smile. “Yeah. Sometimes to the point that I think about moving out of Detroit just to put a little distance between us…and maybe so that I can finally figure out what I want out of life, aside from what she’s always wanted from me.”

  “Well, do you have a few ideas what you might w
ant out of life? Maybe if you were to move somewhere new?”

  Thinking, I took a sip of my iced tea before responding. “I know this is probably going to sound cliché, but I think I just want to be happy and have my own family. A husband and kids…something like the family my grandparents had in their younger days. They both moved north from Mississippi in their early twenties; got married up here; bought some land and started their farm; and then the kids came. And, from then on, as my grandma has told me, the house was never without laughter and joy. To her, anyway. My mom found farm life unbearably stifling. Probably no great surprise.”

  I cracked a smile at Fed, and he smiled back.

  “It sounds like you loved spending time on the farm.”

  I said I had. “I don’t know if I necessarily see a farm in my own future, though…I think the happy home, a loving husband, and a few kids is what’s most important to me.” Realizing what I’d just said, I fought the urge to roll my eyes at myself. “Oh, gosh. You’re probably ready to run the heck out of here right now. You invite me to lunch, and the next thing you know, I’m talking about my future husband and kids.”

  Fed smiled, although it was a smile that didn’t reach all the way up to his eyes. “I don’t mind that you brought up wanting a family in the future at all. It’s good for a person to know what the other person is looking for and wants out of life.”

  “All right, then. Now it’s your turn. What are you looking for, and what do you want out of life? Other than, you know, continuing to have wild success running a multi-billion-dollar company, I’ll bet.”

  Spearing a bite of salad, Fed cracked a smile. “You’d bet right about that. I have big plans for the company’s growth in the next few decades, and I don’t ever intend to leave my role as CEO.”

  “And what about what you want out of life apart from the company? Do you want a family of your own someday?”

  With his gaze on his plate, he hesitated in responding, and the look of clear discomfort on his face pretty much told me everything I needed to know.