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Draco took everything he’d set aside for the next year’s tuition and sank it in the stock market.
His money doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled. He quit school, devoted himself to investing.
And parlayed what he had into a not-so-small fortune.
“Draco Valenti,” the Wall Street Journal said the first time it mentioned him, “a new investor on the scene, who plays the market with icy skill.”
Was there any other way to play the market or, in fact, to play the game of life?
Eventually he founded his own company. Valenti Investments. He made mistakes, but mostly he made choices that led to dazzling successes.
He knew the dot com ride would not last forever, and acted accordingly. He thought packaged mortgages sold by banks made no sense and he bet his money, instead, on their eventual failure. He found small tech firms with big ideas and invested in them.
He made more money than seemed humanly possible, enough to buy the San Francisco condo, the Roman villa. Enough to restore the Valenti castle.
And enough to fund a school for poor kids in Rome and others in Sicily, New York and San Francisco, though he kept those endeavors strictly private.
He was tough, he was hard, he was not sentimental. The schools were simply a practical way of using up some of his money, and he’d be damned if he’d let anybody try to put a different spin on it.
Draco shoved aside the Orsini documents and swung his chair toward the window behind him.
There had to be a way around the Orsini problem.
Valenti Investments could not, must not, go under. He could live through the financial loss—hell, life was, at best, an uphill battle—but to tarnish the Valenti name …
He could not bear the thought of that happening again.
He turned from the window.
There was a solution, and he would find it, but not by concentrating on it. He would, instead, do what he always did at moments of stress. He would think about anything but the problem at hand. He would think logically. Rid his thoughts of emotion.
Draco rang the intercom. His PA answered.
“I have some letters to dictate,” he said.
But, damnit, Anna Orsini would not stay in the mental file drawer in which he’d placed her. She kept appearing in his mind, front and center.
Ridiculous, because she was not really the problem. Her father was.
Then why did he keep seeing her face, that sleepy, sexy look in her eyes when she’d lain in his arms last night?
Why did he keep remembering the way she dressed, the conservative suit, the do-me stilettos?
What did she have on under that suit? Was it the equivalent of banker’s gray? Or was it silk and lace, as sexy as the shoes?
“Sir?” his PA said.
Draco blinked.
“Sorry,” he said briskly. “Uh, where was I?”
“The Tolland merger,” his PA said, and Draco nodded and picked up where he’d left off in his dictation.
Five minutes later, he gave up.
“That’s all for now, Sylvana,” he said.
His PA left the room. Draco rose to his feet, grabbed his suit coat and went to lunch. He followed that with a long, hard workout at his gym.
