His Million-Dollar Marriage Proposal

by Jennifer Hayward

  “My head was too full.”

  With what? He looked down at the book he held, a sketchbook of some sort, open to a drawing of a dress. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing. It’s just a hobby. I like to make my own clothes.” She reached for the book, but he held on to it and flipped through the sketches.

  “These are really good. Do you have formal training?”

  “I did a few semesters of a fashion design degree at Parsons.”

  “Only a few semesters?” He directed an inquisitive gaze at her. “It’s one of the best design programs in the country. Why did you stop?”

  “We needed to prioritize money for the bakery.” She shrugged. “It was a long shot anyway.”

  “Says who? Parsons clearly thought you had talent.”

  Her expression took on a closed edge. “The program was insanely competitive—the design career I would have had even more so. It just wasn’t realistic.”

  He snapped the book shut and handed it to her. “The best things in life are the hardest to attain. What was the end goal if you’d continued with your degree? To go work for a designer?”

  She shook her head. “I wanted to create my own line of affordable urban fashion.”

  “A big dream,” he conceded. “What was your inspiration for it?”

  She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head against the back of the sofa. “My mother,” she said, a wistful look in her eyes. “We didn’t have much growing up. The bakery did okay, but there was no room for extras. My father considered fashion a luxury, not a necessity, which meant I wore cheap, department store clothes or my cousin’s hand-me-downs. Hard,” she acknowledged, “for a teenage girl trying to fit in with the cool crowd.

  “Thankfully, my mother was an excellent seamstress. After dinner, when the bakery was closed, she’d brew a pot of tea, we’d spread the patterns out on the floor and make the clothes I wanted.” A smile curved her lips. “She was incredible. She could make anything. It was magical to me, the way the pieces came together. There was never any doubt as to what I wanted to be.”

  “And then she passed away,” Lazzero murmured.

  “Yes. My father, he was—” she hesitated, searching for the right words “—he was never really the same after my mother’s death. He was dark, lost. He worshipped the ground she walked on. All he seemed to know how to do was to keep the bakery going—to provide. But I wouldn’t go out with my friends, because of how dark he would get. I was worried about what he would do—what he might do. So, I stayed home and took care of him. Made my own clothes. It became a form of self-expression for me.”

  His heart contracted, the echoes of an ancient wound pulsing his insides. “He was angry. Not at you—at the disease. For taking your mother from him. For shattering his life.”

  Her dark lashes fanned her cheeks. “You were like that with your father.”

  He nodded. The difference was, his father’s disease had been preventable. Perhaps even more difficult to accept.

  Chiara returned her gaze to the glittering city view. “Designing became my obsession. My way of countering the mean girls at school who made fun of my clothes. My lack of designer labels. Sometimes I would make things from scratch, other times I would buy pieces from the thrift store and alter them—not to follow the trends but to reflect what I loved about fashion. Eventually,” she allowed, “those girls wanted me to make things for them.”

  “And did you? After what they’d done?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because anger doesn’t solve anything,” she said quietly. “Only forgiveness does. Allowing my designs to speak for me.”

  Lazzero felt something stick in his chest. That struck him as phenomenal—she struck him as phenomenal—that she would have that sense of maturity, wisdom, at such a young age.

  But hadn’t he? It was a trait you developed when you were left to fend for yourself. Sink or swim. Protect yourself at all costs. Arm yourself against the world. But unlike Chiara, he had had his brothers. She’d had no one.

  For the first time he wondered how, in withdrawing when his mother had left, retreating into that aloof, unknowable version of himself he did so well, what effect that had had on his brothers. What it must have been like for Nico, at fifteen, to leave school, to abandon the dreams he’d had for himself to take care of him and Santo. How selflessly he’d done it. How Chiara had had none of that support and turned out to be as strong as she was.

  He picked up her hand and tugged it into his lap. Marveled at how small and delicate it was. At the voltage that came from touching her, the connection between them an invisible, electrical thread that lit up his insides in the most dangerous of ways.

  “You need to go back to school,” he murmured. “Defeating the mean girls was your mission statement in life, Chiara. Some people search a lifetime for one. You have one. If you quit—they win.”

  Her gaze clouded over. “That ship has sailed. My classmates are done and building their careers. I’m too old to start again now.”

  His mouth twisted. “You’re only twenty-six. You have plenty of time.”

  “Speaks the man who put Supersonic on the Nasdaq by the time he was twenty-five.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t compare yourself to others. Santo and I had Martino, our godfather, to back us. To guide us. And Nico, who is every bit as brilliant.”

  She slanted him a curious look. “Was Martino family? What was the relationship between him and your father?”

  He shook his head. “Martino and my father were on Wall Street together. Two of the biggest names in their day. Intense competitors and the best of friends.”

  “Was that where your father’s alcoholism began? I’ve heard stories about the pressure...the crazy lifestyle.”

  “It started there,” he acknowledged. “My father was levelheaded. Smart. Just like Martino. They both swore they’d get out once they’d made their money. Martino, true to his word, did. He founded Evolution with his wife, Juliette, and the rest is history. My father, however, got sucked into the lifestyle. The temptations of it.

  “My mother,” he continued, “didn’t make it easier for him by taking full advantage of that lifestyle and spending his money as if it were water. When Martino finally convinced my father to leave, he was intent on proving he could do it bigger and better than Martino. He bet the bank and his entire life savings on a technology start-up he and a client founded that never made it off the ground.”

  “And lost everything.” Chiara’s eyes glittered as they rested on his.

  “Yes.”

  “Did Martino try and help your father? To pull him out of it?”

  His mouth flattened. “He tried everything.” Just as they had. Pouring bottles down the sink. Hiding them. Destroying them. Nico walking their father to AA every night before he’d gone to evening classes. None of it had worked.

  Chiara watched him with those expressive eyes. “When did Martino take you under his wing?”

  “After my father’s funeral. My father was too humiliated to have anything to do with Martino when he was alive. Martino had conquered where he had failed. He refused all help from him. They had,” he conceded, staring up at the scattering of stars that dotted the midnight sky, “a complex relationship as you can imagine.”

  Chiara didn’t reply. He looked over at her, found her lost in thought. “What?”

  She shrugged a slim shoulder. “I just—I wonder—” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s why my father withdrew after my mother died. Because I reminded him too much of her. We were mirror images, she and I.”

  “No.” He squashed that imagining dead with a squeeze of his fingers around hers. “You can’t take that on. People who are mired in grief get caught up in their own pain. It’s as if they’re in so deep, they can’t dig their way out. They try,
” he acknowledged, “but it’s as if they’ve made it to the other side, they’re clawing their way to the surface, but they can’t make it those last few feet to get out.”

  Her eyes grew dark. “Your father couldn’t climb out?”

  He nodded. And for the first time in his life, he realized how angry he was. How furious he was that his father who had always been superhuman in his eyes, his hero, hadn’t had the strength to kick a disease that had destroyed his childhood. How angry he was that, in his supreme selfishness, his father had put his grief above them. At those who had created such a culture of reckless greed, his father had been unable to resist, tempted by sirens he didn’t have the strength or desire to fight.

  “You can’t blame yourself,” he told her. “This is about your father’s inability to put you first, which he should have done.”

  “He did in a financial sense,” Chiara pointed out.

  “But you needed the emotional support, as well. That’s just as important to a fifteen-year-old. And that, he didn’t give you.”

  She sank her teeth into her lip. “Maybe I didn’t give him what he needed, either. He was so lost. I didn’t know what to do. I keep thinking maybe if I’d gotten him some help, if I’d done something, he wouldn’t be the way he is. As if he’s half-alive. As if he’d rather not be.”

  Her eyes glittered with tears, unmistakable diamond-edged drops that tugged hard at his insides. The defiant tilt of her chin annihilated his willpower completely. “Chiara,” he murmured, pulling her into his arms, his chin coming down on top of her head, her petite body curved against his, “this is not on you. It’s about him. You can’t find his happiness for him. He has to find it himself.”

  “And what if he doesn’t?”

  “Then you were there for him. That’s all you can do.”

  He thought she might pull out of his arms then, a palpable tension in her slight frame. Which would have been the smart move given the chemistry that pulsed between them. Instead, heaving a sigh, she curled closer. Her jasmine-scented hair soft as silk against his skin, the silent, dark night wrapping itself around them, it was a fit so perfect, his brain struggled to articulate it. For once in his life, he didn’t even try.

  His mouth whispered against the delicate curve of her jaw in an attempt to comfort. The rasp of his stubble against her satiny skin raked a shiver through her. Through him.

  She went perfectly still. As if she’d forgotten how to move, how to breathe. His palm anchored against her back, her softness pressed against his hardness, his brain slid back to that lazy, sexy kiss this morning. The leisurely, undoubtedly mind-blowing conclusion he would have taken it to if it had been his call.

  His blood thickened in his veins, his self-imposed celibacy over the past few months slamming into him hard. His fingers on her jaw, he turned her face to his. Her dark lashes glistening with unshed tears, her lush mouth bare of color, the flare of sensual awareness that darkened her beautiful green eyes was unmistakable. The kind that invited a man to jump in and drown himself in it.

  Vulnerable. Too vulnerable.

  “Lazzero,” she murmured.

  This isn’t happening.

  He lifted her up and carried her inside. In one deft move, he sank his fingers beneath the silky hair at her nape and whisked his arm from beneath her thighs until she slid down his body to her feet, the rasp of her ripe curves against his sensitized flesh almost sending him up into flames.

  He doused the vicious heat with a bucketful of cold determination. Because this, this could not happen right now. His brain was far too full and she was too damn fragile.

  He reached up to tuck a rumpled tendril of her hair behind her ear. “It’s late,” he rasped. “Go to sleep.”

  Turning on his heel, he headed for the study and a response from his New York team before he changed his mind and gave in to temptation.

  He had a problem. A big one. Now he had to figure out what to do with it.

  * * *

  Chiara woke late, her body still adjusting to the time difference, her mind attempting to wrap itself around the intimate, late-night encounter she’d had with Lazzero the night before. She eyed the unruffled side of the bed opposite her, indicating Lazzero had not joined her. Which actually wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened given how he’d walked away last night, shutting things down between them.

  Her stomach knotted into a tight, hard ball. She kicked off the silk comforter in deference to the already formidable heat and stared moodily out at another vivid blue, cloudless perfect day through floor-to-ceiling windows bare of the blinds she’d forgotten to close. She might be able to excuse herself for her slip last night because she’d been so vulnerable in the moment, but she couldn’t escape the emotional connection she and Lazzero had shared. How amazing he’d been.

  She buried her teeth in her lip. She had poured her heart and soul out to him last night. Her hopes, her dreams. Instead of brushing them aside as her father had done, pointing to her mother who’d barely been eking out an income as a seamstress before she’d met him, or Antonio, who had advised her she’d be lost in a sea of competition, Lazzero had validated her aspirations.

  Defeating the mean girls is your mission statement in life. If you quit—they win.

  She’d never thought about it like that. Except now that she had, she couldn’t stop. Which was unrealistic, she told herself as a distant, long-ago buried dream clawed itself back to life inside of her. Even with the bakery on a solid financial footing, the rent was astronomical. She’d still need to help her father out on the weekends because he couldn’t afford the staff. Which would make studying and working impossible.

  She buried the thought and the little twinge her heart gave along with it. It was easy to think fanciful thoughts in Lazzero’s world, because he made everything seem possible. Everything was possible for him. But she was not him and this was not her world.

  She conceded, however, that she had misjudged him that day in the café. Had tarred him with the same brush as Antonio, which had been a mistake. Antonio had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, recklessly wielding his power and privilege, whereas Lazzero had made himself into one of the most powerful men in the world despite the significant traumas he’d suffered early on in life. He was a survivor. Just like her.

  It made him, she acknowledged with dismay, even more attractive. It also explained so much about who he was, why he was the way he was, that insane drive of his. Because he would never be his father. Never see his world shattered beneath his feet again. It also, she surmised, explained why Lazzero was a part of the community angel organization in New York—it was his way of helping when he had been unable to help his father. Another piece of the man she was just beginning to understand.

  Then there was last night. He could have used their intense sexual chemistry to persuade her into bed—but he had not. He had walked away instead. Exactly the opposite of what Antonio had done when he had seduced her with his champagne and promises.

  Promises Lazzero would never give because he was clear about what he offered a woman. About what he had to give. Which would likely, she concluded, heat blanketing her insides, be the most incredible experience of her life if she allowed it to happen. Which would be insane.

  She needed coffee. Desperately. She slipped on shorts and a T-shirt and ventured out to the kitchen to procure it. All problems could be solved with a good cup of java.

  Making an espresso with the machine in the spotless, stainless steel masterpiece of a kitchen, she leaned against the counter and inhaled the dark Italian brew. She had nearly regained her equilibrium when Lazzero came storming into the kitchen dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a dark cloud on his face. Sliding to an abrupt halt, he scorched his gaze over her fitted T-shirt and bare legs. Back up again.

  “Make me one of those, will you?”

  Heat snagged her insides. “You mi
ght try,” she suggested with a lift of her chin, “‘please make me one of your amazing espressos, Chiara. I am highly in need.’”

  “Yes,” he muttered, waving a hand at her. “All of that.”

  She turned and emptied the tamper into the garbage, relieved to escape all of that mouthwateringly disheveled masculinity. Took her time with the ritualistic packing of the grinds, because she had no idea where she and Lazzero stood after last night. How to navigate this, because it felt as if something fundamental had changed between them. Or maybe it was just her that felt that way?

  Having artfully packed the tamper with the requisite perfect, round puck, she set the coffee to brew, turned around and leaned a hip against the counter. “You’ve been up all night?”

  Lazzero raked a hand through his rumpled hair. “The designs are not what they need to be.”

  “When is your meeting with Gianni?”

  “Tuesday.”

  She took a sip of her coffee. Considered his combustible demeanor from over the rim of her cup. “I have a thought.”

  He gave her a distracted look. “About what?”

  Definitely past the moment, he was. “Volare,” she elaborated. “I was looking at the Fiammata shoes when I was window-shopping yesterday. The way they are marketed. They’re selling a dream with Volare, not a shoe. A lifestyle. The ability to fly no matter who you are. Your designs,” she said, picking up one of the sheaf of drawings he’d left on the counter, “need to reflect that. They need to be aspirational.”

  He eyed her contemplatively. “You may have a point there. The designs are functional. That’s what I don’t like about them. Fiammata’s approach is very European. Quality of life seems to predominate here. Which, in today’s market,” he allowed, “might appeal to the American consumer.” He slanted her a speculative look. “What would you do with them?”

  Chiara found her sketchpad in the bedroom and brought it back to the kitchen. Setting it on the island, she began sketching out a running shoe that was more aspirational than the one Lazzero’s designers had done. Something she could see herself wearing.