The Italian Billionaire’s Scandalous Marriage: An Italian Billionaire Romance (Italian Billionaire Christmas Brides Book 2)

by Mollie Mathews

  ‘Can’t let the boss’s wife rough it,’ Jack said, as they tracked up the steep bush-clad gully.

  ‘I’m not the Queen,’ she said, ‘I would’ve been perfectly happy sleeping under the stars in my sleeping bag.’

  The boys looked at each other and laughed, ‘Yeah right.’

  Alex silently contented herself with the thought that soon enough they’d see for themselves she wasn’t a prima donna and would report back to everyone that “the missus could rough it as well as anybody.”

  The boys laughed and joked and were in high spirits. As they rode they entertained Alex by identifying all the plants and wildlife they saw, and telling stories about them—including ones about how traditional Maori medicine was made from many of the trees and bushes they encountered along the way. There was one underlying theme in everything they said.

  Survival in a hard country.

  The strong lived, the weak died. There was nothing in between.

  As they rode further and further into the golden plains her father had painted, Alex was too overwhelmed with sadness to be a good listener. The boys quickly sensed her change of mood and chatted quietly to each other.

  The track in places was narrow and rocky, dropping steeply even in the relatively tame descents of the mountains beyond. After an hour of riding under the scorching Otago sun, ducking under arching native bush and trees, and carefully picking over slabs of schist embedded in the dry earth, the track leveled out onto a thick fur of golden tussock.

  When they reached a water-hole nearby the boys advised Alex it would be best to camp there. Alex patted the neck of the champagne mare before dismounting and handing the reigns to Jack. The horse turned her great chocolate eyes to her as though understanding her sadness and gently nuzzled Alex’s hair.

  Tears prickled Alex’s eyes as she wondered, had her father been alive, how he would have comforted her. ‘I’d like to be alone,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Will you stay here and set up camp while I go for a walk?

  The boys looked at each other uncertainly.

  ‘Sure, boss,’ said Rangi nudging Jack. ‘No worries.’

  She left them to it and walked through the tussock, her breath catching, as she headed towards the giant rātā tree which had been depicted so hauntingly in the foreground of her father’s painting. Standing defiantly alone, the gnarled bulbous trunk, with incredibly twisted limbs exploding in a blaze of crimson brush-like flowers, seemed to claw at the sky in tortured longing.

  She remembered the staccato flourishes her father had used as though each dab of paint had stabbed at his heart. Had the tree been to her father a visual expression of his own innermost feelings—the love for another man’s wife that was tearing at his soul? Had he too felt a deep empathy for this land? Had it torn him apart when he had to flee, she wondered?

  She trailed her hand around the trunk of the rātā tree, pressing her back against it, and stared at the ancient mountains that stood like sentinels to untold lifetimes. She had no trouble identifying the giant outcropping of craggy rock from which Lucrezia’s face had emerged. It had probably been there for centuries and would stay the same through centuries to come…indestructible…timeless, like the Great Sphinx of ancient Egypt. An eternal symbol of her father’s love for Lucrezia.

  ‘Speak to me,’ she cried out to the rugged stone range that jagged across the skyline in the distance. ‘Speak to me. Tell me what happened here?’

  Tears gathered in force and spilled down Alex’s cheeks. For the first time in her life Alex didn’t try to stop them. Her father had remembered his daughter. And he had left her a legacy of love…and pain.

  She slid down the tree-trunk to sit at its base, a sob tearing from her mouth. All those lonely, needing years…they might have been so close if they had known each other. For so long she had fought her own battles, made herself self-sufficient, but there was still a child inside her that cried out to be wanted, and to be loved—no matter what she looked like or who’s child she was. To simply belong to someone without question or reservation. Why did her father have to die before she’d even heard of his existence?

  The thundering sound of an approaching helicopter hammered in the air. Her mind screamed in protest against what it meant and sought frantically to explain it away. The mustering was being done a long way from here, but Vitali could be just passing over.

  Surely he wouldn’t be coming for her. He didn’t miss her or need her that much, he’d made that clear. And after last night surely his sexual appetite was sated.

  Tension played havoc with her nerves as the noise came closer and closer. The sound built up to a crescendo, dry grass caught up in the tornado of the wind it created spewed across the sky. The noise lessened then cut out altogether. Her gut lurched.

  He had landed.

  Probably near the water-hole where the boys were setting up camp. And he would come looking for her if she remained hidden. She would have to go to him to minimize his wrath.

  He was sure to be annoyed once he realized why she was here. But how did he know? He must have been to the homestead and found her gone. As soon as he had been told by Bob and Cara where she was heading…she could well imagine the significance he would put on her coming here to the scene of the painting!

  Would he be furious she’d brought the boys with her, fearing that somehow they may piece the significance of why she was here? She didn’t know—she only knew that she was too upset right now to take on another battle. She was a mess; her face streaked with tears, her emotions in tatters.

  How was she going control Vitali when she wasn’t even in control of herself? Any other time or place she would have welcomed Vitali's company, but not here. Not now.

  It only felt like an intrusion.

  She fingered the photo of Lost Love buried in her pocket. Why did so many people want to deny the truth? Why did her father and his painting have to remain a secret? Why did nobody care what she wanted or what she felt? The answer drifted in her consciousness like a soft breeze.

  Because you must open you heart, you must confide your feelings, to love deeply you must risk being hurt.

  No, she resisted. This was an intensely private matter to her, and Vitali wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t be sympathetic, couldn’t be sympathetic. He thought her father had killed his father—or as good as. She had to remember he’d inferred that.

  Even trying to explain anything seemed hopeless, but she had to cope somehow. Vitali left her no other choice. Alex pushed herself to her feet and leaned against the tree-trunk as she rubbed over her face with the sleeve of her shirt. She took several deep breaths in a desperate attempt to compose herself. She took a couple of steps around the trunk to get a view of what was happening at the campsite where the chopper had landed.

  Vitali was covering the ground towards her in long, lithe strides. His workmanlike jeans and shirt did nothing to diminish his strong aura of raw power. He came to a halt a few paces short of her, his hard warrior-face looking as if it were carved from granite, the green eyes seared hers with bitter questions. The tension emanating from him in a cloud of distrust almost choked her.

  ‘What the hell are you doing up here, Alexandra?’ he demanded curtly. ‘I thought we agreed not to drag up the past.’ The lowering sun glinted like blades of fire on his hair.

  ‘I’m not bringing it up, Vitali,’ she said in an attempt to appease the bitter accusation in his green eyes. ‘I’m just looking at it.’ An ungovernable wave of sadness brought another welling of tears and she half turned away as she fought for composure.

  ‘Alexi?’ his deep voice was barely a whisper, weighted by concern. His hand grasped her arm turning her around to face him again. ‘You’re crying.’

  ‘I can’t help having feelings about my father!’ she protested, unable to stop the tears from trickling down her cheeks. ‘I’m not a cold, unfeeling piece of rock. I can’t just shut off my emotions like you do. And I’m not hurting anyone or anything. I know you don’t have rea
son to care about him,’ she sobbed, ‘But he was my father. And this…’ she said pulling the photo of Lost Love from her pocket and sweeping it toward the ranges, ‘this is my only link to him’.

  She bit her lip and shook her head, but it was as if all the bottled-up feelings of her childhood were clamoring for an outlet, and the tears just kept rolling.

  ‘Alex…’ he stammered.

  Her blurred vision didn’t allow her to see the expression on his face, but the concern in his voice was her total undoing, unleashing a floodgate of pent up tears. Tears she’d never cried when she found out her father was dead. Tears she’d refused to shed when her mother told her that her whole life had been a lie. Tears she wished weren’t spilling down her face now.

  ‘Please—’ she said, in gasping sobs, struggling as his arms encircled her in a soft, protective embrace. ‘Please, just—’ she sobbed. ‘Just…just leave me alone…’

  She was swiftly drawn into a warm haven of strength and mountainous support. Keeping one arm around her, he folded her head against his chest, and stroked her hair until at last the turbulence of her emotions faded into limp exhaustion.

  Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to be concerned about the debilitating emotion that left her dependent on Vitali’s compassion. It felt so good just to rest her head on his broad shoulder, to feel his cheek rubbing softly over her hair, to be wrapped in his arms, and sag against him and know he wouldn’t abandon her or let her fall.

  The game she had played, the deception that had rolled on and on gathering an untenable life of its own, the fight to survive, to keep on top, in control—somehow it had all collapsed on her and become meaningless. She wanted the truth—craved it, whatever price had to be paid.

  ‘Vitali—’ She didn’t lift her head, not wanting to see if she was treading on forbidden ground. He would either answer her or not. And if not…there was nothing real between them anyway. ‘Was my father…was he to blame for what happened?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ‘No!’ His voice sounded like a grenade as an explosion of feeling roared from his lips. Everything that he had kept deeply suppressed, that hurt him to admit it, demanding to be cleared.

  ‘You said…you implied…murder…do you truly believe that…?’

  She felt his chest expand as he dragged in a deep breath and there was a note of pained searching for truth in his voice when he slowly added, ‘How does one apportion blame? Who can untangle all the threads that led to tragedy? A meshed web of circumstances, passions and raw unbridled emotions driven to breaking-point…’

  He sighed and his breath wavered through her hair like the soft stirring wind of change. The words that followed were slow and measured, weighed in the balance of what was known and unknown.

  ‘Your father was probably no more to blame than mine. There are some women with the power to twist men’s souls. My mother is one of them. Even Simon…poor damned Simon, hungering for the crumbs she gave him…does give him…and I hate seeing it. I hated it then…what I felt was happening all around me…but I was only a boy, Alex. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Nothing anyone could do…’

  Only a boy…caught in the middle of something he didn’t understand…and his father ending up dead. A wave of sympathy for his lonely fears and the terrible loss he had suffered stirred Alex from her own anguish. She lifted her head, bleak grey-blue eyes meeting and understanding his pain.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father, Vitali,’ she said softly. ‘You must have been very close.’

  ‘Close?’ The slight twist of his mouth mocked himself, not her. ‘How close does anyone ever get to another human? My father was not an affectionate man. Yet he was everything I wanted to be.’ His gaze trailed off to the horizon. ‘A son’s blind love for his father. Obviously, he was not everything my mother wanted.’

  ‘Vitali…’ she hesitated, aware that she was scraping over old wounds, yet her need to know pushed the plea from her lips. ‘How did your father die? What happened? You intimated that it wasn’t an accident. That my father—was he a murderer?’

  ‘No,’ he confessed gently. ‘A violent fight broke out between my father and yours. My mother was screaming. She ran and got a rifle. God only knows why. Perhaps to frighten them…to stop them from brawling. She yelled at me to get Simon, who had walked away when the arguing started. We heard a shot. By the time we’d run inside, my father was dead. My mother was sobbing hysterically over his body, and Ted was standing there, staring down at them, the rifle in his hands. Simon asked what happened. Your father didn’t answer. He just handed the rifle to Simon and walked away. He never said a word. No explanation. He packed up and left within the hour and we never saw him again. My mother kept crying that it was an accident. She said there had been a struggle for the gun and it had gone off.’

  ‘Oh my god—but you, you saw all that?’ Her stomach knotted sickeningly. She looked at the tortured man before her, read the trauma in the set of his shoulders and the stiff, controlled tilt of his head. ‘How horrible.’

  He simply nodded, his mouth pressed in a grim line. ‘Later, I heard talk that my father had killed himself. That your father had wanted to save our family from the scandal of his suicide…and the financial ruin—all insurance null and void, the loss of business confidence–the scar on my future. So, he took the blame and walked away. Looking at my mother and I, only reminded him of the destruction their love had caused—this is embodied in the painting, that and perhaps also the freedom that comes from doing the right thing—not giving into selfish yearnings…sacrifice.’

  Vitali gave an apologetic grimace. ‘It was all a blur, but even now, as it did then, the whole thing seems strange—as though nothing was what it seemed. But no one, other than my mother and your father, knows the truth.’

  Alex, squeezed his hand ‘I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to bring the trauma…’

  ‘All I know is it just seemed so surreal…the whole thing….as though orchestrated in some way. The fact that Ted went away, turning his back on everything…I guess I always interpreted it as guilt. But it might have been shock. It might have been trauma. It might have been disbelief. It might even have been the only thing he could do to protect us from a truth too horrible to bear. I guess I’ve always felt that in some way I owe your father a debt.’

  The kind conciliatory tone of Vitali's last words floated over Alex’s head. What if it had been Lucrezia’s finger on the trigger? Or what if they had been arguing because Lucrezia had told Vitali's father she was going to leave with her father? What if he had killed himself to stop their dreams dead? What if her father had left in order to protect the woman he loved, taking the guilt upon himself? And Lucrezia might well have let him, only to be eternally haunted by the weight of his sacrifice. No wonder she looked so miserable.

  Lost Love was both poignant and painful, infused as it was by blood and beauty.

  However, there was nothing to be gained by sharing Alex’s wild leaps of imagination with Vitali. It was not for her to speculate or to judge. Whatever his mother’s role, whatever her sins, she had certainly suffered for them. Ted Carr had taken their secrets to the grave and it was in everyone’s interests that they remain buried. If Alex had known any of this she never would have exhibited the painting.

  Still, some good had come, she mused looking at Vitali with increasing admiration. And even if it was not the story she wanted to hear, she was much closer to understanding the life and passion that drove her father.

  She gazed up at the barren, desolate rockface of the mountain ranges he had painted so poignantly. She was sure her father would agree, despite the pain, that it was better to have lost in love than never to have loved, or been loved.

  Perhaps, if he hadn’t channeled all his emotions into his paintings, she wondered, would he ever have reached the status, received the acclaim he had, touched people’s lives, if he hadn’t suffered?

  She was reluctant to open Vitali's wounds further but having come
this far she couldn’t repress her unsatisfied curiosity. Again, her eyes lifted to Vitali's in searching appeal.

  ‘What was my father like?’

  He frowned. ‘Don’t you know?’

  Alex felt her jaw tighten. She heaved a deep, shuddering sigh and pulled out of his embrace, feeling too raw and vulnerable to stay in the comfort of his arms. The wounds to them both went too deep. Her legs felt weak and shaky so she backed up against the rātā tree.

  If there was a time when the truth had to be spoken, whatever the consequences, it was now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ‘I never knew my father,’ she confided. ‘My mother hates to be reminded of her first marriage. It grates her to even mention my father’s name. As far as she was concerned he never existed. All my life I thought another man was my dad. Then, bang, like a wrecking ball thundering into my life I finally find out who my real father is—but he’s dead.’

  The memory of how cheated and robbed she had felt shadowed her eyes. ‘All my life I felt different. All my life, even in a room full of family and friends, I’ve felt alone. All my life it’s as though I’ve been searching for something…and it was here all along…with you…within my grasp…but my family, the people who were supposed to love me kept the truth hidden…until it was too late.’

  Alex exhaled a shaky breath, and the sense of release escaped. Finally, she could talk honestly about how she felt, and trust her pain to someone who wasn’t trying to load her with guilt or make her feel ashamed.

  The setting sun blazed a river of molten gold over the infinite-canopy of the colbalt-blue sky, and Alex felt her tears and her sadness and her pain disappear as she stood, wrapped in the warmth of the enormous and immovable love of her husband.

  Vitali was staring at her…as if he was seeing Alex for the first time—not the ice queen façade she had so skilfully engineered, but the seam of glowing gold that coursed below her surface veneer. Suddenly she desperately wanted him to understand.