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Only, rather than turning off the South Circular into London, they continued to head out east.
‘It’s a very important deal, Amelia. I’d really like to get it right,’ he warned, as if noticing that she was distracted.
‘Of course.’
She turned back to the pages and lost herself in what could be an exciting new deal for Rossi Industries. Scanning the projections, the highly sought-after location of the land for sale and the cultural interest in the surrounding area, she could see how it would come together. It would be incredible. Partnering with Chalendar Enterprises was clever and would save Rossi Industries time overall, the two businesses having worked together before.
And even though Amelia wouldn’t be there to see it happen, she was already identifying which team members would be best, what areas might be problematic and how to navigate them. In her absence they would probably give the project to Brent Bennet, but he often made mistakes on the contracts. She should give Legal a heads up...only she wouldn’t. Because she would be long gone by the time that happened. The car slowed to a stop and she looked out of the window to see tarmac.
‘Alessandro, where is this meeting?’
Alessandro said nothing, opening the door of the car and getting out onto the runway of a private airfield just outside London. He said nothing because a worryingly large part of him wanted to shout and rage and yell. But now wasn’t the time for that. There was too much at stake.
He held the door to the car open for her and hated the way that, no matter how the shocking discovery of her true identity had blown his world apart, his body hadn’t got the memo, and the soft scent of jasmine that rose from her skin as she passed in front of him hardened his arousal as much as his anger.
The betrayal of it. Of her. He would deal with that later, but for now his one focus, his only goal, was to find out what she had done and stop it before the rot could take hold. His plan was simple—isolate, interrogate and eliminate.
No one other than her father, Thomas Seymore, had managed to pull the wool over their eyes so successfully. Alessandro choked back a bitter laugh. He and Gianni had, naively, believed that they had learned their lesson that one and only time. Clearly, they were mistaken.
And to think she had the gall not to even change her surname. It had been staring him in the face the whole time and what had he done? Smiled at her, thanked her, and asked her for more.
‘Sir?’
‘Sì?’he snapped and Lucinda, a member of his air crew who had been with RI for nearly six years, flinched a little. ‘My apologies. Truly, Lucinda,’ he said, warning himself to keep his cool.
His emotions swung like a giant pendulum, back and forth between the weight of the past and the future of his company.
He watched Amelia settle into a large cream leather seat, fasten the safety belt and look out of the window. She seemed a little disconcerted but he knew, now, just how good an actress she really was.
‘Coffee, Mr Rossi?’
‘Grazie mille, Lucinda,’ he replied sincerely, taking the espresso over to a seat on the opposite side of the cabin.
He just needed to get to Villa Vittoria. It might have been a refuge for him and Gianni for the past ten years, but there was also a deep irony in taking Amelia Seymore back to the scene of the crime. He refused to think of it as kidnap, even though his conscience contorted itself in order not to do so. He was simply taking her to a place where he intended to cut her off from any possible forms of communication until he could identify just how badly she had sabotaged his company and the hundreds of thousands of people he employed globally. It was the only solution he had been able to come up with in the twelve hours since he had received the call from Gianni.
When they were safely at the villa, all hell could break loose. He just had to get her there first without her realising what was happening. It was why he’d given her the file, to distract her and keep her from asking too many questions.
‘How long has Lexicon been looking to develop the land?’ Amelia asked, flicking back and forth between a few pages. Unease gripped his stomach, empty aside from the coffee he’d all but inhaled. He’d not had long to put together the fake file—in half an hour he’d brought together a mishmash of four old, and failed, pitches. But he could play this game better than anyone, he thought, subtly rolling his shoulders. The Seymore sisters had messed with the wrong billionaires.
‘A while,’ he replied, knowing that she had been seeking a specific answer. A perverse part of him delighted in withholding it, wanting to needle, to irritate, to annoy. It was a small petty victory, but he could not lose sight of the greater picture. Because so much more than his ego depended on him rooting out the damage she had done and putting an end to it immediately.
‘We will soon be taking off, so if your safety belts are fastened?’ Lucinda asked, smiling when they had both nodded to affirm that they were. ‘Lovely. Flight time should be just under two hours—winds are in our favour and the journey should be smooth sailing.’
With that she retreated before Amelia could get a word out of the partly opened mouth. That delectable, betraying mouth.
I think we should speak to HR.
He couldn’t believe the words he’d uttered. Lust-ridden fool. Perhaps that had been her plan after all. To seduce him and—no. Her refusal to speak to HR, her insistence that they never speak of it, her behaviour since Hong Kong, it didn’t make sense if that was her plan.
That he had been foolish enough to open the door to any kind of impropriety in the first place was his very own cross to bear. Self-disgust and acceptance—they burned with enough heat to bring pinpricks of sweat to the back of his neck. Alessandro would take whatever punishment he deserved for his transgression. But the sisters’ text messages had claimed to have identified proof of corruption.
Impossibile.
Even the word ‘corruption’ left a bitter taste in his mouth. It was an outrage that this younger Seymore was trying to claim that against them. The audacity of it was simply incomprehensible and while he could concede that there was a certain ingenuity to their plan of attack, it was this—this supposed evidence of corruption—that betrayed the sheer magnitude of their stupidity.
It was simple. Once he had the information he needed, he would ensure that neither he nor his cousin would hear the name Seymore ever again.
Amelia was feeling really quite uncomfortable by the time they disembarked the plane and got into the limousine waiting for them. She had enough sense to know that any more questions would be met with either silence or derision, which had kept her pretty much quiet no matter how strange the situation was becoming. She pressed a hand to her stomach, and although she desperately wanted to turn up the air conditioning in the back section of the sleek vehicle, the thought of attracting Alessandro’s attention was worse.
