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“You agreed,” Anna said coolly, “because you know you have a problem on your hands.”
She wasn’t wrong. There were those in the judiciary who would be more than happy to see a Valenti prince trapped in endless legal wrangling over a mess like this. The land was indisputably his, but thanks to the way things worked in Sicily, it could take years to put the case to rest.
Assuming there was a case, and there wouldn’t be.
He knew enough about Cesare Orsini and men like him to understand they had only two methods of settling debts.
One involved blood.
The other …
Draco sighed. His plane was back in service; his pilot was already en route to Rome so he could fly him back to Hawaii, the sea, the sun and the warm bed of his mistress—a woman who would not play hot then cold, as this one did.
“Very well.” He went behind the desk, sat down in a chair, pulled open a drawer, took out a gold pen and a leather checkbook. “How much?”
“I beg your pardon? How much what?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m tired of playing games. How much does Orsini want?”
“To buy his land?”
A muscle knotted in Draco’s jaw. “The land is not his to sell.”
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—”
