It would be the last time she slept alone.
She should feel nothing but dread.
The anticipation she had felt before the ball, which even with all that had been going on she had known was for Alessio—or Valente, as she’d believed him to be—was nothing like the anticipation that now coiled through every cell in her body.
Was it any wonder she’d been unable to sleep?
This was worse than her first night here before she’d woken with the resolve to make the best of everything.
After hours spent staring at the cherubs on the ceiling above her head, listening to the noises of the villa gradually reduce to silence as everyone went to bed, her own head refusing to join the silence, she’d realised sleep was impossible. Every fear had crawled out from where she’d buried it to plague her.
She’d needed to clear her head.
Now she spotted a wooden bridge that spanned the width of a relatively narrow section of the lake. She walked to the middle of it and peered over the railing into the blackness.
‘I hope you’re not planning to jump. It’s twenty feet deep there.’
Alessio’s voice, which cut through the stillness of the air, made her jump.
She watched his silhouette approach and put a hand to her suddenly thundering heart. She’d never seen him in jeans before. The pair he wore fit snugly and the dark T-shirt they were topped with emphasised the muscularity of his physique.
Even in the dark he was strikingly gorgeous.
She inhaled and turned her gaze away from him. ‘Are you following me?’
‘I heard you leave and was curious where you were going.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
Beth guessed that him being awake at this time meant he couldn’t sleep either.
‘Nervous?’ he asked lightly.
‘Terrified. Aren’t you?’ She wasn’t making this commitment alone.
‘No.’ He joined her at the centre of the bridge and put his hands on the railings beside hers.
She caught a fresh citrusy scent that had her stomach flipping over in a loop and made her think of long, hot showers.
She tightened her hold and breathed through her mouth.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
‘Doesn’t it bother you at all that you’re committing your life to a loveless marriage?’ she asked.
‘Palvettis don’t marry for love.’
The nonchalance of his answer bugged her as much as the actual words. ‘Never?’
‘The only Palvetti who has married for love since the Second World War is my uncle Giuseppe and he is the only Palvetti to have divorced. That is no coincidence.’
‘What happened?’
‘His wife couldn’t handle coming second to the business. After three years of marriage, she had enough and left him. Things got nasty.’
‘In what way?’
‘At the time Palvetti were in the process of buying into an Australian mining company. They’d discovered an area with an abundance of corundum—that’s the mineral from which you get sapphires and rubies. No one else knew of the site. My uncle was the chief negotiator in the deal so Giulia, his wife, was aware of all the details. She blackmailed us. The equivalent of fifty million euros in today’s money for her silence or she would sell her knowledge to one of our rivals.’
‘Did you pay it?’
‘We did, and we hit her with a water-tight contract that would have seen her ruined if she broke the terms. She didn’t care. All she wanted was the money and to humiliate the family she had come to detest. I was a child when it happened but we all learned our lesson from it. It’s why we go to such great lengths to protect ourselves and the business. Everything is intricately linked: the family, the business and our fortune. Marrying for love is dangerous. Emotions are messy and best kept separate.’
She soaked this new information in. ‘Okay, so it makes sense to protect yourselves after that, but what about the spouses? Do they know what they’re signing up for when they marry one of you?’
‘Always. We select spouses who are familiar with us and who we know well and who we know will fit in and play their part. People with the same mindset as us.’
‘How do your family feel about me becoming a part of it? They don’t know me.’
He took a moment before answering. ‘They trust my judgement.’
It was an evasive answer but she didn’t push it. She would learn for herself what the rest of his family felt about her joining them.
‘I don’t have their mindset,’ she warned him quietly. ‘I’m not like any of you. Until I took guardianship of Dom, I was career-minded, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all for me like your business is with you... Don’t you feel any guilt that you’re locking me into a loveless marriage?’
She felt his eyes fix on her but kept her own gaze on the black expanse of water surrounding them.
‘Marrying you is a gamble.’ His tone was meditative. ‘There were three other women I’d had my eye on as a potential future wife. Any one of them would have accepted my proposal and they would have fitted into Palvetti seamlessly. I could have taken Dom from you and raised him with one of those women but I didn’t. What I did do was take a huge amount of my time away from the business to give you a chance and see if you were suitable. You have no lover that you’re leaving behind. You are coming into this marriage with nothing and I am prepared to give you everything—a beautiful home, great wealth, a fulfilling career and a continued role and influence in Dom’s life.’
Three other women?
Beth had thought there was nothing Alessio could do or say that would shock her but that revelation...
How would he have chosen one? Played Ip Dip Do?
She couldn’t bring herself to ask. Nausea churned deep in her stomach but her head felt light.
Somehow Alessio had managed to make any question of guilt seem like an affront, make it seem that he was doing her a favour...
It dawned on her that he genuinely believed he was.
And maybe he was right to.
Until that point Beth had only thought about their marriage in terms of everything she was having to give up: her job and her home. Alessio truly was taking the gamble he’d stated by marrying her.
He was giving up a future with a wife who was a certainty so that she and Dom could always be together.
She rolled her neck to ease the tension in it then shifted her body to face him. ‘Those women you spoke of...were you...lovers with any of them?’
It was the first time she’d ever uttered the word ‘lover’. Until Alessio had casually mentioned a moment ago that she had no lover to leave behind, she’d never heard it from another’s lips, had thought it a word only used in books.
He shook his head.
‘Do you have a current lover I should know about?’ She was proud of herself for the nonchalance of her tone as she bandied the word around a second time.
If one word encapsulated the Palvetti brand, it was sophistication. If she was going to fit into his world, as she knew she must, she would have to learn it, and that meant learning a language that was so much more than linguistic translation. There was something sophisticated about the term ‘lover’, a wholly different connotation to ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’ or ‘partner’.
The glimmer of a smile played on his lips. He lifted a hand to rub his thumb against her chin. ‘No. There is only one woman who has captured my attention in recent months and I am marrying her tomorrow.’
The gleam that shone from his eyes and the sensation careering over her skin at his touch killed stone-dead the next question she was about to ask.
She tried her hardest to breathe but her heart had expanded so greatly it crushed her lungs into nothing.
How could it be like this? Every time Alessio touched her she me
lted for him. Every time he entered a room her heart crashed into her ribs.
Her feelings for him went against all logic. The truth of his identity should have killed her fledging desire but the opposite had happened. The more time she spent with him, the greater her awareness of all the new feelings being evoked within her. And the greater her awareness of the danger these feelings posed.
Theirs could never be a real marriage as she knew marriages to be. Her parents had been young and often stupid but their marriage had been real. She remembered ferocious arguments and tears, but she also remembered them holding hands whenever they went out, remembered their affectionate kisses, the sneaky bottom-squeezes and the laughter... She remembered the love. Her foster parents had been far more restrained with their affection but she remembered reading the cards they had exchanged on birthdays and Valentine’s and the messages of love written in them.
And she remembered another couple who had loved each other wholeheartedly.
She took a deep breath and moved back. ‘You know what I don’t understand?’
‘What?’
‘How you can say all this stuff about the business and family being so important and intricately linked when you kicked your own brother out of it. Was it because he refused to comply with the business-comes-first line?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHITE NOISE FILLED Alessio’s ears at this unexpected turn of the conversation.
‘He said that?’ he asked slowly. ‘Domenico said we kicked him out?’
‘He said that you did. He said that, when your parents retired and you became the boss of Palvetti, the first thing you did was kick him out of the home and cut his income off.’
A swell of anger rose inside him. It had taken no effort at all to imagine his brother spreading poison about him but hearing outright lies...
‘Tell me everything,’ he said grimly. ‘Everything he said about me and my family.’
He’d never wanted to waste his breath defending himself but could see that letting this go would mean his brother’s allegations always hanging over them.
‘Okay...’ He heard Beth take a sharp breath before the words spilled out. ‘In a nutshell, he said his entire life was spent being groomed to be someone he never wanted to be. His dream of being a musician was opposed and hindered because you didn’t want the Palvetti name associated with anything other than its core brands. He said living in the Palvetti household was like being straitjacketed from birth, and that all any of you ever cared about was the business, and that money, possessions and the family name were more important than your own blood’s mental health. He never felt loved or wanted for himself.’
As soon as Beth had blurted it all out she turned her head to look at him.
She could read nothing from Alessio’s expression. It was as if a mask of his face had been placed over the real one. The only life on the mask was the pulse throbbing in his temple.
Eventually he rolled his neck and grimaced. ‘I cannot comment on Domenico’s feelings but the rest of it is a lie.’ He pointed at the white cottage by the side of the lake. ‘Have you been in there yet?’
She shook her head.
‘Domenico moved into it when he left school. Our parents paid to have a music studio installed in it for him. The studio’s still there. They were disappointed that he didn’t want to join the business but supported his decision. Their only stipulation was that he use a pseudonym if he made it big, but he never made any money off his music.’
His laughter echoed bitterly in the stillness of the night. ‘When I took the helm of Palvetti he was twenty-eight years old, and still chasing the dream, and still turning his nose up at the family business that had supported his lazy lifestyle for all those years. I offered him a job working in the creative department. He could have done any number of things. He could have worked on the advertising campaigns, because I do not deny my brother had a brilliant mind, but he wanted none of it.’
Beth listened hard to this emotionless retelling of a story that flipped on its head Domenico’s perspective.
‘Our parents signed the villa and the land it stood on to me. Domenico was angry that this included his cottage—he thought it should have been given to him. I gave him some home truths.’ His mouth twisted. ‘If he wanted the cottage, then he had to earn it. Either join the business or find the funds to pay for it some other way because he had leeched off the rest of us for long enough. We argued... In truth it was the most ferocious argument we’d ever had. Our parents tried to calm things and Domenico turned on them. He called our mother a name not to be repeated in polite society and that was when I told him to get out because I was this close...’ he put his thumb and first finger together, ‘to hitting him. He left that night. I expected him to come back the next day but he didn’t. He changed his phone and closed his social media accounts. He cut us off so effectively that he’d been dead for a year before I knew of it.’
His lips tightened and he shook his head before emitting another bitter, disbelieving laugh. ‘I did not throw him out of his home—he left. And, as for cutting his income off, what was I supposed to do? He rejected us and everything we stood for. Why give him more money when he’d left with no forwarding address and when he considered us bourgeois bastards? He was given all the freedom and creativity he wanted and a healthy allowance he did nothing to earn. It was not our fault he didn’t have the talent to go with the ideals.’
He turned back to face her. When he met her gaze, his expression softened a touch. Reaching out to capture a lock of her hair, he said, ‘I don’t expect you to take me at my word—it’s too soon for that—but I do ask you give me the benefit of the doubt. Can you do that?’
She held his gaze, wishing she could see the expression in his eyes better, but the darkness of the night shadowed it.
Alessio’s version of events countered everything Domenico had said but he’d spoken with such conviction that she found herself believing him, which in turn made her feel like a complete traitor.
‘I’ll try,’ she whispered then, because she had to say it, ‘But I need you to promise me that you won’t let your loathing of Domenico affect how you treat his son.’
He released his hold on her hair and dragged his fingers through his curls with a groan. ‘Beth, I am not a monster. Dom is innocent of everything. One promise I can make is that I will treat him as I would if he were my own son and that I will do everything in my power to make you both feel a part of this family.’
Then he turned and walked away.
Beth watched his silhouette vanish into the dark as he crossed the bridge, utterly torn.
Later, when she was back in bed for what would be the last time alone, the thought that crowded her mind before sleep finally came for her was that, truth or lie, monster or not, none of that mattered. It didn’t change anything. She would marry him regardless and, whatever direction their marriage took, however well she embraced the role she’d been given, the one thing she would never have was the love she had always hoped one day to find.
* * *
The driver stopped the car by Piazza del Duomo, the vast square right in the beating heart of Milan, and opened the door for them.
Tourists were out in force that sunny afternoon, cameras and phones flashing shots of the Duomo, Milan’s famous cathedral, and the impressive statue of Vittorio Emmanuel II, the first King of a united Italy.
Before getting out of the car, Alessio gazed over at the statue, the King on his horse aloft on its marble pedestal and mighty plinth, and thought Vittorio had had an easier time uniting Italy than he would have uniting his family behind the idea of Beth Hardingstone as a Palvetti.
Her question as to what his family thought about her had been astute but he’d kept his answer evasive. She had enough to contend with without him feeding her fears.
Usually Palvetti marriages were a cause of great celebrati
on but bringing a stranger into the fold had caused mutterings of discontent. Beth was an unknown quantity to the rest of the family. She’d been too good a friend of Domenico, who had hated them all so much, to be trusted. If they knew the poisonous lies Domenico had fed her, they would distrust her even more.
He had no intention of sharing that with them.
Beth now had the facts of Domenico’s life as a Palvetti rather than his brother’s twisted, self-serving version of events. He had to trust she would be as good as her word and give him the benefit of the doubt, and his family too.
And he had to trust that his family would keep their word and give Beth the benefit of doubt in turn.
He turned his gaze from Vittorio’s statue and looked again at the woman he was minutes from tying himself to.
She’d chosen a figure-hugging cream lace dress that managed to be bridal yet sophisticated, falling to just below her knees. She’d plaited her dark hair into a coiled bun at the nape of her neck.
His breath had caught in his throat when she’d descended the villa’s stairs towards him and it caught again now.
Her beauty grew every time he looked at her.
Beth followed him out of the car and stared at the Duomo. ‘Are we marrying there?’
‘No. That would attract too much attention to us. We’re marrying in the royal palace.’ He pointed to the right of the Duomo, at the Palazzo Reale.
She swallowed.
‘It’s not a real palace,’ he told her with a grin. ‘It’s the palace Milan used to be governed from and now it’s a place of culture. It also hosts civil wedding ceremonies.’
She was silent as they took the short walk to the palace, silent as they were taken to the second floor and silent as they entered the Sala degli Specchi hall.
Alessio had chosen this location specifically. He needed a quick wedding to tie Beth to him, so that had put paid to a large traditional wedding, but he still wanted the ceremony to have some meaning and be an event to remember.
A Cinderella To Secure His Heir (Cinderella Seductions Book 1) Page 7
