AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
Then...
Jessie
ASMYNEWheels sank into the red carpet draped over the marble steps of the eighteenth-century Palais Theatre on that late-summer evening in Paris, I felt like a princess for the first time in my life.
Cinderella, eatyour heart out!
I reached into my clutch purse to retrieve the invitation which I’d ‘liberated’ from my cousin Belle and showed it to the doorman. My heart bounced into my throat, but the beefy guy simply smiled, and handed back the gold-embossed card—instead of declaring me an imposter and kicking me back down the marble staircase.
So far. So fabulous. Now breathe.
I sucked in an unsteady breath as I headed through the entrance hall with the rest of the glittering in-crowd and into an enormous ballroom showered with light from crystal chandeliers suspended from a painted ceiling four stories above my head.
My gaze roamed over the splendour surrounding me. Marble columns and golden statues flanked the room, while a fleet of waitstaff dressed in elegant black uniforms descended from huge twin rococo staircases, holding trays of champagne flutes and cordon bleu canapés.
Wow.
I’d left Belle and her son Cai in Nice to travel to Paris two weeks ago on the spur of the moment—I knew she needed some alone time to deal with Cai’s father, Alexi Galanti—but in the past two weeks, I had also realised, now the racing team owner was back in her life, I needed to start figuring out my own future.
Belle and I had been a unit for the past four years, ever since she had turned up on my doorstep in London alone and pregnant. When her son Cai was born, we’d become a family. The first proper family I’d ever had since my mother had disappeared from my life when I was still a teenager.
But I was twenty years old now. And while I loved my job as a chef—which was something I’d trained hard at ever since I was sixteen—the long hours and complete lack of a social life had become more and more isolated. And now Belle and Cai had moved from London to Nice permanently, I knew I could no longer rely on them for company.
We would always be family. But I couldn’t live vicariously through them forever.
When I had spotted the invitation to the famous masquerade ball Belle’s former boss Renzo Camaro held in Paris every year, sitting discarded on her dressing table, I had popped it into my backpack on a whim—with some vague idea of using it to jump-start that process.
Belle wouldn’t miss it. She’d already told me she didn’t have the time, or the inclination to attend Camaro’s lavish event to celebrate the start of motor racing’s Super League season. And I had had some vague notion of pushing myself out of my comfort zone at last, and doing some networking, with the elite crowd Belle was a part of, because of her job as a research and development expert in the Super League. We’d talked often about me starting my own catering business, being my own boss, but I’d never had the guts to consider touting for business until now.
But as I stood under the shimmer of glittering lights, and listened to the hum of conversation as the crowd of people posed and preened in their masked finery—the vintage red satin dress I had found that afternoon after scouring every second-hand shop in the Marais cinching around my breasts and the new business cards I’d had printed burning a hole in my clutch purse—I wondered what on earth I thought I was doing here?
I was a chef. And while I might want to make a career out of cooking for people like this—one day—I’d always been on the periphery of Belle’s glamorous career for a reason. Because I was the mousy cousin, who had always been happy to stay home and babysit Cai whenever Belle attended events like this one.
You’re not a princess, you idiot. Or even a businesswoman. Yet. You’re a fraud.
The strains of an orchestra played a Mozart serenade to welcome the guests, while the clink of champagne flutes and fine china covered the rising buzz of small talk. But the noise did nothing to drown out my thundering heartbeat. I searched the crowd—my gaze partially obscured by the gossamer mask made from scraps of antique lace—for someone I might actually know, to ease the feeling of inadequacy suddenly making my chest feel tight.
But as I looked around, even I could tell I had miscalculated. Badly. This was not the sort of place where people made business connections, or talked about them. The party vibe was far too louche and loud and—exhilarating.
Then my gaze found Renzo Camaro—our host—and Belle’s former boss, the guy who had never noticed me the few times he’d met me with my beautiful cousin. And the feeling of inadequacy threatened to crush my ribs.
He stood on the balcony above, looking like a king in his expertly tailored tuxedo. His dark hair gleamed in the sparkle of light. Lorenzo Camaro, the ‘gutter rat made good’ as the racing press had insisted on dubbing him ten years ago, when his Destiny Team had appeared from nowhere and taken their first Super League title.
He was still only thirty years old, even though Destiny have been at the top of the sport—vying with Alexi’s Galanti team for the championship title—for over a decade. As he watched the crowd, he seemed detached and jaded, even though the stunning women on either side of him—one a supermodel, another a Hollywood starlet, both of whom I recognised—were busy flirting with him as if their lives depended on it...
Camaro was the only person not wearing a mask, making no attempt to hide the mysterious scar on his left cheek—probably because it was all part of the myth he had constructed for himself as the charming and dangerous bad boy of racing, whose notorious but vague origins in an unknown Italian slum had been whispered about for years.
The black tuxedo accentuated his height and the hard, graceful line of his muscular physique to perfection. But it was the stunning masculine beauty of his face—only made more dangerous and exciting by the scar—which captured all my attention.
A strange yearning swept through me—and the crushing weight of inadequacy dropped into my abdomen like a stone.
A hot, glowing, insistent stone.
Where the hell was that even coming from?
Camaro was so far out of my league he was practically on Mars. Forget Mars, make that Saturn, the farthest planet from planet Jessie. And he’d never had an effect like that on me before. Probably because I had been busy fading into the furniture whenever we’d met.
