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Look at the state of my daughter!Everard had thundered.Look at what your unsavory cretin of a brother has done!
Ago had looked. Victoria was tall and slender, an immaculate golden blonde who radiated a serene and implacable contentment—no matter what she might or might not have been feeling inside. As he knew to his cost. The fact that she’d sported that obvious belly that she had not possessed the last time he’d seen her had in no way been concealed by the dress she wore. She had stood there in his office, her hands propped up on the belly in question and her eyes demurely lowered to the floor.
He had felt his pulse beat in the hinge of his clenched jaw, hard. Then harder still.
My brother is quite famously besotted, Ago had replied, faintly surprised that he’d been able to push words out at all.
As if that matters for a wastrel like him!Everard Cameron had cried.
Has Victoria indicated that Tiziano got her in this state?Ago had asked, his voice an icy scrape across the length of his office, as if he, personally was ushering in a winter of snowstorms and icicles with his words alone. As if he possessed such magic.
Everard did not glance at his daughter. He never did, Ago had noticed. To him, Victoria was nothing but a pawn in the game the older man had been playing his whole life—that being, how to gather as much wealth as possible before he died. And knowing him, find a way to take it with him when he quit this mortal coil.
Needless to say, an unplanned pregnancy did not permit Everard to hawk his daughter’s virtue in the way he was accustomed to doing. The way he had been doing all this time. Having jealously guarded her virginity, surrounding her with guards after she graduated from a long series of dreary convent schools, he had presented her to the wealthy men of his acquaintance as the perfect broodmare.
For a hefty price.
And for a certain kind of man, who was focused on his dynasty above all else, Victoria Cameron was a prize indeed.
A prize that Tiziano had long said Ago should claim for himself, more than once, since he appeared so enamored by her.
But Ago had been focused on sorting out his brother’s notoriety, not his own dynastic requirements. Becausehewas Ago Accardi, blameless and beyond reproach. He had been toying with the dossiers of no less than five different spotless heiresses at this time last year and confidently expected that any one of them would leap at the chance to become the next Accardi matriarch.
He had intended that he should marry only once the Tiziano problem was solved, and he had been making good on that intention now that Tiziano had made it clear he would never part from his mistress. And, indeed, intended to marry her.
Which was, Ago supposed, better than never intending to marry at all.
But the perfect bloodlines the Accardi legacy required were down to him, as ever. Thus, in this past year, Ago had painstakingly narrowed his list of selections down to only two remaining spotless young things, each of them overawed by him.
To an exasperating degree, he could admit.
Only now, here, where their fawning and fidgeting was no longer something he need concern himself with.
Victoria Cameron, who too many were aware had been intended for Tiziano and then summarily jilted by him—the scandalous tabloid articles all but wrote themselves and Ago made it a point to never, ever feed the tabloids—had never been on his list.
Yet here they were.
The only thing my daughter has said in her defense, Everard Cameron had growled a fortnight ago,wasAccardi Industries. You and I both know what that must mean.
It was clear that the man meant Tiziano and his well-known whoring about.
And it had only been then, as her father’s implication hung thick in the air, that Victoria had finally raised her clear blue gaze from the floor. Just enough to meet Ago’s for a swift instant, then fall again.
But he had seen all he needed to see.
And worse still, he had—once again—found himself in a crisis of temptation thanks to this woman.
It was unendurable.
Six months ago, Ago had been confronted by that temptation, and he had failed. In every possible way.
And a fortnight ago, he had understood that she was giving him a way out. Ago could blame his brother. It would be easy, especially as Cameron already assumed Tiziano was the one to blame. Ago could neatly sidestep his responsibility where she was concerned and blame the man that most would assume had gotten her with child anyway.
But somehow, looking at her rounded belly and knowing precisely how she had come to find herself in that condition, Ago had not been able to do it.
He had not been able to force the words to his tongue.
Even attempting to do so had made him feel something like ill.
