Sicilian's Bride For A Price

CHAPTER TWO

OF COURSE THE infuriating man couldn’t simply text her the name of the hotel when he’d ordered her to dress appropriately, Ali thought, as the black Mercedes weaved through the heavy traffic, leaving the bustle of the city behind.

But having known Dante since the age of twelve, Ali had made a guess.

Dante was a man who expected, no, demanded the best of everything in life. He had a reputation for being a perfectionist with his employees but then no one complained because he rewarded hard work and ambition. God, she’d really gone looking for reasons to hate him back then.

The luxury Mercedes pulled smoothly into the courtyard of the latest on-trend, five-star resort that had been renovated last year to look like it could proudly belong in any posh European city, with the boat-filled canals of the Chao Phraya river offering a lovely view. The seafood at the restaurant was to die for, Mak had informed her, and he’d heard it from one of his many connections in high places.

Okay, so the worst thing that could come of this meeting was that she could walk away having had a delicious dinner at a lovely restaurant. And to prove to Dante that she could fake class and poise with the best of them.

She smoothed her hand over her stomach as she stepped out of the car and was pleased with the light pink sheath dress that she’d chosen to calm the butterflies. In the guise of studying the hotel’s striking exterior, she took a moment to study herself in the reflection of the glass facade.

Her long hair, freshly washed and blow-dried to within an inch of its life, fell to her waist like a dark silky curtain, her only jewelry a thin gold chain with a tiny diamond disappearing into the low V-neck of her dress. The linen dress was a cheap knockoff of a designer brand she couldn’t afford on her erratic income. But she looked like a million bucks, the fabric clinging to every dip and rise of her toned body as if it were custom designed for her.

The light pink was set off perfectly against her dusky skin and she’d let Kiki do her makeup—smoky eyes, gold bronzer and pale pink lip gloss. Tonight, she would be the sophisticated, poised Ali her mother had raised her to be, even if it killed her.

Another glance at the financial papers of her mother’s charity hadn’t changed reality. Other than a huge influx of cash, there was nothing anyone could do to save it. So, if Dante had something that could help, Ali would listen. She would treat this as a meeting with a professional.

Her beige pumps click-clacked on the gleaming cream marble floor as she walked up to the entrance to the restaurant. Soft yellow light fell from contemporary chrome fixtures. Beige walls and cream leather chairs gave the restaurant an utterly decadent, romantic atmosphere. Her belly swooped as Ali caught sight of Dante’s bent head, the thick jet-black hair glittering in the lights.

Gripping her clutch tighter, Ali looked around. Every other table was empty. She checked her knockoff watch and saw it was only seven in the evening, nowhere near closing time.

The setting was far too intimate, far too private. Just far too much a scene plucked right out of her adolescent fantasies. But before she could turn tail and run out of the restaurant, that jet-black gaze caught her.

The mockery in those eyes made Ali straighten her shoulders and put one foot in front of the other.

He stood up when she reached their booth—a cocoon of privacy in an already silent restaurant. He’d exchanged the white shirt for a slate-gray one that made his eyes pop. With his jaw freshly shaved, thick dark hair slicked back half-wet, he was so...no, handsome was a lukewarm word for Dante’s fierce masculinity.

The scent of his aftershave, with an aqua note to it, was subtle, but combined with the warmth of his skin, it sank into Ali’s pores. Every cell in her body came alive.

“Where is everybody?”

“Everybody?” he said, standing far too close for her sanity.

Ali sat down with a plop, hand smoothing over her stomach. “Yes, people. Other Homo sapiens. Who might want to partake of the delicious food I’ve heard they serve here.”

There was no mockery now when he looked down at her.

Heat swarming her cheeks, Ali ran her fingers through her hair. “What?”

His gaze swept over her face, her hair, the low V-neckline, but went no farther down. A shiver clamped her spine. “You clean up nice.”

“Oh.” The one syllable hung in the air, and she looked away, pretending to smooth her dress, putting her clutch down.

He took his sweet time sitting down, not opposite her, but on the side of the table, to her left. Ali shifted her knees away to the far right.

“If you scoot any farther down, you’ll fall off the seat. Why are you so jumpy?”

Ali stilled, clasped her restless fingers in her lap. “I’m not.”

“No? Really?”

His accent got thicker any time he got a little emotional. It was one of the tells Ali had picked up a long time ago. Pulling herself together, she met his gaze. Did he really have no idea what being near him did to her equilibrium? Did he really not feel the charge in the air around them, the pulse of undercurrents in every word, every look...? God, how was it that she was the only one who felt so much?

Not that she wanted Dante to be attracted to her. Her shoulders shook as a shiver of another kind traveled down her spine.

“If you’re jumpy around me, it means you’ve arranged a little something for me. A surprise.”

Ah...that was what he attributed it to. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She couldn’t even blame him because back then she’d been a little devil all right.

She’d lit sparklers in his room one Diwali night that had put holes in the new suit her papa had bought him. And that had almost lit the entire house on fire.

She’d taken a hammer to his new cuff links—Vikram’s present—and minced them to so much dust.

Oh, and let’s not forget the documents for an important merger she’d taken from his room and shredded.

When he’d brought his girlfriend to meet her papa... Ali groaned at the memory. And those weren’t the half of all the destructive things she’d done to show how much she hated him.

She cleared her throat. “I told you. I’ve changed.” When he raised a brow, she sighed. “I didn’t know where we were dining. How could I arrange anything? I was just surprised to see no other patrons, that’s all.”

“I had my secretary book the entire restaurant for us.” When her mouth fell open, he shrugged. “If you were going to cause a public scene—which given my knowledge of your character seemed like a high probability—I wanted to minimize the public part.”

“Fair enough,” she replied back with all the sass she could manage. Other people would have been a buffer, other people would have distracted her from this...whatever made her skin prickle with awareness.

Luckily, before her sudden awkwardness could betray her, the maître d’ arrived.

“A bottle of your best white wine and the shrimp salad for both of us.”

Ali lifted her chin. “I don’t want shrimp.”

“No?”

His fingers touched her wrist, and again, Ali pulled back as if he were a live current.

His jaw tightened, a flare of heat in his eyes. “Even though it’s what this restaurant is famous for and you made that soft moan when your eyes came to that item on the menu?”

Her cheeks aflame, her heart pounding, Ali stared down at the menu. The words blurred, the tension between them winding round and round.

“Madam?” His expression set into a pleasing smile, the maître d’ spoke up. “If you don’t want the seafood that Mr. Vittori has ordered,” he said, “might I suggest something else?”

“No.” Ali took a deep breath. It wasn’t the poor man’s fault that Dante was playing with her. And she had played into his hands like she was still that irrational, impulsive hothead who wanted to hurt him for everything that was wrong in her world. “I’ll have the shrimp, thanks.”

“Don’t,” she simply said, once the man left.

Don’t manipulate me. Don’t rub me the wrong way. Just don’t...be in my life.

Dante leaned back, his stare intense. “Don’t make it so easy.”

Before Ali could launch into another argument, he placed a rectangular velvet case on the table. Ten minutes into the dinner and she felt like she was already emotionally wound up. She fell back against her seat. Of course, he was the master manipulator, playing on weaknesses, while he had remained untouchable.

“What now?”

“Open it.”

Just get it over with. Just get it over with. And walk away.

Ali opened the clasp. She caught sight of the tiny, exquisitely cut diamonds set into flowers with such delicate white gold that it always took her breath away, as it glittered under the soft lights. She rubbed the necklace back and forth with the pads of her fingers, compulsively, a balloon of ache in her chest. As if the gentle love of the woman who had worn them might have rubbed off on the stones.

It had taken everything she’d had in her to sell her mother’s precious piece.

She pulled the box to her and clasped it so tightly that her knuckles showed white.

First, he had dropped the word about her mother’s charity, now the necklace. Dante never did anything without some kind of payoff. He hated her just as much as she did him, and still he had sought her out. The hair on the nape of her neck prickled while her belly went on a swan dive.

“Why do you have this? What do you want, Dante?”

* * *

What do you want, Dante?

Dante stared at the tears shimmering in Alisha’s large brown eyes, his breath punching into his throat.

It was the equivalent of a punch to his gut. He had borne enough of those in Sicily in his teenage years. Boys he’d known all his life had turned against Dante overnight; calling him names, roughing him up.

All thanks to his father’s crime.

Those boys’ punches had lit a fire in him back then, fueling his ambition to build a name for himself, separate from his father’s. They had turned his young heart into a stone that never felt hurt again.

He had craved a fortune and a name all of his own. He had decided never to be weak like that again; never to be at anyone’s mercy, least of all be controlled by a woman’s love. And he had turned it into reality.

But the candid emotion in Alisha’s face as she touched her mother’s necklace, the havoc it wreaked on him, was a thousand times worse than any harm that had been inflicted on his teenage self.

When he’d delved into those reports on Alisha, he’d been shocked to find that Alisha had visited London several times over the last five years.

She’d had to go to London to deal with problems concerning her mother’s charity. She had even spearheaded a charity gala to raise money. He’d been looking for leverage and he had found it.

He wasn’t cheating Alisha out of anything she wanted. He was, in fact, proposing he give her what she wanted out of it, the one thing she held precious in return for what he wanted.

No, what threw him into the kind of emotional turmoil that he’d always avoided like the plague was that he was involving her in this play.

Alisha, who was a mass of contradictions, who he’d never quite figured out, who’d been the kind of flighty, selfish, uncaring kind of woman he loathed, was an unknown.

From the moment she’d come to live with her father, Neel, she’d hated Dante with an intensity that he’d first found amusing and then dangerous. Even worse, she’d always incited a reaction in him that no one else provoked.

But all this was before the changes in her the last six years had wrought.

Cristo, the sight of her walking into the back alley a few hours ago—the white spaghetti top plastered to her breasts, her shorts showing off miles and miles of toned legs, the utter sensuality of her movements as she pushed away tendrils of hair falling on her face, the sparkle of the fading sun on her brown skin...

The shock in her face, the greedy, hungry way she’d let those big brown eyes run all over him...even that hadn’t made a dent in the need that had pulsed through him.

Dios mio, this was Neel’s daughter.

She was forbidden to him. And not just because he was determined to take the last bit of her father’s legacy from her. But because, with everything he planned to put into motion, Alisha would be the variable. His attraction to her was a weakness he couldn’t indulge, much less act on. There were only two positions for women in his life: colleagues like Izzy and a couple of his business associates, women whose judgment he respected, women he genuinely liked; and then there were women he slept with who knew the score, and didn’t want more from him.

Alisha didn’t fall into either of those camps.

“Dante? What the hell are you doing with my mother’s necklace?”

“I bought it back from the guy you sold it to.” He made a vague motion to her tears, more shocked than discomfited by them. He’d never seen her as anything but poised to fight her father, him, Vikram, with all guns blazing. Never in this...fragile light. “Looks like I made the right call in thinking you would like it back. Why did you sell it?”

She took another longing look at the box before pushing it back toward him. “For a pair of Jimmy Choos.”

“Don’t be flippant, Alisha. I never understood why you were always so determined to be your own worst enemy.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. And really, did you invite me to dinner just to point out my flaws?”

He forced himself to pull his gaze from the way she chewed on her lower lip. Suddenly, everything about her—her mind, her body, Dio...everything—felt fascinating. Everything was distracting. “I know your mother’s charity is failing. Why didn’t you come to me for help?”

“Why didn’t I come to you for help?” Some of that natural fight in her crawled back into her shoulders. He liked her better like that. He didn’t want a vulnerable Alisha on his hands for the next few months. She laughed. White teeth flashed in that gamine face. “Have you met me? And you?”

Despite himself, Dante smiled.

He’d forgotten how witty Alisha could be, how she’d always laughed in any situation, how even with all her tantrums and drama she’d made the house lively when she’d come to live with Neel after her mother’s death. Even with grief painting her eyes sad, she’d been so full of life, so full of character, even at the age of twelve.

He’d never gravitated to her, true, but when she’d blossomed into a teenager, it had seemed as if her hatred for him had grown too. The more he had tried to fix things between her and her father, the more she had resented him.

Her gaze slipped to his mouth for a fraction of a second. Every muscle in him tightened. “I’d starve before I take anything from the company. Or you.”

He was far too familiar with that spiel to question it now. “What did you need the money for?”

“If you know I sold it, and to whom, then you know why. Come on, Dante, enough beating around the bush.”

The waiter brought their food and she thanked him.

She dug into the food with the same intensity with which she seemed to attack everything in life.

Dante, mostly because of the jet lag, pushed his food around. He watched her as she sipped her wine, her tongue flicking out to lick a drop from her lower lip.

He wanted to lick it with his own.

The thought came out of nowhere, hard and fast. He pushed a hand through his hair and cursed under his breath.

Maledizione! In all the scenarios he had foreseen for this, he hadn’t counted how strikingly gorgeous Alisha had become. Or the intensity of the pull he felt toward her.

Whatever tension had been filling up the air, it now filled his veins. And he realized it was because she wasn’t focused on him anymore.

Not so with him. Not even the constant reminder, the ironclad self-discipline that made him a revered name in his business circles, the one that told him this was nothing but a quid pro quo, could distract his gaze from the expanse of smooth brown skin her dress exposed. He took the wine flute in his hands, turned it around and around, watching his fingers leaving marks against the condensation.

He wanted to trace his finger against the slope of her shoulders to see if her skin was as silky as it looked. He wanted to touch the pulse at her throat, to sink his fingers into her silky hair and pull her to him, hold her against his body as he plundered her mouth...

She put her fork and spoon down, and took another sip of her wine. Then she leaned back all the way into her seat, her head thrown back over the top. The deep breath she took sent her chest rising and falling.

Basta! He needed to direct this conversation back to his plan.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to in the last few years.” The words slipped out of his mouth. She looked just as shocked as he felt. “You know, other than living like a hobo and moving around every few months.”

She shrugged, and the simple gold chain she wore glimmered against her throat, the pendant dangling between her breasts playing peekaboo with him. “You don’t have to pretend an interest, Dante. Not now.”

“You’re his daughter. I’ve always been interested in what you do with your life. Until I realized my interest only spurred you toward destruction.”

“Water under the bridge.” She put her napkin on the table, her expression cycling from wariness to fake cheer. “Thank you for the dinner. That was a treat, even with your company. And on second thought, thanks for buying my mother’s necklace back.” She took the velvet box from him and put it underneath her clutch on the table. Waggling her brows, she leveled a saccharine smile at him. “You must know me well to give me a present I would so appreciate.”

Being on the receiving end of that smile was just so...jarring. “You mean to sell it again, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“That will only take care of the payroll for another month. I’ve seen the financials, Alisha. The charity will be bankrupt in a month.”

Her mouth tightened. “I’ll find a way. I always do.”

“Or you could just ask me for help.”

“I told you, I don’t want your money. Or the company’s or Papa’s. I need to do this on my own.”

“Does the charity home really mean that much to you?”

“It does. It’s where Mama grew up. I spent so much time there with her. Some of the happiest moments of my childhood were there.”

“If you really want to save the home, put aside your irrational resentment of me and I will funnel some much needed money into it.”

“And what do I have to do in return?”

“Marry me.”

CHAPTER THREE

MARRY ME...

Marry Dante...

Ali’s mind went into a loop over that one phrase, like one of those gramophone records her mama had had.

Marry Dante, marry Dante...

Dante, who thought she was selfish and spoiled.

Dante, with whom she reverted back to that lonely girl come to live with a distant father, distracted brother and a resented changeling, after her mama’s sudden death.

With Dante she would always be her worst self.

Panic skittled over her skin like a line of fire ants crawling up her legs. She needed to marry Dante like she needed a hole in her head. It would be like all the bad decisions she’d ever made steamrolled into one giant boulder that would chase her for the rest of her life.

A hysterical sound released from her mouth.

“Alisha?”

She brought her gaze to his, stood up from the booth, picked up her clutch and turned. “You’ve gone mad.”

“Alisha, wait.”

Nope.

She didn’t want to hear more. If she did, he would rope her into it.

As a master strategist, he wouldn’t have sought her out across the world, wouldn’t have approached her if he hadn’t already figured out a way to make her agree. And she needed to flee before that happened. Before their lives were even more tangled. Before she betrayed herself in the worst way possible.

Dear God, when it came to him, all she had left was her pride.

“Alisha, stop!” His arm shot out just as Ali got ready to sprint across the restaurant if necessary.

Long fingers roped around her wrist and because of her desperate forward momentum, her foot jerked to the side. Pain shot up through her ankle and she fell back against him.

The breath punched out of her as he anchored her by throwing his arm around her midriff.

Unstoppable force meets immovable object...

“What happens when they crash, Alisha? Who gets destroyed?”

The world stopped tilting at that silky whisper as she realized she’d spoken out loud. And yet, the explosion his touch evoked continued to rock through her body.

The scent of him was all over her skin, filling each pore, drowning her in masculine heat. His legs were thrown wide, the tensile power of his thighs just grazing the back of hers, his chest pushed up tight against her back. Her chest expanded as she tried to stop the panic. On the exhale, the underside of her breasts fell against his steely arm. A soft hiss of warm air bathed her neck, making it a thousand times worse. Or was that pleasure skittering across her skin?

An onslaught of sensations poured through her, her skin prickling tight, and yet, a strange lethargy crawled through her limbs. She wanted to lean into him completely, until her bottom was resting against his hips. She wanted to feel him from chest to toe against her back, she wanted to rub herself against that hard body until he was as mindlessly aroused as her. Until that iron will of his snapped like a thinly stretched rubber band.

As if he could guess the direction of her thoughts, his fingers tightened around her hip, digging into her slightly to keep her still; to keep her from leaning back and learning his body’s reaction to her.

Because, really, in what universe did she imagine Dante would want her back with this same madness?

She groaned—a feral, desperate sound. Why was it that everything she did came back to taunt her a thousand times worse?

“Because you don’t think before you do,” came the voice at her ear. Ah...perfect! Of course, she’d said that out loud too. “You’re impulsive, brash and if I hadn’t caught you, you would have fallen flat on your face.”

“Kissing the floor sounds like a better alternative,” she said, her words throaty and whispery.

“Will you sit down and listen if I let you go?”

As if operating on an instinct that defied rationality, her fingers clenched over his wrist.

She opened her eyes and swallowed hard. Since he’d undone his cuffs earlier, her palm rested against a hair-roughened wrist. She rubbed the skin—the rough texture, the plump veins on the back of his hand—the startlingly sensual contrast between her and him inviting her along further and further.