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‘Thank you.’ She frowned. It was hardly an appropriate sentiment—he’d blackmailed her into this marriage, no two ways about it.
‘I’ve had the papers drawn and a judge has offered a special dispensation. Our marriage can take place within a week. I presume that’s long enough for you to wrap things up in England?’
‘You make it sound like finishing a meal, not resigning my job and shutting up my house.’
‘I know it is more complex than that, and yet I would prefer to be married as soon as possible.’ And with a sigh, and as though the words were being dragged from him against his will, ‘If your employer requires more notice, then I suppose you could return once we are married. We could stay in your house for a time, if we must.’
‘Gee, great,’ she said with an upward shift of her eyes. ‘Seeing as you’re clearly so willing...’
He interrupted her, his words spoken with the same strength as a blade of steel. ‘I am willing to do what it takes to make you my wife.’
She swallowed, the intensity of his statement almost robbing her of breath. This was about possession, she reminded herself, nothing more. Possession, ownership, control. He wanted their baby: she came with it.
She couldn’t have said why the thought was unpalatable to her. ‘Do you just have engagement rings sitting in your desk drawer on the off-chance a woman might drop by?’
His eyes smouldered when they met hers. ‘I got it from the family vault the day after you left Madrid.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I knew you’d be back.’
She made a groaning noise in acknowledgement of that. ‘What if you’d been wrong?’
He caught her hand and ran his fingertips lightly over the ring. ‘Then I would have come to England and helped you see sense,’ he said, the words simple, light, and yet a shiver of anticipation and adrenalin coursed through her veins.
Was she seeing sense? Or had she moved into the realm of insanity by agreeing to this?
Amelia couldn’t say: only time would tell.
* * *
Antonio stared at his desk, his expression brooding.
It was all laid out before him: the totality of his aggressive investment in diSalvo Industries, the way he’d been slowly, meticulously devaluing them, ruining them for the sake of destruction alone. Businesses that had little interest to him beyond one aspect: their ability to wound Carlo and Giacomo.
His fiancée’s family.
I can’t marry a man intent on destroying my family.
And yet she was, and he was. Destroying the diSalvos had obsessed him for so long, and now, since his father’s death, it had become his reason for being.
For so long, he had planned it: he would take what he could from them, and he would enjoy standing over them, seeing the shock on their faces when they realised how completely he’d masterminded their downfall.
He’d thought Prim’Aqua was the sum total of what he wanted, but now there was Amelia. Was it possible that in marrying her, creating a family with her, raising the child as the Herrera heir, he held the greatest key to destroying them?
Carlo hated Antonio—just as Antonio hated Carlo. So what would this child’s existence do to the diSalvos? His smile was one of dark pleasure. It would destroy them, that was what. They would possibly even believe that Antonio had planned it—the seduction, the pregnancy—planned it all. His grin spread. And wouldn’t that kill them? They’d hate it.
So much the better.
A light on his phone blinked, signalling a call, but he ignored it.
Amelia would be on a flight by now. His brows knitted into a gesture of silent disdain at her insistence that she fly commercial—yet again. To his disbelief, she hadn’t even booked first class.
It was clear that she was engaged in some kind of protest against her wealth and situation, but to ignore all the luxuries she had at her disposal, and then the luxuries that he could furnish her with, beggared belief.
Then again, didn’t everything about this situation?
Sleeping with her had been a mistake. A beautiful, heavenly mistake. Because, while the sex had been unforgettable, he’d returned to Madrid knowing he had to forget her. He had to put that misstep in the past and refocus his attention on his need to avenge the insults inflicted on his father.
