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‘And what about you?’
‘I,’ he said with mock sincerity, ‘am an academic genius.’
And she wished he hadn’t said it. The playful mask he wore was just as alluring as the truth behind it.
‘I didn’t need private education. I got my scholarship to NYU...met Dimitri and Danyl. They became my family, each of us having experienced our own hardships. There we were, foreign students, not unaccustomed to America, but perhaps our differences forged our friendship as much as our similarities. We worked hard and played harder. It was at university where we first conceived the Winners’ Circle syndicate. My interest in horses had never faded and it was matched by Dimitri’s and Danyl’s. It was they, along with a small investment from my grandfather, who helped me start Arcuri Enterprises. Within two years I had paid them all back with interest, and bought my mother and sister a house—a home—in Italy. Dimitri and Danyl helped me ensure that they would be okay.’
‘You protected them. Your sister and mother.’
She cursed her foolish heart for unfurling beneath the warmth of his words as he spoke of his friends, his family. And finally she began to understand Antonio’s determination to secure the Bartlett deal. He wanted revenge—that much was clear. He wanted to hurt his father in the only way that he knew how.
But Emma couldn’t help the feeling growing within her that he might not like what he found once he’d achieved it.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, in relation to her earlier statement, as if it was the only way it could have been.
‘It must have been a hard responsibility to bear,’ Emma observed.
‘I would do it again and again.’
‘Where are they now?’
This time his smile broadened fully and her heart nearly stopped at the sight. It illuminated his dark features with light and pleasure, and in that moment she was
thankful that he wasn’t like this all the time. It would be...devastating.
‘A beautiful estate in Sorrento, on the Amalfi coast, with olive trees and lemon groves.’
His simple words conjured a million images in her mind, and she could almost smell a hint of citrus in the air about them.
‘And your sister?’
‘No more nightmares.’
‘Nothing more to fear,’ Emma said, her own nerves beginning to twist at the way the conversation was going.
‘No.’
‘And what is your fear, Antonio?’
Emma didn’t know what gave her the courage to ask. Perhaps it was the darkness outside, or the intimacy created by the only light in the living room dusting them with a warm, gentle golden glow.
But even in that soft lighting she saw his features grow dark. Something bitter entered the air, and the determination that had hung around Antonio since he’d come back to the New York office and asked her to research Benjamin Bartlett returned.
‘That my father will never pay for what he did to my mother and sister.’
And for what he did to you, Emma added silently as the ripple of his words sent icy shivers through her body.
She took another sip of the cool whisky, trying to forestall the question she knew was next on Antonio’s lips.
‘And what is yours, Emma?’
* * *
Antonio watched Emma pull the thin silk robe around her shoulders, covering and protecting herself from the memory of her nightmare. He wished for a moment that she hadn’t. The way the soft material had opened just slightly at the V of her chest, the smooth creamy skin thinly veiled, had been his only anchor—his only tie in the storm of emotions that had surfaced beneath his stark words as he’d recounted his past.
He heard the chink of ice in her glass, drawing him back to the present as she rested it between her palms as she might hold a hot drink.
‘Well, I suppose the nightmare started in pretty much the usual way—I was being attacked by zombie cats.’
