by Dani Collins
“Evelina. Lovely to see you again,” Davin said politely before introducing Kiara. “This is Kiara O’Neill.”
Evelina’s gaze skimmed past her with a dismissive, “Water will do for now.”
Kiara might have been amused—or insulted—but a millennium’s worth of fireworks were going off inside her at the sight of Valentino Casale. Every emotion possible whistled and burst in her ears while sparks and flashes of color exploded in her vision.
He hadn’t bothered with a suit. He wore ripped jeans and a black shirt open at the throat. They clung to a frame that was every bit as athletically lean and flawless as it had been three years ago. His hair was still tousled, his jaw still in need of a shave.
His gaze was exactly as piercing and unsettling. His silvery irises—endearingly familiar—pinned onto her, unwavering and fierce.
Adrenaline urged her to run for her life, but the sting was laced with a bizarre excitement. An urge to run to him. Between those imperatives sat a mixture of more complex emotions. Cavernous guilt and angry resentment and something like painful relief.
She had dreaded and anticipated this day from the moment she had agreed to Niko’s offer to live with him. She would finally confront Val about their daughter. She had braced for whatever consequences that might produce, but she hadn’t braced for the effect Val still had on her.
Profound attraction accosted her. She shouldn’t be surprised. The first time she’d seen him, he’d caused a stab of irresistible fascination in her. Time had stopped and her blood had sizzled as she had begun caressing the lines of his face in velvety shades of charcoal.
That same sensual yank took hold of her today, but stronger. It was deeper, immediate and sexual. Not simply a compulsion to study and re-create him on a page, but a gut-deep desire to close the distance and touch him. She wanted to feel him with her entire body and bask in the fire he lit inside her. She wanted to feel the sweep of his hands down her naked back and his strong grip on her hips.
Her body heated and tingled and grew aroused simply by standing in a room with him because she knew what making love with him felt like. She knew how he could make her feel—animalistic and alluring and good.
She hadn’t calculated the effect of their connection through their child, either. She had spent over two years living with his father and his daughter. She knew so much more about Val Casale now, yet she still didn’t know him. Her brief crush and the memory of a sweet encounter had become a spellbinding enthrallment with someone who had had a profound effect on her life.
Despite the things she’d been told about him, however, and despite the fact he’d ultimately slighted and discarded her, everything within her wanted to reach out and rediscover the sexy, hedonistic man she’d glimpsed that night.
The indulgent smile of her lover was gone, though. His cynicism and contempt were palpable in the polished chrome of his gaze.
Did he know that she’d had their baby? Was that why he was throwing accusation at her like bolts of lightning with his bitter look?
His antagonism was obvious. Her stomach bottomed out as she recalled one of the first things Niko had told her about his son.
Val is a bastard, Miss O’Neill. He takes pride in the distinction and seizes every opportunity to live down to the label.
At different times Niko had used all manner of unsavory descriptors—disrespectful, rebellious, confrontational, reprehensible, vengeful.
He hadn’t been a man one contradicted, even though his view of Val hadn’t sounded like the man she’d met. Regardless, anger with his father had prompted Val to turn his back on a fortune and marry a woman he didn’t love. That made him a man no sensible woman would cross.
And Niko might have offered her protection from Val while he’d been alive, but Niko was gone. Kiara was on her own.
Davin broke the thick silence by setting down the jug of water with a clunk. He held out the glass to Evelina, who ignored it as she stared between them.
“Do you know each other?” Evelina asked.
Kiara’s arteries stung with a fresh release of fight or flight. She looked to the door, willing Scarlett to appear.
“What are you doing here, Kiara?” Val’s voice, for all its lethal sharpness, was still deep enough to invoke a sense of curling into a soft bed under a thick quilt.
She glanced at Davin.
“When all mentioned parties are present, we’ll discuss the particulars of dispersal,” Davin said with a twitch of a smile that died on contact under Evelina’s death-ray glare.
“Do not tell me this...person...is entitled to some portion of Niko’s estate?” Evelina’s outraged gaze went down Kiara’s ample curves in pale yellow and summer-sky blue. Her lip curled with distaste.
“Not exactly,” Kiara croaked, snatching up her own glass of ice water and dampening her throat. “I should check on Scarlett.” Perhaps they could hide together in the ladies’ room until this blew over.
Before she could take a step toward the door, however, it flung open.
“Very sorry,” Nigel stammered. “There’s been a development. Miss Walker has gone to the hospital.”
“What? Why? What happened?” In her shock, Kiara misjudged the height of the table. Her glass tipped as she set it down on her way to the door. The puddle of water streaked out alongside her as the glass rolled toward Val on the other side of the table. He caught it before it fell and shattered.
“She’s in labor,” Nigel said. “Señor Rodriguez has taken her. His mother has chosen not to stay. The, uh, central message of this meeting was, um, conveyed by Miss Walker and...” Nigel glanced uncomfortably toward Evelina then swung his attention back to Kiara. “She said to tell you to finish your business here and call her when you’re able.”
Of course she had. Scarlett never thought of herself.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Nigel said, drawing the door closed on his exit.
“Do not—” Evelina flung around with ominous warning toward Davin “—tell me that some gold digger is having Paloma’s grandchild and all of Niko’s money is going to them.” Tears of rage glittered in her eyes.
Val, on the other hand, gave an ironic snort. A dent of acrid humor twitched one corner of his mouth. “Touché, Javiero,” he drawled.
“Not...um...all of it.” Davin hurried to mollify Evelina. He flashed a cautious glance at Kiara. “Perhaps we should sit?”
“I’ll stand.” Kiara grasped the back of a chair to steady herself while the world spun off its axis around her. Her mind was splintering with concern for her best friend while her heart hammered as the moment of truth arrived like a cliff before her. Her toes curled to keep her from tumbling over it, but she was going to fall regardless.
Her eyes clung to the punishing contact in Valentino’s unrelenting stare. She watched comprehension dawn the way clouds parted and the sun suddenly pierced through in a shaft of brilliant, searing hot light.
A whooshing sensation tipped her past the point of no return. She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t have to.
“Calm down, Mother.” His tone descended to a grim, deadly rasp. “This gold digger has also had a child.”
* * *
“Sir,” the lawyer admonished, but Val didn’t let the man’s disapproval impact him. He was suffering too—a sharp sting of betrayal.
Kiara had presented herself as a sensual, self-deprecating, penniless artist with a heart that he now realized had been iron pyrite.
And he was the fool who’d believed in her.
He’d thought they’d enjoyed a chance encounter, one where he hadn’t needed to deflect or overpower the situation in order to keep control of it. He had thought they had shared, if not secrets, a lack of lies.
She had haunted him.
And she’d been working for his father the whole time.
She had been more than Eve with an a
pple; she’d been the snake, slithering her way into his periphery, seemingly harmless then turning on him when he least suspected it. How was he surprised? How? And of course his father had played the long con. Of course he had.
But how had they managed it? Had she already been working for his father when they met? Had Niko hired her to lure Val into bed and get her pregnant?
Nice work if you can get it. And lucky shot to make it happen in one go and only because one of the condoms broke.
“You have a child?” His mother clawed a pale hand at the diamonds around her throat.
“Yes.” Kiara’s knuckles stood out like brass bullets where her brown hands clutched the back of a chair.
Her hair was longer, parted on one side. Light played through the brown-gold mass of springs that were so fine and narrow, each strand looked as though it had been wound around a pencil or something smaller. The coils piled upon themselves in wild abandon around her oval face, accentuating her high cheekbones.
Her big eyes were pools of espresso, her mouth a round pout painted in brick red. Had she had elocution lessons? Or had the broad Irish accent she’d used that night been a put-on to trick him into believing she was the harmless backpacker she’d pretended to be?
Her teeth had been straightened, but the rest of her was still mouthwateringly curvaceous, draped in clothes of a much higher quality than the last time he’d seen her. She wore heels so she seemed taller than he remembered. A wide belt at her waist emphasized the thrust of her breasts and the generous flare of her round hips and bottom.
A very carnal memory threatened to take hold and dull his wits all over again. Sex was only sex, he reminded himself. It was a pleasant pastime to be enjoyed like dessert or sailing on a hot day, not something that should be used against others the way she had clearly used it against him—on his father’s behalf—damn her to hell.
“Since things have taken such a sharp turn, I’ll come straight to the point,” Davin said, fingering through the papers before him. “Given that both of Nikolai’s sons have renounced their claim to his fortune, he has bequeathed the bulk of his estate in equal parts to his grandchildren. Obviously, we’re wishing everything goes well with Miss Walker’s delivery. With that happy event, to the best of our knowledge, there will be two heirs who will share equally in the assets. Evelina and Paloma have been allotted a one-time, one-million-euro payment.” Davin slid a cashier’s check toward Val’s mother. “Each.”
“One—That’s not enough!” she cried.
“Sounds like you’ll have to be nicer to Kiara,” Val said, drinking deeply of that satire. “Don’t assume she’s only here to fetch your beverages, for instance.”
“This can’t be right.” His mother hurried to Davin’s side and demanded to read it with her own eyes.
Val met Kiara at the end of the table.
“You understand what this means?” he asked, jerking his head to indicate his mother. “She will never let you rest. I thought you were on the pill,” he recalled.
Kiara’s shoulders twitched, but any guilt was short-lived. Her gaze sparked with affront as she met his.
“We’re doing that here? Now?” Her cheeks darkened with a blush. “It was a low dose to regulate my cycle. When I spent the night with you, I missed one. Apparently, it was enough to disrupt the effectiveness. There’s no such thing as a perfect contraceptive, you know.”
“My father didn’t pay you to spend the night with me and get pregnant?”
“And break the condom? No.” She rocked back a step, scowling as if insulted.
“If you knew him well enough to pry half his assets out of him, you know he would be capable of something like that.” Look at the disregard Niko was showing toward the mothers of both his sons right now, throwing them a token settlement while he enriched the women who gave him grandchildren. Niko had been unswayed by sentiment. Ruthless. “Did you sleep with him?”
“No. That’s a disgusting suggestion.”
“Says the woman using a baby to get her hands on a fortune.”
Her chin came up in a tiny signal of challenge.
Challenge accepted, tesoro.
Why? He didn’t care.
He shouldn’t care, at any rate.
But he discovered that he did. Deeply. Emotions he couldn’t name were churning in his gut.
“You pretended you didn’t know who I was that night,” he accused.
She had seemed charmingly unaware when he had told her his name, but at the time he’d been weighing the idea of marriage to a stranger. Obviously, she’d taken advantage of his distraction.
“You skipped the pill on purpose, in hopes of winning the jackpot? Such tactics have been tried in the past, with limited success.” He sent a mocking wave down his front. “You’ll come to regret this.”
“Having my daughter?” she asked with another lofty notch of her chin. “I doubt it. She has a name, by the way. Would you like to hear it?”
“No.” He could have exited on that. The man he had cultivated himself into nearly always stole the last word and tossed a match over his shoulder as he walked away.
Something kept him rooted, however, listening for the name. Waiting for Kiara to take another shot at him. He didn’t know why, but he wanted both. He wanted to stay right here, feeling the streaking pinball of incendiary energy continue to heat as it bounced between them.
How could she still hold such a spell over him when he now knew her to be mercenary and devious.
“I told him to give you the money you needed to take care of it,” Evelina spat from the other side of the room. “He said you did.”
Val had been in enough scraps to duck any punch, but that one suckered him. His abs belatedly clenched as he snapped a look at his mother. “You knew about this?”
“You didn’t?” Kiara’s gaze flashed back to his with wary confusion.
“I knew she was claiming to be pregnant with your child. I didn’t know she had it.” Evelina glared censure at Kiara.
Kiara’s lashes swept down again, and her mouth firmed as she pronounced with dignity, “Niko has given me money to take care of her.”
Evelina caught her breath as she realized how badly she had misplayed her hand.
Val should have found that hilarious, but learning of his mother’s involvement had taken him by the throat and shaken him.
“You knew she was pregnant? And you didn’t tell me?” he demanded of her.
“You were on your honeymoon.” His mother’s voice dropped to the syrupy, conciliatory tone that wheedled for him to take her side. “You didn’t need an ugly scandal.”
“Like the one I grew up in?” When had he last bothered to be angry? Truly furious? Maybe his last visit to this tower? Maybe it was the air in here that stoked his rage. The fetid stench of manipulation and jealousy and profound selfishness. “You live for making a scene. Blaming Niko for my shortcomings is your bread and butter. You could have used the baby for leverage all this time if you had—Oh, my God.”
Val hooked his hands on his hips and laughed drily toward the ceiling as he realized why she had preferred his baby be erased from existence.
“This is a new low for you, Mother.” He was uncharacteristically, profoundly astounded. And sickened. “Or should I say... Nonna?”
“Do not...” she warned in shaken outrage.
“Oh, I will. Because your precious vanity sent her to him.” He pointed at Kiara then the folder representing the fortune that had been the reason for, and the bane of, his very existence.
This situation was abhorrently reminiscent of his childhood, when something clean and precious and his would be sullied and used as leverage and snapped apart in the struggle between his parents and his half brother and his father’s ex-wife, Paloma. Val’s wants and needs had never been part of any conversation. If they had, they’d been dismissed as ir
relevant.
And Kiara had played along with all of that.
“Why did you tell her instead of me?” he demanded of Kiara.
Whatever culpability flickered into Kiara’s face was quickly schooled into something more facetious. “I guess I could have left a message with your wife?”
It was a darling effort at shaming him, but, “I’ve been divorced a year. You’ve had time.”
“There were circumstances.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Niko was ill and needed us there.”
“You’ve been living with him? This whole time?”
If Val believed people were capable of true remorse, he might have thought the way Kiara bit her lip might have signaled regret.
He had played this game too long to believe she felt anything but glee, however, at claiming the pot of gold.
Walk away, he thought. Just. Walk. Away.
“He thought if you knew Aurelia existed, you would pressure me to leave the island instead of staying with him.”
Aurelia. It was the name of the villa in Venice where they’d spent their night together. The site of their lovemaking and, apparently, the conception of their daughter.
Every morning, when he gazed on Kiara’s sketch, he was back there on the bed with her, seated behind her in the rumpled sheets, teasing her into continuing with her study of the open balcony doors while he sampled the scent in her neck and tasted the smoothness of her shoulders and felt her breast rise and fall in growing excitement against his palm.
He swallowed, trying to dismiss any profundity in her bestowing that villa’s name on their child. He didn’t buckle to sentiment. It was a manipulation tactic. Everything was.
Even so, he couldn’t take his eyes off her as she turned her attention to his mother, showing no fear as she said baldly, “Niko didn’t want you or Paloma to know about her or about Scarlett’s pregnancy. He thought it would create more conflict than he could deal with in his weakened condition. Since he was terminal, we respected his wishes.”
