Chapter One
Eleven years later…
The sound of her heels against the marble flooring of the foyer of Gallo Group headquarters in France made Maria Aurora Guilia Gallo feel like a boss. The boss that she would be within months.
Some may have found it petty that she had taken the Gallo Group jet from Italy to France for the sole purpose of rubbing that very fact into Micha Rufina’s face, but she didn’t care.
The receptionist looked at her warily and Maria realised that it was a very real possibility that she had just growled. Out loud.
She shook it off, sending a ripple across the billowing cream silk button-up shirt, tucked into the camel-coloured cashmere trousers pressed to perfection with a flawless crease down the centre of each leg.
The patent leather cream one-of-a-kind Louboutins—the ones clicking so satisfyingly towards the private elevator that only family and board members had access to—were her favourite pair.
Every single item of clothing, down to the lace basque, had been intentionally chosen.
They were pieces of her armour. The armour she would wear to the final battle she ever had with Micha Rufina—her nemesis.
Her enemy. And if he had been anything before that, anything more, she had forced herself to burn it from her memory until all that remained was a jagged scar, hidden so deep, her heart could barely remember it.
She arrived at the lift, swiped her key card and waited.
A woman came hurrying up to her.
‘Mademoiselle Gallo, it’s so lovely…’ she trailed off when Maria cut her a glare. ‘Does Mr Rufina know you’re here?’ The pitch of the poor woman’s voice rose into the stratosphere.
‘No,’ Maria replied, turning back to the lift, ending any and all hopes of further conversation the receptionist may have had.
To her right was the bank of public lifts that would take the building’s staff to whatever floor they worked on. She was aware of a few of the staff casting surreptitious glances her way as they left for the evening. Or trying to at least.
At first, Maria had bemoaned the way that she drew the male gaze.
‘They’ll never take me seriously,’ she’d complained to her cousin Antonio.
‘All they see is this,’ she’d said, yanking on the thick tumble of long black curls.
‘And these,’ she’d said, pushing out her chest. Antonio had barked out a laugh and pushed her out of his face, telling her to ‘get those things away from me.’ They’d both ended up crying with laughter.
‘Then, mi amor,’ he’d said, ‘make them take you seriously in spite of it.’
He’d been right. As always. Her cousin, her favourite family member in the whole wide world, and not just because the rest of them were worse than a den of poisonous vipers out for whatever cent they could get their greedy little hands on.
No, Antonio had always been there supporting her, cheering her on, even when her own parents wouldn’t.
And so what if, for the last six years, Antonio had been a little distracted by his company, and avoiding the wrath of their grandfather.
He was still the only person she could rely on to help her.
And so—despite having worked for longer, and harder, than most of the family members there—she had always used her clothing with near deadly intent.
Dress the part, act the part, get the part.
And today she had dressed rich. Expensive. She had dressed with the kind of class that went beyond money. And she’d done it for one reason and one reason only. She wanted Micha to know that she was so far beyond his reach they may as well be on different planets.
She wanted the boy she’d all but grown up with to know that this was the last time he would ever see her, no matter what he’d meant to her grandfather.
The grandfather she had looked up to, had loved with everything she had in her, but who had never once seen her as worthy.
The grandfather who had been a complex, deeply difficult man, but who sometimes she’d thought she understood.
Until he had passed away and his last will and testament had been read.
The shock waves that had rippled out had been catastrophic for some, but for her and Antonio? Life changing.
Because Gio’s last will and testament revealed that no matter what they had done in the last six years—Antonio marrying someone else, Maria working every hour god sent to prove her worth—Gio Gallo had never given up on his eccentric and utterly irrational plan for her and Antonio to marry and together produce the perfect heir to inherit and run his empire.
It didn’t matter that they were already Gallos.
Antonio was adopted and she was female, these two things marring them in some way for their grandfather.
But a child from the two of them? That was what Gio had wanted from the beginning.
And if they didn’t marry and fulfil the terms of the will?
The entire company would be handed over to Micha Rufina—something Maria would never allow to happen while she still had breath in her lungs.
Antonio felt the same, which was why he had agreed to marry her in name only, to fulfil the terms of the will.
Once Antonio got a divorce from the woman he’d married for convenience six years ago, he would then be free to marry her.
And once they were married, once they had inherited the company, he would sign over his share of the company that he had absolutely no interest in and they would go their separate ways.
Him to his business, Alessina International, and her to Gallo Group.
And no one would ever look down on her again.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened and she entered a small cubicle big enough for three people at a push. The rose gold mirrored glass threw her image back at her in soft reflections and she counted the floors down as she rose higher up the building, all the way to the penthouse.
She had been to the Paris office of Gallo Group several times over the past six years, but made sure to do so when Micha wasn’t there.
She, unlike many others, had not been surprised by the meteoric rise of the boy Gio had taken under his wing all those years ago.
No, she knew something of Micha’s mettle.
And it was cold, hard and impenetrable.
But still, even she had to begrudgingly respect the man’s business acumen.
And where others in the family had snidely remarked about the ‘transferable skills’ of begging and thieving on the streets of Roma, she had only seen survival and determination, her sympathy for the boy she had once known refusing to budge on that instance.
But she had also learned at her cost not to underestimate him.
Maria arrived at the penthouse floor with a ding and the lift doors parted to an exquisite reception area, continuing the use of the Gallo Group’s brand colours of rose gold and cream, she saw with no small sense of satisfaction.
She had been integral to the rebranding three years before and while the board had raised objections Gio had seen the sense in her plan.
Gallo Group’s global perception skewed towards older males and while that had worked in the past, women were the future.
And it was time for the Gallos to damn well catch up.
Frowning when she realised that the receptionist was not at her desk, she checked her watch. It was, she realised, after six in the evening, but it was strange that Micha’s secretary would have left already.
She made her way on thickly piled carpet towards the regional CEO’s office.
The doors were wide open and unable to help herself, she entered and—just like the previous times she’d been here—immediately gravitated over to the window that stretched from floor to ceiling across one entire side of the huge office.
Many others might have boasted three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views.
But what did that matter, when the one window of this office showed the Eiffel Tower in its entirety?
Even as a little girl, she’d loved Paris.
And her heart sighed just to see the most famed image of France stretched out before her.
For a moment, she wondered what it would have been like to be here under different circumstances, but before that half-formed fantasy could even take hold, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise.
‘What are you doing here, cara?’
‘You don’t get to call me that,’ she said, her words filled with the poison she wished she could use to hurt him the way that he’d hurt her.
Micha saw her flinch at his words, at how the muscles tightened all the way across her shoulders and back. He clenched his jaw, instantly regretting the word that had slipped past his usually ruthless self-control.
‘How did you get in here?’ he demanded, raising the armour that had broken at her shocking and surprising appearance in his office.
He stalked over to his desk to put down the folder he had in his hands.
And to buy himself some time to get over the impact of the sudden and perturbing sight of Maria Gallo.
He had seen her only a few weeks before at Alessina Gallo’s party.
Antonio’s mother was trying her best to keep the disparate threads of the family together in her father’s absence.
The man’s will had left more than the company without leadership, and both the family and the business were at risk of breaking apart because of it.
‘I walked.’
‘Oh really? I thought you might have flown in on your broomstick,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘How original, Micha. Calling me a witch.’
Maria’s words lashed across his skin and he winced.
He knew how often she was belittled by family members who were half outraged that she dared to be more than just a pretty face.
And while she and he had a somewhat fractious—okay, downright toxic—relationship, he was nothing like those who called her names like the one he had just used.
‘You know I meant it differently,’ he growled.