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‘That’s rich, coming from you,’ she said shakily. ‘The man who seduced a virgin for revenge.’
He felt his gut twist. But he wasn’t going to feel guilty about that. She should have told him—given him a choice about whether to do things differently.
She lifted one slender wrist and gazed down at her expensive gold watch. ‘If you’re done insulting me, then a simple yes or no will suffice.’
No. Absolutely not. Never. Not if my life depended on it.
He thought about his life before...la dolce vita.
A life of leisure and pleasure. A sweet life.
And then he thought about his mother, and his father, and the promise he had made to his brother.
‘Yes,’ he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
SO SHE REALLY was going to go through with this.
Glancing out of the window of the taxi, Imma felt her fingers tighten around the small posy of lilies of the valley in her lap. Beside her, his dark eyes shielded behind even darker glasses, his fingers pointedly entwined with hers, Vicè sat in silence.
To anyone else he would seem the perfect groom. Young, handsome, intent on marrying the woman he loved.
She swallowed past the ache in her throat. But of course he was good at pretending.
They had left the island and returned to the mainland, ‘borrowed’ Cesare’s private jet and flown to Gibraltar. They had arrived in late last night, and booked into a discreet hotel on the edge of town, near the Botanic Gardens.
Separate rooms, obviously.
Not that it was really necessary. He might be almost painfully attentive in public, but as soon as they were alone he barely lifted his eyes to meet hers, choosing instead to stare at his phone.
And it hurt. Hurt in a way that seemed utterly illogical.
Or just stupid.
Yes, ‘stupid’ was the only way to describe this hollowed-out feeling of loss for something that had been so fleeting and false.
It didn’t help that all the preparations had been so rushed and furtive, but she couldn’t risk Cesare finding out and intervening.
Thinking about her father made her chest ache. She loved him still, but right now she didn’t trust him—and she didn’t trust herself to be around him. She was too angry and confused about everything she had found out, and her desolation and the sense of betrayal were still too raw.
She had no idea what to say or do next. But she did know that she didn’t want anything to do with what he’d done to Alessandro. Which was why she’d agreed to hand over the business to Vicè in a year’s time.
If she hadn’t needed a bargaining chip to get some space and time away from her father she would have handed it over today. She hated owning the thing he wanted—hated knowing that it was the only reason he was here, sitting beside her in the car, on their way to a register office.
Her chest tightened. If they had been other people, or if the circumstances had been different, then maybe all this haste and secrecy would be exciting, impulsive and romantic. But instead it just felt sneaky.
Even though she had texted her father to say that she was at the villa, she kept expecting him to call, demanding to know when she was coming home. Obviously she hadn’t told him she was in Gibraltar, and that made her nervous too.
But, judging by the long, rambling and gleeful voicemail Cesare had just left her, she had been worrying for no reason.
He hadn’t been fretting over her absence at all; instead he had been shooting boar on the Di Gualtieri estate.
A shiver scuttled down her spine. Stefano di Gualtieri was a fabulously wealthy local landowner and the great-grandson of Sicilian nobility. He was her father’s age, and in her opinion he was a bore of a different kind—and a snob. But, despite her hinting as much, she knew Cesare saw him as a possible suitor for her hand in marriage.
Imma exhaled softly, trying to still the jittery feeling in her chest. If her father knew what she was about to do...
But his prospective anger was not the only reason she wanted to keep off his radar for as long as possible. Since reading those emails, her world—everything she had taken for granted about the man who had raised her—had begun to look as fragile as the tiny, delicate bell-shaped flowers in her hand.
