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Someone of importance was calling Sarah, his PA, Dante guessed, for now she glanced down at her own phone and then looked straight up to him in that particular way she did when there was a call Dante needed to take, and the hackles on the back of his neck rose.
‘Why don’t we take a short recess?’ Dante said smoothly. ‘And when we return, perhaps we can discuss something other than my sex life.’
He strode out, leaving Luigi looking like thunder, and headed straight for his office.
There had, in fact, been four missed calls from his father’s doctor and as the screen lit up again he took the call.
‘Dante Romano speaking.’
And just like that it was over.
He was told that his father’s condition had deteriorated suddenly, and even before a call could be made to alert the family that the end was near, Rafael Romano had passed.
Dante had known this day was coming for months and yet the news of the death of his father brought the ice of the winter outside right into his soul.
He looked over towards the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo, the church set on the highest point of the district, and fixed his gaze on its enormous dome. He could not fathom that his father was gone. ‘Did he suffer?’ Dante asked.
‘Not at all,’ the doctor assured him. ‘It was very quick. His lawyer was there for a meeting. Signora Romano was walking in the hospital grounds, but your father was gone before we could get her back to his side...’
Dante did not need to knowhermoves. Mia Romano was irrelevant and would soon be carved out of their lives like the cancer she was. He thought of his father dying with the family lawyer beside him. Ironic, really, when it should have been family. He moved on to ask about the person who mattered, the person who had been a loyal wife to his father for more than three decades before that grifter, Mia, had come along. ‘Has my mother been told?’
‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘Just you. Signora Romano thought it better that this call come from me.’
Well, at least Mia had got that much right, for there was no way Dante would have wanted her breaking this news to him.
Dante had hated her on sight.
Only, that wasn’t strictly true.
Dante had hated her onsecondsight.
The first time they had met she had quite literally stopped him in his angry tracks, for he had been furious with his father about a rumoured affair, though he had not known at that time that his mistress was Mia.
She had worn velvet stilettos and a lavender linen shift dress and had been delightfully pale for an Italian summer. She had worn her blonde hair up and back from her face, allowing full access to sapphire-blue eyes framed with pale lashes.
‘Who are you?’ he had asked when he’d strode into his father’s office.
‘Mia Hamilton,’ she had said, and had told him in less than perfect Italian that she was his father’s new PA and had been brought over from the London branch. Her poor Italian should have been a red flag—his own PA was fluidly multilingual, as was Dante himself, but he had been too enthralled in that moment for logical thinking.
And as he had looked at her and continued to look, Mia had stared back at him. For how many seconds their eyes had held Dante chose not to count. He recalled with perfect precision, though, the slight flush that had spread up her long slender neck and to her cheeks and the thick yet exquisite tension in the air as they’d assessed each other with desire in their eyes, but then his father had come in.
Or rather,thank God, then his father had come in!
It was easier on his soul to omit that memory.
To simply erase that first kick of lust.
His father had asked Mia to leave the office, and in an angry confrontation Dante had found out why her less than impressive linguistic skills had been overlooked. And he had later found out how focused, determined, resilient and tough the very prim Mia Hamilton could be.
As well as ruthless.
No, she refused to remain his father’s mistress, and would settle for nothing less than to be Rafael Romano’s wife.
The newspapers had been full of the drama of the irretrievable breakdown of the long marriage of the golden Romano couple and had been lavish in their vilification of Mia. She had been branded as a gold-digger seeking a sugar daddy, and it had been a sustained and savage attack.
The Ice Queen, many had later called her—the press, his family, the board—for she never betrayed even a hint of emotion. Even when the soon-to-be ex-wife, Angela Romano, openly wept in a televised interview about the end of her marriage, Mia Hamilton merely went about her day and was photographed shopping in the tree-lined Via Cola di Rienzo.
Yet Dante had not joined the pack in its condemnation of her, for his animosity towards Mia wasdeeplypersonal.
