The Ice Prince

by Sandra Marton

  The woman gave him a smile that would have sent a diabetic to the hospital. She was going to drive him crazy!

  “I am not offering to buy it, I am offering—”

  “A payoff?”

  “Compensation. What does your client want to end this insane charade?”

  Anna tossed her briefcase on a chair and strolled to the enormous desk. It was probably very old, and obviously hand carved. Mythological griffins dove on falcons, falcons dove on rabbits, wolves sank their fangs into the hindquarters of stags and brought them to their knees.

  The history of the landed gentry, she thought coldly. She knew a lot about that history. She’d made a point of studying it when she’d first realized her father’s true profession, hoping against hope that understanding the old Sicilian antagonisms would help her understand him.

  What she’d ended up understanding was that the world could be a brutally unfair place, but the world of her father was more than brutal.

  Right now, though, what she was seeing firsthand went a long way toward validating her opinion of princes who thought they could take whatever they wanted from mere mortals, and get away with it.

  “Well?”

  She looked up. The prince, gold pen poised, was watching her much as the wolves carved into his desk had surely watched the creatures they hunted. He looked intent. Determined. Coldly analytical, and certain of how the chase would end.

  Not so fast, big boy, she thought, and she took a long breath.

  “Well, what?”

  “You’re pushing your luck,” Draco said softly.

  “And you’re making foolish assumptions if you think you can buy your way out of this.” Anna jerked her chin toward the checkbook. “You can put that thing away.”

  Draco said nothing for a long minute. A muscle knotted and unknotted in his jaw. Then he dropped the pen and checkbook back into the drawer and slammed it shut with enough force to send the sound bouncing around the room.

  “Let’s get down to basics,” he snapped. “If you don’t want money, what do you want?”

  “You know what I want. The land, of course.”

  “That’s impossible. The land is mine. I have the deed to it. No court in Sicily will—”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Then, how—”

  Anna gave him her best look of wide-eyed innocence.

  “Roman Aristocrat Steals Land from Helpless Grandmother,” she said sweetly, and batted her lashes. “Maybe they can work the words puppies and kittens into that headline, too.”

  “You left something out. Sicilian Citizen Protects Land from Theft by American Hoodlum.” Draco flashed a smug smile. “Or don’t you like that wording?”

  “You’re no more Sicilian than I am!”

  “My ancestors settled in Sicily five hundred years ago.”

  “You mean they invaded it five hundred years ago. The Orsinis were already there.”

  “I asked you a question. What do you want?”

  “And I answered it. I want the land. If you think my client will run from a newspaper calling him a gangster …” Anna showed her teeth in a brilliant smile. “Trust me, Valenti. It won’t be the first time.”

  “Do not address me that way,” Draco said, hating himself for sounding ridiculous, hating the woman for pushing him to it. “As for headlines …” He shrugged. “They come and go.”

  She smiled. It was the kind of smile that made him want to shoot to his feet and toss her out of his office …

  Or take her in his arms and remind her of just how easily he could change her cold contempt to hot desire.

  “The thing is, oh powerful prince, we love that kind of stuff in the States. We give it all our attention. Page Six of the Post. People. US. The Star. All those juicy tabloids, the even juicier internet blogs. The cable news channels.”

  “You’re pushing your luck again,” he said in a soft voice.

  She knew she was, but it was too late to back down now.

  “Even the real newspapers—the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post—will love this.” Anna leaned closer. “See, one of the few things I had time to do was look you up on Google. I know you’re not just a prince, stealing money from the peasants—”

  “A gangster’s legal mouthpiece calling me a thief?” Draco leaned back in his chair, folded his arms over his chest and laughed.

  “You also control a huge financial empire.”

  His laughter ended. A look of cold determination took its place as he rose to his feet

  “If you have a point, get to it.”

  “Oh, I do,” Anna said. She paused for effect, as if this were a grungy New York City courtroom instead of an elegant office. “How do you think a company like yours would stand up to such a scandal in today’s financial climate?”

  His face darkened.

  “How dare you threaten me? Who the hell are you?”

  Anna dug into her pocket, took out a small leather case and extracted a business card. Nonchalantly she plucked a pen from his desk, scribbled the name of her hotel on the back, then flipped the card at him. He caught it, read the black engraving and looked at her through narrowed eyes.

  “Anna Orsini,” he said softly. “Well, well, well.”

  “That’s me,” Anna said cheerfully. “Anna Orsini. Cesare’s daughter.” Her voice became cold and flat. “In other words, a full-blooded member of the Orsini famiglia. I urge you to keep that in mind.”

  It seemed the right line, the closing line, especially when your enemy looked as if he might spring across the desk and throttle you …

  Especially when your own heart was banging so hard you were afraid it might leap from your chest.

  Anna pivoted on her heel, picked up her briefcase and walked out.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DRACO watched Anna Orsini march to the door.

  Head up, shoulders back, spine straight, her long-legged stride on those amazing stilettos clearly sending a to-hell-with-you message.

  Almost.

  The shoes changed her walk, ever so slightly. Balancing on them made her hips sway, changing what she surely meant to be a brisk march into something feminine and damned near feline.

  Golden-haired seductress. Cold-blooded consigliere. Which was the real Anna Orsini?

  For a dangerous couple of seconds Draco came close to demanding the answer.

  He would go after her, swing her toward him, look down into those blue eyes and say, Hell, woman, how dare you threaten me! Are you fool enough to think I can be brought to heel by you and your hoodlum father?

  Or he’d say nothing at all.

  He’d pull her into his arms, lower his head to hers and kiss her hard and deep until she forgot about being her father’s mouthpiece and became the woman he’d known on the plane, the one who’d come within a heartbeat of giving herself up to him.

  Instead, he stood his ground. He didn’t even breathe until she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle.

  He had to move carefully. No rash decisions. No letting the emotions within him overtake logic.

  Draco went to his desk and sat in the massive chair behind it.

  No question, he had a problem. Anna’s threat had teeth.

  Teeth?

  Hell, it had fangs, fangs that could sink into his throat and destroy him. There were some businesses that sought publicity, that thrived on it.

  Not Valenti Investments.

  Even being mentioned in the same breath as a crook like Cesare Orsini could mean the end of everything he had worked for. Not just money, although the amount he might lose, for himself and for his clients, was staggering.

  But there was more at stake than money. If Anna forced a public confrontation, Draco would lose that which mattered most to him.

  The honor of his name. The respect it once again carried.

  A muscle jumped in his cheek.

  To think he’d almost had sex with her. With Cesare Orsini’s consigliere.

&nbs
p; Cristo, he wanted to laugh!

  Not that this was a laughing matter, Draco thought grimly as he took the gangster’s letters from his briefcase and stacked them on the desk in front of him. Nothing about the situation was even remotely amusing.

  If only he’d known who she was last night, he’d never have let things go so far.

  Actually, the more he thought about it, the less he understood why he had become involved with her at all.

  Her name could be Jane Doe, and he wouldn’t want her.

  She wasn’t his type. She was too tall, too blonde, too slender. His tastes ran to petite women. Brunettes, with voluptuous bodies.

  And that attitude of hers, that feminist chip she carried on her shoulder …

  What man in his right mind would be attracted to a woman who argued over everything?

  Calmer now, he could see that it had been the situation, not the woman, that had turned him on. The hushed darkness. The isolation that came of being five miles above the earth. The added rush of knowing you were in a public setting.

  Draco sat back in his chair.

  Given all that, what man would not want to take things to their natural conclusion when he awoke with a woman draped over him like a blanket?

  In a way, he owed Anna Orsini his thanks. Men thought with parts of their anatomy that had nothing to do with their brains. She had saved them both from making an embarrassing mistake.

  Imagine if he’d actually had sex with the Orsini consigliere …

  Draco did laugh this time.

  There was a solution to the problem. There always was. And he would find it—something he could do to get the Orsinis, father and daughter, out of his life.

  He was, above all else, a logical man. A pragmatist. And pragmatism, not emotion, would save the day. Control over your emotions was everything.

  His father and those before him had never understood that.

  They drank to excess. Gambled with money they didn’t have. They went from woman to woman, losing themselves in the kind of passion and intensity that could only lead to trouble.

  The Valenti family history was a minefield of greed, infidelity, abandonment and divorce.

  Absolutely, a man had to learn to curb his emotions. And Draco had learned early how to curb his.

  His boyhood had been filled with scenes that still made him grimace. His mother had taken a string of lovers who helped themselves to what little remained of the family’s money. Still, she’d apparently found her life boring and abandoned her husband and Draco when he was a toddler.

  His father might as well have done the same. He was too busy whoring and gambling to pay attention to his son. Draco’s early memories were of big, silent rooms, most of them stripped of what had once been elegant furnishings. The few servants who remained, overworked and underpaid, ignored him.

  He had been a solitary and lonely child; it had never occurred to him other children might have had different existences from his.

  One winter, his father stayed sober long enough to figure out that the last of what he’d still referred to as his staff had abandoned ship, leaving nine-year-old Draco to fend for himself.

  The prince had given his young son orders to bathe and dress in his best clothes. Then he’d taken him to a school run by nuns.

  The Mother Superior, who was also the principal, had eyed Draco and wrinkled her nose, as if he gave off a bad smell. She’d tested him in math. In science. In French and English.

  Draco had known the answers to all her questions. He was a bright boy. An omnivorous reader. From age five he’d sought solace by immersing himself in the few remaining volumes in the once-proud Valenti library.

  But he’d been struck speechless.

  The nun’s voice had been sharp; he’d been able to see his own reflection in her eyeglasses, and that was somehow disorienting. Her coif had made her round face with its pointed nose look like an owl’s.

  She had been, in his eyes, an alien creature, and he’d been terrified.

  “Answer the Mother Superior,” his father had hissed.

  Draco had opened his mouth, then shut it. The nun glared at his father, then at him.

  “The boy is retarded,” she’d said. Her fingers had clamped hard on Draco’s shoulder. “Leave him with us, Prince Valenti. We will, if nothing else, teach him to fear his God.”

  That was the theology he’d received at the hands of the sisters.

  The other boys had taught him more earthly things to fear.

  Beatings, on what was supposed to be the playground. Beatings at night, in the sour-smelling dormitory rooms. Humiliation after humiliation.

  It had been the equivalent of tossing a puppy into a cage of hungry wolves.

  Draco had been skinny and pale. His clothes were threadbare, but their style had marked him as a member of a despised upper class, as had the way in which he spoke. He was quiet, shy and bookish, with the formal manners of a boy who had never before dealt with other children.

  It had been a recipe for disaster, either unnoticed or ignored by the sisters until one day, almost a year later, when Draco had decided he could not take any more.

  It was lunchtime, and everyone had been on the playground. Draco saw one of his tormenters closing in.

  All the hurt, the fear, the emotions he’d kept bottled inside him burst free.

  He’d sprung at the other boy. The fight had turned ugly, but when it was over, the other kid was on the ground, sobbing. Draco, bloodied and bruised but victorious, had stood over him.

  His reputation was made. And if keeping it meant stepping up to the challenge of other boys from time to time, beating them and, occasionally, being beaten in return, so be it.

  The Mother Superior had said she’d always known he would come to no good.

  The day he turned seventeen, one of the senior boys decided to give him a very special gift. He’d come to Draco during the night while he slept, slapped a hand over his mouth and yanked down his pajama bottoms.

  Draco was no longer small or skinny. He had grown into manhood; he was six foot three inches of fight-hardened muscle.

  With a roar, he’d shot up in bed, grabbed his attacker by the throat and if the other boys hadn’t pulled him off, he might have killed him.

  The Mother Superior asked no questions.

  “You are,” she told Draco, “a monster. You will never amount to anything. And you are unwanted here.”

  He hadn’t argued. As far as he knew, she was right on all counts.

  She’d expelled him, told him to be gone the next morning, and he’d thought, So be it.

  That night he’d jimmied the lock on the door to her office and taken four hundred euros from her desk. Going home was not an option. He had no home, not really. The castle was in a state of near disaster and his father, who had visited him once the first year and then never again, meant nothing to him.

  The next day he’d flown to New York with the clothes on his back, a determination to make something of himself, and a philosophy by which to live.

  Never show weakness.

  Never show emotion.

  Trust no one but yourself.

  New York was big, brash and unforgiving. It was also a place where anything was possible. For Draco, that “anything” meant finding a way to make sure he’d seen the last of hunger, poverty and humiliation.

  He’d found jobs. In construction. As a waiter. A cab driver. He’d worked his royal ass off—not that anybody knew he was a royal. And in the dark of night, in a roach-infested room in a part of Brooklyn that was beyond any hope of gentrification, he’d lie awake and admit to himself that he was going nowhere.

  A man needed a goal. A purpose. He’d had neither.

  Until, purely by accident, he’d learned that his father had died.

  Prince Mario Valenti, a one-inch item buried in the New York Post said, died yesterday in a shooting accident involving former movie star …

  The details didn’t matter. His father had died a shamefu
l death, broke and in debt. And in that moment Draco had known what he would do with his life.

  He would redeem the Valenti name.

  That meant paying off his father’s debts. Restoring the castle. Making the family name, even the accursedly ridiculous title, stand for something again.

  He’d wanted a new start. To get it, he’d worked his way across the vast expanse of the United States. He liked Los Angeles, but San Francisco struck him as not just beautiful but the kind of place that rewarded individuality. He’d talked himself into San Francisco State University, chosen classes in mathematics and finance because he found them interesting. Writing a term paper, he’d stumbled upon an idea. An investment plan. It worked in theory but would it in real life?

  Only one way to find out.

  Draco took everything he’d set aside for the next year’s tuition and sank it in the stock market.

  His money doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled. He quit school, devoted himself to investing.

  And parlayed what he had into a not-so-small fortune.

  “Draco Valenti,” the Wall Street Journal said the first time it mentioned him, “a new investor on the scene, who plays the market with icy skill.”

  Was there any other way to play the market or, in fact, to play the game of life?

  Eventually he founded his own company. Valenti Investments. He made mistakes, but mostly he made choices that led to dazzling successes.

  He knew the dot com ride would not last forever, and acted accordingly. He thought packaged mortgages sold by banks made no sense and he bet his money, instead, on their eventual failure. He found small tech firms with big ideas and invested in them.

  He made more money than seemed humanly possible, enough to buy the San Francisco condo, the Roman villa. Enough to restore the Valenti castle.

  And enough to fund a school for poor kids in Rome and others in Sicily, New York and San Francisco, though he kept those endeavors strictly private.

  He was tough, he was hard, he was not sentimental. The schools were simply a practical way of using up some of his money, and he’d be damned if he’d let anybody try to put a different spin on it.

  Draco shoved aside the Orsini documents and swung his chair toward the window behind him.