The Italian Tycoon's Rejected Bride

Prologue

The drink in my glass was the only thing cold in the room.

Across the table, in Milan’s quietest and most expensive restaurant, Marco Valenti was watching me. He didn’t look at me the way other men did. They saw me as a name, an empire, and a challenge. Marco looked at me as if he knew exactly what I was made of, and yet he remained interested.

That was dangerous…

My brothers, Matteo and Enzo, nearly set our legacy ablaze for… love. They allowed themselves to bleed for their passions, and I saw the devastation it caused. I was the one who helped clean up the mess.

I wouldn’t make that mistake…

I don’t fall in love; I close deals… and Marco Valenti was the best deal of my life. A merger of empires. A marriage of equals. It was logical, clean, powerful.

“Here’s to the future, Bianca.”

His voice was rough velvet, running down my spine and settling in a place I kept locked away. I raised my glass, meeting his gaze, which never wavered from mine.

“To the future,” I replied, and took a sip, feeling the alcohol burn my throat.

My heart—that inconvenient traitor—stumbled. I hated that small betrayal of instinct.

Marco was handsome in a way that was irritating.

A raw, almost brutal beauty that didn’t belong in the rarefied atmosphere of those stuffy salons.

He lacked the polished refinement of the heirs I’d grown up with.

His square jaw seemed carved from stone, and there was a permanent shadow there that his impeccable shave couldn’t erase.

His dark, thick, slightly wavy hair was cut with precision, but it always seemed a second away from rebelling, just like the man who wore it.

He was clad in a tailored suit that could barely conceal the strength of his broad shoulders and powerful chest, in stark contrast to the slender bankers surrounding us.

But his eyes disarmed me… green, not soft, but the deep, untamed green of a forest—the gaze of a predator. They were eyes that didn’t just look; they assessed, calculated, and consumed.

Marco was the wolf who’d been invited to dine with the sheep, and that night, with those hungry green eyes fixed on me, I knew—with a disturbing thrill—that I was the main course.

He was testing me when his knee brushed against mine under the table, in a touch that was accidentally deliberate.

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to take control.

If he wants me, great. That makes him predictable. That gives me the upper hand.

This attraction, I rationalized, was just a bonus. It would make the alliance more pleasant and the merger easier to seal.

A discreet waiter moved like a ghost, cleared away the dessert plates we’d barely touched. The “merger” was sealed. The whiskey burned in my stomach, but not as much as his gaze.

Marco leaned slightly across the table, a gesture that broke the formality of the atmosphere. His broad shoulders seemed to fill the entire space, and his wild green eyes held me captive.

“My place or yours?” he asked.

The voice was low, a rough velvet, and it didn’t sound like a question, but like the next inevitable item on the agenda.

The voice of reason inside me screamed: None. Stick to the plan. Go home. Reevaluate the terms.

The restaurant’s air conditioning suddenly seemed colder, sending a shiver down my spine and raising every hair on my skin.

The woman—that fragile part of me that I crushed every day, the one who felt the brush of his knee—gave up the fight.

“Yours,” I whispered.

The negotiation had shifted to a new venue.

Marco didn’t smile. He just nodded, slowly, as if I’d just conceded a crucial point in a contract. He stood up in one fluid, powerful motion and reached out his hand to me.

I took it. His palm was warm, and his strong fingers wrapped around mine.

I stood up, feeling my legs strangely light. The thrill of the deal gave way to something more primal, setting my blood pounding in my ears.

He placed his free hand on the small of my back and guided me through the deserted dining room, past the empty tables. The heat of his palm burned through the silk of my dress.

Every step was calculated. I kept my chin up, the Ferraro mask firmly in place, even as I felt a tremor begin deep in my belly.

This is just the conclusion of the merger, I told myself, trying in vain to convince myself that there wasn’t something intense pulsing beneath my skin and a desire I couldn’t control.

His car, discreet and imposing, waited on the sidewalk. The driver opened the door without a word.

Inside the car, neither of us dared to speak.

I watched the lights of Milan flash by as blurry smudges, but all I could think about was the tension emanating from the man beside me. The air was electric, thick, and hard to breathe. I could smell him: an expensive blend of cologne, whiskey, and power.

We arrived at his penthouse. The private elevator rose without a word between us, a polished steel box carrying us toward the sky. When the doors opened directly into his apartment, logic evaporated.

I had barely taken a step into the dark hallway when the door closed behind us with a heavy click, muffling the sounds of Milan.

Marco didn’t give me time to breathe.

He pressed me against the marble wall with a jarring impact that took my breath away, and his mouth took mine.

It wasn’t a seductive kiss; it was a hostile takeover. A rough, wet kiss, full of tongue and intent. His hand grabbed my hair at the nape of my neck, tilting my head back, forcing me to accept the depth of his assault.

Instinct took over. I dug my nails into his broad shoulders in an attempt to gain ground.

This is just a clause, my mind screamed, a physical seal on the agreement. Yet instinct betrayed every argument.

I bit down hard on his lower lip, and the warm, metallic taste of blood mingled with ours.

His hands were not gentle; they were a declaration of war. His palm slid down my back, gripping me with fierce urgency until it found the zipper on my dress. The sound of the metal parting was sharp, a metallic rasp that cut through the hall as the expensive fabric shielding me parted.

His other hand, meanwhile, slid up my thigh with the subtlety of an invasion.

It pushed the heavy silk of the dress upward, scratching my skin and sending a shiver down my spine.

His fingers didn’t just find the sheer lace of my panties; they invaded it, and with a sharp, decisive tug, the fabric snapped.

The snap of the elastic giving way was the final nail in the coffin of any notion of courtesy.

“You’re soaking wet for me, Bianca,” he whispered against the skin of my neck, in a muffled growl, while his fingers moved over my increasingly wet and throbbing sex.

Before I could respond, his mouth became an instrument of torture and pleasure: he kissed, then licked the throbbing vein, and finally bit the sensitive skin just below my ear. The pain felt like pleasure.

The broad muscles of his chest and the intoxicating scent of his skin made me even more aroused, while his fingers on my pussy only heightened my desire to have him.

“You want this. You want it just as much as I do.”

All I could manage was a hoarse moan of consent.

My dress slipped off my shoulders and fell to my feet.

Exposed, I reached for his leather belt with unsteady hands and fumbled the buckle open. Then, to the mother-of-pearl buttons on his white shirt. I didn’t undo them; I ripped them off. I heard the buttons clatter like hail against the marble floor, a satisfying sound.

Marco didn’t ask me; he took me. His arms lifted me up in one swift motion.

The movement was so sudden that a startled cry caught in my throat.

My legs wrapped around his waist out of pure instinct, in a reflex born of survival and surrender.

He didn’t take me to the bed; our battlefield was right there, in that hall, with my back pressed against the marble wall.

Through the torn, useless fabric of my panties, I felt the brutal evidence of his desire: his cock, deliberately hard and throbbing, pressing against my bare belly.

The marble chilled my bare skin, and I arched involuntarily, pressing closer to the fierce heat of him.

“Say you want it,” he commanded, his hoarse voice against my ear, making me even more aroused. His warm breath dampened my skin. “Say you want this union.”

I no longer knew whether we were talking about the marriage agreement or sex, but then the distinction no longer mattered. All I wanted was to feel his hard length sliding into my aching core.

The answer didn’t come in words; instinct answered for me. My unsteady hands closed possessively around his hips. I dug my fingers into his taut muscles, and with a strength that surprised us both, I guided him, inexorably, against my wet, open center.

He penetrated me then, in a single, deep thrust—brutal and final. There was no preparation, only the act itself. The sound that escaped my throat was a hoarse, ragged moan that merged with the guttural roar that escaped him.

Our bodies slammed against the wall with rhythmic, violent force, each impact a muffled thud that echoed through the empty hall. The wet sound of our skin colliding was the deliciously provocative soundtrack.

I wanted more—every inch of him—and I clutched his shoulders with my arms and his waist with my legs, demanding it.

Marco responded in kind, pulling out only to thrust deep inside me again and draw another moan from my throat.

My eyes rolled back as the intense, delicious sensation of his thick length filling me consumed every thought.

“Marco…” His name slipped from my lips. He thrust even deeper, and my nails dug into his broad back on instinct.

He buried his face in my neck, gripping my buttocks with a force that promised bruises, pressing his fingers into my flesh.

Marco pulled me harder against him with every thrust, crushing me between the hard planes of his body and the unyielding marble.

In retaliation, I dug my nails deeper into his back, feeling the grooves I was creating in his skin.

The pleasure didn’t come as a wave, but as a tidal wave that formed at the base of my spine, an uncontrollable heat that raced through every limb before detonating at my core.

I clenched violently around him, a spasm of surrender and conquest. I screamed his name as I felt him stiffen in one last, powerful thrust. Marco came inside me with a deep roar that rose from his chest and vibrated through our entwined bodies, pouring his hot fluid inside me in pulsing spurts that left me utterly claimed.

***

Hours later, I woke up alone in his Egyptian cotton sheets. The first light of Milan, pale and gray, streamed through the window, illuminating the dust in the air.

The scent of the two of us—bittersweet sex, dried sweat, and his woody fragrance mingled with my own aroma—permeated the room, a ghost of what had happened.

A blade of panic pierced me. The vulnerability of lying there naked and exhausted…

the surrender. I hated that more than any unfavorable clause in a contract.

I climbed out of bed as if the sheets were red-hot coals and found my dress crumpled on the floor, looking like a cheap, worn-out rag. Getting dressed was like reclaiming an identity.

I stopped in the bedroom doorway, my hand on the cold doorknob.

What had been a conquest for him—a trophy—was now, for me, simply a transaction.

The sweat, the intensity, that moment of raw truth…

all of it was merely the lubricant that would make our contract easier to sign and our handshake firmer.

As the door closed behind me with an almost inaudible click, I forced my heart—that treacherous, emotional organ—to surrender every trace of emotion. I was Bianca Ferraro, and I would never give my heart to any man.