AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
Jenny
IONLYWANTEDone last glimpse of him, the man I once loved.
The man I now hated with every breath in my body.
Constantine Silvera. My stepbrother.
It wasn’t the best choice of occasions—his father’s wake—but I didn’t want to go near him or talk to him. I only wanted to see him and from a safe distance.
Domingo Silvera, once CEO of Silver Inc, one of Europe’s most powerful conglomerates, was being farewelled at the Silvera family’s ostentatious Madrid mansion, and I’d sent Constantine a short, impersonal email offering him my condolences and promising I’d be there.
But I wasn’t there for Domingo. I didn’t care about Domingo. My mother had married him when I was nine and then promptly sent me to boarding school in England, so I’d never had much contact with him. Which was a good thing since he was a very difficult man.
No, the man I wanted to see was his son. One last time before I cut him out of my life.
It was probably a bad idea, and my poor heart had been through enough the past three months, but I needed to say goodbye. Even if it wasn’t actually to him. Even if it was only for myself.
So here I was, hiding behind a column in the white marble-covered ballroom, hoping I’d be lost in the crowd of dignitaries trying to catch a glimpse of him.
Not that it was difficult to catch a glimpse of him when he towered above everyone else in the room and drew every eye.
They called him cold, merciless, ruthless, and maybe in business he was. But he’d never been that way with me. Initially he’d been reserved and distant, yet I’d come to know the man beneath the ice. A kind, caring man.
At least until I’d moved to London permanently four years ago, and then, for some reason, he’d cut off all contact with me.
All contact except once, three months ago, when I’d discovered something else about him: there was fire deep in his soul, a fire that only I knew about.
A fire I’d discovered the night I’d seduced him.
At his engagement party.
My gaze drifted to the woman at his side, tall and blonde and poised. Olivia Wintergreen, CEO of Wintergreen Diamonds, an old and very successful jewel company. She wore a fitted black dress and her pale lovely face was composed. She was everything I was not.
She was also his fiancée.
A business arrangement, I’d heard through the grapevine, since certainly Con himself hadn’t told me. An old friend of the Silvera family, chosen as a potential wife and mother for his heirs. He didn’t love her, so the gossip columns reported, but she had good genes and came from a good family and, as CEO of a large company, she was his match in every way.
And I was...not.
I was short and round and not at all beautiful. I was not a CEO. I worked with the homeless in a shelter in London, much to my mother’s disgust, and I had no poise to speak of.
I was not his match, as he’d told me that night, after he’d had me on the grass near the rosebushes in the garden outside. And I never would be.
The memory made my throat close with pain, but I ignored it. Normally I tried to be optimistic, to look on the bright side of things, but after that night in the garden looking on the bright side had been more difficult. And I was tired of pain. Fury was so much better, so I reached for that instead. Not that I was angry with Olivia Wintergreen, or jealous. How could you be jealous when your own personal god wanted to marry another goddess?
No, there was only one person I was furious with, and he stood in the middle of the room, tall and arrogant and icier than any glacier.
He was in a perfectly tailored, horrifically expensive black suit that clung to his wide shoulders and hugged his broad, muscular chest, emphasising his narrow waist and long, powerful legs. He looked like an emperor from ancient Rome, as if he should be wearing a laurel wreath, a snowy white toga and a cloak of imperial purple.
His face was as familiar to me as my own, and it made the ache inside me deepen. There were his imperious cheekbones, his straight nose, his hard and yet somehow sensual mouth. His inky hair was cut very short, and his eyes were even blacker, and he projected the sharp, ruthless menace of an apex predator.
He was beautiful. So beautiful.
People were afraid of him. They thought he was just as merciless and as ruthless as he appeared, and twice as cold. Detached from all emotion. But they hadn’t seen him tuck a blanket around me when I’d fallen asleep on the chair in his office, or frown in concern over a nest of sparrow chicks I’d rescued and demanded help with, or give one of his very rare laughs when I told him a funny story.
He was only like that with me, and he had been right from the day I’d first met him, when I’d first arrived at the mansion at nine years old. And he hadn’t been detached that night in the garden, when he’d dragged me down onto the grass. Somehow I’d unlocked his passion and fire had burst out of him...
