THERE WAS GOING to be the devil to pay.
The very devil.
Alessandra stood near the bank of elevators, her feet rooted to the ground, staring across the vast white marbled lobby to the dark oak door that should bear the warning “Beware all you who enter here” or some such.
Everything in her wanted to run away from this. From him. But she was done running.
Her reflections in the metallic shine of the elevators—all six of them—had her second-guessing her direct arrival here at BFI’s towers in Milan’s financial district straight from the airport after her long flight from San Francisco.
She felt grungy in clothes that she’d worn for the last forty-eight hours. Her eyes felt permanently gritty from all the different time zones her body had had to endure in the past fortnight. But the one upside to her disheveled appearance was that no one had recognized her on either side of the Atlantic.
The last thing she’d had, after the initial hearing with the family court in the States and the subsequent meetings with her lawyers, was any energy left to charter a private jet to bring her over to Italy. And seeing that she’d already annoyed her agent; her two assistants, and Greta and Leo; Massimo—though at least he had sympathized with her actions and warned her she was just postponing the final reckoning—Javier; and the man sitting behind the oak door in front of her, she hadn’t felt she could reach out to any of them and ask for a favor.
God, it felt like she’d been traveling forever, jumping from one painful situation to another, never stopping and thinking, never standing still.
Because if she did, if she stood in one place for more than a moment and allowed herself to look inward she’d have to listen to her heart. Her pathetic, bruised, still-foolish heart.
She’d have to face the fact that her mother was gone and the last time Alex had seen her, she’d said hateful words to her, that all the memories she had now were stilted, sterile meetings of the last few years. She’d have to swallow the bitterness she’d nursed when she’d realized her mother loved her little half brother, Charlie, far more than she’d ever loved her.
She’d have to face the fact that she had let that same, soul-sucking desperate need to be wanted, to be loved push her into a disastrous marriage with a man she didn’t even truly know, that she’d given her heart to a man who didn’t even understand what that meant.
The image of Charlie’s small, scrunched-up face, determined to look strong in front of Alex as she’d said goodbye to him, rose in front of her eyes, and she pushed away all the fears that could shake her resolve to do the right thing for him. For all her estrangement with her mother, she had fallen in love with Charlie from the first moment she’d set eyes on him as a newborn baby seven years ago.
Whatever the nature of her complex relationship with her mother, whatever insecurities she’d felt for years, whatever bitterness she’d nursed after Charlie’s birth, she had to put all that away now. This was not the time for guilt or grief or regrets.
This was the time to take action. To make sure Charlie wasn’t lost in the shuffle of adults’ mistakes like she’d been as a child.
She had to stop running. She had to be strong for that innocent boy. She had to face the one man she never wanted see again in her life.
In the nine weeks that she’d been hiding, the world had exploded with all kinds of speculation about the mysterious billionaire Vincenzo Cavalli, who headed up Cavalli Enterprises, a finance shark that had its fingers in myriad industrial sectors.
That he was battling with Leonardo Brunetti for the position of CEO of BFI, although they didn’t know why.
That he was a mathematical genius who’d made his first billion on the stock market.
That he was ruthless when it came to his opposition.
All the things Alex had been blissfully unaware of when she’d said yes to his sudden proposal.
She still couldn’t assimilate the man she’d known in Bali—tender, funny and kind—with the man who’d been raining hell on the Brunettis with not a hint of conscience. And now she had to beg him to cooperate with her after hiding from him for nine weeks.
No, she wasn’t going to beg. She was going to demand that he do this for her. She couldn’t show weakness in front of a man who didn’t understand the meaning of family.
“Mrs. Cavalli?”
“Don’t call me that,” Alex snapped.
“I’m sorry. You look...quite unlike yourself,” came the tentative response from one of the receptionists hovering behind the huge swathe of gleaming white marble designed to intimidate anyone who dared assume they could approach the mighty Vincenzo Cavalli.
But not her.
She squared her shoulders. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“Shall I get one of the Mr. Brunettis for you? They’re both in the building,” a different woman asked, her perceptive eyes taking in Alex’s state.
“No, thanks.” Leo and Massimo, as powerful as they were, couldn’t help her now. Only the devil she’d tangled with would do. “I was told on the ground floor that Mr. Cavalli has taken over this floor. Is that right?”
“Yes, he has. He’s already made many changes—”
“Is he in there now?” Alex interrupted.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks, Miriam,” she added, looking down at the shiny plaque sitting in front of the woman. “I’ll just... Don’t announce me.”
The woman nodded, sympathy shining in her eyes.
Alex looked away. The chance to get a quick, quiet divorce had come and gone. Now she needed this marriage to work. And, oh God, Vincenzo was going to love that, wasn’t he?
But only temporarily, she promised herself.
Whatever deal she made with Vincenzo, it only needed to last for as long as she needed him. After that, she would walk away forever. From his charming words, his penetrating eyes and him. Far away from him. From her own naive heart and its foolish hopes.
Vincenzo wondered if going so long without regular sleep was making him hallucinate. If his sanity was truly hanging by its last thread. Alessandra’s continued absence—with not even a leaked rumor in the last nine weeks about where she was—had stripped away any semblance of civility from his demeanor.
Even his own team—people who’d been with him for more than a decade—were giving him a wide berth for fear of having their heads bitten off. He hated admitting it, but the ease with which Alessandra had walked out on their far-too-brief marriage rankled like a festering sore.
And still, he wasn’t ready to give up. The creak of his door had him barking out a command to be left undisturbed.
His words stuck in his throat as the tall, lithe form of his runaway wife stood inside his office, her back plastered to the door, her white-knuckle fingers clutching the strap of her cross-body bag, neatly delineating the globes of her high breasts in a way he was sure she didn’t realize.
“Hello, Vincenzo,” she said, and then he knew she was real.
That soft, lilting voice, with its strange mix of American and Italian accents—he’d know it in his sleep. He’d had it whispered in his ear while he’d moved inside her body, finding refuge in it at long last, after never knowing it. Refuge that had been denied him for more years than he cared to count. Peace that he hadn’t been able to afford however many millions he had made.
And then, just like a very vivid dream that you never wanted to wake up from, that refuge, that sense of peace had been snatched away from him.
No, she had snatched it away. At the first sign of trouble, she’d run. Very possibly straight into her ex’s arms.
His heart thudded in his chest as he took her in, his blood rushing through his veins with a ferocious hunger along with a burning resentment for how easily she evoked his desire. But something was different about her.
This Alessandra looked nothing like the woman who’d worn her hurt in her eyes when she’d learned who he was, nothing like the advocate who’d argued passionately about the children she championed all over the world, or like the beautiful princess he’d taken to his bed for a night and decided to make his wife the next morning.
One night and he’d been lost. Enslaved as simply as if she’d woven a spell around him.
This woman looked as if she was barely held together at the edges.
Her clothes had seen better days. At first glance, she could be mistaken for a poor grad student with no time or energy for anything beyond academics.
Her hair was a glorious mess, a light brown halo around her face, the edges falling to those high breasts. Her skin had always been golden, but now she was tanned, as though she’d spent the whole of the last nine weeks outdoors.
Frolicking under the sun with her ex, perhaps, the insanely jealous part of him piped up.
But it was her eyes that transformed the panorama of her perfectly symmetrical face. They held a fire Vincenzo had never seen before.
Instead of guilt or shame or any of the other emotions he’d imagined he might see when she returned, pure challenge shone in her eyes. Her mouth, lauded for its pillowy pout, was set into a firm line. Now that he was over his shock, he recognized the energy, the determination pouring out of her very stance.
She didn’t want to be here. But she was resolved to a particular action.
“Welcome back, Princess,” he said, pushing his chair back, but without making a move to get up. He wasn’t entirely sure his legs would hold him. His throat felt hoarse, his heart pounding away at a rate that threatened to send it bursting out of his chest. She’d been gone for weeks without a word, leaving him in a special kind of hellish limbo.
“Had enough of traipsing around the world with your ex?” he said, baring his teeth in a mockery of a smile.
She startled but recovered fast. Pushing away from the door, she ventured a few steps in. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I was nowhere near Javier.”
The hotter the anger that flared inside him, the more Vincenzo forced himself into stillness. He’d be damned if he showed his fragmented self-control in front of a woman who’d run out on him at the first sign of trouble. “No? Both he and you conveniently disappeared at the same time for over two months. It’s a logical conclusion.”
She snorted, her nose scrunching with distaste. “You think I’d run away from one deceitful, dishonest man to another?”
Beneath the resentment still burning within, Vincenzo heard the truth in her indignation. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering at how far his jealousy had taken his thoughts. How much Alessandra’s abandonment of their marriage had affected him.
How much he wanted the loyalty she gave so freely to the Brunettis.
“And yet, when I finally tracked him down on the phone, your ex wouldn’t deny that you weren’t with him.”
She sighed. “That’s because Javier, just like you, is a devious bastard. If he thought it would torment you, he’d say anything. He isn’t particularly happy with me at the moment, like the rest of the world.”
Vincenzo heard the weariness in her tone but it did nothing to assuage his own jagged emotions. Nothing to tell him that he was any different from that damned ex of hers. Nothing that would remove Massimo’s taunting claim that Vincenzo had only been a rebound fling for her. “But he knew where you were, si?”
“Yes,” she admitted, her gaze searching his face. “He got me in touch with a friend of his, a stud farm owner in Brazil.” Something shifted in her expression. “But he wasn’t with me at any point.”
“And while you were having this extended temper tantrum on a stud farm in Brazil, did you wonder about what it might look like to me? Nine weeks, Alessandra, you were gone for nine weeks with no word. Not even a bloody text.”
“You knew I was safe within a week of me leaving. I told Massimo to inform you.”
Vincenzo caught up to her in two long strides, frustration mounting. Almost as tall as him, Alessandra looked straight at him, chin lifting, shoulders squaring. Readying herself for a battle. Dio mio, where was that seductively sweet, uncomplicated woman that had beguiled him in Bali? “I’m your husband. Being informed secondhand, especially by that taunting creep Massimo, that you’re quite safe in some hole that you’ve crawled into is not acceptable.”
The slender set of her shoulders tightened. “What did you want from me, V? A call telling you that I was questioning everything you said and did with me, that I couldn’t even bear to look at myself in the mirror because I’d made such a fool of myself, or that the thought of being near you while you happily destroyed Massimo and Leo made me physically nauseous?
“I needed to get away. From you. From Greta. From all of it.”
“And?”
“And what? What’s with the interrogation? How can you not see that all the promises we made to each other mean nothing when the foundation itself is cracked?”
The last bit of his temper frayed and his voice pitched dangerously low. “And if it’s broken, you simply walk away, instead of fixing it?”
Still, she didn’t back down. “Not if it’s completely shattered, like my trust in you.”
Tears and hurt were preferable to this version of Alessandra that looked at him with stony defiance and distrust. “I guess Massimo is right.
“The Alessandra that’s lauded in the papers, that captures millions of hearts with her take-charge attitude is a sham. The Alessandra that said she’d always dreamed of having a big family is a lie.
“The woman I married is in fact an impulsive brat who runs when things don’t go her way.
“Whose promises means nothing.
“Who clearly thinks marriage is only fun and sex and romantic escapades. Who’s so immature that she can’t even stand and communicate with the man she’d promised to spend the rest of her life with.”