The Return of the Di Sione Wife

by Caitlin Crews

  “I’ll have the earrings now. Or are there more hoops to jump through?”

  Dario Di Sione should be feeling triumphant—he’s about to fulfill his grandfather’s wish and retrieve the precious earrings, but all he feels is fury. The beautiful lawyer handling the sale is the woman who betrayed him six years ago…his wife!

  Discovering Anais has kept their child a secret makes Dario determined to be the father he never had. But Anais’s return to his side casts a new light on past events, and now it’s not just the child he wants to claim!

  Book 3 of The Billionaire’s Legacy

  It was the same madness he remembered. That same wild burn that sizzled through Dario, lighting him up and making him crazy, eating him alive. Anais still tasted sweet and perfect, the way she always had, as if no time at all had passed.

  Dario moved closer, slid his hands into the thick fall of her hair, then tugged her mouth into a better angle beneath his and kissed her deeper, harder. As if he could block out not only what she’d told him, all the accusations she’d thrown at him, but the six years since he’d touched anyone like this or let himself be touched in return. He hadn’t wanted anyone near him. He hadn’t wanted anything that resembled intimacy with anyone.

  And yet here, now, with that breeze still dancing all over him and Anais’s perfect mouth hot and demanding beneath his, he couldn’t seem to remember why that was.

  The Billionaire’s Legacy

  A search for truth and the promise of passion!

  For nearly sixty years Italian billionaire Giovanni Di Sione has kept a shocking secret. Now, nearing the end of his days, he wants his grandchildren to know their true heritage.

  He sends them each on a journey to find his ‘Lost Mistresses’—a collection of love tokens and the only remaining evidence of his lost identity his lost history...his lost love.

  With each item collected the Di Sione siblings take one step closer to the truth...and embark on a passionate journey that none could have expected!

  Find out what happens in

  The Billionaire’s Legacy

  Di Sione’s Innocent Conquest by Carol Marinelli

  The Di Sione Secret Baby by Maya Blake

  To Blackmail a Di Sione by Rachael Thomas

  The Return of the Di Sione Wife by Caitlin Crews

  Di Sione’s Virgin Mistress by Sharon Kendrick

  A Di Sione for the Greek’s Pleasure by Kate Hewitt

  A Deal for the Di Sione Ring by Jennifer Hayward

  The Last Di Sione Claims His Prize by Maisey Yates

  Collect all 8 volumes!

  The Return of the Di Sione Wife

  Caitlin Crews

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

  Books by Caitlin Crews

  Mills & Boon Modern Romance

  Castelli’s Virgin Widow

  At the Count’s Bidding

  Undone by the Sultan’s Touch

  Not Just the Boss’s Plaything

  A Devil in Disguise

  In Defiance of Duty

  The Replacement Wife

  Princess from the Past

  Wedlocked!

  Expecting a Royal Scandal

  The Chatsfield

  Greek’s Last Redemption

  Scandalous Sheikh Brides

  Protecting the Desert Heir

  Traded to the Desert Sheikh

  Vows of Convenience

  His for a Price

  His for Revenge

  Royal and Ruthless

  A Royal Without Rules

  Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

  Contents

  Cover

  Back Cover Text

  Introduction

  The Billionaire’s Legacy

  Title Page

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Extract

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE HAWAIIAN ISLAND of Maui was tropical and lush, exactly as advertised, which irritated Dario Di Sione the moment he stepped off his private jet and into its unwelcome embrace.

  The press of the island humidity felt intimate, and Dario didn’t do intimate. The thick air insinuated itself against his skin, making the faded jeans and expertly tailored jacket he’d worn on the long flight from New York City feel limp and too close as he strode across the tiny tarmac toward the Range Rover that waited there for him, as ordered. A gentle breeze carried the exotic scent of the island—deep green things in exultant growth and the rougher, deeper smell of sugarcane production from all those fields they’d flown over on the way in to land—playing across his face like so many unsolicited kisses.

  It only annoyed him more. He was trying to conduct a business conversation, not indulge in sensory overload on a damned tarmac.

  “Is the car waiting as promised?” his secretary, Marnie, asked through the top-of-the-line, brand-new smartphone he had clamped to his ear. He was a proud user of his company’s highly coveted products. “I was very clear about the need for a sports utility vehicle. The road out to the Fuginawa estate is very rough, apparently, and—”

  “I can handle rough road,” Dario told her, trying to rein in his impatience. He didn’t want to be here so soon after the major product launch his company had pulled off this past weekend—or at all, for that matter—but that wasn’t his secretary’s fault. It was his. He should never have allowed an old man’s sentimentality to win out over his own hard-won rationality. This was the result. He was halfway across the planet—when he should have been in his office—surrounded by lazy palm trees and exotic smells, all to appease an elderly man’s whims. “The Range Rover is fine. And here, as ordered.”

  Marnie moved on to the long list of calls and messages she’d fielded during his first absence from the office he’d actually been sleeping in these past few months, a flashback to the kind of stress he’d been under six years ago when he’d first started with ICE. Dario scowled as another sultry breeze licked over him. He didn’t like flashbacks and he didn’t like that breeze, either. It was fragrant and sensuous at once, moving through his hair like a caress and getting beneath the fine linen of the button-down shirt he wore. Like a woman’s fingers trailing down the length of his abdomen, suggestive and mischievous.

  He rolled his eyes at his own flight of fancy, then scraped a hand over his unshaven jaw, aware that he looked a little more disreputable than the CEO of a major computer company, currently the darling of the tech industry and the smitten public, probably should. And he was about as interested in the intimate touch of Hawaiian breezes as he was in being here in the first place. Not at all.

  This entire trip was a waste of his time, he thought as Marnie kept talking her way through the pile of messages and calls that needed his personal attention immediately, if not sooner. He ought to be back in his office in Manhattan today, handling all of this in person. Instead, he’d flown some ten hours down hi
s grandfather’s memory lane to appease the very worst kind of nostalgic sentiment. Giovanni had sold off his collection of beloved trinkets years ago and had talked about them endlessly throughout Dario’s youth. Now, ninety-eight years old and facing down his impending death with his usual sense of theater and consequence, the old man wanted them all back.

  They remind me of the love of my life, his grandfather had claimed when he’d asked Dario to buy back these earrings for him. From a reclusive Japanese billionaire on his remote estate in Hawaii.

  In person.

  Dario actually snorted at the memory as he threw his bag into the back of the Range Rover and shrugged out of his jacket, too. He didn’t know how he’d managed not to do exactly that to his grandfather’s face when the old man had summoned Dario to his side earlier this month and made his outlandish request. But who refused an old man what he’d claimed was his dying wish?

  “Email me those specs, Marnie,” he told his secretary before she could ask what that noise was. Bless that woman. She was infinitely more dependable than anyone else he knew, including every last member of his overly dramatic and periodically demanding family. He made a mental note to give her another richly deserved bonus, simply because she was not one of the pain-in-the-ass Di Siones he shared his blood with, if little else. “Give me a minute to switch to hands-free and then start rolling the calls.”

  He didn’t wait for Marnie to respond. He rolled his sleeves up, hoping that would cut some of the tropical humidity. He dug out his earpiece and activated it, then climbed behind the wheel of the sparkling, brand-new Range Rover. He started it up, punching the address he needed into the GPS and heading out of the small airport as the first call came in.

  But even as he listened to one of his vice presidents lay out a potentially tricky situation with the brand-new phone they’d just released over the weekend, he was thinking about his grandfather and the so-called lost love of his very long life.

  Lost loves, in Dario’s experience, were lost for a damned good reason. Usually because they hadn’t been worthy of all that much love in the first place.

  Or possibly—and this was his pet theory— because love was a great big lie people told themselves and everyone else to justify their own terrible and usually painfully dramatic behavior.

  And lost loves certainly didn’t need to be found again, once the truth about them came out the way it always did. Better to leave the past where it lay, so it could fester on its own without infecting the present, or so Dario had always believed.

  It had been difficult not to share his thoughts on that with his grandfather when Giovanni had told Dario that same old mushy story about love and secrets and blah-blah-blah. He’d shared it in one form or another all his life. Then he’d sent Dario off on this idiotic errand that anyone—literally, anyone, including the overzealous recent college grads working in Dario’s mailroom—could have performed. But then, Dario was used to biting his tongue when it came to the foolish emotions other people liked to pretend were perfectly reasonable. Reasonable and rational and more than that, necessary. Whatever.

  There was never any point in saying so, he knew. Quite apart from the fact that Dario wasn’t about to quarrel with the elderly grandfather who’d taken him and his siblings in after his parents had died, he’d also come to realize that the more he shared his opinion on subjects like these, the more people lined up to tell him how cynical he was. As if that was an indictment of his character, or should allow them to dismiss his opinion out of hand. Or as if it should be a matter of deep concern to him, that weird fetish he had for realism.

  He’d stopped bothering years ago. Six years ago, in fact.

  And the truth was, he cared so little either way that it was easier to simply do as he was asked—in this case, fly across the planet to buy back a pair of earrings that could easily have been sent by courier had there not been so much sentiment attached to them, apparently—than to explain why he thought the entire enterprise was ridiculous. He was vaguely aware that the old man had been sending all the Di Sione siblings off on these pointless quests for what he called his Lost Mistresses, but Dario had been far too busy with this latest product launch to pay that much attention to round nine hundred and thirty-seven of the Di Sione family melodrama.

  Surely they’d had a lifetime’s worth already. He’d been sick of it at eight years old, when his hedonistic and undependable parents had died in a horrible, utterly avoidable car crash and the paparazzi had descended upon them all like a swarm. His feelings on the subject hadn’t improved much since.

  There was a part of Dario—not hidden very deeply, he could admit—that would have been perfectly happy if he never heard from another one of his relatives again. A part of him that expected that, once the old man passed on, that would happen naturally enough. He was looking forward to it. He would retreat into his work, happily, the way he always did. God knew he had enough to do running ICE, the world’s premier computer company if he said so himself, a position he’d won with his own hard work and determination. The way he’d won everything else that was his—everything that had lasted.

  Besides, the only member of his family he’d ever truly loved had been his identical twin brother, Dante. Until Dante had smashed that into so much dust and regret, too. He couldn’t deny that his brother’s betrayal had hurt him—but it had also taught him that he was much better off surrounding himself with people he paid for their loyalty, not people who might or might not give it as it suited them.

  Dario really didn’t want to think about his twin. That was the trouble with any kind of involvement with his family. It led to precisely the thoughts he spent most of his time going out of his way to avoid.

  He’d assumed that if he performed this task for his grandfather the way the rest of his brothers and sisters were supposedly doing, they could all stop acting like any of what had happened six years ago and since was Dario’s fault. Or as if he shared the blame for what had happened in some way, as he’d been the one to walk away from his marriage as well as his relationship with Dante. He hadn’t exactly asked his brother to sleep with his wife during what had been one of the most stressful periods of his life. And he refused to accept that there was something wrong with him that he’d never forgiven either his brother or his wife for that, and never would.

  They’d let him twist in the wind, the two of them. They’d let them think the tension between them was dislike, and Dario had believed it, too busy trying to sort out what to do with the company he and Dante had started and whether or not to merge with ICE, which Dario had thought was a good idea while Dante had opposed it. All that mess and tension and stress and sleeplessness to discover that the two of them had been betraying him all along...

  Here and now, in Hawaii of all places, Dario thought the only thing wrong with him was that he was still paying any kind of attention to anything a member of the Di Sione family said, did or thought. That needed to stop.

  “It will stop,” he promised himself between calls, his voice a rasp in the Range Rover’s quiet interior. “As soon as you hand the old man his damned earrings, you’re done.”

  He drove through the business district of Kahului, then followed the calm-voiced GPS’s directions away from the bustle of big-box stores and chain restaurants clustered near the airport toward the center of the island. He soon found himself on a highway that wound its way through the lush sugarcane fields, then up into the hills, where views even he had to admit were spectacular spread out before him. The Pacific Ocean gleamed in the summer sun with another island stretched out low in the distant water, green and gold. The old volcanic West Maui Mountains were covered in windmills, palm trees lined the highway and exuberant flowers in shockingly bright colors were everywhere, from the shrubs to the trees to the hedges.

  Dario didn’t take vacations, but if he did, he supposed this would be a decent place for it. As he waited for another call to connect, he tried to imagine what that would even look like. He’d never lounged
anywhere in his life, poolside or beachside or otherwise. The last almost-vacation he’d taken had been an extreme sports weekend with one of Silicon Valley’s innumerable millionaire genius types. But since he’d landed that particular genius and his cutting edge technology after they’d skydived down to a killer trail run in Colorado, en route to some class-V rapids, he didn’t think that counted.

  Even so, he certainly hadn’t been lounging around that weekend out west, contemplating the breeze. He’d always worked. Maybe if he hadn’t been working so hard six years ago, he’d have seen what was coming. Maybe he’d have seen the warning signs between his brother and his wife for what they were instead of naively assuming that neither one of them would do such a thing to him...

  Why are you dwelling on this old, boring nonsense? He shook his head to clear it.

  The road headed out along rocky cliffs that flirted with the ocean, then turned to packed red dirt, and Dario slowed down. He was listening to one of his engineers when his cell signal dropped out, and he sighed, scowling at the GPS display that showed he still had quite a distance left to go.

  He didn’t understand why anyone would live out here, this far from the rest of the world. He knew the current owner of his grandfather’s earrings was the kind of wealthy man as well known for his eccentricities as the family fortune he’d augmented considerably throughout his lifetime, but this was taking things a little bit far. Surely a paved road wouldn’t have gone amiss.

  But then, Dario loved New York City. He liked to be where everything was happening, all the time. Where he could walk down streets as busy at 4:00 a.m. as they were at four in the afternoon. Where he could be anonymous on the street and then recognized instantly when he walked into a favorite restaurant. He didn’t understand all this lonely quiet, no matter how pretty it was out here. He didn’t get what it was for. It appeared to allow entirely too much room for maudlin contemplation.

  Then again, his idea of relaxing was closing a new deal and bolstering his stock portfolio. Things he was very, very good at.

 
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