Chapter One
Hatred was such a fascinating sensation. It had a taste: metallic and acrid. A feeling: a heavy weight that sat at the center of her chest and made her heart beat differently. It had a scent: whiskey, spiced cologne and old leather.
At least, for Heather Gray it did.
Because hatred smelled exactly like her stepbrother, Romeo Accardi. God, she wanted nothing more than to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze until…
If he were dead she’d never feel this way again. The idea nearly took her own breath away.
It was maybe poor taste for her to ponder his death while his father lay dying in the room upstairs.
But he hadn’t been sympathetic to her when her mother had passed last year and now Giuseppe was close to following his beloved wife to the afterlife and she could still hardly get a whiff of emotion from him.
Just that same spiced cologne, which for her would always create a red haze of rage.
It had always been this way.
From the moment she and her mother had darkened the door of the Accardi mansion, when her mother had been nothing but a housekeeper and Heather had been a twelve-year-old girl, awkward and uncertain, thrust into a world she didn’t understand.
Because right away Giuseppe had gone out of his way to give more help than they’d ever gotten before.
Where do you plan to have the child get her education?
At the public school down the road.
Nonsense, she shall go to the same school my son attends. Fairfield is sure to give her the sort of future she deserves.
I could never afford it…
It is part of your compensation, Miss Gray.
And so Heather had gone to Fairfield, with all of the rich kids, a daisy among the hothouse flowers.
It had been a trial by fire, a strange fire she had never seen before. When her mom had taken the job at the Accardi home it had been a chance for them to try something different, to be somewhere different.
After a childhood spent in New York City, living in an apartment the size of a closet while her mother cleaned houses on the Upper East Side, her mother had longed to give her something else.
A taste of another place. Of another life.
Perhaps her mom just wanted a different life, and Heather couldn’t fault her for that.
She’d heard about the opening through the gossip network with other cleaners—a wealthy Italian looking for a housekeeper for his property in the Italian Alps, but also for potential travel to other homes he kept around the world.
The salary seemed so generous that it almost felt like a scam. Perhaps human trafficking.
Her mother had taken the risk.
The job came with a house on the estate, and for the first time in her life Heather had her own bedroom.
She was still sad to leave New York. For all that they’d had very little, the city itself had a heartbeat, and it had resonated inside of Heather every time she walked to school, whenever she went to the bodega to get snacks, to find something to eat if her mother was working late.
The space and quiet of the Italian estate was deafening to her.
It felt frightening. Yawning. Stranger still was the way Giuseppe Accardi treated her and her mother like they were people.
He made eye contact. He spoke directly to her, not around her.
Not as if she were an ornament or a pebble sitting in the middle of the floor that didn’t belong.
They arrived in the summer, before school term at Fairfield started. And he had told Heather that she was allowed to use the pool.
That was the first time she saw him.
The man who would become her stepbrother.
Romeo Accardi.
Two years older than her, and already built like a man. In hindsight, she could see that wasn’t strictly true, but at the time she had been…
Dazed by him.
He was six feet tall, shirtless and muscled, standing by the pool, his black hair slicked away from his face, a pair of dark glasses covering his eyes. He was the most beautiful human being that Heather had ever seen. And her mother had worked for celebrities.
She had seen her share of beautiful humans, both on the silver screen and at her mother’s cleaning jobs for the rich and lovely.
She had seen her share of glamour and glory. Somehow, even at fourteen, Romeo Accardi supplanted them all.
But everything his father was, he was not.
The first time he looked at her, he was not struck dumb as she had been when she laid eyes on him. Rather, his lip curled into a sneer.
“Who are you?”
“I… Heather. My mom works here.”
“Are you meant to be at the pool?”
“Your father said that I could.”
He had lowered his sunglasses, looking at her with deep disdain. “I see.”
Then he had left. As if sharing the same air as her was anathema. That had set the tone.
Things did not improve after that. In fact, they only got worse when her mother began a romantic relationship with Giuseppe.
Worse still when they got married.
It wasn’t a clean start to a relationship. Carla Accardi, Giuseppe’s wife, had always been a distant presence in the house. At least from Heather’s perspective. The beautiful, statuesque socialite hadn’t been cold; she’d simply been the way that employers usually were.
When the relationship had started between Heather’s mother and Romeo’s father, he had been insistent his romantic relationship with his wife was long over. At least that was what he said later.
It had been confusing for thirteen-year-old Heather, whose life had been improved in almost every way by her mother’s relationship with Giuseppe.
And yet she had known that the way it had all come about was…wrong. She also had no control over any of it. Which, to this day, was the most important angle on that, she felt.
As an adult, she didn’t think her mother was responsible for the dissolution of the Accardi marriage.
The truth was, there had to be issues. Many of them, in order for infidelity to have been able to get a foothold.
And Giuseppe wasn’t a serial adulterer. He had married Lisa Gray and they had stayed together until death did them part after Lisa suffered a heart attack two years ago.
In the end, Heather saw them as a love story. An imperfect one perhaps, but over the years it had become clear that they were meant for each other. At least, it was clear to her.
One thing she could be certain of was that Romeo had never gained any perspective on the situation. As a result, Heather had never gained any perspective on him.
When his father and her mother had married, his disdain and distance had turned into outright cruelty. He blamed her mother for his own mother’s unhappiness, and he hated Heather.
Popular and adored by all of their classmates, he had made her life a living hell at school.
And then he had proceeded to make it hell at home as well.
When he was in residence, that was. Often, he was with Carla.
But when he was around he never hesitated to make his dislike of their family situation known.
Their warfare was as covert as possible, of course.
Heather would never complain and risk ruining her mother’s happiness.
She had never really understood why Romeo bothered to hide his disdain, but while they were never friendly to each other in any situation, they were civil—mainly—in front of their parents.
If it had changed when they were adults, Heather would’ve been happy to revise her opinion of him.
Like her, he had been young and at the mercy of the adults in their lives.
But he had never changed. He had never grown any kinder, or seemed to gain any deeper understanding of the complexity surrounding his parents’ marriage or anything of the kind.
He had been just the worst. Responsible for making her life miserable.
As if her rumination had conjured him, Romeo strode into the library where Heather was sitting staring at her computer. She felt him before she saw him. That low, vibrating frequency that always resonated in her chest when he was near. And then she looked up.
He was wearing a resplendently cut navy blue suit, his dark hair pushed off of his forehead, his jaw as sharp as broken glass.
The artful stubble that covered it was like a tease.
As were his full lips, which looked mobile, like they might smile easily and beautifully.
The truth was, they did. For other people.
Never for Heather.
That had been one of the most damaging things about Romeo back when they’d been teenagers.
He liked everyone. To know him was to long to be in his orbit. He was like the sun, creating warmth and light wherever he went.
She was the only exception.
He hated her. And when he looked at her it was like being thrown into a snowdrift.
Freezing.
But it was only one of the most damaging things about Romeo.
The other was that he was and forever, irrevocably her first experience with physical attraction.
And nothing, not the vitriol that existed between them, not the resentment that grew daily inside of her, not years or wisdom or maturity could do anything to dampen her response to him.
Hatred had a taste, a scent, a bone-deep feeling.
So, alas, did desire.
And for her the two things were intertwined in such a way that she didn’t know how to separate them. She was sick.
Thankfully, after his father died they would have no further connection to each other.
What a horrible thought. That her only route to freedom was losing Giuseppe.
Giuseppe had been the only father figure Heather had ever had. He was her father.
But he had grown so frail and gray in the years since his wife had died.
He had never really recovered from it. He’d gotten a cancer diagnosis afterward and hadn’t seemed to have any fight in him at all.
She hated to see him like this. She wanted him to be reunited with his wife.
She had to believe that was what awaited him.
She wasn’t looking forward to losing him. It was just that…
Finally having that last tie severed to Romeo would be a gift.