Chapter One #2
‘Which I’ll never do,’ Erin confirmed, looking out at the superyacht moored just outside of the marina.
It was obscene, ostentatious and near offensive as far as she was concerned.
It was rumoured that Enzo didn’t possess a single piece of property.
That he spent all of his time flitting from one hotel room to another, and that even though he’d spent every summer since his eighteenth birthday on some form of luxury boat, he couldn’t even be bothered to buy one for himself.
Wasteful.
Enzo was wasteful and Erin did not approve. Which had been firmly put down on the ‘For’ column of her For and Against list, when she had been debating with Sam over whether to agree to Gio Gallo’s hare-brained scheme. In her mind’s eye she saw the list again:
FOR
He is amoral.
He is careless.
He is wasteful.
Ownership of Charterhouse.
AGAINST
It’s wrong.
I can’t do it.
Sam had, quite rightly, pointed out that whether Erin could do it or not was not a reason for or against, but merely something to be worked around.
‘So we’re sticking to the plan then?’ Sam asked.
‘Yes, we’re sticking to the plan,’ Erin replied.
‘Good. I like a plan, and yours is sound,’ Sam insisted, the support and confidence she offered to Erin more welcome than Sam could ever imagine.
Erin had discovered the invitation for Samara’s network, Conxion, in her email inbox in the second year of university, just as her sober-driver app had begun to take off.
Working flat out on the app and studying for her bachelor’s in business management hadn’t left room for making friends.
And just when Erin had been at her loneliest, over two hundred miles away from home and her mother, Conxion and the women in the network had made her feel seen and supported.
Linking business-minded women across the globe of all different nationalities, ages, and experience levels for support, problem solving, and the opportunity to see other women doing what they were doing, had been a literal lifeline.
A lifeline that she was using even now to help with the plan she had come up with, just like one of her beloved detective fiction heroes.
‘Step One...’
‘Catch his eye,’ Sam added knowingly, having been heavily involved in the plan herself.
‘Which will happen at the party tonight,’ Erin concluded.
A party that, despite the money she had from the sale of her startup, she’d never have been allowed into if Marcus Rothsburry, the British billionaire whose party it was, hadn’t hired Angelique Xavier to plan it.
Angelique was one of the first members of Conxion that Erin had come to know and the guest list she’d secretly added Erin’s name to only proved the truth behind the running joke about Conxion: that between them, they had the power to topple heads of state and small countries should they wish to.
Erin looked back to the yacht, where a speedboat was waiting for two female passengers to board from the deck. Erin picked up her binoculars but no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find a trace of Enzo anywhere.
He couldn’t even be bothered to see his guests off after a night of what—if the rumours were to be believed—would have been orgasmic delight. Multiple times.
‘Are you sure that this is something you want?’ Sam probed gently.
Erin narrowed her gaze through the binoculars, considering the question.
Was she sure that she could marry a man she didn’t like in order to get her family’s business back from an owner who was willing to shred an entire business just because he could? Outrage and anger whipped through her like a sudden sea squall.
She hadn’t been sure. Not really. Not until she’d done her research on the man who seemed to revel in his reprobate antics.
Who ignored the reams of verbiage printed about the women who had loved and lost the Playboy of Amalfi.
Convinced of his heartlessness, Erin was only too happy to do the women of the world a favour and teach Enzo Rossetti a lesson.
‘Yes,’ she answered truthfully. She could. And she would.
Which was how she found herself, several hours later, arriving at an ultra-exclusive, deeply private party on a beach far down below the rocky heights of the island of Capri.
Erin exited the lift that had brought her and all the other guests down the several hundred feet of cliff face with more than a little relief, having had her eyes clamped shut throughout the entire ride.
She’d never liked heights and this had tested her.
But still, when she stepped out onto the beach she had to stifle a gasp.
It wasn’t a large beach by anyone’s standards, but it was truly beautiful.
Not far from the shore, great husks of rock reached into the sky.
Some of the more adventurous revellers had stripped down to swimwear and were perched at various places, or hurtling down into the water.
Beyond the three jagged bluffs, the sea stretched out to the horizon where the sun kissed the sea in a blaze of molten pinks and oranges.
Behind her, men and women glittered like jewels in silver and gold, their tans deep, their clothes expensive and their alcohol levels high, dancing on a concrete platform around a sunken pool beside the bar that was hewn out of the rock wall itself.
This was how the glitterati partied: in luxurious hedonism.
Music rippled over the crowded beach, hands held high beneath a sky already pincushioned with stars, and excitement and joy heavy enough to taste in the air.
Almost immediately she saw him in the heart of the crowd.
Enzo Rossetti. Hair, darker than the night, slicked back thickly on top and faded at the sides, the closely cropped beard sharp around his mouth and chin.
His dark blue shirt was open at his neck, the shimmer of a silver chain glinting in the night, and a whisper of the dark chest hair that she’d seen earlier slick against his torso from the water.
The midnight-coloured suit clung lovingly to lean hips and broad shoulders, and the crowd all but shivered as he danced with them.
She watched him as he threw his head back and laughed, fascinated by the way he moved. Until he turned, his eyes opening straight onto hers, and even though she was prepared, even though she didn’t like anything about him, the breath was still punched from her lungs.
* * *
Who was that?
The question circled in Enzo’s mind as he searched the crowds for any sign of the woman he’d just seen.
From the corner of his eye, he’d caught the dramatic sweep of red hair—not light strawberry, but a deep fiery red—followed by a powerful punch of confident turquoise.
But neither had eclipsed the magnificent clarity of her sparkling gaze.
She was tall. Unusually so, her features fine, nose just a little snub, between high cheekbones and a narrow chin. Eyes were the kind of blue that made him think of curacao, his mouth near watering just at the thought of the sweet orange liqueur.
The blush that painted those cheeks when their eyes had connected was young, innocent.
It was one hell of a combination with the dress and the hair.
One he didn’t see very often. His fingers itched to wind a curl around his finger, and when she bit her lip, he fisted his hand, regretting the way she cut the connection a moment later, to slip invisibly into the crowd.
Marcus stumbled into his side.
‘Who is the redhead?’ he shouted into his friend’s ear, his gaze still scanning the crowd.
Marcus craned his head and peered in the woman’s direction, frowning, and offered him a shrug. ‘No idea. Why?’
‘No reason,’ Enzo dismissed as Marcus grinned and said, ‘there’s always a reason with you.’
Marcus turned back to him, his gaze sobering.
‘You should probably know that Jeremy is here.’
Enzo frowned, unsure why that was of any significance.
‘Kayla’s husband?’ Marcus pressed.
The faint stirrings of his memory began to shake free.
Kayla. London.
‘Wait, Kayla Masters?’ Enzo asked.
‘Yeah,’ Marcus said, wide-eyed as if he should understand the warning inherent in his gaze.
‘The one I gave a lift to? After her husband got in a snit and stormed off leaving her alone at the opera house in Covent Garden?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘But nothing happened,’ Enzo said.
Not that her marriage vows had stopped Kayla from trying it on with him.
Disgust shivered across his skin from the memory.
Despite what everyone seemed to think of him and his proclivities he would never cross that line.
Unlike his parents who made a mockery of the institution, repeatedly, he respected the sanctity of marriage and abhorred anyone who didn’t do the same.
‘I don’t think he believes that.’ Marcus winced.
Enzo dismissed it as very much not his problem with a shrug, and turned back to find the stunning redhead weaving her way towards him. Oh, she wasn’t making a beeline for him. Her movements were more like a dance. Subtle. They created...expectation.
She was going to make him work for it, he instinctively knew. And he liked that.
They locked eyes again, and again he felt it. That fizz, bubbling in his veins, as if someone had dropped baking soda into water. The crystalline blue was so unusually bright, it made her gaze almost startling.
They skirted each other, the distance between them getting shorter and shorter. He wondered where she was from. She looked almost Celtic in her colouring. He swept two glasses of champagne from the tray of a nearby waiter, and inclined his head towards her in an offering.
Her gaze brightened, the smile broadening, before frowning slightly, with a slight look of alarm on her features, when her eyes focused on something over his shoulder.
It prompted him to turn, just in time to see a large, red-faced man bearing down on him. Now, Enzo was tall, but this man looked like a door, and while Enzo could probably have held his own in a fight, he also didn’t have to and instead simply chose to sidestep the oncoming force.
This, however, was a near fatal mistake.
Because while Enzo had successfully managed to avoid the bull-sized charge, it had left the other man with nothing stopping him from careening straight into the large sunken pool that the guests had been dancing around, taking both the redhead and another poor innocent bystander with him.
Genuinely shocked, Enzo looked around to find somewhere to put his glasses down so that he could at least help the red-haired woman, whose name he still did not know, out of the pool.
She had emerged from the water with a gasp, and was all but indecent as the turquoise silk, now a dark forest green, clung desperately to a lithe, toned body of subtle, but no less delicious, curves.
Laughter and cheers broke out from the fringes of the gathering from people who had clearly not seen the entire situation, but above them all, Kayla Masters arrived and turned her not inconsiderable ire on him.
‘This is all your fault!’ she screamed, as Enzo realised that the large man must have been her husband.
Utterly taken aback, Enzo peered at her. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘No, I am not! None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for you,’ she shouted accusingly, causing Enzo to question his sanity.
Because while he enjoyed his fun, skirting the edges of what most would call common decency in his private life, this was quickly becoming very public.
He felt the wide-eyed furious gaze of the wet woman in the pool, and Dio mio, he hated this.
The drama, the hysteria. It was all too close to home for a man who had witnessed his parents’ dramatic and often very public exchanges, one too many times.
The memory was strong enough to blot out all thoughts of red hair and turquoise silk, of pleasure-filled evenings and simple fun.
‘Did you tell your husband that we slept together?’ he forced out through gritted teeth.
Kayla’s eyes glittered for one moment, as if she’d suddenly realised that she might have made a mistake.
‘I...no, I...’
The lie was as clear to him as day.
‘That was a monumentally stupid thing to do,’ he said succinctly, before knocking back both glasses of champagne in his hands.
‘Are you just going to leave me here?’ she demanded.
‘It’s your bed. You lie in it.’ And with that he stalked off without a backward glance.
* * *
Erin pushed the long thick wet ropes of her hair back from her face.
This is all your fault.
Did you tell your husband that we slept together?
Oh, the man was a beast!
He’d gone and left that poor woman alone to face his music, while her husband splashed about furiously making things worse.
Someone handed her a towel which she gratefully accepted. She walked, rather slowly because of the way that the water pressed against the silk skirts of the gorgeous—and now ruined—dress, towards the steps and awkwardly hauled herself from the pool.
Everyone was in paroxysms of gossip, pointing and staring, and just like that Erin’s cheeks flamed.
Oh, she knew they weren’t talking about her, but the staring and the pointing, the pity, and the sniggers.
.. It was all a little too much like what she had experienced as a taller-than-average sixteen-year-old new student with a posh British accent in a Cornish state school.
A painful, ugly blush rose to her cheeks from her throat, and reached out across her chest. And no matter how much she tried calm thoughts and slow breathing, nothing worked to dim the red stain of humiliation.
She looked into the crowds just in time to see Enzo running away from a chaotic scene of his own making, after his extra-marital affair had been discovered.
And she was supposed to marry this man?
If there had been even the slightest hesitation, any twist of conscience, left over from the concerns about manipulating or using Enzo Rossetti for her own means, there were none remaining.
Enzo Rossetti deserved everything he had coming to him.