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Had it really only been a month ago that she’d propositioned him?
How could his entire world transform in such a small timeframe?
‘Believe me, if I could have that time again I would do everything differently,’ she said, wriggling out of his hold. ‘Let’s go sit in the garden. But only because I don’t want to have a scene in front of my family.’
* * *
The breeze had picked up since Hannah had sat in the garden with her mother. Now the evening party was in full swing, the peace she’d found then had gone, music and laughter echoing through the windows.
She sat on the same bench. A bunch of kids had escaped the party and were having a game of football with an empty can.
Francesco sat next to her, keeping a respectable distance. All the same, she could feel his heat. How she wished she didn’t respond to him so physically. Her emotional reactions to him were bad enough without her treacherous body getting in on the act, too.
‘Go on, then, what did you want to talk about?’ she said, making a silent vow to not say another word for the duration of the next five minutes. If he started spouting any more nonsense about loving her she would walk away.
If he loved her he would never have let her face this day on her own.
‘I want to tell you about my father,’ Francesco said, surprising her with his opening thread.
Despite her vow to remain mute, she whispered, ‘Your father?’
He breathed heavily. ‘I always knew what a bastard he was, but he was my father and I respected him. God help me but I loved him. All I ever wanted was his respect. I turned a blind eye to so many of his activities but turned the blindest eye to what was happening right under my own roof.’
His eyes held hers, the chocolate fudge hard, almost black.
‘I always knew my father was a violent man. To me that was normal. It was our way of life. I knew he craved respect. Again, that was normal. What I did not know until after his death four years ago was that he was one of mainland Europe’s biggest suppliers of drugs. That was a blow, enough to make me despise him, but not enough to destroy all my memories of the man. But what I learned just a year ago when I discovered my mother’s diaries was that he beat her throughout their marriage, cheated on her, and fed her the drugs that eventually killed her.’
When he reached for her hand she didn’t pull away, not even when he clasped it so tightly she feared for her blood supply.
‘She was seventeen when they married, an innocent. He was twenty-three years older and a brute from the start.’ He practically spat the words out. ‘He forced himself on her on their wedding night. He beat her for the first time on their honeymoon. I wish I’d known, but my mother did everything in her power to protect me from seeing too much. As a child it was normal for my mother to be bruised. We would laugh at how clumsy she was, but it was all a lie.’
He shook his head and dragged his fingers through his hair. ‘I spent three days reading her diaries. When I finished I was filled with so much hate for the man. And guilt—how could I have been so blind? The man I hero-worshipped was nothing but a drug-peddling wife beater. He wanted her hooked—it was a means to control her. I swear if he hadn’t been dead I would have killed him myself using my bare hands.’
Hannah shivered. Oh, poor, poor Francesco. She’d known he hated his father, but this? This was worse than she could ever have imagined.
Suddenly he let go of her hand and palmed her cheeks. ‘I have spent the past eleven months eradicating everything that man built. Everything. The parties stopped, the womanising stopped. All I wanted was vengeance for my mother and, even though my father was rotting in hell, I was determined to destroy what was his. I’d already closed his drug dens, but I resolved to annihilate everything else—the armouries, the so-called legitimate businesses that were in fact a front for money laundering—every last brick of property. The one thing I wanted above all else, though, was the Mayfair casino.’
Here, his eyes seemed to drill into hers. ‘Years ago, my father tried to get that casino. It was the only failure of his life. He tried everything to get his hands on that place, but Godfrey Renfrew refused to sell it to such a notorious gangster. That failure was a large thorn in my father’s side. For me to purchase that same property would mean I had succeeded where he had failed, proof that I was a better man than him.’
‘So you’ve won,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve got your vengeance.’
‘No.’ He shook his head for emphasis. ‘I walked into that room with the Mastrangelos today and knew I had lost. I had lost because I had lost you. How could I be a better man than him when I had let the most important person in my world down for the sake of vengeance?’
