Chapter Four #2
After all, he had bought her. Twice . It wouldn’t happen again.
He might be able to afford it, but she couldn’t.
She couldn’t get used to it. Because all of this?
It wasn’t real. And the moment that he got his divorce, she’d be back in her flat in South West London, with only herself to rely on, once again.
Antonio drummed his fingers on the white cloth of the small square table in the central square in Siena, the Piazza del Campo.
He looked at his watch, his gaze narrowing on the time.
She was late. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he resisted the urge to check the email notification that was surely just more bluster from the Americans, panicking about what promised to be one of the largest business deals of the century so far.
It was a bold claim. One he intended to make true.
But the Americans were accusing him of being distracted.
He could understand why they might feel that way, between his grandfather, his wife and his future fiancée.
But Antonio would never let such things impact his work, not even for a single moment.
The Chinese were trying to renegotiate already agreed upon terms. They needed to be seen putting up a fight to their shareholders and both he and the Americans could wait. But Maria couldn’t.
Already, Gallo Group was beginning to buckle beneath the lack of clear leadership.
They’d just lost another VP, and while Maria was in the office every single day, working all the hours God sent to keep the roof on tight, Micha, someone he’d once considered a friend, the man that their grandfather had threatened to give the company to, was nowhere to be seen.
Although his mother was of the belief that he would be at the family party at the end of the week.
A family party that Antonio had absolutely no intention of attending.
He rolled his shoulders subtly, trying to ease the tension in his neck, aware of the attention he was drawing.
But hadn’t that been the entire point? Sitting in one of the busiest squares in Tuscany, a place no normal Italian would be seen dead in during the summer.
Tourists flocked to the region from all over the world, while Italians counted down the days until they left again and it returned to being their home.
Others clung to the industry, making their money in short intervals through the year—hoping it would be enough to pay the bills through the off season.
Antonio might have never known poverty personally.
But the possibility of it had always been there.
A shadow life of what could have been, had he not been adopted.
And it had left its mark. It was a knowing that the others of his circle couldn’t imagine.
Because they were there by birth. He was there by grace, and never had he been allowed to forget it.
First by his adoptive father, then his grandfather.
And as for his biological parents? One of them had seen fit to abandon him not only once, but twice.
His fingers gripped the stem of the wine glass, which wobbled precariously as tension fought with condensation.
‘Scusi, Signor Gallo, posso offrirle qualcosa?’
Antonio dismissed the offer of another drink with a grimace and a shake of his head.
Until recently, his life had been as close to perfect as it could get.
He’d worked at his business hard, demanding only what he gave himself: excellence and dedication.
He’d started with little more than a handful of contacts and what was in his personal bank account, and he’d made it a multinational, billion-dollar industry.
He’d paid his mother back beyond measure, and he hadn’t looked back.
Until his grandfather had passed. And since then, everything he sought to do was frustrated by incompetence and other people’s agendas. If he were religious, he’d think his grandfather was purposely tormenting him from beyond the grave.
He missed him, Antonio realised, the miserable, autocratic bastard.
He missed verbally sparring with him, finding ways to wind the old man up, to shock him, or best him.
He’d been the longest, strongest, male figure in his life and, Dio mio .
He was rocked by a sliver of grief rippling through his chest and lungs.
It hurt. The absence of a man Antonio had genuinely thought would survive the apocalypse.
He knew Maria felt similarly, though she wrestled with it for different reasons.
Their grandfather had always thought her less because she was a woman, and Antonio had never been able to side with that way of thinking.
Maria was, in all likelihood, a better businessman than them all.
And if his grandfather would have just acknowledged that, they wouldn’t be in this mess at all.
Everyone knew that the last thing either cousin felt for the other was sexual attraction.
But Gio had refused to see it. Determined to keep the business in the family, and unwilling to leave it to him—who had not a single drop of Gallo blood in his veins—this had been Gio’s ultimate goal, no matter who it hurt.
Back when they’d been teenagers, Antonio had always thought that Maria would end up with Micha.
The three of them had been inseparable, but Maria and Micha, they’d had something different.
Something special. Until Micha had left, severing all contact, leaving Antonio confused and Maria utterly distraught.
Antonio would never forgive Micha for the hurt he’d caused, his anger crowding out the possibility that Gio had sent Micha away because he threatened to interfere with Gio’s plans for Gallo Group’s successor.
No, deep down, Antonio feared that, like his mother, Maria had paid a heavy price for caring for him.
That had she not, Gio would never have even thought of his crazy scheme to marry them off.
Antonio took a sip of his wine, to swallow down the ache in his throat, and was distracted by the sight of a slash of vibrant red. Even before he could see what it was, it made him think of Ivy.
Her favourite colour .
And as he remembered that, he also recalled how she’d rubbed her temple the night before. How she had thought it was dark when the sun was still in the sky—low, but still there. Strange.
The slash of red appeared in his peripheral vision again, distracting him, and several male tourists, from the looks of things.
Heads turned, eyes peered, following the glimpse of crimson, the same way he did.
And then the crowds parted and his hand jerked, sloshing wine over the rim and onto the cloth.
Ivy’s hair fell in loosely curled layers around her face, shoulders and arms. Bare arms that held a camera up to her eye.
A straight, low neckline between two solid red straps pressed against breasts that arced near indecently over the top and Antonio had to work harder than he’d care to admit to avert his gaze.
The corset hugged her torso lovingly and the skirt flared from her waist, falling elegantly to a mid-calf point that seemed only to emphasise the shape of her legs in a way that Antonio had never seen before.
Dio mio.
Arousal hit him so hard, and so fast, that he was simply unprepared for the assault. Need surged throughout his entire body from a single pump of his heart. Breath punched from his lungs from a strike to the gut so hard, so deep it left bruises. He hadn’t been expecting it.
Not the red. He’d thought that a trip to the salon would make Ivy more presentable, less… librarian . Not a siren, not sensual, not irresistible.
The waiter who had served him earlier was frozen, gawping, as Ivy approached their table, having returned her camera to the small bag hanging from the crook of her arm, apparently ignorant to the trail of near destruction she was leaving in her path.
As she came closer to the tables, one hand hovered outstretched by her thigh as if unconsciously balancing herself as she slowly wove between the tables.
That was new . One of the things he’d remembered—almost against his will—was how Ivy had woven between the tables of Affogato, taking orders and sweeping away used coffee cups as if it were a performance. She’d been graceful .
Perhaps it was the shoes, he thought, taking in the thin four inches of matching red stilettos on her feet. His gaze zeroed in on her heels, wondering about the plaster he had given her yesterday…until those same feet came to a stop beside the table.
Following, at his leisure, the turn of her ankle, the shape of her calf, the warm cream tone of her skin, bright against the shocking carnal red—innocence and sin—and skating over the span of her waist and the press of her chest against a neckline he struggled not to find fascinating, he finally reached her face, catching on her concerned expression.
‘Do I look okay?’ she asked self-consciously.
Antonio cleared his throat. ‘No, cara . You do not look “okay”,’ he replied truthfully. ‘You look magnificent.’
Ivy’s heart lurched.
Foolish, she called herself, as she sat in the chair the waiter had pulled out for her.
They were in public on purpose, she had been made over, on purpose.
All this was part of the plan to show Ms Quell that they were giving their marriage a go.
‘Date night’ had been Antonio’s idea, and he was simply following what normal date etiquette was, she presumed. She’d never actually been on a date.
Perhaps if he’d held her gaze she’d have been able to see in his eyes whether it was the truth or an exaggeration. It might have given her some of the confidence she’d felt at the salon, where the team had oohed and aahed at her appearance from the dressing room.