AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’d finally believed love was possible. That for her, it was possible.
The realization that it wasn’t had nearly destroyed her. But now she had a new reason to put herself back together. And so she did.
Everything was perfect—except one morning she went to pick up fresh baked scones from a bakery down the street to bring to the café and she was hit head-on by a reckless driver.
Everything was perfect—until she lost consciousness and a swirling darkness claimed her as its own.
CHAPTER TWO
“MR.VALENTI,IT’SABOUTthe girl.”
Kravann Valenti looked across his desk at the man standing there. And then looked behind him, at the expansive view of Rome in all its bustling glory. He was tired of Rome.
He was tired of everything.
He had been tired of everything until he’d met Riot Phillips.
She had been standing in the ruins like fate that night, and he had been the fool who’d decided to grab hold of her.
Unexpected. And he had been in a low place in his life, and he was utterly furious he had allowed anyone into that moment.
He had no one to blame but himself.
Perhaps his father had been right after all. Perhaps there was weakness in him after all. A weakness that had needed to be beaten out of him.
It didn’t work, did it?
She had wrecked his life.
She had been all he’d wanted, all he’d craved. He’d never been like that, not with anything. Control mattered above all else, and he had none with her.
He’d never kept a woman beyond a weekend, and Riot had been with him a month. One month of sex. He hadn’t been able to get enough of her.
Then she had told him she was pregnant.
If there was one thing he had always known it was that he would never have children. And suddenly she didn’t seem like simple fate. She seemed like a twist of it. The enemy of everything he’d built. Of all that he’d sworn to be or not to be.
He was not a man who did regret. And yet regret had been his very breath since that night. She had run from him, like he was a monster. And then she had fallen.
Everything is lost.
He’d known then he had to let her go. Because he had never thought he was his father, and that moment had brought him closer than he’d thought possible.
The darkness in him...it had won out.
The image of her there, bleeding, weeping...
It woke him at night.
Shook him awake with its insistence. Evidence of his demons. Demons he would never escape no matter how much he wished he might.
He had not personally looked into what Riot was doing since she had gone. But he had asked that his people keep watch on her.
The Valenti Company was the only reason his father had ever had anything to do with him. A man at his wit’s end after his oldest and only legitimate son had died, he’d gone to Cambodia and stolen his bastard from the arms of Krav’s mother, making him the heir to the family fortune.
It was not because Sergio Valenti had any soft feelings for a son. It was because he believed in carrying on the family business, and believed it had to be done by Valenti blood.
And he had been the only other direct line to his father remaining.
