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And he had done it alone.
No stockholders. No outsiders. Not just in his financial existence. In his world. His very private world.
Life’s great lesson numero due.
Trusting others was for fools.
That was why he’d left Maui after a middle-of-the-night call from his PA had dragged him out of a warm bed made even warmer by the lush, naked body of his mistress.
Draco had listened. And listened. Then he’d cursed, risen from the bed and paced out the bedroom door, onto the moon-kissed sand.
“Fax me the letter,” he’d snapped. “And everything we have in that damned file.”
His PA had obliged. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Draco had read through it all until the pink light of dawn glittered on the sea.
By then he’d known what he had to do. Give up the cooling trade winds of Hawaii for the oppressive summer heat of Rome, and a confrontation with the representative of a man and a way of life he despised.
The worst of it was that he’d thought he’d finished with this weeks ago. That initial ridiculous letter from someone named Cesare Orsini. Another letter, when he ignored the first, followed by a third, at which point he’d marched into the office of one of his assistants.
“I want everything you can find on an American named Cesare Orsini,” he’d ordered.
The information had come quickly.
Cesare Orsini had been born in Sicily. He had immigrated to America more than half a century ago with his wife; he had become an American citizen.
And he had repaid the generosity of his adopted homeland by becoming a hoodlum, a mobster, a gangster with nothing to recommend him except money, muscle and now a determination to acquire something that had, for centuries, belonged to the House of Valenti and now to him, Prince Draco Marcellus Valenti, of Sicily and Rome.
That ridiculous title.
Draco didn’t often use it or even think it. He found it officious, even foolish in today’s world. But, just as his PA would have resorted to using it in her search for a way to get him from Hawaii to Italy, he had deliberately used it in his reply to the American don, couching his letter in cool, formal tones but absolutely permitting the truth—Do you know who you’re dealing with? Get the hell off my back, old man—to shine through.
So much for that, Draco had thought.
Wrong.
The don had just countered with a threat.
Not a physical one. Too bad. Draco, whose early years had not been spent in royal privilege, would have welcomed dealing with that.
Orsini’s threat had been more cunning.
I am sending my representative to meet with you, Your Highness, he had written. Should you and my lawyer fail to reach a compromise, I see no recourse other than to have our dispute adjudicated in a court of law.
A lawsuit? A public airing of a nonsensical claim?
In theory, it could not even happen. Orsini had no true claims to make. But in the ancient land that was la Sicilia, old grudges never ended.
And the media would turn it into an international circus—
“Excuse me.”
Draco blinked. Looked up. The American and the lounge hostess were standing next to his chair. The American had a determined glint in her eyes. The hostess had a look in hers that could only be described as desperate.
“Sir,” she said, “sir, I’m really sorry but the lady—”
“You have something I need,” the American said.
Her voice was rushed. Husky. Draco raised one dark eyebrow.
