The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction by Olivia Gates
He shouldn’t have been so smug.

He should have known that she’d had more cards to play. And she’d played them. Played him. And how.

She was the woman he’d spent the most revitalising, enthralling time of his life with. The woman who’d made him forget exhaustion and every preconception about himself and what he could feel.

She whimpered at his sudden withdrawal. It had only been moments since their lips had met, before he’d learned her real name and plunged from the heights of delight to the depths of disillusion.

So what if she wasn’t the woman he’d thought her to be? It should change nothing. His body was reaching critical mass. And she was offering…everything. He should drag her inside, throw her to the ground and take it all. Then walk away.

The Heir’s Scandalous Affair by Jennifer Lewis
“I came to New Orleans to find my late husband’s son, his heir” Samantha explained. “His name is Louis Dulac.”

“I’m Louis DuLac,” said the handsome mystery man with whom she’d just shared a night of incredible passion. His features grew hard and he gazed at her through narrowed eyes.

Sam’s knees almost gave out. If he hadn’t been holding her wrist she might have plunged backwards down the stairs.

“But you can’t be.” The words fell from her lips, dazed and barely coherent. “It’s impossible.”

“Come in,” he said. This time, it was a command rather than an invitation. He still held a firm grip on her wrist.

She felt herself struggling for breath. He tugged her towards him. “You’re my late husband’s…oh no.” She tried to free herself.

He pulled her closer. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Available in May 2010
from Mills & Boon® Desire™

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The Moretti Seduction by Katherine Garbera

The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction by Olivia Gates

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The Heir’s Scandalous Affair by Jennifer Lewis

The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction

by

Olivia Gates
The Heir’s Scandalous Affair

by

Jennifer Lewis

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Prodigal Prince’s Seduction

by

Olivia Gates

Dear Reader,

Being a romance author has got to be one of the best jobs there is. For in what other job can one experience the rush of falling in love over and over again?

And it happened again in the second instalment of THE CASTALDINI CROWN trilogy, where I fell in love with my hero, Prince Durante D’Agostino. Each hero I write is another fantastic specimen of manhood and humanity, but Prince Durante has characteristics that surprised even me as I wrote his story. Contrary to all the über alpha males I’ve written about, he was so open to the notion of falling in love, so wholehearted about it. He was like that massive source of romanticism and sensuality that had gone unplumbed until he laid eyes on Gabrielle Williamson and it all came pouring out.

I mean, who could resist a hero who wants to savour the torment of not touching the woman who has him on fire until he gets to know more of the “real” her, who serenades her, who actually offers the other cheek, and who eventually gives up everything to atone for the sin of not trusting her, for hurting her?

I was certainly not immune, and I hope no reader will be, either.

I hope Durante and Gabrielle’s story gives you as much pleasure as it gave me while writing it.

I would love to hear your thoughts at oliviagates@ oliviagates.com.

Also please visit me at www.oliviagates.com.

Thank you for reading.

Olivia Gates

Olivia Gates has always pursued creative passions—painting, singing and many handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career: writing.

She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.

When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.

To my husband. To my daughter.

Both of you, my one and only. More and more, I wouldn’t be doing all this without you. Thank you for being who you are.

One

“I want one hour with you.”

Prince Durante D’Agostino froze at the foyer’s threshold.

That voice. Coming out of nowhere. So low he shouldn’t have heard it over the live jazz music blaring its infectious energy from the ballroom where the charity function was in full swing.

He heard nothing but its softness. As if faders had been hit, boosting it, dousing every other sound. More. As if it had been generated inside his head, a caress of a thought, making all else recede from his awareness. An awareness that bristled with responses so tactile that every hair on his body rose as if he were caught in a field of static electricity.

He frowned. What was all this, over hearing a woman’s voice? Over yet another blatant invitation?

A scowl seized his face as he swung around to the offending entity. And everything receded farther. Disappeared. He felt as if his blood stopped in his arteries even as everything else hurtled through him. Heat, sensations. Urges.

Eyes. From the shadows behind the foyer’s door, they trans-fixed him. Pieces of heaven. Staring up at him from a face that was what the offspring of an angel and a siren must look like.

Then the impossible creature spoke again. “One hour. I’ll pay one hundred grand for it.”

His eyes dragged away from the clear skies of hers to the lips spilling that offer. Dimpled, dewy and flushed as if she’d been sucking on bloodred cherries. They were still again, slightly parted. But he could see them as they’d wrapped around each syllable of her spell, could imagine them nibbling and suckling their way down his body…

He shifted, stunned to feel himself hardening, zero to one hundred in two seconds.

Aroused? Here? From just a look and a few words?

He expanded his chest in an effort to draw in more oxygen, to drive blood to his head instead of his loins. He managed only to suck in her scent—clean, with a tinge of jasmine and a deluge of pheromones. Every cell in his body twitched, revved.

Then she stepped out of the shadows and he forgot any intentions or delusions of subduing his body.

This might not be happening anyway. He might still be in the back of his limo, dreaming this apparition as he dozed off on the way to the charity event he was sponsoring. Thirty-six sleepless hours must have taken their toll on his nervous system. It would explain her, the epitome of his every far-fetched fantasy. From hair the shade of fire he’d once seen in a painting and wondered if it truly existed in nature, a waterfall of silk his fingers itched to twist through, to a complexion of such clear olive that it offset the vividness of her hair and the lightness of her eyes, to features sculpted and aligned in such an unusual way that they screamed character and whispered sensuality, to curves and swells in the abundance and the distribution to answer his every specification.

But she was no figment of his overworked mind. She was real.

What was unreal was her effect on him. Women had been throwing themselves at him since he’d turned seventeen, and even then he hadn’t operated on hormones. Then had come this woman.

She’d aroused everything in him just by breathing those words, by being near. Now, by just looking at him, she had his imagination flooding with images and sounds and sensations and scents, of drenched silk sheets and hot velvet limbs, of cries rising in the dark along with the aromas of arousal and satisfaction.

Was this it? The overtures of the breakdown Eduardo and Jade claimed he was teetering on? Was this surreal reaction the first crack before a chasm tore his psyche wide open? Not that he cared. If this was a breakdown, maybe it was exactly what he needed.

“I have a check right here.” She fumbled inside her evening purse. “Make it out to the charity or cause of your choice.”

He watched her supple hands, with those neat, short, unadorned fingernails, found himself imagining grabbing them, sucking each finger until she was begging for his lips and teeth and tongue elsewhere…everywhere.

He took a step toward her, maybe not to translate fantasy into action, but to feel her—any part of her—against him, to confirm that she—and what she evoked in him—was real.

She stumbled back. He surged forward to stop her, only to become trapped in the swarm of people who’d materialized between them.

Maledizione. He hadn’t even heard them approach. Now there was nothing but the cacophony of their intrusion, the encroachment of their self-interest.

“Prince Durante! You’re finally here!”

“Prince Durante, this way.”

“You must come this way first, Prince Durante.”

“I have someone who’s dying to meet you.”

“Me, too, and you’ll definitely want to meet him first.”

He was suddenly sorry that he’d left his bodyguards outside. He fought the urge to signal them to disperse the throng who’d so rudely fractured the pristine intensity that had cocooned him with her. But they might rush to deal with the situation with inappropriate force. They’d been jumpy ever since Jeremiah Langley had stabbed him a month ago.

Apart from bellowing for everyone to get the hell away from him, he had no recourse but to let them sweep him along, watch her recede as she remained standing where she’d first intercepted him in that evening gown that could have been spun from the hues and radiance of her eyes. The last thing he saw of her before the ballroom doors closed was her arm falling to her side, the check held limply in her hand.

He buzzed his head bodyguard, muttered an order to keep track of her if she left. He couldn’t risk losing her.

Only then did he start playing the evening’s sponsor, burning to wrap everything up so he could do what he really wanted to do. The first thing in years that he couldn’t wait to do. Seek her out, give her whatever she wanted and experience that eagerness and exhilaration she’d inspired in him, something he hadn’t felt in…ever.

Gabrielle Williamson’s eyes clung to one thing among the ebbing wave of people. The man they’d swept along, the one who towered above them all.

So that was Prince Durante D’Agostino.

She’d thought she knew what he looked like from endless photos in newspapers and magazines, including her own publications. She’d known nothing. Every photo had downgraded him to the man who deserved every letter of his reputation as the world’s most notorious, eligible and panted-after royalty.

In reality he was a…a god.

And she’d approached him—okay, ambushed him more like—with her pathetic offer. A hundred grand felt ridiculous now. But what would an hour with a god rate?

The ballroom door closed, severing the mesmerism of those azure twin stars he had for eyes.

A tremor hit her. A second hit harder. Then a deluge broke out, until she was shaking like a rag in a storm.

What was wrong with her? She was the one who was supposed to surprise him into agreeing to give her that hour. To make a solid pitch before he asked questions. Especially about who she was. She’d wanted to eliminate—or at least postpone—the prejudice her name had already elicited from him. She’d wanted a fair hearing.

But seeing him in the flesh, even from the back, had almost blanked her mind. Then he’d turned, and everything had vanished.

She’d forgotten where she was, what she was supposed to say, could only stare at him. She’d moved only when the tractor beam of his will had forced her forward for his inspection. And boy, had he inspected. She’d felt…inspected down to her cellular level.

Then, those people had charged him, saved her from doing that rag-in-the-storm impression in his presence. They’d also taken him away before he’d said yes. And he’d been about to. Or she could have been imagining that, along with his surreal impact on her.

Imagining shimagining. She was a thirty-year-old divorcée who hadn’t had fantasies even as a young girl. Being the only child of parents whose marriage had sunk daily into the dark realities of bankruptcy and depression hadn’t been conducive to flights of fancy.

That was part of the convoluted journey that had brought her here today, on a mission to save her own company from bankruptcy, while repaying the man who’d supported her family during those desperate years. King Benedetto of Castaldini—Prince Durante’s father.

After her father went bankrupt, the king, a friend and former business associate, had convinced him to move his family closer, to Sardinia, so that the king could be of more help. And he had more than helped, had continued to do so after her father’s death six years later. He’d supported her and her mother and financed her education until she’d graduated from journalism school.

She’d since insisted on repaying her family’s debts with interest. But while she’d needed to settle the financial debt, she’d always cling to the emotional one.

It had been because of that bond, along with what had been solid financial advice at the time, that she’d invested heavily in stocks and assets in Castaldini. It was partly why Le Roi Enterprises, her publishing company, was in trouble now. The kingdom had been hit by a steep recession after the king’s stroke six months ago.

His condition had been hushed up until his recovery hadn’t conformed to his doctors’ optimism. His grim prognosis had leaked out, and Castaldini’s stock market had crashed like a meteor.

He’d called her a couple of weeks ago, requesting a video meeting. He’d said he had a solution to all her problems. She remembered that call…

She’d waited for the meeting to start, contemplating how to turn down his offer of more help. It was one thing to settle her father’s debts and see to their household upkeep, but another to float a company with multinational subsidiaries. She didn’t think he could afford anything of this magnitude now. And she couldn’t be so deeply indebted again, even to him. She’d been so driven to repay her family’s debt that she’d done something as crazy as marry Ed. But…could she afford to turn down help, when hundreds of people depended on her for their jobs?

Then a stranger came onto the screen. It was several dropped heartbeats before she realized it was the king. The incredibly fit and virile seventy-four-year-old man she’d last seen seven months ago at her mother’s funeral had metamorphosed into an emaciated, hundred-year-old version of himself.

Tears surged behind her eyes, at seeing him like that, at the acrid thankfulness that her mother’s illness had been quick and merciless so that she hadn’t suffered his fate, hadn’t lasted long enough to see her beauty almost mummified.

“It’s good to see you, figlia mia.”

The wan rasp that used to be the surest baritone forced a tear to escape her control. She wiped it away, pretending to sweep her hair back. “I-it’s good to see you, too, King Benedetto.”

His smile was resigned, conciliatory. “No need to tiptoe around me, Gaby. I know that seeing me must be a shock for you. But I had to speak to you face-to-face as I ask you this incalculable favor.”

He was asking, not offering, a favor? She didn’t see how that could solve her problems, but the very idea of being of service to him infused her with energy and purpose.

“Anything, King Benedetto. Ask me anything.”

“You once wanted to approach Durante with a book offer.”

She frowned, nodded. She’d asked him how best to approach his elusive son with an offer for a motivational biography, when the enigmatic media-magnet had turned down every offer to publish anything about his life. The king had told her to forget it.

That had been before her mother’s death and she’d since forgotten about it, along with every plan she’d had, lacking the drive to pursue anything new that required focus and determination. Her grief was dulling to a pervasive, crippling coldness, and there was nothing and no one to ameliorate it.

She’d made no friends since she’d returned to New York, seemed to have made only enemies. She had colleagues and employees, was on good terms with most, but she hadn’t forged a real closeness to any of them. Her uncles and their families lived states or continents away and she’d never been close to them anyway. From the men who hunted her for the fortune they thought she’d inherited and the one she’d acquired, to the disaster of her marriage, to the disappointment of her attempts to wash away its ugliness in other men’s arms, to the women who treated her like a succubus who’d drain their men of life, it felt as if she’d lost one bond to the world after another. Her mother’s death had cracked the last link. Why bother? was the one thought left echoing inside her.

Only the employees who’d lose their jobs and the causes she’d be unable to contribute to if she threw in the towel had kept her going, just enough to keep her head above water.

“I feel responsible for your company’s problems.”

The king’s rasp dragged her back to the moment. She blinked.

“Please, don’t, King Benedetto. It’s not your fault.”

She bit her lip on much more. Her company’s decline had started with the discovery of her mother’s terminal illness, and its slow death had begun when a part of her had died with her mother, a part she didn’t know how to resuscitate, didn’t feel like trying. Castaldini’s recession had just been the last straw.

But she could see how he’d think that, because she wasn’t alone in her decline. Many smaller corporations heavily invested in Castaldinian stock were floundering. Even though the new regent, Prince Leandro D’Agostino, had stepped in and floated the economy, the original hit had been bad. She’d heard that Leandro would work his way down to companies at the level of hers, but doubted her company could last until he did. And then, even with his power and financial clout, as regent only, he didn’t promise the market the long-term stability a king would. Advisors had urged her not to await rescue, said Leando might even let lesser interests go under to stabilize the big picture.

The king went on. “Durante could revive your company, either with a bestseller or in other ways if he so wished.”

That was what her advisors had said. That only a guaranteed bestseller or a merger with any major player would buoy her company. Prince Durante would have answered both criteria. But previously, the king had said Durante wasn’t an option. Which meant…“So he’d be amenable to an offer now?”

“I’m not saying he would be.”

That stymied her. “Then what has changed?”

“Your situation. And mine.”

She didn’t understand what her situation had to do with his, only that he thought a positive result might be obtained now. She should jump at the opening. Yet she wanted to do nothing but say goodbye and sit staring into space. It seemed that her lethargy wasn’t about to let her challenge-tackling abilities escape its somnolent grip. She sighed. “I’ll give it some more thought—”

“I’m asking you to do it, Gaby.” The king interrupted her. “And I don’t just want you to sign a contract with him. I want you to insist on being his editor or ghostwriter or however you get such books written. I want you to work as closely as possible with him so that you can convince him to come back to Castaldini.” Gabrielle adjusted the screen, as if that would help his words make sense. He elaborated, ending her confusion. “He left five years ago, saying he’ll never return as long as I live. And he’s kept his promise. He didn’t even call when I had my stroke.”

Something trickled through the clotted mass of indifference inside her. Emotions. Surprise, indignation…anger.

What kind of monster would do that to his father, and a great man like King Benedetto, too? And to think Durante had been the one she’d admired most among all Castaldinian princes, his self-made success intriguing her far more because it didn’t have the crown as its goal. As the king’s son, Durante was the one prince who was ineligible for the crown. And then, success didn’t describe what he’d achieved. He’d become one of the world’s richest, most powerful men, starting with investment banking, then branching into just about everything, garnering a worldwide reputation for being unstoppable, as well as inaccessible. But it was one thing to reject intimacy as evidenced by his misanthrope/heartbreaker reputation, another to reject the man who was his father and king.

“Why all this…antipathy?” she asked.

“Durante blames me for terrible things, things I haven’t been able to prove I wasn’t responsible for.” Okay. So it was more complicated than she could imagine. She really couldn’t form an opinion here. She shouldn’t. It had nothing to do with her. And she wanted it to stay that way. “But it doesn’t matter what he believes. He must come back, Gaby. It’s not only that I need my son—Castaldini needs his power and influence.”

Scratch the no-opinion status. No matter Durante’s reasons, he was a callous creep if he not only didn’t care about his father’s incapacitation but also about Castaldini’s troubles. And she was supposed to make him care?

She asked that, and the king nodded. “I know you can. You’ll come in with a fresh slate and views, with legitimate business offers and concerns. But give me your word that you’ll never tell him of our connection. That would make him send you straight to hell. And none of us can afford that. The situation is grave, and I must be clear. I want you to do anything to make him come back.”

His words had echoed long after their goodbyes. What he’d meant by anything was so glaringly clear, it was blinding. Seduction.

She was resigned to her femme fatale reputation. But it hurt that even the king thought seduction was one of her weapons, her only one, even. Still, she excused him. He was old and sick and desperate to resolve his problems, to secure his kingdom’s future.

And then, what he’d proposed was a worthy cause. If she succeeded—seduction certainly not on the menu of maneuvers she’d use—everyone would come out a winner. The king would have his son back—a reconciliation that was bound to make said son happier, too—Castaldini would get a heavy-hitter to help its regent pull its fat out of the fire, and she’d stabilize her company.

But the damned prince hadn’t even acknowledged her messages. She could think of only one reason. His initial background check on anyone who approached him must have accessed the usual slander. Seemed he’d thought such unsubstantiated filth enough to condemn her.

Furious, she’d called in a favor with one of his insiders and gotten his schedule for the next week. Besides being impossible to get hold of, he was also known for badgering the privileged into doing more for the world. This function was one of his traps where he wrung what he could get out of them for his favorite causes. She’d intended to intercept him, make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. At least, that had been the plan.

So far, all she’d done was stammer three sentences and got nothing out of him but that disconcerting stare.

She needed results, but she had to restart her own volition first. Or at least the autopilot that had steered her for months now.

One or the other must have kicked in, because she moved at last.

She leaned on the door as she opened it. The exuberance of jazz and the forced gaiety in the overcrowded ballroom slammed into her. But what almost knocked her off her feet was the power of his gaze. He’d been watching for her, as if certain she’d follow him.

Not that she could. Those people who had the same idea as her—of ambushing him here—left her no chink to get through.

He left her no air to breathe as his gaze drilled into her across the ballroom. She began to think it might not be a bad thing after all if she didn’t get a chance to talk to him alone.

She was a seasoned businesswoman who’d been through a battlefield of a marriage and divorce, who’d before and since been pursued by men, had thought she’d seen and tried all kinds, to her crushing dissatisfaction. But Prince D’Agostino fell far outside what she’d thought to be her inclusive experience. To lump him under “man” with those she’d had experience with was as accurate as lumping a top-of-the-food-chain predator with a jellyfish. Something very sure of itself told her she shouldn’t get closer. For any reason.

She should leave. Now.

She had to pry her gaze—her will—from his first.

Somehow she did, was at the door when a rough velvet whisper hit her between the shoulder blades. “Don’t run off yet.”

Logic said that omnidirectional/internal sound effect was the surround system’s doing. But there was no logic here. There was only the influence the voice exercised, the reactions it ignited. The certainty that it was talking to her.

She swayed around, found him on the dais in front of the mic, his gaze still cast on her like a stasis field.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for paying the ten-grand admission fee. But because you’re getting…restless, I’ll fast-forward to prying some real contributions out of you. You have the auction list, but in light of a certain…development, I have made some changes. Now the first item on auction is…myself.”

Two

If Prince Durante D’Agostino had announced he was Superman and launched into the air to circle overhead, there wouldn’t have been a more drastic reaction to his announcement.

Not that it would have shocked her. He did look like some superhuman being as he dominated the scene just by standing there, the rugged nobleness of his features and his leonine forehead accentuated by the swept-back mane of raven satin, the jacket of his sculpted designer charcoal suit casually pushed back by the hand resting on his hip, his white shirt stretching across his torso, detailing the daunting power beneath. He looked like a modern god swathed in the trappings of the times that equalized other men but that didn’t begin to contain the influence he exuded, to disguise his in-his-own-league nature.

His gaze panned the ballroom yet somehow managed not to release hers. That alone kept her heart practically dropping to the polished Carrara marble floor. But what restarted her tremors was what she saw in those eyes—an intensity untouched by the cynical amusement with which he watched the mayhem he’d kicked up.

“Before you get too excited,” he finally said. “I’m not auctioning off all of me, just my ear. Considering how in demand it is, with so many of you attempting to talk it off, I’m offering one hour of its exclusive use.” His lips tugged into what had to be the most arrhythmia-inducing weapon ever deployed on susceptible females. And it had her in its crosshairs. “I already have an opening bid. One hundred grand.”

Now she knew how mamma mia had been coined. It had to have been a woman who’d first exclaimed it, as a brutally gorgeous male plucked her strings.

And she did feel like a marionette, compelled to obey his every tug, any reluctance or misgiving evaporating in the excitement his mischief sent through her. She walked back under the pull of his challenge.

When she stopped at the fringe of the bidding crowd, he put his lips to the mic, implanted hot, wild images and sensations straight inside her, pitched his voice an octave lower. “Do I hear one hundred ten?”

Over three-dozen people, mostly women, raised their hands. She’d beaten them all in speed of response.

His lips spread in satisfaction, his pose grew more languid, a conqueror certain of his victory, indulgent in his triumph. “Thank you. Do I hear one hundred twenty?”

Her hand was up in the air before she could will it to be there. Seemed he’d jumpstarted her competitiveness. More. He’d sparked the first sign of life in her since she’d witnessed her mother’s being extinguished.

He kept raising the bid, and her competition dwindled. Soon suspense was fast reaching the point of overload.

When a dozen hands still shot up in the air when he reached the four hundred fifty grand mark, her stamina snapped and recoiled like an overextended string.

She blurted out, “I bid one million.”

A hush fell. Everyone turned to gape at her.

He straightened, his eyes losing all lightness, singeing hers through the charge that filled the space between them. “Now that’s a nice round figure. Anyone willing to top that? No? Fine, then. I have one million from the lady in blue. Going once, going twice—”

“I bid ten million.”

Durante saw shock seize his mystery woman’s face before he registered the words that had caused it. Only then did he drag his eyes and senses from her and search out the new speaker.

His every muscle tensed. How had he gotten past security? How had Durante not noticed him before?

His security had messed up. As for him, all his faculties had been converged on her, everything else skimming his consciousness without leaving an imprint.

And there was the now-gaunt, wild-eyed Jeremiah Langley. Staring at him like a drowning man would at a lifeboat. A month ago he’d looked at Durante as if at his own killer, before attempting to stab him. Durante couldn’t imagine how Langley had ended up blaming him—and not the investments he’d made against his advice—for his bankruptcy, but he’d hushed everything up, not wishing to add criminal charges to the distraught man’s troubles. He’d also postponed announcing Langley’s bankruptcy until he sold shares that would leave the man with minimal debt. But he’d made it clear to Langley, and to his security—he didn’t want to see the man again. Not in this lifetime.

No one knew how things stood between them, or that Jeremiah didn’t have the ten million he’d bid for Durante’s leniency. He couldn’t call Langley on it without outing him. Langley had cornered him into accepting his so-called bid as the winning one.

And that was his worst crime.

She had already accepted defeat. This time, she was walking away. He might not have more of her. Not tonight. Unacceptable.

He would have more of her. And if he had his way, as he always did, he would have all of her.

Gabrielle felt all animation drain from her system.

The moment her bid had burst from her incontinent mouth, she’d launched into feverish calculations to determine how she could part with that much cash in one lump sum in her current situation. Then that ten-million-dollar sledgehammer had fallen, pulverizing both worry and hope.

So that was it. She’d bid and lost. And he was no longer looking at her. Ten million dollars would distract even him.

So what was that tightening behind her ribs? Disappointment?

How stupid was that? This scheme wouldn’t have worked anyway. She didn’t know how she or King Benedetto could have thought it might. All her moronic endeavor would achieve was to give the scandal sheets fuel for the coming decade. She had to leave before the paparazzi he’d banned from the event got wind of this and ambushed her. Leave. Now. And don’t look back.

She managed that, but still felt as if she were wading through quicksand. His gaze had latched on to her again, robbed her of dominion over her own body. Desperation to get away kicked in.

In minutes she was in the parking lot, running to her car.

She remote-opened her door, was reaching for its handle when a boom cracked the silence of the night.

“Stay.”

She dropped her keys. Her purse. Probably a few months’ to a couple of years’ life expectancy, too.

She slumped against the warm metal and glass as if pressed there by the presence closing in on her. She heard nothing but the blood thundering in her head. The presence expanded at her back, pinning her to her support, squeezing her heart.

She fumbled for the door handle. She’d managed to open the door when that voice hit her again, a quiet rumble this time.

“Stay.”

She clenched her eyes shut, pitched forward, her nerveless weight closing the door with a muffled thud. That one word.

An invocation. Deeper and darker than the moonless night.

She turned around, leaning on the car. And there he was.

The good news was that he kept a dozen feet between them. The bad news was that it made no difference. And why should it? He’d been dozens of feet away in that ballroom and had still overwhelmed her.

“Stay?” Where was her voice? She’d addressed him before in a breathless whisper. This time it was a husky rasp. Both were nothing like her usual crisp tones. “What am I? Your poodle? What’s next? Roll over? Beg…?” She winced, stopped. Where were her brakes?

“How about ‘stop,’” he drawled. “Before you inflame my already-raging imagination beyond control.”

His voice wasn’t the same as what had flowed from the sound system earlier. It was so much more layered and modulated and hard-hitting, the prominent r’s of his accent far more intoxicating. Hearing it without distortion delayed her comprehension of his words. Then it hit her and she almost went up in a puff of mortification.

She couldn’t believe she’d said something so provocative, just begging for misinterpretation. He’d never believe she hadn’t meant anything beyond sarcasm.

But wonder of wonders, his eyes weren’t stained with that knowing derision she was used to from men. His emitted only pure excitement. “Would ‘stop’ be less open to unfavorable interpretation? How about ‘don’t leave’?”

His voice sluiced another rush of heat over her. She quivered. “Still orders, both of them.”

He tilted his head. Light ignited the azure depths of his eyes and carved dimples in his sculpted cheeks. “At least they don’t have canine connotations, if my idiomatic English serves.”

And she did something she’d thought was beyond her, now and forever. She giggled. Giggled.

His eyes widened as if she’d electrified him. He retaliated with something far more debilitating than electricity. He chuckled.

She struggled not to melt into the ground. “You’re pleading less-than-perfect English skills to explain the inappropriateness of barking ‘stay’ at me across the parking lot like that?”

“Barking? Still going with the dog motif, eh?”

“You did bark,” she mumbled in embarrassment. “You frightened me out of my skin. I think it’s still pooled on the ground.”

His eyes swept down her body, until she felt it was her dress that lay at her feet. “From where I’m standing, your skin is still enveloping you like a glove and, propriety notwithstanding, you can see what the sight does to me.”

More heat splashed through her as she fixed her gaze on his so it wouldn’t stray to “see” anything. “See? Perfect English skills.”

“I’m sure my English tutor would love to hear that the ulcer he swore I gave him has ultimately been validated.”

“You gave your teacher hell? You’re pulling my leg.”

“Again, do watch what you say to me, or I might succumb and tell you exactly how and where I want to pull both your legs.”

Images slammed into her. Vivid, tangible. Those large, perfectly formed hands dragging her by the thighs, opening her around his bulk as he bore down on her…

“I’ve changed my verdict,” she choked. “Your English skills are not perfect. They’re horrible. Evil. Sietto un uomo cattivo.”

Suddenly the sounds of the night were amplified in the stillness that echoed between them. Whoever had said one could drown in another’s eyes must have been describing Prince Durante’s endless azure seas and the submersion of their focus.

Just as she felt her lungs using up the last tendril of oxygen, he exhaled. “Mia bella misteriosa…parlate italiano?”

She realized she’d said he was a wicked man in Italian. It had once come to her as unconsciously as English did. She used to talk and think in an inextricable mix, a habit that had faded since she’d returned to the States. This was the first time in many years that she’d reverted to the second-nature practice. It felt as if a missing part of her had clicked back into place.

Then more registered. He’d called her his mysterious beauty, asked if she spoke Italian.

“I lived in Sardinia and Italy from age five until I returned to the States to enter college at seventeen.”

These revelations were way beyond the simple yes his question warranted. But he made her want to do unknown things. Flirt, tease. Confide. It had to be the premium royal testosterone overexposure.

After a long moment when he looked at her as if at a gem with a thousand facets, he breathed, “Dio Santo, what are you?”

“What…? Uh, yeah, I haven’t exactly introduced myself yet.”

“No, you haven’t. Exactly or otherwise.”

“Umm…yeah, there’s sort of a reason I haven’t. You see, I’m—”

“You are mia bella misteriosa, who’s done what no woman has ever done—offered money to spend time with me.”

“Now that I find impossible to believe. I bet women offer anything and everything for time with you. I bet most wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t even one-on-one.”

“You think so? Because of who I am?” Her gaze wavered with uncertainty. He elaborated. “Rich and royal?”

Her laugh morphed into a snort that would have made a sailor proud. “Are you kidding? Or are you fishing? Women would throw themselves at you if you were a penniless nobody.”

His eyes flared. “Coming from anybody else, I’d think that a worthless exaggeration, but from you, I know it’s how you see me. For it’s how I see you, too. As for the one-on-one basis, that is the only way I would accept to have time with you.”

A moan of stimulation stumbled over her croak of embarrassment.

Hell, the man was reducing her to a pubescent state. But he was doing something even worse.

He was obliterating the distance between them.

Mesmerized, she took in the control and power that permeated his every move, the breadth of shoulders and chest that owed nothing to padding, the sparseness of waist and hips, the hardness of thighs rippling beneath exquisite fabric as he prowled toward her, a majestic creature by birthright and by merit. Now this was a man to make her revise her stance on swearing off men forever, a pledge she’d made happily years ago.

Which was a crazy thing to think.

Crazier would be to act on such insanity.

She stood there waiting for him to reach her with the same fatalism she’d watch a collision in progress, could think only that no man had ever looked at her like this. As if she was something incredibly unexpected, and unexpectedly incredible. The wonder in his eyes drowned out the urgent voices that yelled that his damage potential would far surpass the devastation caused by any such collision.

Every step closer to his mystery woman solidified into fact what Durante had sensed from the first moment he saw her.

This was new. Surprising and stimulating. When he’d been certain nothing and no one would ever surprise or stimulate him. She did both, and far more, with every breath.

Her effect on him was so unprecedented that he’d done the unprecedented. He’d delegated running the rest of the charity function to his deputy. And he’d sent his bodyguards away, forbade them to follow him. He wanted to be alone with her at any price.

Her face tilted up as he approached. Beams from the nearest streetlight embraced it in a swathe of highlights and shadows. Her tresses billowed in the night breeze like undulating flames.

Contradictory compulsions wrenched at each other inside him. The need to capture, conquer, and the urge to savor, slow down.

The second impulse won out, forced his feet to stop before they took him all the way pressing her against her car.

He was close enough to reach out and run his fingers through that blazing cascade of hair. He didn’t. Somehow. He drew deep of her scent instead, let it permeate him, before he let it escape on a grudging exhalation. “So…you bid one million dollars for an hour with me.”

Her shoulders jerked on a dejected shrug. “Yeah. And for the record, I would have doubled the winning bid if I could have.”

He inhaled sharply. “You think I’m worth that much?”

“I think you’re worth every dollar of your billions.”

He bit into his lip. It was either that or drag her to him and bite into hers. As he would. Just not yet. What flowed between them deserved the reward of leisure and thoroughness. But holding back was a punishment, too. One her every word made harder to take. He was used to flattery, could sense falseness and self-interest even in trace quantities. He detected only sincerity from her. Alien urges swamped him, to punch the air, to thump his chest.

He shoved his hands into his pockets so they wouldn’t find their way around her. “I do have more hours available apart from the one that other bidder won, you know?”

“Oh. Oh. You mean…?”

The surge of hope on her face made him fist his hands in his pockets, emphasizing his—problem. It was either that or snatch them out and pounce on her. “I mean, if you’re still interested, I’ll take that million-dollar check.”

“If?” She coughed. Her eyes tore from his, slammed around, the dazed excitement in them tingling through him on a path that connected his fingertips to his scalp, his loins to his toes. Her gaze settled at her feet. “There it is.” She dropped down in a crouch, pooling her flowing taffeta skirt on the ground, making her look like a gigantic flower as she retrieved the matching evening bag. She jerked back up, not lingering to look up at him from that position, to milk it for all the sensual promise it could yield.

She didn’t need any of that. She needed only to breathe—to be—to exercise maximum effect on him. But it pleased him beyond measure that she didn’t operate that way.

She fumbled with her bag, produced her checkbook. He watched as she scribbled furiously with even, beautiful print. Then she tore out the check, extended it to him. “Fill in the beneficiary.”

He took it, folded and placed it in his outer pocket before he reached into his inner one, produced his own checkbook and pen.

In a minute he tore a check out, handed it to her. “I’m bidding two million. Add to that whatever amount you see fit, fill in the total and make it out to whomever you like.”

Her movement to take the check felt like a reflex. She didn’t look at it, remained gaping at him. “What’s this for?”

“The two million is my bid for the time we’ve had together so far. The amount you’ll specify is for the rest of the evening.”

“The whole evening?”

“And the night.”

“The night?”

Durante’s lips twitched. Her squeaks would have amused him if they weren’t pouring fuel on his inflamed senses. She really hadn’t thought it a possibility he’d offer this. “If you wish it.”

Her blush intensified until she seemed to smolder in the night. And he saw it in his mind’s eye in high-definition clarity, himself carrying her to the nearest flat surface to ravish her for that hour she’d bid on, before sweeping her away from the world to do so again for several nights on end.

It was all so surreal he felt he was dreaming it. Yet it was so real it abraded him with its intensity and immediacy. He’d never experienced such a state of distressed arousal. And for him to be in this condition just by looking, imagining…Unbelievable.

At last she spluttered, “Uh…isn’t this a bit…you know…?”

He inclined his head. “Too fast? Too soon? You think so?”

A moan-giggle escaped her, another blow to his restraint. “If you think I can think right now, think again.”

“Exactly. This isn’t about thinking. This is about feeling. About knowing. I know what you make me feel. You made me feel it from the first moment. I wanted more than an hour with you. I want this night, bellissima, and as many more as you’ll give me.”

“That’s assuming you’ll want more nights after the first…” Her face scrunched into a wince. “Okay, excuse me as I give swallowing my tongue a serious shot.”

“With me around to do it? What a waste that would be. And why would you even want to try?”

“Because it sounded as if I was agreeing to share this night with you and was trying to make sure it wouldn’t be the one and only.”

Every word out of her mouth…He pressed the heel of his palm to his breastbone, as if that would quell the itching behind it. “And you didn’t mean that?”

“God, no, I-I…” She threw both hands over her face, before looking up at him, helplessness and accusation filling her expression. “It’s your fault. Exposure to you is turning my gray matter into day-old milkshake.”

A laugh tore out of him, drove his head back with the force of its unexpectedness and power. “Turnabout is fair play. Although you turn mine into the boiling version.” He reduced the distance between them another step, testing his stamina, thrilling to the torture of balancing on the edge of loss of control. “And I will want more nights. As many as I can have. I hope you won’t hold back to observe an ‘appropriate’ period before indulging in intimacy. I want nothing more than to end this night with you in my arms, in my bed.”

She melted back against her car. “And I want nothing more than to end this night in both.”

Gabrielle watched Durante’s eyes flare at her admission, knew he’d reach for her. She had to say the rest now. Now.

“But I can’t.”

The flare subsided, ice putting out the blue-hot flames.

Something twisted beneath her ribs. She couldn’t bear to see disappointment replacing exhilaration in his eyes.

She hurtled on. “Believe it or not, I did approach you with business and only business in mind.”

Relief swamped her when his eyes simmered again. “I believe you. But it ceased to be business the moment you laid eyes on me.”

She didn’t even think of denying the fact. “Yes.” She still had to qualify it. “But I can’t afford to let it be that way—”

He cut across her unsteady words. “You can’t afford to let it be any other way. Business will be taken care of in due time. But I’m not postponing this for anything else’s sake.”

“But what is this?”

“Something unknown to either of us, something unprecedented. And you know it as well as I do.”

Gabrielle stared at him. He kept stunning her. But what most amazed her was that she picked up no malice from him, that malignant triumph most men transmitted when women made the mistake of not only falling for them, but admitting it, too.

Not him. She felt he was above pettiness and double standards. This was also no line that he gave every desirable woman he met. In fact, his ruthlessness likely originated from his never instigating the pursuit. He was renowned for his detachment.

There was nothing detached about him now. She just knew he was being swept along the same unstoppable current as she was.

That didn’t mean she could let herself be swept. There was far more at stake than the elapsing of “an appropriate period before indulging in intimacies.” And not only couldn’t she tell him what, but that this was happening at all made her feel she’d fallen flat on her face into someone else’s life. Men like him—and there were no men like him—didn’t appear in hers.

She looked up at him, at once pleading for him to understand her chaos and afraid he’d shimmer and disappear. “Whatever this unknown and unprecedented thing is, and no matter how I feel about it or how right it feels to feel this way, I’m still totally weirded out by the detour everything has taken. Hours ago I didn’t dream…”

“…you’d see me and the world would cease to matter.”

His confidence sent her explanations scattering. “Oh, quit making it harder for me to make sense. The world might have ceased to matter, but it didn’t cease to exist. I had this proposal memorized and now I barely remember what it was all about.”

“I barely remember why I came here tonight, too. I don’t care about anything now beyond you.”

“Maybe if you hear my proposal, you’ll change your mind.”

“I won’t. Not even if you’re coming to me with the patent for an eternal-youth or super-power serum.”

“Actually, I was thinking along opposite lines. That you’d be so opposed to my offer, you’d drop me.”

“So it’s something you think I’m liable to turn down flat? Is that why you were trying to sweeten me with the hundred grand? Is there something dark and controversial about you, mia ragazzaccia?”

The way he said “my bad girl” quickened her melting rate. “Oh, I wish. Okay, really, I don’t. I’m pretty grateful there’s nothing so…interesting about me. I’m just—”

“The woman I want to know everything about. And to that end, I want to conduct an experiment.”

She blinked. “An experiment?” She stopped. “God, I keep repeating things. I might start asking for crackers next.” His smile widened, blinding her with a flash of charisma. She groaned. “So, what’s this experiment? What are you out to prove?”

“That you were onto something great when you approached me without revealing your identity and purpose. The labels might have interfered with our impact on each other. I don’t think your name or your business will shed any light on who you really are. I want to know you. What you are, what makes you tick, what shaped you, what you want and why and how you want it. I want to revel in what we have blazing between us, to enjoy us, man to woman. For tonight.”

Another breaker of reaction shuddered through her. “Are you for real, or am I dreaming you up?”

The heat of his smile became almost unbearable. “I take it you agree to participate in my experiment.”

She shook her head. “That experiment is skewed and the results are bound to be unreliable. I know exactly who you are.”

“You only think you do. But what do you know? My statistics? My reputation, status and estimated fortune? Sterile facts mixed with conjectures and financial data. Did knowing any of the above prepare you for the effect I have on you in the flesh?”

She raised her hands begging for respite. “Okay. I admit the ‘labels’ conjured up a man who, while impressive, has nothing to do with the flesh-and-blood reality of you. In fact, I’m having a tough time connecting you at all to that man.”

“You see? If you can’t access your preconceived ideas about me, we’re on a level playing field. Say yes, bellissima.”

“Now I know why you’ve soared so high. You’re relentless.”

“That’s your expert opinion as a fellow unstoppable force?”

“Hah, I wish. Or again, not really. Okay. On one condition.”

“Anything.”

She exhaled a tremulous chuckle. “Not very businessman-like of you, all these carte-blanche concessions.”

“I’m not a businessman now. I’m just a man who knows you’re the woman to whom only carte-blanche concessions will do justice.”

“God, stop with the impossible-to-live-up-to stuff.”

“You’ve already lived up to all of it by making me feel this way, think this way. So, what’s your condition?”

“That you give me back my check.”

He didn’t hesitate, not in expression, not in action. He produced her check as the words left her lips. Delight fizzed in her blood. He hadn’t paused to ponder her intention, trusted that whatever it was, there was nothing underhanded about it.

Her hand trembled as she extended his back to him. “Here’s yours. Now I don’t owe you untold millions.”

He didn’t reach for it. “Keep it, bellissima. You wouldn’t owe me a cent. That’s for the causes of your choice.”

“Oh, I would owe you. I wanted to make a donation through you, while gaining something for myself. But if I take your check, I would be ‘donating’ your money. So, you donate what you wish and I’ll do the same and let’s take money out of the equation, start this on a real equal footing.”

He took the check. “I’ll just keep it until you wish to donate something you can’t afford. Now, shall we?”

Her heart began to race her. “Shall we…what exactly?”

“Spend the rest of the evening together. As for the night…I won’t push for anything you can’t wait to…donate.”

Three

Durante leaned back against the railing of his yacht, almost tasting the beauty of his bellissima an arm’s reach away.

She stood on the first rung, holding on to the railing, arching into the wind, framed against the lit-up Manhattan skyline they were sailing parallel to.

They’d just left port. There was no moon, but stars hung like tiny beacons above her, and beams of light from the yacht’s interior stroked her back in gold, flaring fire through the tresses that billowed behind her as if they were powered by her vitality.

Up until a moment ago, he’d kept catching himself bating his breath. He realized why.

Subconsciously, he’d been waiting for something to kick in, that cynicism that had always been an integral part of him. On some level, he expected to be slammed back to a reality that had nothing to do with this state of affinity. Experience—his and others’—kept trying to intrude with warnings that interaction always doused the testosterone-generated spark.

But then, his pleasure in being near her wasn’t just about anticipating the pleasures of bedding her, being inside her. He thrilled to her every gesture and glance. Her every word engaged his demanding sense of the absurd, fueled his eagerness for repartee. He’d wondered if the uncontainable drive to possess her painted his reactions to the rest of her in such intensity, or if it was the other way around.

Now he knew. The amalgam that was her was inextricable to his senses, his mind. Physically and mentally, she was a woman the likes of which he’d never dreamed of encountering.

The thrill of their encounter had been escalating, and he’d gladly succumbed to that unprecedented rapport, reveled in the overpowering attraction. And he hadn’t even touched her yet.

“This is magic.”

He hardened more at her huskily voiced wonder just as he softened, too, inside. “Si, ciò è magica, bellissima. You are.”

She swung toward him, a smile frolicking across her lips, her eyes glittering with awareness and delight. There was also a touch of mischief. But the emotion that made him struggle not to crush her in his arms was the hint of hesitation—trepidation, even.

Could it be she was wary of him?

No. He knew she trusted him just as instinctively as he did her. So why was she uneasy? Did she suspect that this couldn’t be real? That it would end? He didn’t share that worry. Not anymore. He couldn’t tell her not to worry, but he would show her she had no need to.

She took one hand off the rail, swept her arm in a graceful arc, eloquently encompassing their surroundings. “I meant this. This perfect night, on this enchanting yacht as it sails through the placid ink of the river.”

“But take your magic—ours—out of the equation and it would be just another yacht cruise on another pleasant evening.”

She sighed, a sound of contentment. “You must be right. I’ve been on night cruises before, in great weather. Felt nothing like this.”

Before he could revel in her admission, Giancarlo, his allaround right-hand man, caught his eye in the distance.

Durante inclined his head at her. “Are you ready to eat?”

She jumped down from the railing. “I’m ready to dive into the river and catch fish in my teeth.”

“Why didn’t you say you were hungry?”

She seemed taken aback. “I didn’t realize I was.”

“I didn’t, either. Other hungers overshadowed it.”

Delight swelled in his chest at the guilelessness, the unhesitating consent of her gaze and nod.

He wanted to forget his resolve to delay their gratification, knew she wouldn’t stop him if he did. But holding back, while chafing, was more gratifying than anything he’d ever done. He gestured for her to precede him, exhilaration shooting through him. She gave a choked laugh and almost skipped ahead.

As they traversed the massive deck to the dining hall, she exclaimed, “Is that another swimming pool, under that plexi roof? There was a huge one on the second-level deck.”

“Yes, that’s the covered one. I’ll take you around after I’ve fed you. You can take a dip in either. I can’t offer you something to wear, but you’ll be draped in night and wrapped in water, their silk caressing yours unhindered by barriers.”

She sped ahead as if to escape his suggestion, muttering, “I’ll take a dip-check, thanks.”

He chuckled, pointed out another section. “This is where the whirlpools, saunas and Turkish bath are.” He pointed to another area. “And there are the only modern additions to the yacht’s outfitting—a fitness room and comprehensive water sports equipment storage. We can windsurf, water-ski, jet-ski, scuba dive and sail, if you’re into any of those.”

“I’m into them all. I was raised on a Mediterranean island, too, remember? In my opinion, water sports are the ultimate freedom a human being can enjoy. It’s been too long since I’ve had the pleasure.”

“You’ll never again be deprived of your freedoms and pleasures, bellissima. This yacht and all its facilities are at your disposal to enjoy whenever and however you please.”

Her eyes glowed up at him with that light that seemed to shine from inside her. “That’s too generous, but I can’t—”

“It isn’t, and you can and will accept. Say, ‘Yes, Durante. I’ll do you the honor of considering your yacht my own.’”

Her grimace was at once teasing and moved. “You have the rest of your life to wait? That’s how long it will be before I say something like that.” He opened his mouth to override her and she rushed to add, “But if your offer stands after tonight, I will take advantage of one or two weekends’ windsurfing or jet-skiing.”

She still didn’t believe this was going to last beyond tonight. He’d have to convince her by action, not words. So he said nothing for now, just smiled down at her.

They were crossing the foyer of the uppermost deck when she turned to him. “When you said ‘yacht,’ I thought, ‘yacht.’ Then, when I became certain this floating fortress is where we were headed, I wanted to ask just how you define the word.”

His lips twisted. “Yacht-obsessed magazines define this one as the ninth largest private boat in the world. From my specs, it’s four hundred feet long with twelve suites of more than six hundred square feet each, not counting the thousand-square-foot master suite. There is also more than eighty thousand square feet of covered and open space.”

“Whoa. It’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen and I’ve been to some exorbitant places. Just this staircase is mind-boggling. I tried to count the steps and got lost.”

“Now I feel guilty that I had you climb all one hundred and twenty steps. I should have carried you.”

“When I run up to my tenth-floor apartment for exercise? I pick my teeth with a hundred steps.” His admiring gaze devoured the results of her hard work. Her constant blush deepened. “This endless balustrade looks like it’s made of one piece of solid brass. Which it can’t be. Care to explain how it came into being?”

He grinned at her attempt to swerve to safer topics. “It was hand-beaten from solid brass by twenty top metal craftsmen who re-created it from remnants of the original balustrade.”

She whistled as he seated her at the table that had been set for them. He signaled for Giancarlo to serve dinner right away.

Her eyes panned the huge chamber, lingering on the heavily gilded and embossed wall paneling and the intricately carved and adorned Baroque- and Ottoman-style furniture.

“Everything is so…ornate.” She turned to him, her eyes reflecting the flickering candles, that intelligence simmering in her ponderous look. “I somehow didn’t think you’d go for something so humongous and elaborate.”

“You mean pretentious and gaudy, don’t you?”

She didn’t seem to give denial a moment’s thought. “It is mighty pretentious, though I guess it stops a step shy of gaudy.”

He guffawed, loving this. “Everyone I bring on board bursts into raptures extolling my extreme taste. Not you, though.”

The look of absolute horror on her face was priceless. “Maledizione…spiacente…I’m sorry…” She groaned. “God…I’m so rude.”

“You’re candid. And it goes straight to my head. You’re also right. There’s nothing here that appeals to me, either. But this yacht was my mother’s. It was her father’s gift to her on her marriage. He was flaunting his wealth, wanting to prove he was on par with the king his daughter married. He named the boat La Regina del Mare, to underline my mother’s new royal status. He also wished her to keep the Boccanegra family name and old-world nobility in the minds and envies of the jet-set, the new world’s aristocracy. But she had no interest in that and sent the boat to languish at the docks of Napoli, where it fell into disrepair.

“After her death I renamed it Angelica for her, commissioned its restoration to its exact former glory, which I didn’t have the vaguest recollection of. I regretted my act the moment I stepped on board the finished product. But even with its…excessive size and interiors, I discovered I loved living on board and roving the seas. I thought to re-outfit it to my needs and tastes, but I decided to leave it as is. Eventually I will donate it as a museum in my mother’s memory, one that can be rented for huge sums that will go to the charities I founded in her name. I’m in the process of buying another yacht that doesn’t scream ‘party animal.’”

She sighed with the satisfaction of someone who’d been listening to a poignant tale. “Which is just about the last thing you are.”

“Sì. The sporadic sponsored charity event is the limit of my social mingling.” He only then noticed that Giancarlo must have served their entrées. “Which must be why the etiquette my mother struggled to infuse me with as a small child has rusted from disuse. Andare avanti…go ahead, please. I’ll talk and you eat.”

She immediately pounced on her plate, snatched up one of the golden, crisp lobster puffs. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He chuckled, shaking his head at his all-out reaction, started to eat himself. “So tell me…what made you move to Sardinia and/or Italy when you were five?”

She chewed, moaned in enjoyment, beamed at him. “I thought it was you talk and I eat. Lucky for you my mother never succeeded in teaching me not to eat and talk at the same time.” She reached for a second puff. “About the move—gotta say outside influences helped me make that decision. Like my parents hauling me there.”

“Ragazza difettosa.” His no-touching-yet rule was growing difficult. His hands ached to smooth those glowing cheeks, cup them and dip his tongue in those tormenting dimples and smile grooves. “You must know where I want to haul you.” Her eyes all but groaned Yes, please. He inhaled, reminded himself of his resolve. “So why did they haul you there?”

She reached for her champagne flute, her eyes losing heat and brightness. “It’s a convoluted story. I think it started with my father’s business in the States having many outlets in Italy and the surrounding Mediterranean islands. He went bankrupt around the time I was five. He also suffered from depression. In the years following his death, I’ve often asked my mother if she thought that influenced the decisions that led to his bankruptcy, or if it was the other way around. Not that I expected an answer, or thought it would make a difference.”

“When did he die?” He watched her put down the puff. It was clear her appetite was gone. He groaned. “Don’t answer that.”

The surprise in her eyes seemed directed at her own reaction, not his words. “No, I-I want to tell you. He died when I was eleven.”

He gritted his teeth, hating to see her suffer echoes of the anguish the child she’d been must have felt. “You were old enough to be aware of all the problems going on around you then.”

She nodded. “I was.”

“It still haunts you.”

She put down her glass unsteadily. “It’s not fun remembering nothing of my father but a man buried under so much gloom and despair. I try to cling to memories of the man he was beneath all that, but they’re rare. During those times he was wonderful, which makes it all more painful, knowing how much of him was wasted. Remembering how angry I was at him doesn’t help, either. I’ve since realized that he couldn’t help his condition, but try to convince a kid of that. I blamed him for his moods, his inaccessibility. And later on, I blamed myself for that blame.”

Everything she said struck chords inside him. He’d suffered something very similar. “Where was your mother during all that?”

She started to eat again, an adorably determined look on her face. “Struggling to protect me from the torment festering within Dad as it spread out to engulf us, and to keep him from disintegrating while not succumbing herself under the burdens thrown on the so-called ‘healthy adult’ in this setup.”

“You have a good relationship with her.”

She swallowed her mouthful convulsively, her eyes tearing up. “I had the best relationship a girl could hope for with her mother. She died seven months ago.”

He ached to stop this, to spare her reliving her anguish. But he felt she’d refuse to abandon the subject. She more than wanted to tell him. It felt as if she needed to. He wanted to give her anything she needed. He asked quietly, “How?”

“Sh-she had rheumatoid arthritis. A severe condition. Then, during a regular checkup, she was diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. She was dead within two months.”

“You were with her when she passed away?”

She nodded. “She didn’t live here with me, because her condition deteriorated whenever she left the Mediterranean climate. I went to her every minute I could. When we knew there was no hope of remission, she wanted to live at home. I wanted to be the one to take care of her, so I moved into her villa. I’d taken paramedic courses and administered the palliative measures that were all that could be done until…until the end.”

“You had medical supervision during that time?”

She bit her lip, hard. “Her doctor was on call and two nurses came twice a day to check on my measures.”

“And they found everything to their satisfaction.”

“It was easy to get it right. There wasn’t much to be done.”

“Yet you’re still afraid you messed up those simple measures, didn’t give the mother you loved—who trusted you to take care of her during her last days—the best care.”

He saw shock rip through her, as if he’d reached inside and yanked out her heart. Then, to his horror, her face crumpled, her teary eyes spilling over. “Sometimes I wake at night crying, terrified I gave her a wrong painkiller dose, that she was in agony and bearing it as usual, that I made her make the wrong decision in going home. That she died suffering because of me.”

Battling their physical need was one thing. But this need, for solace, he was powerless against. He hadn’t offered or sought comfort since childhood. He had to offer it now, seek it. To and from her.

He exploded to his feet, came around to her, pulled her up.

The moment she filled his arms, it was as if things were uprooted inside him. Separateness. Seclusion.

This. He’d been waiting for this. This woman. This connection. And he’d never known he’d been waiting.

She lay her head against his heart and trembled. He stroked her hair as he’d longed to from the first moment. It was beyond anything his imagination had spun. And so was what he felt for her. He wanted her to let go, give him all her resurrected misery to bear. He wanted her to pour out the rest. He was certain she’d never unburdened herself.

He prodded her to give him all. “Why did your father take you to Sardinia when his business collapsed? Was he going home?”

“No.” She sniffed, stirred, her eyes beseeching him to resume normalcy. He complied, let her go, somehow, seated her, went back to his chair, signaled for Giancarlo to serve the main course.

She stalled, tasting her lobster in lime butter sauce, asking Giancarlo about the recipe. When she ran out of delaying tactics, was in control again, she began talking. “Dad had a friend who asked him to relocate us there so he could help, which he couldn’t do effectively if we lived thousands of miles away.”

“And did he? Help?”

“Above and beyond. He paid off Dad’s debts, tried endlessly to put him back on his feet. But no matter what he did, Dad kept spiraling downward. This friend even took care of us after he died, financed my education until I graduated.”

“And you didn’t like that. Even though you liked the man.”

“God, how do you keep working out how I feel? Do you read minds?” She groaned. “But of course you do. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” Before he could tell her it was only her he was so attuned to, she went on. “Yeah, I love him. But I hated feeling so helpless, so indebted. I worked, paid my rent and expenses, but he was adamant about not letting me get a tuition loan. I only accepted when he promised he’d let me pay him back.”

“But he was only humoring you so you’d accept.”

“Your insight is uncanny, isn’t it? You realized at once what I only realized when I got a great paying job and demanded to repay him only for him to—surprise—refuse to take a cent.”

“But you drilled your way into making him take it, giusto?”

“Assolutamente giusto…dead right. I bet he finally took the money so he’d hear the end of it. Not that that was the end of it. When my mom finally gave me a real idea of the magnitude of our family’s debt to him, I became consumed with the need to repay it all, so I’d feel free, and she would, too.”

“And I bet you managed to pay it all back.”

Her lashes fluttered down again. “Eventually, yes.”

“And that cost you. What did it cost you, bellissima?”

Her lips twisted in something too much like self-loathing. “Marrying the worst possible man.”

The world stopped. His heart followed. “You’re married?”

Her eyes slammed back to his, enormous with alarm and agitation. “No. I’m divorced. Six years ago now. Grazie a Dio.”

His heart attempted to restart, lurched and clanged against the insides of a chest that felt lined with thorns. “Was he rich?”

She winced. “Filthy.”

“Like me?”

“Uh, no. Your wealth transcends filthiness into obscenity.” He couldn’t reciprocate her tremulous attempt to lighten things up. “You married him so he’d repay your family’s debts?”

“Actually, it was his idea. I was his PA and he heard me on the phone with my mom and used it as another pressure tactic.”

“He needed to? You weren’t attracted to him?”

“I felt nothing beyond unease that I couldn’t reciprocate his interest. But the job was great, so I kept hoping he’d find someone else. He didn’t, kept pointing out that I didn’t, either, that maybe I can’t feel…passion, which was okay because love stories never end well, anyway. I began to think he was right, as I knew nothing of what makes a relationship work or what a man who’d make a good husband was like. Compared to my father, he seemed like the essence of stability. And he made a solid case for a marriage between us built on mutual respect and realistic expectations.”

He barely stopped himself from snarling. “He conned you.”

“Oh, no. I decided to disregard my reservations, my lack of feelings for him, followed the lure of paying off my family’s debts in one chunk. I dug my own grave by being so mercenary.”

He snarled now. “You were nothing of the sort. He was the conniving bastard. If he felt anything for you, he would have freed you from debt and left it up to you to take him or not.”

“That would have only transferred my debt to him, and I would have felt honor-bound to marry him anyway.”

“He could have made it clear that there would have been no debt, or offered that you repay it in installments.”

“I did insist on including the condition in the prenups that our funds be separate and whatever he loaned me I’d return.”

“And he pounced on those terms,” he bit off. “You were what? Twenty? Twenty-one? And how old was he?”

“I was twenty-three. He was thirty-nine. And a widower.”

“He did con you. He convinced you to consider it a business deal in which pros outweigh cons, pretended he was satisfied with that. Until he got his hands on you.” Her shrug was loud with concession. He wanted to slam his fists down on the table. “And he didn’t pay off your debts.”

“How did you…? Oh, OK. I did say I married the worst man.”

“Actually, you said paying your debt cost you marrying said man. Most would assume that he did pay it. But I’d bet my fortune he didn’t. I know that because I know users, and that man was beyond that. He kept after you to break your resistance, but instead of building anticipation as he pursued you, he built up antipathy, planned to wreak vengeance on you as soon as he had you in his power.” He caught her hand, pressed it. “I only wish to God the extent of his aggression was the passive breaking of the pact he never meant to keep. But he didn’t stop there, did he?” She shook her head. “He abused you. Verbally, mentally.” The last word seemed to cut him as it came out. “Sexually.”

She stared at him again as if he’d torn her open and looked inside, distress brimming with the shock of exposure, with the misplaced shame of the victim.

At last she gave a choking gulp. A mortified nod admitted his insight. “I bought his excuses, his blame, for four months. I didn’t love him, he was frustrated, yadda yadda. Then he…he…”

“He hit you.”

She lurched. Her chest heaved. With a sharp inhalation, she muttered, “He put me in the hospital.”

Four

Durante had never considered himself a violent man.

Now, as he stared down at her bent head, murderous aggression took hold of his every nervous transmission. Need boiled his blood—to defend her in retrospect, to avenge her, to torture and cripple that vermin who’d hurt her.

Words left his lips in a vicious staccato. “Tell me you reported him and he’s now serving time.”

“Uh, no…actually, I didn’t.” He heard something rumbling, vaguely realized the sound was issuing from him. She rushed in to add, “But he didn’t get the chance to come near me again. I started divorce proceedings before I even reached the hospital.”

He glared at her, his brain seeming to expand in the confines of his skull with the brutal buildup of anger, the inability to vent it. At least not yet. He would pay that man back.

She suddenly shut her eyes. “Okay, let’s rewind and replay before I dig a hole to Malaysia. I made it all sound so pathetic and self-pitying, and that isn’t how I see my life. I’ve had it way better than most people. Despite my father’s problems, so many things, starting with my mother and our benefactor, provided me with a secure and reasonably happy childhood. I had a great time at boarding school and college, and my marriage, ugliness and all, lasted only four months and I own up to my role in it. I’ve established my own company and I loved every second of exploring and achieving so much on the way. My mother died, but I’m thankful she didn’t suffer long and that I had such an incredible friend and parent for so long. So…I hope I haven’t caused you to reach your whining tolerance level.”

She was making light of her ordeals, and, maledizione, meaning it. The expectedness of her last words awoke his humor, which he thought an insult to the suffering she’d related. But her come-on, laugh-with-me expression forced him to submit.

He coughed a distressed laugh. “You sent my sense of perspective levels through the roof, after they’d dwindled to trace elements. You forced me to revise how I perceive my own life. Seems I’ve been guilty of letting my…issues rule my mind-set.”

She shook her head, teasing radiating from her heavenly eyes. “I thought higher beings like you had global obstacles and dilemmas and crises, but nothing so petty as ‘issues.’”

He gave a grunt laden with self-disgust. “Leave it to you to underline how oblivious and tiny and self-indulgent it all is.”

She chuckled. “Anytime.”

He reached out across the table, took her hand. He needed to be connected to her as he made his own confessions. “My experience with my mother reflects yours with your father. She died five years ago, but I too was eleven when I started to realize I was losing her. It was then that I set out to detach myself, that I learned that no one is guaranteed to be there for me. I’ve become so comfortable being disconnected, so driven and distracted, that I no longer notice all the good that fills my life.”

Her other hand descended to his, imbuing him with a calm that was previously unknown to him, a restfulness to mirror the compassion that filled her eyes. “She suffered depression, too?”

He’d never discussed this, never given what his mother had suffered a name, not even with his siblings. He needed to talk about it now, with her, needed to name what had taken his mother away a piece every day, look it full in the face instead of evading it and having it invade far more of him instead.

“I think she was bipolar. Severely so.”

“So it’s true. No one is exempt. My father, a man who had everything, your mother, a queen with the world at her feet, both prisoners to something so dark and inescapable inside them.”

Pressure built behind his eyes as cold outrage at the injustice of it all gave way to the empathy flowing between them in sweeping currents. He surrendered to the release of sharing, of having another fully appreciate and understand.

Suddenly, urgency stained her gaze. Everything inside him became primed to defend, to contain. He had no tolerance for her distress, he was discovering. “What is it, bellissima? Tell me.”

She grimaced. “It’s nothing. It’s…” She stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “What the hell. I’ve put my foot in it too much already to get delicate at this late stage. I was just wondering if…if you’ve ever wondered if you have that seed of sourceless desperation and instability inside you?”

He stiffened with yet another jolt at how in tune she was with him, sensing fears that never came into focus, but cast their darkness over his existence nevertheless.

He let his counter-question acknowledge her insight just as it expressed his concern for her. “Do you?”

“Only since my mother died. I finally wondered if I’ve never been able to be close to others because I had something lurking inside me, because I subconsciously felt that emotional involvement would raise the chances that it would manifest.”

“And what’s your verdict?”

“I don’t know. What complicates matters and stops me from coming up with anything conclusive is the fact that it wasn’t a struggle not to be close. I wasn’t even tempted until…”

She stopped. He couldn’t anymore. He cupped her cheek as he’d been aching to. “Until tonight.”

Warmth surged from his gut when she acquiesced, to the truth of his statement, to his hold, letting her flesh mold to his palm.

And he had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if whatever consumed your father wasn’t sourceless, after all?”

She nuzzled into his caress. “I guess sourceless is the wrong word to use, what with all the physiological and social factors involved in the development of such a major disorder. I guess it’s the out-of-proportion, ever-compounding emotional response that becomes so far removed from whatever triggered it, making it seem as if there were no origin.” She sighed, singeing his flesh with the heat of her breath. “As I said, I’ll never know what started my father down that spiral.”

“I know what started my mother down hers. It was my father.”

Such shock, such pain flooded her eyes at his muttered bitterness that he groaned, cupped her head, needing to alleviate her distress.

She reached out to his face, her hand trembling in a caress that assuaged some of the darkness festering inside him.

She finally said, “I’m so sorry you believe that. I can’t imagine how painful it is to think one of your parents was responsible for the other’s deterioration. It’s the only thing that holds me together, that I believe that there was no one to blame.”

He rose, bent across the table. He gazed into her misty eyes for a heart-thudding moment, then descended, pressed his lips to hers in a brief, barely leashed kiss. “Grazie, bellissima.”

Her moan reverberated inside him. His fingers fisted in her tresses, spilling another moan from her lips, detonating charges of sensation across his skin. He withdrew before temptation overwhelmed him, sat down. His gaze pored over her, the image of her beauty burned onto his retinas.

Such beauty. Totally her own, following no one else’s ideas or rules, including his own before he’d set eyes on her. Beyond physical, with so many levels to it—levels he kept discovering with no end in sight. She was short-circuiting the civilized man he’d been certain he was, unleashing a primal male who wanted to possess, plunder. But it also made that same male want to protect, to pamper.

She inclined her head at him. “You can sing, can’t you?”

He blinked at the question—the statement, really. He didn’t even think to inquire about such a detour’s origin and intent. He just flowed with her along the wave of unpredictability, of freedom from rules and expectations.

“Can’t everyone,” he said. “to some degree or another?”

“Uh, no. Not according to my singing teacher, another suffering soul who told me she had nightmares of waking up in a world where everyone had my same singing ability, making her profession obsolete and putting her permanently out of a job.”

He frowned. “My teacher criticized my intentional truancy. He wouldn’t have disparaged my performance or made me feel responsible for it had it been a limitation on my part. That inconsiderate wretch who taught you had no business telling a child something like that, just because your talents didn’t meet her standards and your progress didn’t conform to her timetable.”

She beamed him such a look, full of mischief and embarrassment, that he wondered where he found the will to remain where he was. “Uh, I wasn’t exactly a child when the brilliant idea of taking singing lessons sprouted in my mind three years ago. And I did test her last tune-sensitive nerve by insisting on singing along with Whitney Houston and Maria Callas. The comparison was agonizing even to my own self-forgiving ears. But I have a feeling you can hold your own with the Elvises and Pavarottis of the world.”

He raised one eyebrow, goading her into telling him more. “Hmm, I wonder how you came by that conviction.”

Her grin grew impish and indulgent at once. “In your case, fishing will get you whales. You reaffirm that conviction every time you open your mouth and unleash that honed weapon you have for a voice. Uomo cattivo that you are, you unrepentantly use it to its full destructive effect. It’s very easy for me to imagine you taking your mastery over it to its highest conclusion.”

Stimulation revved higher. He let himself revel in the gratification of their repartee, challenged, fishing for even bigger whales. “I’ve heard many superlative singers who don’t sound special when they talk.”

“Sure, but I bet that’s not the case with you.”

“So what are you after? An admission? An audition?”

Her dimples flashed at him. “The first would be great, so I can gloat over my uncanny acumen. The second, alas, would be so much better even than having your ear for an hour—or a week—that I think it would warrant something larger than a ten-million-dollar bid.”

He reached for her hand and placed it on her fork. “I have a third option. Let’s finish this meal, and I’ll offer you something better than either at no cost but your willingness to accept it.” She sat forward, anticipation ablaze on her face. And he offered something he’d never imagined offering to anyone, ever. “A serenade.”

Darkness was melting under dawn’s advance, the horizon starting to simmer with colors, the rest of the sky’s blackness bleaching to indigo, the stars blinking out one by one.

Durante had taken his bellissima to the bow, initiating a match of quips around the Titanic movie parallel. Merriment had dissolved with the night into a silence filled with serenity and companionship. Soon it seemed as natural and needed as breathing for her to fill his embrace, just as she seemed to need to be contained there.

For the next hour, as the magic of the night segued into the new spell of dawn, he encompassed her, her back to his front, his arms crisscrossed around her midriff, his legs parted to accommodate her, imbuing her with his heat, protecting her from the chill of the breeze. She accepted him as her shield, surrendered to his cosseting and to that of the wind on her face as the yacht sailed toward the sun.

In this proximity, there was no disguising the extent of his arousal. Not that he tried to. He’d admitted his reaction to her minutes into their first conversation. His body had made its own admissions to her the moment he gathered her to him, his erection obvious through the confines of clothes and control.

Her own state must be as acute. The only movements she seemed capable of were the spasmodic pressing of her hands on the railing, and trembling. Was she trying not to press back into him as hard as he wanted to grind into her?

But he wouldn’t fracture this intensity, this purity of feeling for anything. This was too rare to rush, too precious to squander even for the ecstasy they were certain to find in each other. Not yet. They had to have this first.

It was magnificent, sharing this with her, experiencing each other without words after the liveliness of their verbal communication. Now the only sounds that permeated the whispers and whistles of the wind and the splash of the water were his groans as he pressed his lips into her neck, against her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, her moans as her tremors spiked with every press and glide. He felt as if every inch of her was made to click into every inch of him, that the eight or nine inches he had on her five foot six or seven had been bestowed on him so he’d envelop her like this.

Then she turned her head, turned up eyes glittering with the wonder of what they’d shared since they’d met twelve hours or a forever ago, whispered, “Ora, per favore.”

Now, please. Indeed. So this was it. The moment of truth.

He’d never sung in another’s presence. Not since primary school, anyway. And he was about to sing to this enchanted creature who’d appeared out of nowhere and made him forget everything, his exhaustion, his wariness. The world.

He let his arms tighten around her for a moment before he stepped away. Then he went down on one knee.

A sharp gasp tore from her. Then, with another distressed sound, she swooped down, tried to pull him up.

He tangled his hands into her hair, tugged gently, brought her down for another of those fleeting, tormenting kisses.

Then, as his lips clung to hers, he breathed the first line of Caruso. “Qui dove il mare luccica, e tira forte il vento…”

Here where the sea sparkles and the wind is blowing…

She bolted up, severing the last clinging touch between their lips, and staggered back to lean limply against the railing, her eyes stricken, her lips parting on choppy puffs.

He remained kneeling at her feet, giving his voice full rein as he continued to sing the song he’d only ever memorized because he felt like he was soaring when he let his voice ride the beauty and power of the melody, never giving a moment’s thought to the lyrics. Now the lyrics seemed to have been written so that he could describe these moments with her. They took on meanings their writer hadn’t intended, poured into the mold of the moment.

Then he came to the refrain, and that, most of all, resonated with the exact expressions that crowded inside him, let the passion she’d aroused in him take shape and sound and flow with the fervor of the timeless words.

“Te voglio bene assai, ma tanto tanto bene sai. È una catena ormai, che scioglie il sangue dint’e vene sai…”

I want you so much, I truly want you so much it’s now like a shackle that melts the blood inside the veins, you know…

Tears gushed from her eyes, and her face shuddered with too many emotions to follow, let alone fathom. She seemed in pain.

Alarm and suspicion crashed inside his head. What if this song provoked raw memories, if he’d managed, not to please her, woo her, but to upset her? He surged to his feet. He couldn’t stop his arms from gathering her to him until he had her off the ground and in his safekeeping.

“Durante…please…” The quivering of her voice augmented his alarm, made him hold her away so he could ascertain her state, apologize, divert her agitation. His gut clenched, now he grimaced as he saw her lips working before he realized they were forming a tremulous smile. “Please…don’t stop.”

His whole body slackened with relief.

She swayed when he set her back on her feet, gripped his arms, eagerness blazing on her face. “Please, please keep singing. I thought I could imagine how incredible you’d sound, but it seems even my imagination is tone-deaf.”

He guffawed. There was no way he could ever predict what she’d say next. “If so, how do you know if I sound incredible or not?”

“Oh, my ‘difficulties’ lie in tone reproduction, not recognition. And then this…” She waved both hands at him, before taking them both to her chest to press her heart in a gesture so moved and moving he groaned. “…transcends hearing. Please—sing.”

He plastered her against him, no longer restraining his urgency, one hand dipping below her corset-like top to bask in her firm softness and heat, the other digging into her mane, turning her face up for his worshipping. And he sang.

The liberation, the exhilaration was indescribable. To cut the tethers of separateness and wariness and propriety, to let himself go, let his voice boom with passion, break with poignancy. The storm of emotions and expressions that raged on her face with every note, the tears of acute enjoyment that streamed, were the purest form of adulation he’d ever had, the only he craved having.

When the last vibrato died away, she was panting, then she flung herself at him, pressed her wet face into his chest, until he felt her fervor practically eating through it, her essence permeating it. “Grazie, Durante. Molto, molto grazie.”

It was a long time before either of them stirred. It was she who moved, casting stunned looks around, before looking up at him sheepishly. “It’s morning.”

“Sì, that’s what usually follows dawn, I hear,” he teased.

Something warm danced in her eyes. “I wouldn’t know. I’m no expert on dawn or how long it takes to break. I’m always in a coma from one until seven a.m.”

“So this is your first time staying up all night?”

“It’s my first time…for just about everything.”

There was no doubt in his mind that was the truth. There was no thought of hiding how he felt in return. “Sì. For me, too.”

The blast of delight in her clear-again eyes made him feel limitless, swathed everything in new meanings and depths. He basked in it all until contrition entered her expression. “I kept you up all night on a work day.”

He waved it off. “Why did I strive so hard to be where I am if not for the flexibility of forging my own timetable?”

“Who’re you kidding? You crack the whip over your own head harder than you do over anybody else’s.”

He guffawed again, loving this. “Very subtle way of saying I’m a slave driver. One with a fetish for self-flagellation.”

“I bet you didn’t become who you are by being flexible with your time and taking days off.”

“To put your mind to rest on the sacrifice of my taking a day off, I can afford to in this instance, because before we met I put in thirty-six hours of work, more than covering for it in advance.”

“Oh, God…that means you’ve been awake for forty-eight hours now. And I kept you up all night yakking and singing and…and…”

“And being tormented within an inch of my sanity? Laughing my head off? Confessing my darkest secrets? Being fully alive?”

“Yeah…uh…all that,” she croaked. “But I bet you were longing to hit the sheets.”

“The only sheets I want to hit are those with you spread out on them. Being with you has been the most worthwhile reason to forgo sleep that I’ve ever had. I never realized there was anything to want as fiercely as I want a steady supply of sleepless nights with you.”

She stared up at him, motionless, breathless. Then the first tremor broke through the stillness. The second merged into a stream that shook her. Gratification swelled, that he affected her to that extent. He might not be exhibiting the same outward manifestation, but she shook him, too, to the core.

He embraced her again, absorbed her tremors. They were her response to him made tangible. They belonged to him. He wanted them, along with everything that made her herself.

He’d given Giancarlo orders to keep sailing until he told him otherwise. He wanted to keep on sailing, never to return her to her life, never to return to his.

He was thinking she’d say yes if he proposed that radical plan when she raised an agitated face, whispered, “Take me home, please, Durante.”

Five

Durante raised an eyebrow at Gabrielle’s TriBeCa apartment building’s concierge in response to his open surprise and curiosity. Very strange reaction coming from someone whose job description was headed by discretion and diplomacy.

Did the man recognize him? Or was it his tenant’s return dressed in an evening gown in broad daylight, escorted by a strange man?

He did see recognition in the man’s eyes. Which wasn’t strange. Royalty was an endless source of public fascination and romanticizing anywhere in the world. But it was far more so in the States, especially in New York, his adopted home for the last five years. It seemed New Yorkers clamored for anything that would transport them from their hectic lives. Being a prince of an exotic kingdom, combined with his vast wealth, was the stuff of fairy tales to them. That this view did not match the reality of his life had nothing to do with their perception of it. The perception was there to stay.

So the man recognized him. But Durante was still convinced his second interpretation of his reaction was the correct one. Which led to another conviction. The incident had so surprised the man because he hadn’t seen her coming home with a man before. She’d told the truth about first times. As he knew she had.

Not that he was “coming home” with her. He was taking her to her door, had no idea if she’d invite him in.

She’d asked him to take her home after he’d again stressed his open-ended desire, had barely spoken during the ride there. Considering how fluent she’d been up until then, her fraught silence had disturbed him more by the minute. He’d tried to tell himself she was exhausted, that not everyone was an insomniac able to function on sporadic half hours of sleep. But what if this night hadn’t meant as much to her as it had to him? What if she’d decided that it wasn’t prudent to let things develop further?

The sharp ping of the elevator as they reached her tenth-floor apartment cut through his oppressive thoughts. He let her precede him, fell into step with her through the dimly lit corridor leading to her corner apartment, his hand gripping hers as if he were afraid she’d dematerialize. Then they reached her door.

It was the same as all the others. It was also the gateway to the one place on earth he wanted to be.

Behind this door lay the stage of her unseen existence. Where she walked barefoot, dressed and undressed, reflected, shed tears. Where she sang in out-of-tune abandon as she cooked her meals, danced in front of mirrors to snippets of music that blipped inside her head, washed away exhausting days under the spray of hot water, drowned her angers and anxieties in steaming baths and surrendered to oblivion after a book dropped from her hand at the strike of 1 a.m… or after she’d pleasured herself.

Crossing this door into that microcosm became his highest goal. To be allowed into her sanctuary, to be given the privilege to witness her secrets, see to her safety, cater to her needs.

She turned, her eyes overflowing with so much emotion that his mind seized. Then her whisper floated in the silence, impeded, unsteady.

“I wanted to be on my turf when I said this. I-I…”

She was going to say goodbye. No. He couldn’t let her. “Don’t say anything now, bellissima. Just get some sleep. When you’ve taken it all in, let me see you again. We’ll take it from there.”

Her gaze wavered, then she groaned. “God, I’m so stupid. You must be exhausted. Oh, just go please…”

He caught her arm, stopped her babbling. “The last thing I need now is sleep. What did you want to say? If it’s anything other than ‘I don’t think this should go any farther,’ please say it.”

Her flush rose. His whole body bunched as her lips parted on a hectic inhalation and she burst out, “I want this night, Durante. Or this day. Or whenever we are. And I want as many nights and days as I can ha—”

Durante couldn’t wait for her confession to finish exiting her lips before he devoured it along with them. The way she met his ardor halfway with as much ferocity told him everything he needed to know. This time there was no hesitation on her part, as there was no intention of holding back on his.

He stilled the tremors invading the fullness of her lower lip in a bite that made her cry out, arch into him, all lushness and surrender. The taste and feel and scent of her eddied in his arteries, pounded through his system. Her urgency spilled into his mouth in moans and gasps that blanked his mind. He gathered her thighs through the layers of cloth, raised her, opened her for his bulk, pinned her to her door with the force of his hunger. His tongue drove inside her as his erection thrust against her heat through layers of barriers, losing rhythm in the wildness.

Her tongue slid against his, rubbed, tangled, her lips suckled at his, her teeth matching him nip for nip until he slammed against her, rattling the door, the wall that housed it.

This—as she called it—was everything. It couldn’t be spoiled, could only deepen and widen and intensify. This wasn’t rushing things, wasn’t too soon. This was how it should be. They didn’t need time to know this was right. It was. Time would only provide the leisure to explore and savor all the ways of how right it was.

But this totality of response was also frightening. His grip on control was softening, the need to ram inside her, here, now, ride her until she convulsed around him, drenched his flesh with her pleasure and he pumped her full of his, was replacing his mental faculties. And that was after just a kiss.

But it wasn’t a kiss. It was a rehearsal for their mating, enough to portray what that would be like. Something so outside the realm of his experience he couldn’t even begin to imagine it.

He knew that on a fundamental level. He had to know the rest.

He tore his lips from the lock of her passion, shuddered with her cry, her lurch, her demand that he resume their fusion.

He molded her features with his mouth as if mapping them into tactile memory. “Tell me your name, bellissima. I need to know it now, to whisper it into your lips and against your every pleasure point. I need to think it, have it fill my mind as I look on your beauty. I want to roar it as I fill you.”

“Gabrielle…” Her moan penetrated his brain, lodged in his erection. Gabrielle. Yes. Laced with femininity and strength and complexity. It fit her. But then she’d make any name exceptional, magical. “Gabrielle Williamson.”

Everything decelerated as her full name sank into his mind. Then it hit bottom, detonated like a depth mine.

Gabrielle Williamson. The woman who’d recently approached him with an offer he’d refused, as he had dozens of similar ones.

She hadn’t accepted “not interested” for an answer, had contacted just about everyone who had an in with him to secure face time with him. He’d heard from many on her behalf, but it was one of his associates who’d finally roused his curiosity. Gerald Whittaker, as shrewd a businessman as they came, had said she was confident her offer was one he couldn’t refuse. When he’d said that he’d heard the Don Corleone line too many times for it to work, Gerald had had every confidence himself that she must be on to something Durante would want to know about, that he should at least give her a chance.

Out of respect for Gerald’s opinion, he almost had. He’d also wondered what kind of woman had such a rock so taken with her.

But he hadn’t agreed to meet her. Because he’d found out exactly what kind of woman she was. The most casual background check had returned a screaming verdict. Don’t let her within a mile of you.

So he hadn’t. Not because he’d believed himself in any danger from the femme fatale whose favorite snack was billionaires. He’d been disgusted by the picture he’d put together. Of her stringing Gerald around, using him to get to an even bigger prey. Him. The offer he couldn’t refuse would have been the pleasure of having her, no doubt. She’d have been confident that he, like dozens before him, would succumb once she had him in range of her charms. He’d fleetingly entertained agreeing to her panted-after meeting, just to get the message across that he could snack on women like her. If he was into junk food.

He shouldn’t have been so smug. He should have known that she’d have more cards to play. And she’d played them. Played him. And how. She’d reinvented her approach, hit from another angle. And she’d struck the bull’s-eye. He hadn’t only proved himself susceptible to her wiles, but he also must have been her easiest quarry ever.

Gabrielle Williamson. She was the woman with whom he’d spent the most revitalizing, enthralling time of his life, a time he’d planned never to end. The woman who’d made him forget exhaustion and every preconception about himself and what he could feel. The woman who was wrapped around him, her flesh feeling as if it were as vital to him as his own.

She dragged his face back down to hers, whimpering at his momentary withdrawal. It had been only a moment since the lips claiming his had formed the name that had sent reality crashing into him. It had taken only a moment to plunge him from the heights of delight to the depths of disillusion.

His whole being in revolt, he tried to pull back, but she wouldn’t let him. She tightened her vise around his body, his will, her ragged whispers of desire impaling his brain, causing another geyser of response to erupt inside him.

So what if she wasn’t the unique woman for whom he’d broken all his rules, was instead a siren who came with a warning ignored at the price of defamation and destruction? It should change nothing. His body was reaching critical mass, demanding hers. And she was off ering…every thing. He should drag her inside, throw her to the ground and take it all. Then walk away.

Disillusionment bellowed its bitterness over the flames of desire. It wasn’t powerful enough to douse them. Only agony might be.

It tore him apart to think of it all reduced to…this. Rutting. Sexual release. He wanted the unprecedented passion, the sublime emotions along with the all-consuming lust.

But those had all been an illusion. She was everything he abhorred and despised. Nothing like what she’d projected so seamlessly all night. How had she done it? How had she misled his senses to this extent? How had she imbued herself with a vibe that had been so attuned to his? How had she been able to assume a nature so alien to her own? To project characteristics she couldn’t begin to understand, let alone have?

The answer to all that was obvious. She was a chameleon. A black widow. A cold-blooded predator.

“Durante, te voglio bene assai…”

Her words echoed the ones he’d sung—sung—to her. They ripped into him, made him go rigid with the spike of arousal.

For a suspended moment, he let her overwhelm his reason, let himself surrender to the need to forget caution, to deny his realizations. But the very loss of the control finally hurt enough to ignite the deep freeze of rage.

He was just another quarry to her. One she’d gambled she could capture if she got close enough. And he wouldn’t let her win. Not even if he was dying to let her. Especially because he was.

He tore her arms off his body, feeling as if they’d taken off strips of his own skin.

Still oblivious to his awakening, she cupped his face, her own etched with her coup de grâce, an expression that would have brought him to his knees if he hadn’t realized the truth. Total trust, full surrender. Temptation thundered through him.

He staggered away in self-disgust.

This time when he recoiled, he broke free from the prison of her thighs, dropped her back on her own feet. She stumbled, crashed back against the door.

Panic flashed in her eyes. His heart stampeded. Had his involuntary force frightened her, brought back memories of when another man had used his superior strength to hurt her?

Dio, what was he thinking? This was an act. Her sob story about the husband who’d abused her—the husband she’d used and destroyed instead—had been a string of masterfully composed lies.

Sure enough, the panic was turning to an uncanny emulation of pained confusion, then dread. “Durante…what’s wrong?”

Everything, he wanted to roar. You, the woman, the treasure I thought I found, doesn’t exist.

He glared at her, everything he wanted to yell frothing inside him. His body quaked as if on the verge of explosion.

Then, after a long moment filled with labored-breathing, without another word or glance, he turned on his heel and walked away.

He wouldn’t look back. Ever again. The dream was over.

Gabrielle stood plastered to her door, watching Durante walk away.

She couldn’t breathe. Something sharp and burning had lodged in her gut, twisting her to shreds, coagulating into a mass of pain.

A wave of darkness swamped her.

She stumbled around, pressed her clammy face to her door, fumbled inside her purse. Key. Get inside. Damned if she would faint out here. She’d given the tabloids enough fodder for a decade. This would see her to her grave.

Then she was inside. Alone. As she should have remained, as she would from now on. She’d never let anyone close again, never…

All her nerves seemed to snap. She went down in a heap on the ground, her dress swirling around her like a suffocating vortex.

She tore at it. Couldn’t bear the oppression. Had to breathe.

It took forever. Then she was in her panties, staggering up and to her bedroom. She fell onto her bed, folded into a ball of anguish. Her body was still throbbing, demanding him…Stop it.

Misery engulfed her, wrung her, first with dry heaves, then with tears so violent she thought she might dissolve, dissipate.

She’d thought she’d braced herself for the worst when she’d sought him out, preparing for anything from cold dismissal to ireful rejection. But how could she have predicted the events that had dominoed since she’d laid eyes on him, knocking sense and good intentions out of reach until she’d found herself wrapped around him, unaware and uncaring if the world was watching, begging for him to possess her, all but offering him carte blanche with her life?

She’d been certain of what he felt. She’d thought they’d shared something that transcended time and explanations, something real on the most fundamental level.

It had all been an illusion. He’d lied when he’d said he didn’t care about labels. He must have been trying to stimulate his glutted senses by leading on yet another desperate female to see how far she’d go, how much of herself she’d offer.

She’d offered him everything. Her pain and shame and trust. She’d left herself wide open, and the blow had crushed her.

In her mind, the feverish moments played again, filled with the cherishment and pleasure his every word and touch had bestowed. Then he’d demanded her name and she’d given it, delighted to complete his knowledge of her, unable to wait to hear it on his lips in all the ways he’d promised.

More images and sensations rose until she felt she was drowning in black ink. Durante, his body losing its gentle ferocity, stiffening, withdrawing, pushing her away.

For one moment, panic had flashed, fear that he, too, got his kicks abusing women. Worse, that something was wrong with her, like Ed had told her, something that drove otherwise normal men to abuse her.

The fear had passed as soon as it had flared. Not Durante. She wouldn’t let Ed’s vicious psychological sabotage fester again, not for a second. The only one who had something wrong with him was Ed.

But then, something worse than physical abuse had filled Durante’s eyes, twisted his face. The rage and revulsion he’d transmitted would leave a deeper scar than anything Ed had done.

After all they’d shared, she hadn’t warranted the benefit of a moment’s hesitation before he believed the labels she’d been stuck with rather than the reality of her. His decision had been instantaneous, the change in him clearly irreversible. It was the final proof that there was no use. That Ed had won.

He’d been winning for years now, he and his lackeys painting her so black that no one would believe her even if she broke her pact of silence and told the world what a sick bastard he was. And she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t cared for anyone enough to care what they thought of her. Until Durante…

Was this how despair took root in someone’s psyche? Would it now blossom into a monstrous growth that would suffocate everything in its path? Had an injury like this been the origin of her father’s suffering? His mother’s? Would she react the same way, follow in their footsteps down that bottomless spiral…?

She came to no conclusion before the blackness of exhaustion and heartache dragged her under.

Six

Durante was standing in the distance. His eyes were heavy with disparagement, accusation, his fists clenched at his sides.

She began to walk toward him, her steps gaining speed until she was running. She had to beg him to hear her out. She wasn’t what the rumors made her out to be. He of all people knew that. He was the only one she’d shown her real self.

But as she approached him, he turned around and strode away. And she went mad.

She felt her feet lifting off the ground as she caught up with him, sank her fingers in his arm, wrenched. He turned on her with a snarl. And she punched him. In the face. Felt the crunch of cartilage and bones in her hand and his nose, the pain explode through her joints.

She stared up at him in horror as his eyes brimmed with icy rage, and she knew he wouldn’t hit back. She almost wished he would, to show her some reaction besides that chilling disdain.

He gave her nothing, stared down at her as if at a maggot.

Her thoughts were swerving from insisting on paying for the reconstructive surgery that would repair the nose she’d pulverized, to deciding to give him a matching broken jaw to go with it… when she lurched awake.

Her eyes wouldn’t open. She’d cried them shut.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Damn him and damn everyone else in this damn stupid world. But the biggest damns were reserved for herself and her stupidity.

She was done being stupid. She’d start by never again shedding a tear. Certainly not over Prince Durante D’Agostino.

She spilled from the bed, barely saw herself in the mirror through her turgid lids as she plodded to her bathroom.

She came out an hour later feeling as if the hot bath had homogenized the pain clamping her chest and melted it to seep through her. She now ached down to her toenails.

She called Megan, her PA, and told her she was taking a few days off. She was sick.

She wasn’t lying. She was. Sick of the whole world. Heartache should be at the forefront of ailments one should take sick leave for. And she was taking it.

She needed time to rearrange her mental and emotional papers, invent some priorities, locate her vanished purpose. First on the agenda was purging her memory of Prince Durante D’Agostino.

To do that, she had to admit she owed him a debt of gratitude. He’d made all the slander she’d ever suffered come crashing down on her. She could now face her fury and bitterness, deal with it, put it in perspective and move on.

She should also thank him for curing her of a delusion she’d been suffering from without even realizing it—that miracles happened sometimes and Prince Charming existed somewhere.

Now that she knew for certain that was a load of crap, she could at last have her mind functioning at capacity, unhindered by the insidious virus of such self-sabotaging illusions.

Maybe now she could get rid of all the shackles that had been holding her back. Maybe now she would start to live for real.

Gabrielle looked at her cell phone.

Come on. Do it.

She’d put it off long enough. It had been ten days. She had to call him now. He wouldn’t be happy. But he, too, had to face facts. Like she had.

Facts said she’d back down if she waited another moment.

Do. It. Now. She hit the speed dial button, flinching as if she’d hit a remote for a nearby bomb.

The ringing blared on speaker mode until the line disconnected. Relief that he hadn’t answered and reluctance to try again sent nausea bubbling in her stomach. Coward. Do it. Get it over with.

She pressed the button just as the phone came alive.

She almost dropped it in fright. Then she remembered. She had it on vibration-mode. The caller ID blazed on the screen. The king.

She gulped and hit the answer button.

His voice flowed into her ear, sounding worse than she’d last heard it. “Figlia mia, apologies for the delay in answering.”

“I should have called much sooner. I-I…” The words congealed into a lump, choked her. Just spit them out. “I-it’s about your son. I-I tried and failed. He wouldn’t talk to me.”

That last bit wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was true. All the talking Durante had done had been with his “bella misteriosa.” He hadn’t given her the consideration of one word.

Not that the king who’d told her to do “anything” would take her failure lying down. She braced herself for his arguments, for the brunt of his desperation, the distress of having to disappoint it. Just as she thought she was ready for anything, his exhalation almost deflated her with its dejection.

“It was a desperate gamble, Gaby. I was deluded to hope that Durante would relent. Castaldini and I will have to face our fate without his intervention. Forgive me if I caused you any discomfort by involving you in this.”

A long time later, she didn’t remember what she’d stammered in answer to King Benedetto’s apology and acceptance of defeat.

She knew only that her temperature was rising geometrically.

Durante. That cruel, intractable, holier-than-thou bastard.

So he’d condemned her and walked away without a glance back. Fine. She was no one to him. But she was damned if she’d let him get away with doing the same to his father and live happily ever after with his sanctimonious “disconnection.”

She didn’t care that he thought his position validated. It was still indefensible. And besides, she’d bet he had as much proof of his father’s so-called crimes against his mother as he had of her alleged ones against male-kind.

She didn’t care about the level of demeaning disdain with which he’d no doubt smear her. She was not letting this end without stripping off a few layers of his rhino hide. Maybe she’d even find something beneath to shame into coming through for his father and his kingdom.

She unclasped her death grip on her phone, hit another speed dial button. Megan answered on the first ring.

She fired away. “Megan, I want you to get me every shred of info on Prince Durante D’Agostino of Castaldini. And I don’t mean financial and personal profiles. At least, nothing reported in ‘reliable’ or ‘respected’ sources. Dig me up all the dirt. Make it thick, and make it quick. I need it…ten days ago.”

Durante stared at the wall across his extensive bedroom.

It looked so…tempting. All walls did. He wanted to bang his head against each and every one.

It was the conviction that some explosive pain and serious self-abuse might dampen the volcano seething inside him that tempted him.

How? How had he found himself in this position?

He trusted his instincts, which had steered him through his meteoric rise. But he’d always deferred acting on them until he’d deliberated all ramifications. Instinct didn’t equate with impulse to him. He’d believed that he was without urges, did nothing with spontaneity. His closest people told him he took premeditation to uncharted and aggravating heights. That was, until Gabrielle Williamson. Her.

His instincts hadn’t just totally misled him about her nature. He hadn’t thought once before accepting their verdict, hadn’t found ramifications to ponder as he let himself be swept away in the tide of what he’d thought mutual perfection. She’d satisfied his every demanding taste, his merciless critical eye finding only things to appreciate in her. Even the qualities that she’d put forward as her shortcomings, her hang-ups, had charmed him, secured his unquestioning empathy. And it had all been the practiced routine of a hardened seductress who got ahead in the world by seducing powerful fools like him.

If that night had been her first approach, if he hadn’t researched her in advance, if he’d found out her truth after he’d tasted her for real, he wouldn’t have been able to walk away, would have blinded himself to wallow in the pleasures she offered. He would have signed that contract, and maybe, like her previous victims, would have ended up signing over half his fortune. Or all of it.

And the worst part? His condition seemed hopeless.

He’d known how hopeless it was when his cousin Eduardo had passed by to check on him with that outspoken bride of his, Jade.

Durante hadn’t exited his penthouse for five days, spending that time prowling the cage of his mind. He’d thought it might save his sanity to have a distraction, especially that of people whose show of caring wasn’t a setup. So he’d invited them in.

It hadn’t played out that way. He’d bristled at their alarm at the sight of him. But when their solicitude had taken the form of questions, prodding, advice, with Giancarlo joining in the chorus of concern, he’d gone off like a landmine.

They’d exchanged the same look that he’d seen on employees faces during the last and most aggressive of his uncharacteristic blowups at his offices. Eduardo and Jade had given Giancarlo—the keeper of the beast—sympathetic murmurs, before they’d left, telling Durante he needed to seek one of two things. A radical lifestyle change. Or psychiatric help. He’d faced it then.

The one thing he needed to seek was her. Gabrielle.

No matter how much he’d told himself to forget her, to move on, he couldn’t.

He still couldn’t bring himself to seek her out. He missed the persona she’d projected as much as he missed his mother, with the same hopelessness of ever seeing her again. To him, that persona had also disintegrated before it died. The night he’d shared with Gabrielle was entrenched in his memories and senses. He couldn’t bear to see her wear another face.

But he’d reached the point where he no longer cared. He had to see her, with any face, at any cost.

He grimaced at his reflection in the full-length mirror then exited his bedroom. At least he no longer looked like the missing link between primates and Neanderthals.

He’d go to her now. This time, he knew what he was getting into, who he was dealing with. He’d walk into the situation with all the brutal clarity of disenchantment, take from her what he needed to get her off his mind and out of his system before walking away…

“I hope this won’t get me tossed from the veranda.”

Durante rounded on Giancarlo. “If you’re worried, as you should be, wear a parachute first. We’re high up enough that there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’d land with only minor fractures.”

Giancarlo grinned. He was Durante’s deceased valet’s youngest son and was eight years Durante’s junior. But for the past seven years, since he’d taken over his father’s position, he’d become even more invaluable than his father had been. He was an irreplaceable assistant who observed their situations impeccably in public and in private became a friend as trusted as Durante’s younger cousin Eduardo and younger brother Paolo, if less intrusive than either. Not that that said much, because those two were incorrigible. Each had married the “love of his life,” and things had gone from bad to dismal.

But Durante wasn’t in any condition to humor even Giancarlo. Now that he’d decided to see Gabrielle, he felt as if there were burning coals beneath his feet.

“I know you forbade me to interrupt you unless there was a lot of blood involved—”

“And you’re not bleeding,” Durante growled. “Yet.”

Giancarlo went on as if he hadn’t spoken, unperturbed. “—but there’s a lady downstairs asking to speak with you. She’s—”

“Gabrielle.” Her name blared in his mind. He growled it, not wanting Giancarlo to utter it as if he had to be told she was here. When he knew. Knew. “Gabrielle Williamson.”

Giancarlo nodded. “That’s her name, yes. I took the liberty of admitting her to the foyer. I judged she warranted the courtesy, because she was the first woman you ever took to Angelica, and the first—and I trust, the last—creature you’ll ever sing to. But because you’ve been like a tiger with a half-ripped-out claw since you stormed down from her residence, I assume you don’t want to see her? Shall I tell her you’re busy having a breakdown?”

Durante’s hiss could have scraped steel. “Bring her up.”

Giancarlo gave him an opaque glance. “Molto bene, principe.”

Durante paced on those coals, feeling the burn spreading through his system. Gabrielle. Here. She’d sought him out. At the exact moment he’d been about to seek her. How did she know that he was ripe for another incursion? How could she be so attuned to thoughts and decisions that seemed random even to him?

Giancarlo returned within two minutes. He wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his smile. Durante would bet he wasn’t even trying.

The man cleared his throat as if he were going to sing. “Signora Williamson insisted I deliver her message word for word. She said, quote, ‘I’m not coming up. You’re the one who’s coming the hell down here and facing me like a man. If you are one, that is’…unquote.”

Durante came the hell down.

After a moment of being unable to believe anyone could not only talk to him that way, but have the temerity to deliver a slap through his right-hand man, to even win said man to her side so that Giancarlo had felt justified and satisfied to transmit it full force.

So he came the hell down. He hurtled, streaked, zoomed and tore his way the hell down. He forced himself to slow once he exited his private elevator. She might have thrown down the gauntlet, but damn if he would give her proof of how she had seeped into his blood, had taken hold of his reactions.

He came to a stop just outside the foyer, depleting reserves of control that he saved for navigating crises of global scope. He yelled inwardly at his instincts, wrestled some rhythm into his heartbeat and breathing. He should make her wait.

He couldn’t wait. Her challenge, his eagerness to see her again, was boiling in his blood.

He started walking again, his gait a study in subterfuge, radiating the opposite of what roiled inside him.

He turned the corner and…there she was. Standing at the reception desk, part of her profile visible to him.

She was wearing a skirt suit in another shade of blue, a cross between royal and navy, the richness and depth of the color setting off the clarity of her complexion, the vivid gloss of her hair. The getup was impossibly more flattering than that evening outfit he’d thought the best showcase of her lushness. It molded to her lithe frame, emphasizing her height, the perfection of her proportions, detailing each curve and dip, showing off the symmetry and sculpted creaminess of her legs. Those legs. Her flowing skirt had deprived him of seeing them before. He’d had them wrapped around him when he’d been stupid enough to walk away from the promise of fulfillment they’d been offering, almost dealing his potency an irreparable blow.

She was carrying a briefcase. Navy blue to go with her outfit. She looked all business today. And there was this…royal assurance to her bearing, a bring-it-on air to her stance, befitting the potent woman that she was and the mission that had brought her here. To conquer him? He’d bet that was it.

She turned, as if she’d sensed his entrance. She couldn’t have possibly seen him, not at the periphery of her vision, not in any reflection. He was still too far for his footsteps to be heard. She had sensed him.

And he sensed her. Her emanations were unchanged. How did she do that? How did she mess with his perception so that he felt only what she wanted him to feel?

He didn’t care. He had to get closer, get more.

He struggled to keep his stride tranquil, as if reaching her was low on his priorities.

When he was finally within arm’s reach, he stopped. Her face was a mask captured in blankness, her vibe transmitting nothing of her mood or intentions.

A crack exploded by his ear, on the side of his face, slashing the tranquility of the exclusive foyer’s silent occupants and sourceless music.

Seven

Durante blinked, gaped. Beyond stunned. Paralyzed.

He would later swear that she hadn’t even moved. But the evidence that she had would resound inside his head forever. Echoes ricocheted off every sound-reflecting surface in the allmarble, chrome and quartz massive space. He barely heard the gasps that went off in a chain reaction of incredulity around him, the quickening footsteps of the guards whose perpetual orders were to stay out of sight.

He made an adamant gesture, banishing them back where they came from. He couldn’t bear for others to exist in this moment. Only Gabrielle. Gabrielle, whose eyes were panning away from his with the same void filling them as if she didn’t even see him.

Then she brushed past him, walked away with all the grace and serenity of a fairy creature.

It was only when she exited the door the stunned bellman held open for her that Durante registered the burn spreading through his flesh. His hand went instinctively to the pain from the imprint of her fingers, as if to investigate the damage. He moved his mouth from side to side. His jaw felt almost loose.

It excited the hell out of him.

Which made him even more of a colossal fool than he’d realized.

She was pulling his strings. He knew it. But he could sooner resist the pull of a black hole. He rushed out after her.

He caught up with her in less than a minute, her head start and brisk stride no match for his longer legs and urgency.

She suddenly stopped. He overshot her by six strides and retraced them at once.

“Here’s the other cheek.” He presented her with it. “Go ahead, I know you want to.”

She gave no indication that she heard him or even felt him there. She put her briefcase on the ground, opened it, produced a dossier, took papers out, straightened, started reading.

“Prince Durante Benedetto D’Agostino. Eldest son of the King of Castaldini, and therefore, according to the ancient laws of succession, the only member of the extensive D’Agostino royal family ineligible for the crown.”

She was reading him a report? On him?

“To prove to the world that his inability to run for the crown meant nothing to him, Prince Durante decided to be king of his own kingdom, emperor of his own empire.”

Would there be a point to this somewhere? Knowing what he did about her, she was bound to have a whopper. But what could it be?

“During his meteoric ascent from age twenty, the prince masterminded takeovers that redefined the word hostile. Those he took an ax to say that they would have preferred it if he’d taken a contract on their lives and been done with it. Two of those he destroyed did end up taking their own lives. Then, at thirty-five, he engineered a market crash that sent thousands into bankruptcy while catapulting himself from mere billionaire status to that of financial god. Ever since, he’s been shearing his way through the pantheon, cutting down fellow deities in his climb to the absolute and solitary top.”

He’d heard all that before. Not that articulate or concentrated, and certainly not to his face.

She wasn’t finished. “On a personal level, it is said that Prince Durante is as cold-blooded and unrepentant a lady-killer as he is a rival-slayer. He is known to pick beauties from those who crowd around his feet, use them and discard them. On one notable occasion, one of his fleeting indulgences tried to commit suicide and is still undergoing intensive psychiatric treatment. Her family reports that Prince Durante systematically destroyed her self-esteem, and she ended up despising herself. A second woman—a married one—said that Prince Durante’s influence rivals that of the Prince of Darkness himself. After her husband divorced her and gained custody of their two toddlers, denying her even visitation rights, the spellbound and discarded woman still said that, even knowing where it would lead, she’d do it again. She only wished Prince Durante would take her back.”

And he got her point. Right through the heart.

Something else skewered him there. Shame.

He of all people, who suffered slander, shouldn’t have been party to perpetuating it, to judging her and carrying out his judgment based on secondhand information.

But beyond shame, which was self-indulgent and worthless, something harsher tore at him. The hurt he felt emanating from her.

He could no longer deny it. His instincts hadn’t been tampered with. They’d told him the truth all along. Everything else had lied. Everything he’d heard about her had been as false as the reports propagated against him by his enemies.

The fair reports were also out there, as abundant, but they weren’t as interesting as the defamatory ones, weren’t sensational enough to be bandied around. His friends didn’t feel the need to defend him and he’d never wanted them to, leaving the field wide open to the foes who spoke loudest, were most persistent.

She stopped sifting through the pages. “All reports of Prince Durante’s atrocities remain unsubstantiated allegations, because he manages to remain beyond reproach, faultlessly covering his amoral and immoral tracks. As such, he is considered to be our era’s only Machiavellian prince. Some even claim that he used Machiavelli’s most famous work, Il Principe—The Prince—the immortal guide to acquiring and maintaining power, as the template from which he forged his persona and kingdom. What he added of his own heartlessness and intelligence has created a modern hybrid even the philosopher couldn’t have imagined being spawned.”

He raised his hands, surrendering. “Abbastanza, Gabrielle. Enough. You can stop now. I get it.”

Without a glance at him, she rearranged the papers back into the dossier, bent to pick up her briefcase. He caught her arm.

“We need to talk.” Her blank stare deepened his desperation. He gritted his teeth. “I need to talk.”

“That you do, now, is of no consequence. I am not here to talk. I am here to tell you something. You’re a paranoid bastard who’s so full of your own convictions and hang-ups, you can’t see how your actions injure and maim people around you. If you have one shred of humanity—and according to your lofty opinion of yourself, you’re full of…it—I’m giving you an assignment to find out how much you do possess. Write down a list of all the people in your life. Be honest about their condition today, emotionally, psychologically, financially, and calculate the role your condemning, unforgiving nature has played in it.”

Her accusation slid right off him. Not because it didn’t shame him that it might be true, but because his only concern was for undoing the injury he’d caused her.

Pedestrians and even drivers were slowing down to watch the scene unfolding between their city’s most famous resident royal and the stunning woman who was clearly telling him off. Some were openly gawking. Some were clicking away on their cell phones.

Not that he cared. But he was beginning to realize the role speculation and the media must have played in smearing her reputation.

He had to take her away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. “Come up with me, Gabrielle. Please.”

“No.” She extricated her arm from his urgent grip. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my…vast experience, it’s what to avoid in the interest of self-preservation. I thought being punched black and blue was the worst thing that had happened to me, but now I know how hard you hit, I’d be crazy if I came near you again. Goodbye, Prince Durante.”

He blocked her path. “Per favore, Gabrielle, you must listen to me.”

Her disdain would have annihilated a lesser man. At least a less determined one. “As you listened to me? Oh, wait, you didn’t give me the chance to say anything to listen to. You heard my name, recalled the report some bored assistant collated on me and disregarded everything you learned about me during that night you kept calling magical and unprecedented—the line you handed me when you wanted to score another one-night stand. Funny part is, although your criteria for one-nighters are reportedly pretty flexible, it seems you draw the line somewhere. At my level.”

He surged forward as if to stem the flow of her bitterness. She took two steps back to his every step forward in a wretched parody of a waltz.

He stopped, clenched his fists so he wouldn’t haul her over his shoulder and take her someplace where he could make her listen. “You think I leave functions I sponsor, dedicate whole nights and ignore work—for days on end—for anything, let alone what you make sound like scratching an itch? It was

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