She kept their child hidden...

Now the secret’s out!

Valentino Casale is outraged to find Kiara kept their daughter a secret from him for two years! Forever branded by his own illegitimacy, the hardened billionaire wants to do things differently...

Kiara could never regret the consequence of her one delicious night with Val. Even if he turned out to be every bit as coldhearted as their night was hot! Yet behind Val’s reputation is another man—revealed only in their passionate moments alone. Could she give that man a second chance?

Canadian DANI COLLINS knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Mills & Boon novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.

Also by Dani Collins

Claiming His Christmas Wife

Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband

Cinderella’s Royal Seduction

Bound to the Desert King collection

Sheikh’s Princess of Convenience

Innocents for Billionaires miniseries

A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire

Innocent’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Montero Baby Scandals miniseries

The Consequence He Must Claim

The Maid’s Spanish Secret

Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him

Dani Collins

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09819-9

A HIDDEN HEIR TO REDEEM HIM

© 2020 Dani Collins

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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In May of 2012 my editor Megan Haslam

phoned me with an offer for my first sale to

Mills & Boon. Eight years later, this is my thirty-fifth

title. The longer I do this, the more I appreciate the

entire team at Mills & Boon—particularly Megan.

Thank you for this career, Megan.

I absolutely couldn’t have done it without you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

EPILOGUE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

VALENTINO CASALE HAD long ago hardened himself against useless things like feelings, but he found himself irritated by the congested streets of Athens.

Traffic was his driver’s problem, not his, but he shifted restlessly, acknowledging the real pea beneath his mattress. Returning to Greece grated on him. Being sent here as a child had always felt like a punishment and still did. And to be thrust into the space between his father’s money and his mother’s grappling for it? That was the equivalent of being thrown into a cage with a hungry tiger.

So no, he was not pleased to be here.

This will be the last time, he assured himself with a grim look at the bustling midmorning streets. At least his father wasn’t here. There was a silver lining.

If he had feelings, Val supposed he would be experiencing grief or what some called “closure.” Since receiving the news that Nikolai Mylonas had died two days ago, however, he had experienced no emotions at all, not even relief. His father would be cremated and his ashes interred on his island property. In lieu of a service that no one would attend, Nikolai’s two sons and their mothers were requested to appear in person at the reading of his will.

Val had rejected any share in his father’s wealth two decades ago. He’d built his own fortune off his own oiled back, grazie. He had even supplied his mother with a healthy allowance in hopes she would quit lusting after Niko’s money, not that it had worked.

She had continued to take Niko’s occasional checks and remained convinced that her son was entitled to all of his father’s fortune. If she absolutely had to, she would settle for his receiving exactly 50 percent.

Val still didn’t want it, as he had reiterated to his father’s lawyer when the man had called to set up this meeting. Whatever he stood to inherit could be signed over to his mother if it couldn’t be refused.

There were stipulations, he had been informed, that demanded the presence of all parties before anything could proceed.

The king was dead, but his legacy of manipulation lived on.

And yes, Val’s mother was mentioned, the lawyer had hurried to state, so it was in Val’s interest to show up and keep the wheels turning.

Who cared where the money went?

Evelina Casale, that was who. She cared about Niko’s money above all things. She most especially cared how much she would receive as compared to Niko’s ex-wife, Paloma. If the other woman was bequeathed so much as one euro more, well, Val supposed he would finally meet his half brother with pistols at dawn.

Another silver lining—

“Stop,” he commanded, lifting his head off the back of his seat as his gaze caught the frontage of an art gallery. “Let me out here.”

As he stepped from the car, his phone dinged with another text from his mother, informing him she had arrived in the lobby.

She could wait. They all could.

He shoved his phone back into his pocket and crossed the street. Habit propelled him. For three years he had been entering every gallery he glimpsed, no matter what else was on his agenda. No matter if he’d been in the same shop days before.

Perversely, he was forever on the hunt for his own naked form and was always disappointed not to find it.

It didn’t escape him that if he had wanted to embarrass his father with public nudes, he could have taken a photo down his drawers and posted it online years ago. Hell, in his heyday Val had modeled underwear so sheer and tight he might as well have been bare-assed, so any barb in such an act was long lost. At this point an unknown artist capitalizing on his notoriety by circulating a “classy” rendition of his junk was pure, pretentious vanity—which he was probably guilty of along with a multitude of other sins.

Alas, today was one more fruitless search.

He smirked at his own joke, but his humor was quickly overshadowed by aggravation. He ought to be pleased when he failed to find himself. Everyone used him to whatever extent they could. In this case he had blatantly given his permission to be exploited, but this one struggling artist hadn’t done so.

Why not? It could have been the break she needed. As three years passed, however, and he failed to glimpse anything like her work again, a niggling concern had begun roiling in him that something had happened to her.

Why that might bother him, he couldn’t fathom. His own father had died, and he had continued with the tennis game his mother’s call with the news had interrupted.

There had been something about that young artist, though. She’d been both mature and self-reliant, yet naive. Charmingly open with her opinions and genuinely curious of his, unafraid to challenge his assumptions or have her own views picked apart. She hadn’t taken anything from him, either. Not even the money he’d left for the sketch he’d ripped from her book and tucked into his briefcase so he wouldn’t lose or crumple it.

His phone buzzed again. His mother was worried she might run into Paloma and Javiero before Val arrived.

As if Val would allow them to hurry him along. He didn’t respond, only moved leisurely through the gallery, skimming his gaze across landscapes and abstracts, cats and fruit bowls and a view through a window that bore only the vaguest resemblance to the framed sketch hanging in his bedroom. The execution on this one wasn’t nearly as skilled, and the signature was not the KO he sought.

One of these days he would go to Ireland and poke around their galleries, see if he was hanging out there.

He smirked again at his double entendre, but his glimmer of amusement fell away as he walked the final few blocks through blistering heat into the ninth circle of hell, otherwise known as the Mylonas office tower. He hadn’t been here since, well, it must have been right before he’d flown to Venice three years ago, acting on a social media post that his father’s rival was vacationing there.

Val wondered yet again whether he might have backed out of his ill-fated marriage if he’d come back to his hotel room after that initial meeting and found his unassuming artist still in his bed, rather than finding all the cash he’d had in his wallet still in its tidy stack on the night table, her and her sketchbook gone.

She’d been guileless and refreshingly oblivious to his position and money. He’d been utterly relaxed as she sketched him. It seemed ridiculous to say he had felt “safe.” He was a powerful man with strength and position and money, rarely at a disadvantage, but it had been a surprising relief that he hadn’t felt a need to keep his guard up with her.

He hadn’t fully appreciated that until much later and to this day, he was annoyed with himself that he’d left her that morning, giving her a chance to disappear without a trace. He hadn’t caught her last name and, with his father’s ultimatum still ringing in his ears, he’d gone through with his plan to firmly divest of the old man once and for all.

That ruthless move had been the last time he’d allowed emotion to drive him. The “marry in haste” cliché had its roots in truth. He’d found no satisfaction in his marriage, only a sexless existence with a woman whose interests were not his own. At least their divorce was finalized, and he could turn the page on that chapter in his encyclopedic collection of sordid mistakes.

“Take your time,” his mother said as he came through the revolving doors. She gave him a dismayed once-over. “Would a suit have killed you?”

“A suit would have implied this meeting was important to me.”

She tsked and moved toward him from the waiting area, almost as tall as he was and still catwalk-thin at fifty-eight—though she would slay anyone who tried to claim she was a day over fifty-one. Of course, that would have made her pregnant at eighteen, when she’d been gracing the cover of swimsuit issues, but she reserved her math skills for counting calories and money.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Casale. I’m Nigel,” one of his father’s minions said. “May I escort you to the meeting room?” He waved them toward the bank of elevators.

Val turned and a megajolt of electricity shot through him as he was smacked in the eyes by the large oil behind the security desk.

“Where did that come from?” he demanded.

It hadn’t been there three years ago. He had never seen it before in his life. The seascape framed by a window was unfamiliar, although the view itself had to be Greece. The blend of colors was new to his eyes, but they were gloriously understated while providing infinite texture and depth. Something in the composition was deeply familiar to him, too. The waft of the curtain in the breeze was reminiscent of the drape of a charcoal shirt over the back of a chair.

The painting was so bizarrely evocative of her, she might as well have stood next to him, whispering in his ear, telling him that she felt safe in here, but the wildness beyond called to her. This painting was a threshold of sorts, as she contemplated moving into a new world filled with uncertainty, but also with vast and glorious new experiences.

“You can’t come back here, sir.”

He brushed past the security guard and examined the signature. Not the KO on his own sketch, but Kiara. His skin tightened all over his body.

“Where did you get this? I want to speak to this artist.” He didn’t ask himself why, but when the security guard only gave a baffled shrug, Val wanted to punch him.

“Um, sir?” Nigel the minion offered a perplexed look. “Miss O’Neill is upstairs. She arrived for your meeting ten minutes ago.”

“For the reading of my father’s will?” His scalp prickled. The sensation kept going, lifting a sharp tingle along the sides of his neck and running the length of his spine. His gut knotted and his groin twitched. His skin felt too tight for the heat that was suddenly pressurizing inside him, crystalizing the carbon in his body tissue to diamond hardness.

“Who is she?” his mother asked at a distance.

Val barely heard her over his harsh laugh of outraged, gallows humor.

“Someone who worked for Dad.” How had he missed that? Blinded by his own libido, he supposed. Cursing himself, he said, “Yes. By all means. Take me to her. I. Can’t. Wait.”

Kiara O’Neill could tell that Niko’s lawyer, Davin, was trying to put her at ease with his incessant small talk, but it wasn’t working. Maybe he thought he was charming her? They’d met several times in the past three years and he had invited her to dinner more than once, but her priorities were always her daughter and her art, in that order. If she squeezed in an evening of wine and a rom-com with her best friend, Scarlett, she considered her life complete.

Trying to fit a man into her narrow world would only complicate her to-do list. Besides, the last time she’d gone on a date, she’d wound up pregnant.

And the man in question would enter this boardroom any second.

Her whole body was soaked in a clammy sweat, her mind incapable of holding a sensible thought, let alone a conversation. Her belted dress and flowing kimono jacket, chosen so carefully to be unobtrusive and comfortable while offering an impression of quiet confidence, felt constrictive. Her unsettled stomach was full of snakes, and the feminist inside her who had happily told men to talk to her hand for three years was wringing said hands like an adolescent girl when the grad ball was announced. The cute boy was coming down the corridor and she didn’t know if she wanted him to notice her or not.

She kept thinking she should have done something different with her hair. Straightened it, maybe. She should have worn more makeup, to disguise her apprehension. Or maybe not so much, so she didn’t look so...polished. Niko had liked her to look and sound and act a certain way and she’d gone along with it because, ugh, reasons, but this wasn’t who she was.

Deep down she was still a mixed race orphan from Cork’s dodgiest neighborhood. Scarlett would point out she was actually a mother and an artist, but Kiara was faking her way through both of those things so she wasn’t sure they counted.

Val Casale had seemed like a smart man. She suspected he would see straight through to the fraud she was, no matter how she presented herself.

Although, he had seemed to think her work had genuine merit. When she had demurred, he’d said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

She hadn’t. Not until much later.

It was all coming home to roost now, though.

She concentrated on not licking the lipstick off her mouth. Her throat was dry, making it impossible to swallow. All morning her heart rate had been picking up to a panicked speed, then petering out in a cold flush, leaving her light-headed and vaguely exhausted. She worried she would faint any second and reminded herself yet again to breathe. She didn’t want to be stroked out on the floor when Val walked in.

She wanted to text Scarlett to hurry back from the ladies’ room, but she had already set her phone to silent and tucked it into her clutch. Pulling it out midconversation would be rude.

With a stiff smile she fought to keep in place, she waited for Davin to pause in his rattling on, planning to say something about checking on Scarlett. Scarlett was heavily pregnant. It wasn’t strange that she pretty much lived in the ladies’ room these days, but she was taking a long time. Had she bumped into some of their guests? Was today’s meeting taking place out there without her?

Had Val already heard the news and walked away, before he’d laid eyes on her or offered her a chance to explain? Given everything she’d heard about him since, that was probably for the best, but her heart twisted in anguish on behalf of—

The door opened and the air changed in a subtle rush. A thrust of tense energy came in with the three people who entered.

“Signor and Signora Casale,” Nigel announced, glancing at his tablet as it dinged. “The other party has arrived. I’ll return with them shortly.” He melted away, closing the door.

“Davin.” Val’s mother, Evelina, sounded as frosty and cultured as she had the one time Kiara had spoken to her three years ago. In person, Evelina was the epitome of what fashion magazines deemed sexy and attractive, nearly six foot and wispy. She had ivory skin and lustrous brunette hair that shimmered as she floated down the far side of the table. Her clothes were designer, her neck and ears and fingers bedecked in glittering jewels. She greeted Davin with perfunctory air kisses.

“Evelina. Lovely to see you again,” Davin said politely before introducing Kiara. “This is Kiara O’Neill.”

Evelina’s gaze skimmed past her with a dismissive, “Water will do for now.”

Kiara might have been amused—or insulted—but a millennium’s worth of fireworks were going off inside her at the sight of Valentino Casale. Every emotion possible whistled and burst in her ears while sparks and flashes of color exploded in her vision.

He hadn’t bothered with a suit. He wore ripped jeans and a black shirt open at the throat. They clung to a frame that was every bit as athletically lean and flawless as it had been three years ago. His hair was still tousled, his jaw still in need of a shave.

His gaze was exactly as piercing and unsettling. His silvery irises—endearingly familiar—pinned onto her, unwavering and fierce.

Adrenaline urged her to run for her life, but the sting was laced with a bizarre excitement. An urge to run to him. Between those imperatives sat a mixture of more complex emotions. Cavernous guilt and angry resentment and something like painful relief.

She had dreaded and anticipated this day from the moment she had agreed to Niko’s offer to live with him. She would finally confront Val about their daughter. She had braced for whatever consequences that might produce, but she hadn’t braced for the effect Val still had on her.

Profound attraction accosted her. She shouldn’t be surprised. The first time she’d seen him, he’d caused a stab of irresistible fascination in her. Time had stopped and her blood had sizzled as she had begun caressing the lines of his face in velvety shades of charcoal.

That same sensual yank took hold of her today, but stronger. It was deeper, immediate and sexual. Not simply a compulsion to study and re-create him on a page, but a gut-deep desire to close the distance and touch him. She wanted to feel him with her entire body and bask in the fire he lit inside her. She wanted to feel the sweep of his hands down her naked back and his strong grip on her hips.

Her body heated and tingled and grew aroused simply by standing in a room with him because she knew what making love with him felt like. She knew how he could make her feel—animalistic and alluring and good.

She hadn’t calculated the effect of their connection through their child, either. She had spent over two years living with his father and his daughter. She knew so much more about Val Casale now, yet she still didn’t know him. Her brief crush and the memory of a sweet encounter had become a spellbinding enthrallment with someone who had had a profound effect on her life.

Despite the things she’d been told about him, however, and despite the fact he’d ultimately slighted and discarded her, everything within her wanted to reach out and rediscover the sexy, hedonistic man she’d glimpsed that night.

The indulgent smile of her lover was gone, though. His cynicism and contempt were palpable in the polished chrome of his gaze.

Did he know that she’d had their baby? Was that why he was throwing accusation at her like bolts of lightning with his bitter look?

His antagonism was obvious. Her stomach bottomed out as she recalled one of the first things Niko had told her about his son.

Val is a bastard, Miss O’Neill. He takes pride in the distinction and seizes every opportunity to live down to the label.

At different times Niko had used all manner of unsavory descriptors—disrespectful, rebellious, confrontational, reprehensible, vengeful.

He hadn’t been a man one contradicted, even though his view of Val hadn’t sounded like the man she’d met. Regardless, anger with his father had prompted Val to turn his back on a fortune and marry a woman he didn’t love. That made him a man no sensible woman would cross.

And Niko might have offered her protection from Val while he’d been alive, but Niko was gone. Kiara was on her own.

Davin broke the thick silence by setting down the jug of water with a clunk. He held out the glass to Evelina, who ignored it as she stared between them.

“Do you know each other?” Evelina asked.

Kiara’s arteries stung with a fresh release of fight or flight. She looked to the door, willing Scarlett to appear.

“What are you doing here, Kiara?” Val’s voice, for all its lethal sharpness, was still deep enough to invoke a sense of curling into a soft bed under a thick quilt.

She glanced at Davin.

“When all mentioned parties are present, we’ll discuss the particulars of dispersal,” Davin said with a twitch of a smile that died on contact under Evelina’s death-ray glare.

“Do not tell me this...person...is entitled to some portion of Niko’s estate?” Evelina’s outraged gaze went down Kiara’s ample curves in pale yellow and summer-sky blue. Her lip curled with distaste.

“Not exactly,” Kiara croaked, snatching up her own glass of ice water and dampening her throat. “I should check on Scarlett.” Perhaps they could hide together in the ladies’ room until this blew over.

Before she could take a step toward the door, however, it flung open.

“Very sorry,” Nigel stammered. “There’s been a development. Miss Walker has gone to the hospital.”

“What? Why? What happened?” In her shock, Kiara misjudged the height of the table. Her glass tipped as she set it down on her way to the door. The puddle of water streaked out alongside her as the glass rolled toward Val on the other side of the table. He caught it before it fell and shattered.

“She’s in labor,” Nigel said. “Señor Rodriguez has taken her. His mother has chosen not to stay. The, uh, central message of this meeting was, um, conveyed by Miss Walker and...” Nigel glanced uncomfortably toward Evelina then swung his attention back to Kiara. “She said to tell you to finish your business here and call her when you’re able.”

Of course she had. Scarlett never thought of herself.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Nigel said, drawing the door closed on his exit.

“Do not—” Evelina flung around with ominous warning toward Davin “—tell me that some gold digger is having Paloma’s grandchild and all of Niko’s money is going to them.” Tears of rage glittered in her eyes.

Val, on the other hand, gave an ironic snort. A dent of acrid humor twitched one corner of his mouth. “Touché, Javiero,” he drawled.

“Not...um...all of it.” Davin hurried to mollify Evelina. He flashed a cautious glance at Kiara. “Perhaps we should sit?”

“I’ll stand.” Kiara grasped the back of a chair to steady herself while the world spun off its axis around her. Her mind was splintering with concern for her best friend while her heart hammered as the moment of truth arrived like a cliff before her. Her toes curled to keep her from tumbling over it, but she was going to fall regardless.

Her eyes clung to the punishing contact in Valentino’s unrelenting stare. She watched comprehension dawn the way clouds parted and the sun suddenly pierced through in a shaft of brilliant, searing hot light.

A whooshing sensation tipped her past the point of no return. She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t have to.

“Calm down, Mother.” His tone descended to a grim, deadly rasp. “This gold digger has also had a child.”

“Sir,” the lawyer admonished, but Val didn’t let the man’s disapproval impact him. He was suffering too—a sharp sting of betrayal.

Kiara had presented herself as a sensual, self-deprecating, penniless artist with a heart that he now realized had been iron pyrite.

And he was the fool who’d believed in her.

He’d thought they’d enjoyed a chance encounter, one where he hadn’t needed to deflect or overpower the situation in order to keep control of it. He had thought they had shared, if not secrets, a lack of lies.

She had haunted him.

And she’d been working for his father the whole time.

She had been more than Eve with an apple; she’d been the snake, slithering her way into his periphery, seemingly harmless then turning on him when he least suspected it. How was he surprised? How? And of course his father had played the long con. Of course he had.

But how had they managed it? Had she already been working for his father when they met? Had Niko hired her to lure Val into bed and get her pregnant?

Nice work if you can get it. And lucky shot to make it happen in one go and only because one of the condoms broke.

“You have a child?” His mother clawed a pale hand at the diamonds around her throat.

“Yes.” Kiara’s knuckles stood out like brass bullets where her brown hands clutched the back of a chair.

Her hair was longer, parted on one side. Light played through the brown-gold mass of springs that were so fine and narrow, each strand looked as though it had been wound around a pencil or something smaller. The coils piled upon themselves in wild abandon around her oval face, accentuating her high cheekbones.

Her big eyes were pools of espresso, her mouth a round pout painted in brick red. Had she had elocution lessons? Or had the broad Irish accent she’d used that night been a put-on to trick him into believing she was the harmless backpacker she’d pretended to be?

Her teeth had been straightened, but the rest of her was still mouthwateringly curvaceous, draped in clothes of a much higher quality than the last time he’d seen her. She wore heels so she seemed taller than he remembered. A wide belt at her waist emphasized the thrust of her breasts and the generous flare of her round hips and bottom.

A very carnal memory threatened to take hold and dull his wits all over again. Sex was only sex, he reminded himself. It was a pleasant pastime to be enjoyed like dessert or sailing on a hot day, not something that should be used against others the way she had clearly used it against him—on his father’s behalf—damn her to hell.

“Since things have taken such a sharp turn, I’ll come straight to the point,” Davin said, fingering through the papers before him. “Given that both of Nikolai’s sons have renounced their claim to his fortune, he has bequeathed the bulk of his estate in equal parts to his grandchildren. Obviously, we’re wishing everything goes well with Miss Walker’s delivery. With that happy event, to the best of our knowledge, there will be two heirs who will share equally in the assets. Evelina and Paloma have been allotted a one-time, one-million-euro payment.” Davin slid a cashier’s check toward Val’s mother. “Each.”

“One—That’s not enough!” she cried.

“Sounds like you’ll have to be nicer to Kiara,” Val said, drinking deeply of that satire. “Don’t assume she’s only here to fetch your beverages, for instance.”

“This can’t be right.” His mother hurried to Davin’s side and demanded to read it with her own eyes.

Val met Kiara at the end of the table.

“You understand what this means?” he asked, jerking his head to indicate his mother. “She will never let you rest. I thought you were on the pill,” he recalled.

Kiara’s shoulders twitched, but any guilt was short-lived. Her gaze sparked with affront as she met his.

“We’re doing that here? Now?” Her cheeks darkened with a blush. “It was a low dose to regulate my cycle. When I spent the night with you, I missed one. Apparently, it was enough to disrupt the effectiveness. There’s no such thing as a perfect contraceptive, you know.”

“My father didn’t pay you to spend the night with me and get pregnant?”

“And break the condom? No.” She rocked back a step, scowling as if insulted.

“If you knew him well enough to pry half his assets out of him, you know he would be capable of something like that.” Look at the disregard Niko was showing toward the mothers of both his sons right now, throwing them a token settlement while he enriched the women who gave him grandchildren. Niko had been unswayed by sentiment. Ruthless. “Did you sleep with him?”

“No. That’s a disgusting suggestion.”

“Says the woman using a baby to get her hands on a fortune.”

Her chin came up in a tiny signal of challenge.

Challenge accepted, tesoro.

Why? He didn’t care.

He shouldn’t care, at any rate.

But he discovered that he did. Deeply. Emotions he couldn’t name were churning in his gut.

“You pretended you didn’t know who I was that night,” he accused.

She had seemed charmingly unaware when he had told her his name, but at the time he’d been weighing the idea of marriage to a stranger. Obviously, she’d taken advantage of his distraction.

“You skipped the pill on purpose, in hopes of winning the jackpot? Such tactics have been tried in the past, with limited success.” He sent a mocking wave down his front. “You’ll come to regret this.”

“Having my daughter?” she asked with another lofty notch of her chin. “I doubt it. She has a name, by the way. Would you like to hear it?”

“No.” He could have exited on that. The man he had cultivated himself into nearly always stole the last word and tossed a match over his shoulder as he walked away.

Something kept him rooted, however, listening for the name. Waiting for Kiara to take another shot at him. He didn’t know why, but he wanted both. He wanted to stay right here, feeling the streaking pinball of incendiary energy continue to heat as it bounced between them.

How could she still hold such a spell over him when he now knew her to be mercenary and devious.

“I told him to give you the money you needed to take care of it,” Evelina spat from the other side of the room. “He said you did.”

Val had been in enough scraps to duck any punch, but that one suckered him. His abs belatedly clenched as he snapped a look at his mother. “You knew about this?”

“You didn’t?” Kiara’s gaze flashed back to his with wary confusion.

“I knew she was claiming to be pregnant with your child. I didn’t know she had it.” Evelina glared censure at Kiara.

Kiara’s lashes swept down again, and her mouth firmed as she pronounced with dignity, “Niko has given me money to take care of her.”

Evelina caught her breath as she realized how badly she had misplayed her hand.

Val should have found that hilarious, but learning of his mother’s involvement had taken him by the throat and shaken him.

“You knew she was pregnant? And you didn’t tell me?” he demanded of her.

“You were on your honeymoon.” His mother’s voice dropped to the syrupy, conciliatory tone that wheedled for him to take her side. “You didn’t need an ugly scandal.”

“Like the one I grew up in?” When had he last bothered to be angry? Truly furious? Maybe his last visit to this tower? Maybe it was the air in here that stoked his rage. The fetid stench of manipulation and jealousy and profound selfishness. “You live for making a scene. Blaming Niko for my shortcomings is your bread and butter. You could have used the baby for leverage all this time if you had—Oh, my God.”

Val hooked his hands on his hips and laughed drily toward the ceiling as he realized why she had preferred his baby be erased from existence.

“This is a new low for you, Mother.” He was uncharacteristically, profoundly astounded. And sickened. “Or should I say... Nonna?”

“Do not...” she warned in shaken outrage.

“Oh, I will. Because your precious vanity sent her to him.” He pointed at Kiara then the folder representing the fortune that had been the reason for, and the bane of, his very existence.

This situation was abhorrently reminiscent of his childhood, when something clean and precious and his would be sullied and used as leverage and snapped apart in the struggle between his parents and his half brother and his father’s ex-wife, Paloma. Val’s wants and needs had never been part of any conversation. If they had, they’d been dismissed as irrelevant.

And Kiara had played along with all of that.

“Why did you tell her instead of me?” he demanded of Kiara.

Whatever culpability flickered into Kiara’s face was quickly schooled into something more facetious. “I guess I could have left a message with your wife?”

It was a darling effort at shaming him, but, “I’ve been divorced a year. You’ve had time.”

“There were circumstances.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Niko was ill and needed us there.”

“You’ve been living with him? This whole time?”

If Val believed people were capable of true remorse, he might have thought the way Kiara bit her lip might have signaled regret.

He had played this game too long to believe she felt anything but glee, however, at claiming the pot of gold.

Walk away, he thought. Just. Walk. Away.

“He thought if you knew Aurelia existed, you would pressure me to leave the island instead of staying with him.”

Aurelia. It was the name of the villa in Venice where they’d spent their night together. The site of their lovemaking and, apparently, the conception of their daughter.

Every morning, when he gazed on Kiara’s sketch, he was back there on the bed with her, seated behind her in the rumpled sheets, teasing her into continuing with her study of the open balcony doors while he sampled the scent in her neck and tasted the smoothness of her shoulders and felt her breast rise and fall in growing excitement against his palm.

He swallowed, trying to dismiss any profundity in her bestowing that villa’s name on their child. He didn’t buckle to sentiment. It was a manipulation tactic. Everything was.

Even so, he couldn’t take his eyes off her as she turned her attention to his mother, showing no fear as she said baldly, “Niko didn’t want you or Paloma to know about her or about Scarlett’s pregnancy. He thought it would create more conflict than he could deal with in his weakened condition. Since he was terminal, we respected his wishes.”

It was so poetic, it bordered on sappy, but to keep the knowledge of his daughter from him for three years? He would never forgive any of them for this.

“We’ll wait for a DNA test before we continue this discussion.” Evelina took care to tuck her cashier’s check into her clutch. “Niko can’t overlook his son in favor of a child we’ve never seen. We’ll fight this.”

“You’ll be wasting your money,” Davin said. “There’s already a DNA test that proves Aurelia is Niko’s descendant. Her sample was correlated with the DNA test that proved Mr. Casale’s paternity. Niko was of sound mind. Further tests won’t change anything.”

Val didn’t need a test. He wasn’t so gullible as to take Kiara’s word, but his father had always been diligent about such fine points.

He didn’t care anyway, he assured himself. Not beyond how galling it was that Niko had gotten the last laugh, but so what? Val had never wanted offspring—one of the reasons his marriage had tanked—and he hadn’t wanted his father’s money, either. He had no desire to take responsibility for the child in possession of that fortune—Oh, wait. The girl was only entrusted with half. That meant any involvement he had with her would mean dealing with Javiero on some level, as well.

And all the while, his mother would continue to claw at him for her piece of the pie.

Definitely time to exit stage right. He certainly could. Kiara was financially equipped to meet the needs of his child. Nothing in his life had to change. In fact, his mother would become Kiara’s problem. The solution was elegantly simple and utterly freeing.

Yet, he remained where he was, coldly enraged. His insides were gripped by a wrath that swelled his chest with the pressure of a primal yell he couldn’t release.

He could hardly pick apart why this provoked such a volcanic rise of fury in him. It had something to do with the grotesque replay of history. While he’d been married to Tina, Kiara had been having his child, sentencing an innocent to the label he’d worn like a dead albatross until he was old enough to make damn sure he deserved the slur.

No. He might not have crafted himself into the most upstanding of men, but he was decent enough to pluck a child out of a toxic spill before she was lethally poisoned and scarred forever.

“Refuse that money,” he told Kiara. “My daughter will inherit my fortune, not his.”

“A minute ago you didn’t even want to know her name.”

“She can have mine,” he shot back. “You’re going to marry me. Today.”

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