Chapter Two #2
Ivy swallowed the feeling of nausea welling from deep within.
She reminded herself of the good that she had done for Jamie with the money.
The rehab centre that had turned him around and the flat they’d had—the home—even if it had just been for a few short years, it had been enough security to get him started on a new life path.
She could do the same again. Use Antonio’s money to help others.
The determination, the plan forming in her mind soothed her jaded heartbeat and jagged breathing.
It had worked before—it could work again.
Mrs Tenby might have refused her a holiday request so soon after starting, but if it would help them secure the funding they needed, surely that would be different?
All she’d have to do was ask Antonio for the money.
She was returning the trolley to the desk when she had a horrible thought.
What if he’d already found a way to circumvent Judge Carmondy’s requirements?
What if he didn’t need her to go to Italy any more?
Suddenly the plans she’d begun to make in her head disappeared like the end of a road and she mentally screeched to a halt.
Panic broke out in a cold sweat at the back of her neck.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Retrieving it, she scanned the message from the unknown number.
We need to meet.
A shiver of apprehension cut through her. The way that she’d been thinking of him when he’d messaged her was unnerving. Ivy didn’t have to guess who it was from. Only Antonio Gallo would dare send such a message without even bothering to sign his name.
She typed back.
When?
Now.
She frowned and messaged back.
I’m working.
‘As I said before, Ivy, this is more important,’ Antonio said from behind her.
Antonio watched an entire range of emotions pass across Ivy’s fine features.
Shock, surprise, guilt… hope . With her hair swept back from her face in a knot atop her head, they were exquisitely on display and he wondered at them.
A light dusting of freckles covered the bridge of a perfect nose, small enough and just slightly upturned enough to be considered cute.
He took in a small scar halfway along her jaw that hadn’t been there when he’d known her six years. Seeing it set off a small twist in his memory, something he should have remembered but couldn’t quite…
The thought disappeared before it could take hold as she bit into her bottom lip, slicked only with gloss that made it look simple, homely. All the things that the women he encountered on the rare occasions he socialised disguised in an attempt to garner his attention.
His lawyer had warned him not to go to the library where Ivy worked, fearing that Antonio’s wife would recognise the power she held at that moment.
But the one thing Antonio knew about Ivy was that she wasn’t calculating in the least. Had she wanted to, she could have demanded twice as much six years ago.
Negotiation hadn’t even crossed her mind.
Yes, he’d been surprised that she’d denied his request—demand?
—to follow him to Italy, and she’d baulked at his offer of money.
But she didn’t understand the severity of the situation for him.
He’d come here to plead his case, but something had changed, he could tell.
He didn’t know what, and he didn’t care.
As long as it resulted in her agreement to pursue this farce of a plan the judge had cooked up.
Simon had informed him that the judge was beloved in the UK, which just went to show how crazy the English were, and that no one would be willing to either defy or circumvent his decision. They just had to get through these ‘assessments’ as quickly as possible—time was running out.
Antonio had one month to meet the requirements of the will.
And only then would Maria finally be free to inherit the company she deserved more than anyone else.
Gio might have entailed the whole of Gallo Group to Maria and Antonio on the occasion of their marriage, but Antonio had absolutely no intention of touching his grandfather’s company.
Maria was the one who had sacrificed blood, sweat and tears, she had danced to their grandfather’s tune, and Antonio was determined to see that his cousin got what she deserved.
Because if she didn’t, the entire company would go to Micha Rufina, their grandfather’s henchman, and while Antonio didn’t care a single bit about the company, he did care about that.
Aside from his mother, Maria was the only person who had treated him like family from the very first, even when others hadn’t.
And he would do whatever it took to repay that kindness.
So, he had come to the work address listed on Ivy’s paperwork to convince her that she needed to come back to Italy with him.
Ivy took a step towards him and then stopped, claiming his focus.
‘You can’t be here,’ she whispered, staring around her as if someone—her boss presumably—would come and tell her off.
Antonio bit back a sigh of impatience, frustrated that she was bothering to fight this. He just didn’t have time. He opened his mouth to say as much when she cut him off.
‘What would you do if I barged into your boardroom and demanded you return to England with me?’ she pressed on.
Laugh .
He didn’t have to say it. She knew the answer.
‘Precisely,’ she concluded, hugging the worn hardback to her chest as if it were armour.
He clenched his jaw, feeling the muscle flickering under the strain of holding back his frustration. In an ideal world he’d have liked to be less blunt, but he didn’t have time for gentle. Brutal was perhaps the only way to get through to her.
‘Ivy—let me be painfully clear. I need this divorce. A billion-dollar company hangs in the balance. It employs over four hundred thousand people globally, it has contracts with household name companies, and stocks and shares and subsidiaries that would make any businessman weep. So, forgive me for being crude, but your single job that can’t pay much more than twenty-five thousand pounds is literally the definition of less important. ’
Eyes widening as each word struck, outrage warred with shock, and then confusion.
‘I didn’t realise that Alessina International had grown so big,’ she said, taking a step back.
This time, Antonio frowned. He wasn’t talking about his company, but she was. She knew about that?
‘It hasn’t. I’m talking about Gallo Group,’ he clarified.
She frowned, evidently taking in that piece of information. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see how a divorce will help with that?’ she said, doing that question/statement thing again that he found so hard to translate.
He paused, taking a breath, buying a few seconds to debate how much to tell her.
He baulked at providing information that would give her power over him, reminded himself that she wasn’t so much of a threat, remembered that looks could be deceiving, and finally concluded that, despite every instinct to the contrary, he needed to tell her the truth.
‘I need to marry Maria.’
Her face did a strange scrunchy thing to express her confusion.
‘The same Maria you married me to avoid marrying six years ago?’ she asked, coming a step closer. ‘Your cousin Maria?’
The irony was not lost on him. Six years ago, Antonio had believed the only way to escape his grandfather’s demand that he marry his cousin in order to ensure the familial succession of Gallo Group was to remove himself completely from that scenario by marrying Ivy.
Finding a suitable successor had been an obsession for Gio Gallo. He had considered none of his five children remotely worthy and had, in fact, already disinherited one of them.
And despite any number of cousins and uncles and hangers-on who would have readily, nay, gleefully , welcomed taking on the mantle of Gallo Group, Gio had been firm; it would go to a grandchild.
Antonio had been ruled out, because even though he was the only child of Gio’s eldest, he didn’t have a single drop of Gallo blood. No, Antonio had been adopted and thus was unsuitable . Maria, by sole default of being female, was also unsuitable.
But in Gio Gallo’s mind, if Antonio married his non-blood-related cousin Maria, their child would be of Gallo blood as well as being linked to his eldest child, and as such the child would be the successor supreme .
And while it might be considered a unique example of two wrongs making a right, both he and Maria had, naturally, been horrified by the prospect, with neither feeling for the other anything remotely more than familial love.
Burying the deep sense of rejection and hurt caused by his grandfather’s actions, Antonio had told no one of his plan to avoid Gio’s manipulations. Not Maria, not his mother. He’d done it quickly and quietly, before anyone could stop him.
He’d come to England with two intentions: first, find a way to make it absolutely impossible for Gio to force the marriage between him and Maria. This had been achieved when he’d married Ivy and, as far as Antonio was concerned, Gio would just have to find someone else to take over Gallo Group.
And second, to start his own business. One that couldn’t be taken away, bargained, bribed or used against him in any way.
And at the age of twenty-nine, Antonio had done that.
Six years of inconceivably hard work, long hours, sacrifice and self-determination.
He had become utterly self-sufficient, financially independent, worth many millions in his own right, and had ensured security for his mother and, should she have wanted it, his cousin Maria.