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‘Not the woman, the businesses!’ his great-grandson contradicted in impatient rebuttal.

The papers for the handover of Aldo’s estate were already prepared for signature. The lawyer appeared, accompanied by two witnesses, both of whom were doctors.

Only on exiting the mansion did Raffaele learn what had driven Aldo Manzini to his decision to sign over his empire before he passed away.

‘Dementia,’ one of the doctors told him with a shake of his head. ‘In a few months, who knows what he will still be capable of doing? At his age, the degeneration can be rapid, and he knows that.’

And an utterly unexpected pang of regret stung Raffaele and he knew he would visit again, whether he married to acquire the second company or not.

‘Oh, my word, I’ve never seen a more beautiful man!’ Nicola, the bride-to-be, carolled at Maya’s side.

‘Where?’ One of Maya’s other companions demanded to know.

‘Over by the bar...isn’t he just dreamy?’ Nicola sighed in a languishing tone.

Maya flicked an instinctive glance over to the bar and saw him. Man whore, her brain labelled instantly. There he was, at least six feet four inches tall, powerfully built but somehow lean and lithe at the same time, lounging back against the bar of the VIP section of the club with a glittering confidence that blazed like an angel’s halo. A man supremely comfortable with being the cynosure of every female eye in the room, coolly accustomed to attention and appreciation in spite of the fact that he was dressed down in ripped jeans, a black tee shirt and what looked like motorcycle boots. It was a certainty that he got admired every place he went.

And it showed. He knew exactly how gorgeous he was.

Luxuriant black hair brushed his shoulders, a dark shadow of stubble accentuating his strong jaw line and perfect mouth, throwing his swoon-worthy high cheekbones into prominence. Without the stubble, the muscular development and the tousled hair, he might have looked too pretty or clean-cut as some male supermodels did. Nice wallpaper, she categorised him, but very probably highly promiscuous and definitely not her type. That fast, she dismissed him from her interest and glanced away.

But then she didn’t ‘do’ men in the same way as her university friends did. Maya didn’t have time to date, and sleeping around for the sake of a quick physical thrill had never appealed to her either. Life was too short to waste on a man. Her soft mouth curled at the thought and she wondered if her utterly hopeless nice guy of a father had ruined her for all other men and embittered her to a certain extent.

After all, her father was a lovely man, loving, good-natured and caring, but when he went into business, he was a disaster and that truth, matched with the debts he had accrued, had dominated Maya’s life for far longer than she cared to recall. Her teenaged years had been a blur of bailiffs, debt collectors and threatening letters and the constant worry of how to keep her family fed and safe. She had her parents, her twin sister, Izzy, and Matt, her eleven-year-old brother in a wheelchair, to look after. Izzy never seemed to resent the harsher realities of their lives and the part their feckless parents had played in depriving their daughters of a normal youth. But Maya had often wondered what it would be like to have ordinary self-sufficient parents, who did the caring, rather than relying on their kids to look after them.

And then, just as quickly, she felt like a bad person for even thinking that way, for being mean and selfish and resentful.

It wasn’t her parents’ fault that they had always been poor. Neither of them had the desirable talents or educational achievements required by employers and, in any case, her mother had only ever been able to work part-time hours with a disabled son to look after. Indeed, Maya had never contrived to work out how any of her father’s car-crash businesses could ever have done well enough to enable her parents to buy a house in London, but they had had the house before she and Izzy were born and that small property was the only stable element in their catastrophic financial world. It was the one plus they had as a family.

Maya had completed two doctorates in mathematics at university after first graduating at eighteen. Being a prodigy from an early age had only two benefits that she recognised. Firstly, academic brilliance had enabled her to finance her studies by allowing her to win scholarships and prizes and, secondly, it had given her higher earning powers in part-time jobs and projects that required a maths whizz. Extra work had always been available to Maya but had she had a choice she would have gone into academic research because, aside of her family’s needs, money didn’t mean that much to her. There were so many more important, lasting things than cash, she thought ruefully on the dance floor, wondering why Nicole was giving her meaningful glances until a hand lightly touched her shoulder to attract her attention.

Maya spun round and, even in her very high heels which took her to five feet eleven, she had the unfamiliar experience of having to tip her head back to see the man who had approached her. And it was him, the guy from the bar, and she was stunned because she was not a good bet and she would have assumed such a man would have already worked that out for himself. Her outfit was conservative, her demeanour quiet and she didn’t drink, all of which should have loudly signalled her unavailability in the ‘fun for a night’ stakes.

‘Join me for a drink,’ he told her. He definitely didn’t ask; it was a command.

Maya simply laughed, plucking an explanatory hand at the silly pink sash she had been forced to wear. ‘Sorry, I’m on a girls’ night. No men allowed.’

He had dark deep-set eyes as hard as black granite with little gold highlights and he couldn’t hide the fact that the rejection had disconcerted him because for a split second those eyes flared like fireworks against a night sky. And she forgave him because close up he was even more devastatingly gorgeous than he had looked at a distance and she assumed that he had little experience of meeting with female dismissal. He emanated an aura of golden vibrancy comprised of bronzed skin, vital good health and leashed masculine energy. And like all men, he had an ego and she had briefly dented it.

‘Are you crazy?’ Nicole hissed in her ear, grabbing her arm to march her back to their table and tell the rest of the hens what Maya had done.

And there was a whole chorus of voluble protests. The mood did not go in the direction Maya expected. Indeed, her companions were ready to gift-wrap her for him and hand her over. A bunch of arguments in that line came her way unasked for: she was single, allowed to stray from the hen party, should grab male opportunity when it beckoned and was far too much of a nerd to appreciate that a man like that only came along once in a lifetime.

‘He said, “Join me for a drink.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ Maya told them defensively when she could finally get a word in. ‘He’s an arrogant bastard.’

‘Got to expect some flaws in all that perfection,’ someone gibed, unimpressed.

‘Are you seriously telling me that a guy like that isn’t worth more than sitting in swotting prissily every night over your computer like you do?’ someone else piped up.

And Maya’s polite smile froze a little because there was envy in those comments and she was, sadly, used to dealing with that, after being horribly bullied at school for her scholastic attainments. Her peers preferred to believe that she had to swot from dawn to dusk to gain the results she did, and she let them believe that even if it was a lie. Evidently a nerdy swot was more acceptable than someone gifted at birth with a photographic memory and an IQ that ran into the highest possible triple figures. Maya had been doing algebra at the age of three; she didn’t need to swot.

Raffaele returned to the bar, seriously unsettled. He had wanted to meet her on level ground on his own terms but from the first glimpse she had not met his expectations. She dressed badly: there was no avoiding that obvious flaw. The high-necked black dress she wore had as much shape as a sack but still couldn’t hide the length of her show-stopping long legs or the delicacy of her curves at breast and hip. As for her face, she was, unbelievably to Raffaele, a cosmetics-free zone. Her face was bare, not even liner or mascara applied. Lucky for her that her porcelain-pale skin was smooth and faultless, he mused irritably, and her green eyes so arresting that she could get away without artificial definition. But she had turned him away. Ordering up a rare second drink, Raffaele gritted his perfect white teeth.

Women didn’t walk away from Raffaele Manzini. It didn’t happen. He was as bemused as if a tame dog had suddenly bitten the hand off him. Other guys got blown off by women, Raffaele didn’t. She had barely glanced at him, dismissing him instantly, he reasoned, his jaw line clenching even harder. He ordered her a fancy cocktail and sent it over to the table. She waved a bottle of sparkling water in an apologetic gesture in his direction and passed the cocktail over to another woman at the table. By that point Raffaele was ready to strangle her because she wasn’t the pushover he had assumed she would be. It annoyed him when those around him refused to fit the frame he had set them in. He departed from the club in a brooding mood, raging frustration bubbling only an inch beneath it as he stole a last lingering glance at her.

Madre di Cristo... For some peculiar reason she looked even more beautiful now, light blonde hair shimmering in a veil down her back as she shimmied her curvy little bottom to the music beat with one of the other women, long perfect legs flashing, that determined little chin at an upward angle, signalling that she didn’t give a damn about anything, anyone. Well, she would learn different, Raffaele swore to himself soothingly, denying the all too ready pulse at his groin that had a mind of its own; she would learn not to tangle with Raffaele Manzini and expect to walk away free and undamaged.

‘I think she’s a nice girl...didn’t mean any harm.’ Sal broke into speech unexpectedly on the pavement as the limo door was flipped open for Raffaele’s entry. ‘Not your usual hook-up. Nothing flirtatious about her, nothing suggestive in her dress, just not your usual type.’

Raffaele bit out a curse in Italian, enraged by that comforting assurance from a man who was probably closer to a father than any he had ever known.

‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a nice girl.’

‘Most of us marry the nice ones,’ Sal riposted cheerfully.

Of course, Sal knew she was a Parisi from the investigation agency he had employed to track her down for Raffaele to meet. And yet they hadn’t officially met as yet. Maya Parisi... Raffaele savoured the name. It suited her better than Campbell, which was too ordinary for a blonde that could catch his eye garbed in a dress like a sack and without make-up or silicone or Botox or, indeed, any of the artificial enhancements that Raffaele was more accustomed to finding featured in the women he bedded.

But if he married Maya, it wouldn’t be to keep her as Sal implied. It would be to bed her and get her pregnant, Raffaele reflected coldly, and strangely enough that idea no longer repulsed him in the way it had only a week earlier. In fact, he discovered it was more of a turn-on for his jaded libido because it was something new, something different. But only for a short time until the task was accomplished. And no, he wouldn’t be keeping her, he would be corrupting her with pleasure and then discarding her again, which was pretty much the norm for him. After all, the window of his attention span for a woman was notoriously short.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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