by Nina Milne
Over time he’d seen enough to decide romantic love was transitory at most. Of course there were exceptions, like his partners’ marriages. But at this stage in his life Cesare wasn’t that confident that he was marriage material. He hadn’t witnessed two parents loving each other. So far he felt he was better off alone like his mother. With a sister and brother-in-law and their daughter Elana, Cesare was happy enough with the family he loved.
In fact he had all he needed, including the occasional relationship with a woman. There was no guarantee that one would stay with him if he did get married, or that it would last.
Or that he might not be more like his father than he thought...
From time to time that thought haunted him because he hadn’t met a woman who meant everything to him. Maybe he’d subconsciously pushed them away so he didn’t have to deal with commitment. Though he didn’t want to bring up past pain to his mother, one of these days he would have a talk with her about the man who’d disappeared on their family, on him.
When the limo finally reached the villa, Cesare put his darker thoughts away and paid the driver before getting out. His mother was expecting him, and knew he’d be flying Ciro Fragala back to Milan with him the next day. But it was close to one o’clock. She always went to bed early.
He’d told her not to wait up and they’d talk in the morning before Ciro arrived at the villa in a limo Cesare had arranged for ahead of time. The man would be shipping his belongings to Milan and he’d stay in a room at the castello until he decided where he wanted to live.
Every time Cesare came to Palermo, he was charmed by the large ochre-colored villa spread over two floors with three beautiful terraces and a Mediterranean garden. The small pool was lined with glazed tiles of North African origin.
From the terrace off the dining room he was met with a glorious view of the Gulf front. It was a sight he’d always loved after climbing the bluff called Mount Pellegrino many times in his youth. From there he could imagine himself escaping the suffocating heat and madness of the city and sailing away to America. Incredibly that dream had come true.
Once he’d entered the foyer, he turned off the outside light and moved across the stone tiles of the villa in the dark to the kitchen with his suitcase. After setting it down, his first instinct was to grab himself a small bottle of his favorite grappa digestivo from the cabinet where he knew it was kept, then head upstairs to his suite with it. Before sleep, all he wanted was to take a few sips to remind him he was back in the land of his roots.
But as he turned to pick up his suitcase, he bumped into another body and heard a cry.
“Mamma?” He automatically hugged her to him. “Mi dispiace tanto. I didn’t think you’d be up this late. Did I hurt you?”
That’s when the bottle slipped from his hand and cracked on the floor. But the strong scent of the 60 proof alcohol wasn’t nearly as shocking as the feel of the woman in his arms.
She wasn’t built anything like his wiry brunette mother or her housekeeper who came in several times a week. In fact she was taller than both of them. To add to his surprise, the flowery scent from her hair and skin intoxicated him. It took him a second to gather his wits.
“Don’t move. There’s broken glass. I’ll turn on the light.” He let her go and walked to the doorway to flip the switch. Cesare was shocked yet again.
If he didn’t know better, he would think he’d released a gorgeous enchanted princess from her bottle. Her stunning figure was swathed in a lemon silk robe. Thank heaven she was wearing sandals. Between her medium-length black curls and eyes gray as the morning mist off the ocean, his gaze managed to swallow her whole before he realized she looked familiar to him. He knew he’d seen her before but couldn’t place her.
She stared back as if disbelieving before taking a few steps away from the wet mess on the stone flooring. A hand went to her throat. “You’re Cesare,” she murmured, sounding astonished.
“I’m afraid you’ve got me at a disadvantage, signorina.” Maybe he was in the middle of a fantastic dream, but so far he hadn’t awakened. Quickly he walked over to the utility closet for a cloth and brush to pick up the glass and clean the floor.
“My name is Tuccia. I’m so sorry to have startled you.”
Tuccia. An unusual name.
Tuccia. Short for... Princess Tuccianna of Sicilian nobililty?
Over the years there’d been photos of her in the newspapers from time to time, mostly stories about her escapades away from the royal palazzo where she got into trouble with friends and was seen partying in local clubs to the embarrassment of the royal household. But Cesare had never seen her up close.
The latest news in the Palermo press reported she was engaged to be married to some French comte who lived in Paris and was one of the wealthiest men in France.
No. It couldn’t be, yet he realized it was she.
“I’m afraid I don’t recognize it,” he dissembled until he could work out why the daughter of the Marchese and Marchesa of the ancient Sicilian House of Trabia, was in his mother’s villa.
“You probably wouldn’t. It’s not common.”
She was trying to put Cesare off, but he intended to get to the bottom of this mystery. “Did Mamma hire you to be a new maid?”
She averted her eyes. “No. Signora Donati allowed me to stay with her for tonight.” He frowned, not having known anything about this. Why hadn’t his beloved mother told him what to expect when he arrived? “I—I thought I heard a noise, signor,” she stammered, “but I didn’t have time to turn on the light.”
“No. We were both taken by surprise,” he murmured, still reeling from the sensation of her incredible body clutched to his so she wouldn’t fall.
Cesare had enjoyed various relationships with attractive women over the years, but he’d never gotten into anything serious. Yet the feel and sight of the beautiful young princess, whose face was like something out of Botticelli, had shaken him.
“I guess you know you have the most wonderful mother in the world,” she gushed all of a sudden, breaking in on his private thoughts. He was amazed by her comment. It had sounded completely sincere.
He closed the utility door and turned to her, growing more curious by the second. “I do. How did you two meet?”
His question caused her to hesitate. “I think it would be better if you ask her. I’m truly sorry to have disturbed you and will say goodnight.” She darted away, leaving him full of questions and standing there wide awake in the trail of her fragrance.
The princess, reputed to be a spoiled, headstrong handful, had elegance and manners. Damn if she didn’t also have an unaffected charm that had worked its way beneath his skin.
He took a deep breath. Though Cesare didn’t like waking his mother, he knew there’d be no sleep until he had answers. Before heading upstairs to her bedroom, he opened the cabinet for another bottle of grappa. All he found was a half-opened bottle of cooking sherry.
That’s what he got for not turning on the light earlier. That and the memory of a moment in time he feared wasn’t about to let him go.
* * *
With a pounding out-of-control heart, twenty-five-year-old Principessa Tuccianna Falcone Leonardi rushed to the guest room down the hall at the rear of the villa. She should never have made a trip to the kitchen, but needed something to drink. Lina had told her to help herself to anything, including the soda she kept on hand in the fridge.
Being crushed unexpectedly against a hard male body in the dark had come as such a huge surprise that her mind and body were still reeling. She could still feel the male power of him and smell the faint scent of the soap he’d used in the shower. The combination had completely disarmed her.
After he’d turned on the kitchen light, she’d had her first look at Lina’s tall, incredibly attractive brown-haired son. Tuccia knew of him, but h
ad no idea that Lina had given birth to the most striking man she’d ever seen in her life. Those deep blue eyes and his masculine potency had managed to make such an indelible impression her heart still kept turning over on itself.
“I didn’t know there was a man in Palermo who looked like that,” she whispered to herself. Tuccia was positive there wasn’t another one in all Europe who could match him.
More than ever she was revolted at the thought of marrying her forty-year-old French fiancé who had only stared at her with lust. The fabulously wealthy Comte Jean-Michel Ardois, who would soon inherit the title after his ailing father passed away, was always trying to touch her, and lately more and more inappropriately.
On occasion she’d seen him be quite ruthless with the people who worked for the Ardois family. He was a cold, calculating man whom she could never love or bring herself to marry.
Her betrothal at the age of sixteen had been a political necessity arranged by her parents, the Marchese and Marchesa di Trabia, whose funds needed constant bolstering. Since that time she’d felt doomed to an existence she’d dreaded with every fiber of her being.
After careful planning, she’d seized the moment to run away twenty-four hours before the ceremony was to take place. Taking flight from the boutique, she’d flown back to her home in Sicily. Thanks to her Zia Bertina, her mother’s widowed elder sister, she’d been given the help she needed to escape on that jet.
Bertina lived in her own palazzo in Palermo where she entertained close friends and loved Tuccia like the child she’d never been able to have. Tuccia’s zia was a romantic who’d always been in sympathy with her niece’s tragic situation, and had prevailed on her cook, Lina Donati, to let her hide at her villa overnight. In the meantime she was still trying to arrange transport for Tuccia to stay with a distant cousin living in Podgorica in Montenegro until the worst of the scandal had passed.
But Tuccia had placed her in a terrible position. Bertina had continued living in the palazzo after her husband died, but she needed monetary help on occasion. Tuccia’s zio, Pietro Spadaro, hadn’t been a wealthy man. If Tuccia’s parents got angry enough at Bertina, they could stop giving her extra money. They might throw her out of the only home she’d known since her marriage.
Worse, if they knew Bertina had involved a cousin in another country, let alone asked such a desperate favor of her adored cook to help solve Tuccia’s problems, who knew how ugly the situation could get. If Bertina were forced to lose the palazzo and any extra money, she wouldn’t be able to pay Lina for being her cook. Lina could be out of a job for harboring her. All of it would be her fault.
She couldn’t believe her bad luck in running into Lina’s son. Naturally he was going to wonder why she was here and question his mother. What she needed to do was get dressed and pack her bag so she’d be ready to steal from the villa at dawn before anyone was up.
Tuccia knew a full-scale search by Jean-Michel and her parents had been underway for her since she had disappeared from the salon. At least with her gone from Lina’s villa, Bertina wouldn’t be implicated.
She had saved enough money to take a bus and travel to Catania where she could get a job through a friend who would help her. If she were careful, she could subsist for a while. She didn’t dare access her bank account even though its pitiful balance had never been big enough to pay for as much as an airline ticket.
Tuccia had no idea how long she would have to remain hidden. But even if it meant being disowned and disinherited, it didn’t matter because she’d rather be dead than have to marry Jean-Michel. She was sickened at the thought of him taking her to bed, let alone living with him for a lifetime.
Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Winters
ISBN-13: 9781488015168
Claiming His Secret Royal Heir
First North American Publication 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Nina Milne
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
