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PROLOGUE
THE BAR WAS starting to empty.
Across the room, the blonde sitting at the counter with her friend looked over and gave Vicenzu Trapani a slow, lingering smile. A smile that promised a night, or quite possibly more, of unparalleled, uncomplicated pleasure.
Under normal circumstances he would have smiled back and waited for her to join him. But nothing was normal any more, and he wasn’t sure he was ever going to smile again.
Picking up his glass, he stared down into the dark gold liquid. He didn’t normally drink bourbon, particularly when he was back in Sicily, but it had been Ciro who had caught the bartender’s attention. Ciro who had snapped out the order before Vicenzu’s own numbed brain had even fully registered where they were. Ciro who had commandeered the table in the corner and pushed him into a seat.
They had left the meeting and come straight to the bar. Vito Neglia was their lawyer, and an old family friend, but today he had also been their last hope.
A hope that had been swiftly and brutally extinguished when Vito had confirmed what they already knew.
There was no loophole. Cesare Buscetta had acted within the law.
He was the new and legitimate owner of both the Trapani Olive Oil Company and the beautiful, beloved family estate where Vicenzu and Ciro had spent an idyllic childhood.
Vicenzu’s fingers tightened around his glass. The family estate he still called home.
Home.
The word stuck in his throat and, picturing his mother’s expression as he’d handed the keys over to the agent, he felt his stomach lurch.
It had broken his heart, having to do that to her, and the memory of her bewildered, tear-stained face would be impossible to forget. The reason for it impossible to forgive.
‘We must fix this.’
Ciro’s voice broke into his thoughts and, looking up, he met his brother’s gaze—and instantly wished he hadn’t.
Ciro’s face was taut with determination, his green eyes narrow with a certainty he envied...eyes that so resembled their father’s that he had to look away.
His stomach tightened. Ciro was his younger brother, but he was his father’s son. Whip-smart, focused, disciplined, he could have taken over the business and run it with his eyes shut—hell, he could have turned it into a household name overnight. And, had their father been cut from different cloth, that was exactly what would have happened.
But Alessandro Trapani had not been a cut-throat man. To him, family had mattered more than global domination.
Or had it?
Vicenzu felt his stomach lurch again and, pushing away the many possible but all equally unpalatable answers to that question, he lifted his glass to his lips and drained it swiftly.
Meeting his brother’s gaze, he nodded.
‘We have to get it back. All of it.’
Ciro’s voice was quiet, but implacable, and Vicenzu nodded again. His brother was right, of course. Cesare Buscetta was not just a thief, he was a bully and a thug. But it was too soon...feelings were still too raw.
He’d tried to explain that to his brother—had reminded him that revenge was a dish best served cold. Only Ciro couldn’t wait—wouldn’t wait. His need for vengeance was white-hot, burning him from the inside out. He wanted revenge now and he needed his brother to play his part.
‘Vicenzu?’
For a moment he closed his eyes. If only he could turn back time. Give his father back the money he’d borrowed. Be the son his father had needed—wanted.
But regrets were not going to right the wrongs that had been done to his family and, opening his eyes, he leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, I know what I have to do and I’ll do it. I’ll take the business back.’
His chest tightened. It sounded so simple—and maybe it would be. After all, all he had to do was get a woman to fall in love with him.
Only this wasn’t any woman. It was Immacolata Buscetta—the daughter of the man who had hounded his father to death and robbed his beautiful, always-laughing mother of her husband and her home.
There was not much to go on. Cesare was a protective father, and by all accounts his eldest daughter was a chip off the old block—as ice-cold as she was beautiful. Who better than her to pay for the sins of her father?
He felt a sudden rush of fury. He would make her melt. Seduce her, then strip her naked—literally and metaphorically—and make her his wife. He would take back what belonged to his family and then, finally, when she was his—inside and out—she would discover why he had really married her.
A fresh round of drinks arrived and he picked up his glass.
Ciro’s eyes met his. ‘To vengeance.’
‘To vengeance,’ Vicenzu repeated.
And for the first time since his father’s death he felt alive.
CHAPTER ONE
‘OH, MY, DOESN’T she look beautiful?’
Without changing the direction of her gaze, Immacolata Buscetta nodded, her insides tightening with a mixture of love and sadness.
‘Yes, she does,’ she said softly, addressing her response to the Sicilian matron who was standing beside her, clutching her handbag against her body with quivering fingers.
Actually, privately she thought ‘beautiful’ was too mundane a word to describe her younger sister. Her stunning, full-skirted traditional white wedding dress was beautiful, yes, but Claudia herself looked beatific.
Not a word Imma had ever used before, and she would probably never use it again, but it was the only one that remotely came close to capturing the blissful expression on her sister’s face.
Imma’s heart gave a small twitch and she glanced over to where Claudia’s new husband was greeting some of the one hundred carefully selected guests who had been invited to celebrate the marriage of Claudia Buscetta to Ciro Trapani on this near-perfect early summer’s day in Sicily. There would be another hundred guests arriving for the evening reception later.
Of course Claudia was in a state of bliss. She had just married the man who had stormed their father’s citadel and declared his love for her like some knight in a courtly romance.
But it wasn’t Ciro’s impassioned pursuit of her sister that was causing Imma’s insides to tighten and her heart to beat erratically. It was the man standing next to the newlyweds.
Ciro’s brother, Vicenzu, was the owner of the legendary La Dolce Vita hotel in Portofino. Like pilgrims visiting a shrine, members of royalty, novelists looking for inspiration, divas and bad boys from the world of music and film—all eventually made their way to his hotel.
