‘A lot...like what?’ she asked, bewildered.
‘I didn’t marry you because of your background, Lucy.’
‘I... I know that. I didn’t at the time, but I know now. And you know I know.’
‘But because I didn’t marry you because of your background, doesn’t mean that my intentions were entirely...honourable.’
‘Dio, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘It’s a long story.’ He sighed heavily and glanced at her with that same uncertainty in his pale eyes that filled her with apprehension. ‘Your father wasn’t entirely unknown to me when I decided to take over his company. In fact, I’ve known about your father for a very long time.’
‘But how?’
‘It goes back decades, Lucy. Before you were born. Our fathers knew one another.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Skeletons in cupboards,’ Dio said wearily. ‘All families have them.’
‘They do,’ Lucy accepted, thinking of her own skeletons, no longer a secret from this man sitting across from her.
‘Sometimes those skeletons have bones that rattle so much, they create all sorts of problems down the line. A long time ago, my father invented something pretty big and at the time he was friends with your father. They were at university together. My father was a boffin, yours was...what can I say? The life and soul of the party. I have no doubt that my father was somewhat in awe of your father’s rich, playboy lifestyle. He was studious, poor, everything your father wasn’t. When your father decided that he was worth investing in, my dad believed him. Unfortunately, his trust was somewhat misplaced.’
Comprehension was beginning to drip in and Lucy’s eyes widened. ‘My father...’
‘Took everything. He took his family business and built it into something huge on the back of my father’s hard work. I grew up with that and it... Let’s put it this way, for a very long time I’ve been hell-bent on revenge. I waited my time, Lucy. I went to university and I made sure that I was better than good at everything I did. Fortunately, I seemed to have a knack for making money. I traded but quit that pretty quickly, just as soon as I had enough capital, along with a bank loan, to begin the business of acquisition. I made more money than I knew what to do with but there was only one thing I wanted to do with my millions and that was to wait until the time was right. I knew it would come because I knew what kind of man Robert Bishop was.’
‘He was drinking himself into a hole...stealing from pensions.’
‘He was and I knew just when to strike. The conversation you semi-overheard that night was when I told him exactly who I was.’
‘He must have known before—he would have recognised your name.’
‘Of course he did but the man was so arrogant, so sure that he was top dog, that it never occurred to him that he had become involved in a game in which there could only be one winner and that winner would be me.’
‘So you went out with me...’
‘I hadn’t planned to. In fact, whilst I knew to the very last detail the progress of your father’s company, I never had the slightest interest in the progress of his personal life. I didn’t know you existed until I met you on that very first visit when I came to enquire about buying the company.’
‘And my father encouraged us to go out...’
‘I needed no encouragement, trust me on that, Luce. He knew who I was but he still stupidly thought that he could somehow con me into paying full whack for his company whilst keeping him on, honour intact. Maybe he thought he could use you as a bargaining tool to get an even better deal out of me. He’d swindled my father and he thought that we were cut from the same cloth. I have to admit that I didn’t immediately disillusion him. I got involved with you and I was having...a good time.’
‘You were having a good time...’ Lucy said slowly, driven to search for an answer she knew she wouldn’t want to hear. ‘But did you plan on actually asking me to marry you?’
Dio looked at her steadily. He’d brokered hundreds of edge-of-cliff deals but never had he felt more nervous about the outcome of any situation...or more desperate to secure the outcome he wanted.
‘No.’
‘You planned on having some fun with me and then getting down to the main business of ruining my father as payback.’
‘That’s about the sum of it.’
‘Why did you change your mind? Why did you decide to ask me to marry you?’ Her puzzled, questioning eyes tangled with his steady, cool ones and it dawned on her that a man hell bent on revenge might find that revenge in all sorts of ways contrary to what he might have planned originally. ‘I get it,’ she said in a small, appalled voice. ‘You figured that not only would you get the company but you would take me with it, and that way you would have wiped my father out on all fronts...’
Dio said nothing. He found it impossible to understand the whole business of revenge that had motivated him for such a long time, but then something so much bigger had come along and knocked him to the ground.
‘How could you?’ She sprang to her feet and paced the room, dodging the packing crates, her mind in turmoil, her stomach churning with his revelations.
With a flick of his hand he caught her as she jerkily paced past him and pulled her so that she toppled onto him, only to push herself back immediately, shaking with mortification and anger.
‘I thought I’d misjudged you,’ she flung at him bitterly. She clenched her fist because she wanted to slap his beautiful face so much that it was a physical pain.
‘I know you did,’ Dio told her gently. ‘Just like I knew that finding out the truth would...hurt you. Why do you think I decided that the best outcome would be for me to walk away? Spare you the details?’
‘Oh, how generous of you,’ Lucy jeered with biting sarcasm. She could feel the heat from his body against hers and the steady beat of his heart under her arm, which was pinned into position. He was only holding her lightly but she still couldn’t move an inch. Tears stung the back of her eyes.
‘Generous and, as it turns out, impossible,’ Dio murmured. He could sense the effort she was making not to cry. He felt powerless to ease the pain and enraged that he was responsible for causing it, even though when all this began he had no idea that this was the route it would end up going down.
‘Not impossible,’ Lucy whispered. ‘You could have just left me believing what I did.’
‘You deserved to know the truth, Lucy, especially as...’ He sighed, shook his head and released her abruptly.
Freed from his clasp, Lucy was dismayed to find that her body didn’t immediately behave the way it should have. It took her a few seconds to leap away from him and sprint to one of the packing crates, where she sat, glaring at him.
‘Especially as...what?’ She wondered how many more revelations he had tucked up his sleeve.
‘This isn’t quite the end of what I have to say...’
‘What more can there be, Dio? What more can you possibly have to say to me?’
‘I thought I married you as a fitting way of making sure the wheel turned full circle. I took you for a daddy’s girl and, yes, I thought that I could deprive him of more than just his company in one fell swoop. It never occurred to me that what I felt for you went far beyond anything to do with getting even with your father.’
‘Oh, please...’
‘I knew I fancied the hell out of you; I just didn’t realise that I felt much more than that, which was why I was just so damned furious with myself when you decided that sleeping with me wasn’t going to be on the table. I figured you’d strung me along to get me to sign on the dotted line, thinking, like your father, that I would be a sucker for your pretty face.’
Lucy flushed because, although that had been a horrible misunderstanding, she didn’t emerge as flawless. They had both had i
ssues with one another.
‘I made sure I got what was mine, though... But I spared your father the humiliation of a prison sentence because of you.’
‘Surely that would have been the ultimate revenge?’
‘I found I couldn’t do it.’
‘Even when I refused to sleep with you?’
‘Even then. Maybe...’ he smiled wryly ‘... I wasn’t quite as hard-nosed as I thought I was, or maybe I just fell in love with you and couldn’t bring myself to take that ultimate step.’
‘Fell in love with me?’
‘It’s why I lost interest in all other women the minute you came on the scene. The only woman I went to bed dreaming of was you. I thought that it was because I had never had the chance to take you to my bed. I thought it was a simple case of wanting what had been denied me...’
‘Which was why you wanted the honeymoon, so that you could get me out of your system.’ He’d fallen in love with her?
‘I came here to tell you everything, Luce. I... I let you go, and I never should have done that, but I didn’t know how to stop you, not when I knew that there was so much muddy water under the bridge.’ He looked at her, wondered what was going on behind that beautiful, expressive face. If he lost her...
The thought filled his head like a blackness.
‘When you say you fell in love with me...?’
‘By that I mean I want you next to me for the rest of my life. I don’t want a divorce, Lucy, although if you insist on one then I’ll walk away. Unless,’ he mused, ‘I choose the other option of pursuing you relentlessly until you can’t stand it any more and you just give in. I should warn you that I can go to great lengths to get what I want.’
Lucy threw him a wobbly smile. ‘I can hardly believe what I’m hearing, Dio,’ she confessed unsteadily. She sighed heavily. ‘I fell in love with you the second you stepped into my life.’ Her eyes flickered and got the response they wanted, the steady, tender gaze that warmed her to her very depths. ‘It was like I was waking up for the first time in my life. I never thought...it never occurred to me that what was happening between us might not be real. I was so...inexperienced; when I overheard that conversation and then had it all confirmed by my father... You have no idea. It was like something inside me shrivelled up. I’d been bought, like something from a shop.’
‘I was blind, Lucy. I hadn’t been looking for love and I was arrogant enough to assume that it wouldn’t find me unless I had been.’
‘I was married to a guy I was crazy about but I was forced to tell myself otherwise. I knew that if I just confronted that truth I would break apart.’
‘You played a part and I was responsible for that, my darling. You’d spent your life playing a part and then you were forced to continue...’ And that hurt him. ‘Little wonder that you were searching for an exit.’
‘And I thought I’d found it. I could get back to what I had always dreamed of doing. I thought I’d be free, like a bird released from a cage, but then we went on our honeymoon and all the truths I’d shoved away out of sight began creeping out of their hiding places—and this time round I couldn’t hide any of it from myself. I was still crazy about you. I’d never stopped...’ Never had she felt more naked but that look on his face was still there, still warming her, taking her heart to heights she had never known existed.
‘My darling...’
‘I love you so much, Dio.’
‘Revenge might not be an honourable emotion.’ Dio stood up and walked across to her, dragging another packing crate so that their knees were touching. ‘But I wouldn’t have changed a second of those dishonourable emotions because they brought me to you, Lucy, and being with you is coming home. So...’ He went down on one knee and looked at her with such tenderness that her heart melted. ‘My darling almost-ex-wife, can I ask you not to divorce me?’
‘I never thought I’d have a marriage proposal as weird as that!’ Lucy’s heart took flight and she reached forward and ran her fingers through his hair. ‘So how can I say no? The past is behind us, all of it, and now...now we just have the future.’ She laughed, leant to kiss him and lingered a bit more as their mouths met. ‘My dearest husband for ever...’
* * * * *
Keep reading for a bonus novella by Amanda Cinelli, CHRISTMAS AT THE CASTELLO!
‘THERE’S STILL SOMETHING MISSING.’
Dara stood poised at the top of the staircase, looking over the Winter Wonderland theme that had transformed the opulent grand ballroom below her. Her assistant, Mia, waited patiently by her side. The younger woman had long ago got used to her boss’s obsessive eye for detail. Devlin Events was about creating perfect Sicilian weddings for their high-profile clients. Over the past three years Dara had gained an army of the industry’s most talented people and put them onto her payroll, but she still liked to oversee the final run-throughs at their most prominent venues. There was no one in the industry who could spot the little things better than she. And right now something was off.
Sweeping yet another glance around the room, she mentally checked off twenty-five tables, each adorned with a glittering crystal tree centrepiece. The overall effect was like a winter forest, with white and blue lighting completing the wintry theme. Her bride, a famous opera singer, had expressly forbidden any real flower arrangements on the tables. She had instead ordered hundreds of spherical arrangements of fresh white and pink roses, to be suspended from the ceiling in intricately symmetrical clusters.
Dara counted across the floating flower bombs—as she had so lovingly named them. She got as far as the third row before she noticed the problem.
She sighed. ‘They’ve doubled up on the colours.’
Mia’s head snapped up. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Right over here.’
She walked down the marble staircase, the click of her heels echoing on the hard surface. She came to a stop underneath the offending decoration. It wasn’t a major issue, but it was damned irritating now she’d noticed it. Mia’s quiet voice came from behind her.
‘Should I fetch one of the guys from the ceremony room?’
Dara shook her head. ‘The wedding is due to start in two hours—the ceremony room is priority.’ She smoothed down the front of her sleek red pencil skirt, trying to focus on everything but the mismatched flowers above her. Her eyes drifted upwards again.
Mia laughed. ‘I’ll go and get somebody.’
She disappeared out through the door, leaving Dara alone in the glittering winter ballroom.
The rest of the room was perfect. Her team was talented, and very capable of doing most of the work unchaperoned. She could pick and choose which events to attend, leaving her plenty of time to travel with her jet-setting husband. But it had been three weeks since she and Leo had been together—his newest business expansion into Asia had kept him away much longer than usual.
The restlessness that had plagued her over the past months seemed to have intensified in the absence of her husband. Three weeks was the longest they had spent apart. She was unable to shake the feeling that something was wrong—or perhaps something was about to go wrong.
Their joint venture into charity work in Sicily kept her busy. The Valente Foundation was doing fantastic work in some of the most disadvantaged areas on the island. And with Christmas fast approaching there was lots of volunteer work to do. But, as busy as she kept herself, something still kept her wide awake at night and staring at the ceiling.
Making a snap decision, she grabbed a ladder from nearby and set it up, removing her heels in the process. She didn’t need to stand here waiting for a big strong man to fix the problem. There was no reason why she couldn’t do it herself.
She quickly reached the top, keeping both hands in front of her on the cold metal for balance. It was true: if you wanted a job done well, sometimes you had to do it yourself. She foc
used on the arrangement, unhooking it from its place and lowering it down. It was heavier than she had expected, and she gasped as the world unexpectedly tilted on its axis.
‘Dio, what is it with you and ladders?’ a deep voice shouted from below her as the ladder suddenly righted itself and she was entirely vertical again.
‘Leo.’ Her heart gave a sharp thump.
Her husband was looking up at her, his hands holding the metal ladder steady. Dara dropped the flower arrangement and cursed.
‘It’s nice to see you still haven’t lost your love of daring stunts, carina.’
Dara descended the ladder as quickly as she could manage and practically fell into her husband’s arms. The familiar smell of him surrounded her, making her sigh involuntarily.
‘Surprise...’ he whispered huskily against her neck.
His permanent five o’clock shadow brushed against her skin and she shivered. Oh, how she had missed those shivers.
‘You’re a week early.’ She pulled back in his arms.
He smirked. ‘I like to be unpredictable.’
She loved it when he smiled like that, filled with mischief. Life was too serious without Leo around.
‘I’ve got a surprise planned. Do you think you can manage a few days away from your work?’
‘Right now? Leo, that sounds wonderful, but I’m needed here.’
Dara made a noise of protest, only to have him silence her with a finger against her lips.
‘Do you remember your wedding vows, Signora Valente?’
Dara remembered their wedding day as if it had been yesterday. She had originally planned a simple ceremony on the beach in the Caribbean. But then they’d both realised there was only one place they could imagine becoming man and wife, attended by a few select family and friends: the castello, which had become the setting for the most romantic day of her life.
‘We both agreed to remove that medieval part about obeying one’s husband from our vows.’ She raised a brow.
‘I’m talking about the part where we promised to spend each and every day loving each other.’ His gaze darkened as his hand drifted lower on her back. ‘And it seems I’ve got about twenty-two days of loving to make up for.’
The Wedding Night Debt: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella) Page 17
