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A carelessly graceful shrug was Raffaele’s response. He had few illusions about his own character but there were few people alive who knew what he had suffered as a child and adolescent, a live toy for a woman with mental health issues to play with, abused one day, over-indulged the next. He didn’t do self-pity any more than he did compassion. He didn’t trust people and it hadn’t harmed him. He didn’t care about people and it had kept him safe as an adult from the nightmares that had haunted his childhood. If you had no expectations, you didn’t get disappointed. That approach worked efficiently for him.
He hoped it would work for Maya Campbell as well because he wanted those companies. He would take them and, whatever it took, he would whip them into shape again, restoring both business enterprises to fresh growth and profitability.
‘I’m getting tired,’ Aldo was forced to admit, his head starting to droop. ‘Will I call in my lawyer?’
Raffaele smiled his very rare smile. ‘Thank you for an entertaining experience, Aldo. And the prospect of even more entertainment on the horizon.’
‘She is a beauty.’
‘Not the woman, the businesses!’ his great-grandson contradicted in impatient rebuttal.
The papers for the handover of Aldo’s estate were already prepared for signature. The lawyer appeared, accompanied by two witnesses, both of whom were doctors.
Only on exiting the mansion did Raffaele learn what had driven Aldo Manzini to his decision to sign over his empire before he passed away.
‘Dementia,’ one of the doctors told him with a shake of his head. ‘In a few months, who knows what he will still be capable of doing? At his age, the degeneration can be rapid, and he knows that.’
And an utterly unexpected pang of regret stung Raffaele and he knew he would visit again, whether he married to acquire the second company or not.
* * *
‘Oh, my word, I’ve never seen a more beautiful man!’ Nicola, the bride-to-be, carolled at Maya’s side.
‘Where?’ One of Maya’s other companions demanded to know.
‘Over by the bar...isn’t he just dreamy?’ Nicola sighed in a languishing tone.
Maya flicked an instinctive glance over to the bar and saw him. Man whore, her brain labelled instantly. There he was, at least six feet four inches tall, powerfully built but somehow lean and lithe at the same time, lounging back against the bar of the VIP section of the club with a glittering confidence that blazed like an angel’s halo. A man supremely comfortable with being the cynosure of every female eye in the room, coolly accustomed to attention and appreciation in spite of the fact that he was dressed down in ripped jeans, a black tee shirt and what looked like motorcycle boots. It was a certainty that he got admired every place he went.
And it showed. He knew exactly how gorgeous he was.
Luxuriant black hair brushed his shoulders, a dark shadow of stubble accentuating his strong jaw line and perfect mouth, throwing his swoon-worthy high cheekbones into prominence. Without the stubble, the muscular development and the tousled hair, he might have looked too pretty or clean-cut as some male supermodels did. Nice wallpaper, she categorised him, but very probably highly promiscuous and definitely not her type. That fast, she dismissed him from her interest and glanced away.
But then she didn’t ‘do’ men in the same way as her university friends did. Maya didn’t have time to date, and sleeping around for the sake of a quick physical thrill had never appealed to her either. Life was too short to waste on a man. Her soft mouth curled at the thought and she wondered if her utterly hopeless nice guy of a father had ruined her for all other men and embittered her to a certain extent.
After all, her father was a lovely man, loving, good-natured and caring, but when he went into business, he was a disaster and that truth, matched with the debts he had accrued, had dominated Maya’s life for far longer than she cared to recall. Her teenaged years had been a blur of bailiffs, debt collectors and threatening letters and the constant worry of how to keep her family fed and safe. She had her parents, her twin sister, Izzy, and Matt, her eleven-year-old brother in a wheelchair, to look after. Izzy never seemed to resent the harsher realities of their lives and the part their feckless parents had played in depriving their daughters of a normal youth. But Maya had often wondered what it would be like to have ordinary self-sufficient parents, who did the caring, rather than relying on their kids to look after them.
And then, just as quickly, she felt like a bad person for even thinking that
way, for being mean and selfish and resentful.
It wasn’t her parents’ fault that they had always been poor. Neither of them had the desirable talents or educational achievements required by employers and, in any case, her mother had only ever been able to work part-time hours with a disabled son to look after. Indeed, Maya had never contrived to work out how any of her father’s car-crash businesses could ever have done well enough to enable her parents to buy a house in London, but they had had the house before she and Izzy were born and that small property was the only stable element in their catastrophic financial world. It was the one plus they had as a family.
Maya had completed two doctorates in mathematics at university after first graduating at eighteen. Being a prodigy from an early age had only two benefits that she recognised. Firstly, academic brilliance had enabled her to finance her studies by allowing her to win scholarships and prizes and, secondly, it had given her higher earning powers in part-time jobs and projects that required a maths whizz. Extra work had always been available to Maya but had she had a choice she would have gone into academic research because, aside of her family’s needs, money didn’t mean that much to her. There were so many more important, lasting things than cash, she thought ruefully on the dance floor, wondering why Nicole was giving her meaningful glances until a hand lightly touched her shoulder to attract her attention.
Maya spun round and, even in her very high heels which took her to five feet eleven, she had the unfamiliar experience of having to tip her head back to see the man who had approached her. And it was him, the guy from the bar, and she was stunned because she was not a good bet and she would have assumed such a man would have already worked that out for himself. Her outfit was conservative, her demeanour quiet and she didn’t drink, all of which should have loudly signalled her unavailability in the ‘fun for a night’ stakes.
‘Join me for a drink,’ he told her. He definitely didn’t ask; it was a command.
Maya simply laughed, plucking an explanatory hand at the silly pink sash she had been forced to wear. ‘Sorry, I’m on a girls’ night. No men allowed.’
He had dark deep-set eyes as hard as black granite with little gold highlights and he couldn’t hide the fact that the rejection had disconcerted him because for a split second those eyes flared like fireworks against a night sky. And she forgave him because close up he was even more devastatingly gorgeous than he had looked at a distance and she assumed that he had little experience of meeting with female dismissal. He emanated an aura of golden vibrancy comprised of bronzed skin, vital good health and leashed masculine energy. And like all men, he had an ego and she had briefly dented it.
‘Are you crazy?’ Nicole hissed in her ear, grabbing her arm to march her back to their table and tell the rest of the hens what Maya had done.
And there was a whole chorus of voluble protests. The mood did not go in the direction Maya expected. Indeed, her companions were ready to gift-wrap her for him and hand her over. A bunch of arguments in that line came her way unasked for: she was single, allowed to stray from the hen party, should grab male opportunity when it beckoned and was far too much of a nerd to appreciate that a man like that only came along once in a lifetime.
‘He said, “Join me for a drink.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ Maya told them defensively when she could finally get a word in. ‘He’s an arrogant bastard.’
