Her bombshell: “I’m pregnant.”

His demand: “Marry me...”

Painfully insecure and media-shy heiress Pia is duty-bound to marry well. So illegitimate Angelo is completely unsuitable husband material. Yet this irresistible Spanish tech tycoon seduces Pia with an evening of bliss...that leaves her pregnant!

Pia can’t afford a scandal, but Angelo wants to publicly claim his heir. Now to control the headlines, Pia must wed the only man who has ever made her feel. With Angelo posing a danger to her well-guarded heart, can she step into the spotlight—with the wedding of the century?

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

The Secret Beneath the Veil

Xenakis’s Convenient Bride

Consequence of His Revenge

Claiming His Christmas Wife

Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband

The Maid’s Spanish Secret

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 Sauveterre Siblings miniseries

Pursued by the Desert Prince

His Mistress with Two Secrets

Bound by the Millionaire’s Ring

Prince’s Son of Scandal

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

Dani Collins

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08841-1

BOUND BY THEIR NINE-MONTH SCANDAL

© 2019 Dani Collins

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 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.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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For my wonderful readers.

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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

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

PIA MONTERO FEARED her sister-in-law’s masquerade ball would be interminable, and it was, but not for the reason she had anticipated.

The October evening was cool, but dry. Guests had embraced the chance to cast off tuxedos and backless couture for something more exciting. Women twirled in overblown gowns with bell skirts, elaborate wigs and feathered headdresses. Men stalked in colorful brocade jackets with epaulettes and lace cuffs and short pants with stockings. Some even wore the traje de luces of a bullfighter with horned masks.

The masks were works of art. A few had cat ears and bird beaks, some covered an entire face, others were part of a jester hat with bells dangling from the cockscomb. Some were made from handblown Venetian glass, others were made of lace or satin and adorned with feathers and flowers, beads and sequins.

There were prizes for best costumes, but Pia had chosen to forfeit. She wore an understated gown in indigo topped with a purple velvet jacket. Her mask was a conservative cat’s eye in molded silk painted with musical notes and roses, ideal for blending in.

She wished now that she’d chosen a full face mask as she watched a gold-lipped cherry blossom porcelain canvas swirl by. It would have allowed her to hide her thoughts behind a physical mask, rather than having to maintain the aloof expression she had practiced in the mirror at boarding school, back when she’d been hiding hurt feelings over everything, most especially being noticed.

Even when girls had stuck up for her back then, saying, “She’s shy. Leave her alone,” Pia had blushed and burned behind her breastbone, wishing herself into a hole in the ground because someone had looked at her.

Misery did not love company, as it turned out. She’d been lonely her entire childhood, too awkward to make friends and ridiculously smart, which had made her an academic rival, bookish and superior on top of all the rest.

Her saving grace was her bloodline. She came from Spain’s aristocracy. Her parents were the Duque and Duquessa of Castellon, her father an innovator in industrial metals who had become a well-respected, elected member of parliament once his sons were old enough to take the reins on what was now a multinational corporation.

Pia was also reasonably attractive—not that she played it up. She eschewed makeup and designer wear, seeing little point in trying to attract a boyfriend when her mother would ultimately assign her a husband.

Which La Reina Montero was trying to do right now, turning a perfectly tolerable evening into something Pia struggled to bear.

“I’d prefer to wait until January, after I’ve defended my dissertation,” Pia said, and braced herself, but it still stung when she received the expected tsk of tested tolerance.

Pia’s brothers were chemical engineers, both unmarried until they were thirty, but Pia’s accelerated study pace and soon-to-be-achieved doctorate only “wasted her best years,” according to her mother.

“These things take time,” her mother insisted. “Signal your interest. Was that the Estrada heir?”

Please no. Sebastián was decent enough, but he talked nonstop.

“His outgoing nature would balance your introversion. You’ll have to work on that so you can host galas like this.”

Say it louder, Mother.

“Perhaps if we go into the marquee, we can match names to the silent auction bids.” La Reina tilted away her mask, which was mounted on a stick like a lorgnette. “I shouldn’t have agreed to anything so childish as a masked ball. Very inconvenient.”

“Most people seem to be enjoying themselves,” Pia said mildly, noting laughter and noises of surprise as they approached the bustling tent where guests mingled while perusing the fund-raising items.

Ever the observer of animal behavior, especially human, Pia considered why a disguise would instill such high spirits. Was it the nostalgia of youthful play? She wouldn’t know. Her childhood had been so rigid as to be a form of conditioned adulthood.

“Poppy is doing well.” La Reina acknowledged her new daughter-in-law with reluctant approval as she glanced over the bids for rare vintage wines, antique jewelry, spa packages and VIP tickets to shows on Broadway and London’s West End.

Did the masks reduce caution and provoke a willingness to take risks, Pia wondered? Similar to the way social media provided a removal from face-to-face interactions, thereby emboldening people to behave more freely?

Pia certainly felt at liberty to stare more openly. From behind the screen of her mask, she watched a couple debate a bid for a certain item. The woman protested it was too extravagant while the man insisted he loved her and wanted her to have it.

Pia was fascinated by interactions like that. They reminded her of the tenderness and indulgence that existed between her older brothers and their wives. They had both started their marriages in scandal, but had turned them into something meaningful, making her yearn for something like it for herself—as she repaired the family name by way of a low-drama, civilized marriage that was more a contracted merger with a dynasty of equal rank and prestige.

She bit back a sigh. Taking up the mantle of duty wasn’t a sacrifice, she assured herself. It was a sensible course of action that benefited everyone, including herself. Her few attempts at dating had been failures, something the perfectionist in her loathed. Love and passion were foreign concepts. She wouldn’t recognize either if she tripped over them.

She turned from spying on the couple and ran straight into a man setting down a pencil.

Physically the impact was light. With wistfulness blanketing her, however, the collision felt monumental. Life altering.

His opera cloak opened like dark wings that threatened to engulf her as his hands came up to grasp her upper arms and steady her.

Their masks had caused this, her confused mind quickly deduced. They interfered with peripheral vision. She wasn’t clumsy or blind and doubted he was, either. He was too vital and controlled.

She recognized those traits in him instinctively, even though she wasn’t usually sensitive to such things. Or sensual either, but she found herself taking in nonvisual elements even more swiftly than the sight of him. The heat of his body radiated around her. The strength in his hands was both gentle and firm. The scent of fresh air and orange blossoms clung to his clothing as though he’d arrived from a long walk through the grove, not from the stale air of a car.

Who was he?

His black tricorn hat had simple white trim. She glanced down to his black-on-black brocade vest over a black shirt, his snug black pants tucked into tall black boots.

A pirate, she thought, and looked back to his porcelain mask, white, blank and angular. It cast a shadow onto his stubbled jaw, his beard as black as the short hair beneath his hat.

She couldn’t tell what color his eyes were, but as he looked straight into hers, her pulse shot up with the race of a prey animal. She held that inscrutable stare, arms in his talon-like grip, skin too tight to contain the soar of emotion that rose in her.

Most people skipped past her in favor of more interesting folk, which she preferred. Sustained eye contact was never comfortable, but her mask gave her the confidence to stare back. To stare and stare while her whole body tingled in the most startling and intriguing way.

Sexual attraction? He possessed the attributes that typically drew female interest—height and broad shoulders, a firm physique and a strong jaw. She was stunned to learn she was human enough to react to those signals. In fact, as the seconds ticked by, the fluttering within her grew unbearable.

“Excuse me.” Someone spoke behind her, jolting her from her spell.

A woman wanted to place a bid on Poppy’s framed, black-and-white photo.

The black satin lining of the man’s cloak disappeared as he dropped his hands from her arms. The noise around them rushed back, breaking her ears.

Pia moved out of the way. When she looked back, the man was leaving the tent.

Still trying to catch her breath, she moved to the bidding sheet where he’d left his pencil. She knew all the names on the list and none of those men had ever provoked a reaction like that in her.

At the bottom, in a bold scratch, was a promise to quadruple the final bid. It was signed Anonymous.

“How does this work?” Pia pointed to it as her mother finished speaking to someone and caught up to her. Pia’s hand was trembling and she quickly tucked it into the folds of her skirt.

“It happens occasionally,” her mother dismissed. “When a man wants to purchase something to surprise his wife.”

Or didn’t want his wife to know at all, Pia surmised. She wasn’t a cynic by nature, but nor was she naive about the unsavory side of arranged marriages.

“He’ll leave his details with the auctioneer,” her mother continued. “It’s a risky move that becomes expensive. Other guests will drive up the bid to punish him for securing the item for himself.”

“The price one pays, I suppose.” Pia’s witticism was lost on La Reina.

“This is one of the paintings from the attic,” La Reina said. “A modest artist. Deceased, which always helps with value, but not the sort of investment I would expect to inspire such a tactic.”

Pia studied the portrait. The young woman’s expression was somber. Light fell on the side of her round features, highlighting her youth and vulnerability.

“Do you know who she is?” Pia picked up the card.

“Hanging pictures of family is sentimental.” Her mother plucked the card from her hand and set it back on its small easel. “Displaying strangers in your home is gauche.”

“The final bid is sewn up,” Pia pointed out. “I was merely curious.”

“We have other priorities.”

A husband. Right. Pia bit back a whimper.

Angelo Navarro nursed a drink as he clocked the rounds of the security detail, picking his moment for the second half of his mission.

He could have sent an agent to bid on the portrait, but along with not trusting anyone else with the task—loose lips and all that—the opportunity to slip onto the estate undetected had been far too tempting.

He hadn’t expected such a bombardment of emotions as a result of visiting his birthplace, though. Anger and contempt gripped him; fury and injustice and a thirst for vengeance that burned arid and unquenchable in the pit of his belly.

These people prancing like circus clowns, making grand gestures with extravagant bids to benefit victims of violence, were the same ones who had ignored a young woman’s agonizing situation. They hadn’t interfered when her child had been taken from her and had continued to revere her persecutors.

Angelo felt no compunction whatsoever at infiltrating this private fund-raiser with the intention of retrieving what his mother had stolen. Or been given. He’d never been clear on how she had obtained the jewelry or exactly which pieces had gone missing. That part didn’t matter. He would happily have gone to his grave with the knowledge that she’d fought back in her own way.

However, when this chance to add a fresh blow had arisen, he hadn’t been able to resist it.

Did it make him as soulless as his father that he was willing to commit a criminal act to continue her retaliation? So he could show his half brothers how it felt to be toyed with and abandoned to poverty?

Perhaps.

The thought didn’t stop him. He casually made his way to the corner of the house, waited for the guard’s attention to turn and slipped into the dark beyond.

He came up against a Family Only sign on the first step of the spiral staircase and smirked with irony as he slipped past it to climb to the rooftop patio.

The stairs gave a nostalgically familiar creak as he reached the top—where he discovered someone had arrived ahead of him.

The sound and light from the party were blocked by the rise of the west wing of the house, casting the space into deep shadow. He could only see a silhouette and the lighter shadow of her mask as she turned from gazing across the moonlit Mediterranean. Even so, he recognized her as the woman who had careened into him as he was bidding on the portrait of his mother.

For one second as he’d steadied her, he had forgotten everything—his thirst to punish, his purpose in coming here. Something in her uninspired costume gave him the impression she didn’t belong here any more than he did. That she was hiding in plain sight. His male interest had been so piqued, he had nearly asked her to dance.

“Oh.” The lilt in her voice told him she had identified him from their brief encounter as well, which also told him she had found it as profound as he had.

“Were you expecting someone else?” He adjusted his mask to peer harder into the shadows. The rickety bench where his mother used to read to him was gone, replaced by a dark shape that suggested a comfortable, L-shaped sectional.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

That was good news. On many levels.

“Did you follow me?” she asked.

“No.” He would like to think he would have timed things differently if he had known she was up here, but he wasn’t sure. Nor was he as dismayed as he ought to have been that she was now an obstacle to his goal.

“Did you invite someone to join you?” she asked, vaguely appalled.

He should have said, Yes. She sounded so uncomfortable at intruding, she probably would have hurried away, but something in him balked at letting her think he was involved with anyone.

He heard himself say a throaty and inviting, “Not yet.”

Her silhouette grew more alert. The air crackled between them.

“Who are you?” Her voice sharpened and her mask tilted as she cocked her head.

It struck him that he couldn’t tell her. Damn.

“I think the purpose of a night like this is to maintain the mystery.”

“And telling me would identify you as the buyer of that portrait you bid on so generously. And anonymously.”

“True.” The peril he was in began to impact him. She could place him with the painting and here on the rooftop. Maybe she didn’t know his name, but there was a chance she could find out.

Dared he linger? Was it worth the risk?

He couldn’t tell whether this rooftop patio had been repaved or the old bricks merely pulled up and reset, exposing the hidey-hole he had discovered as a child. He doubted his half brothers had ever found it. If they had, they wouldn’t have been so sly in their sale of this estate. There was every chance the new owners had found the treasure, though, and kept the contents without mentioning it. Angelo had very little faith in humanity, particularly those who sat like cream on the top of society without having worked to get there.

He couldn’t leave until he knew for sure. He had come this far, and so decided to wait her out.

He joined her at the wall. The last time he’d been here, he’d barely been tall enough to peer over. His distant memory of that time was swept away by the breeze off the water and the woman’s voice beside him.

“If you didn’t follow me or come to meet someone, why are you here?”

“Curiosity.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He was definitely intrigued by her. “You?”

“To think.”

“About?”

“The nature of happiness. Whether it’s a goal worth pursuing when there are no guarantees I’ll find it. That it would come at the expense of others if I did.”

“Nothing too heavy, then,” he drawled. Her hand was close to his on the wall, pale and ringless. “In my experience, happiness is a fleeting thing. A moment. Not a state of being.”

“And if a moment is all you have?”

His scalp prickled beneath his hat. He turned his head and tucked his chin, trying to see through the dark and the holes in his mask to read her expression, but it was impossible.

“Regret is also a moment. A choice not to seize happiness when it presents itself.”

“I would regret it if I didn’t take a chance,” she agreed with a nod of contemplation.

“What kind of chance?”

She let a couple of seconds tick by with crushing silence, then said in a thicker voice, “An overture. Letting my interest in someone be known.” Her hand had been curled into a tense fist, but it unfurled, her pinkie finger splaying toward him.

His stomach knotted. “Are you married?”

“No.” Through the rush of relief in his ears, he heard her add, “But obligations to do so loom. And I don’t want to risk making a fool of myself when I don’t know if he’s even—”

“He is,” he cut in. His chest felt tight and his throat could barely form words. “He’s interested.”

CHAPTER TWO

PIA’S HEART WAS pounding so hard, she ought to have hammered down the walls around her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked faintly.

“Should I?”

“No.” If he did, he would be treating her differently. With kid gloves, because of her family’s influence. There would be no intimate questions about whether she was meeting someone or encouragement to act impulsively.

It was enormously refreshing not to carry the weight of history and expectation, which had been the nature of her dilemma when she’d come up here. That ever so brief moment with him in the marquee had sent her into a spiral of doubt about duty to family versus selfish pursuits.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“I’m not involved with anyone. But a moment is all I have, too.” His velvety timbre was layered with regret.

She kept trying to place his voice, certain she would remember if she’d heard him before.

“I don’t even know what I want except not to let this moment pass without...”

“Seizing it?” he suggested.

“Stealing it,” she said wryly, finding the idea deeply seductive. It was the best of both worlds. She could briefly shed mousy, dutiful Pia Montero without giving her up for good. It was safe.

“Strangers in the night.” He held out a hand as if inviting her to dance.

Her hand went into his even though the music was a distant drone without a discernible tempo.

He was too compelling to resist, though. It wasn’t the outfit, either. She understood that some animals were innately dominant. He was one of them and he ought to send her scurrying, but she was too fascinated. She was utterly riveted by him and her reaction to his air of supremacy.

She distantly noted that she would have to tell her mother to find her a good-natured beta male so she wouldn’t be so completely overwhelmed by the simple act of being held in a man’s arms.

This was biology, she told herself through the fog of her deepening attraction. She was reacting to a chemistry that didn’t come from a mix of beakers, but from the scent of pheromones off skin. Receptive male meets receptive female. The pseudoerotic nature of their disguised identities and their clandestine meeting on an unlit rooftop exaggerated the excitement.

But even as her head tried to explain it and dismiss it, her body grew pliant and her feet shifted closer into his sphere. She wasn’t acting like herself, but she would never have an encounter like this again, when she could be someone else, free of commitment and the constraints of being Pia Montero. When her physical appearance and other shackles of identity were so absent she was nothing but the energy of pure, universal womanhood.

And he was all man.

“I want to kiss you,” he said in a voice that rumbled deep in his chest.

Her pulse skipped. It was only a kiss. She wanted to feel his mouth, to experience him. “I want that, too.”

“Come here.”

It was magnetic attraction rather than his arms that pulled her as she followed him into the shadow of the chimney. She couldn’t discern his features at all as he slipped his mask up, knocking his hat away.

His arms encircled her and his mouth brushed against her cheek, seeking and finding hers.

An electric current jolted through her at first contact, leaving her tense and waiting when he drew back slightly, his breath catching the way hers had.

She wasn’t great at kissing. It was yet another of those human interactions that had eluded her, but as his mouth returned, she discovered she liked it. His lips settled firmly across hers, flooding her with incredible heat, smooth and unhurried. As if they had all the time in the world for stolen kisses.

Her hand found his stubbled cheek and she enjoyed the abrasion against her palm as much as the lazy play of his mouth against hers. He teased her like that a few times, deepening the kiss with incremental degrees until she was parting her lips to catch his, wanting more. Her tongue darted out on instinct, practically begging for more.

With a growl in his throat, he settled into a hot kiss of intense passion, something she recognized with a fresh jolt of surprise and excitement. Then she lost the ability to consider what was happening to her as his strong arms pulled her into a world of pure sensual pleasure. The strength and safety of his embrace was all that held her together as she shuddered under an onslaught of pleasure so intense a helpless noise throbbed in her throat.

“Stop?” he whispered against her lips.

“Never. This is...” Overwhelming. Glorious. Essential.

She touched the back of his head, brought him back into the kiss and tried to give him the same sort of pleasure she was receiving. She offered all of herself, completely open to whatever he needed. She had never experienced anything so extraordinary.

He made another noise, this one more unfettered, as though he was slipping loose of whatever sort of control he held himself under—which perversely thrilled her. His hands stroked firmly through the layers of her velvet jacket and full skirt, molding her form, lighting a fire under her skin, sending a heavy ache into her loins.

“I’ve never felt like this,” she told him in a rasp of need, burrowing her hands beneath his cloak, into the heat beneath his vest. She had never been so forward, seeking so compulsively to touch a man, to take in his textures and musculature.

He swore. “Me, either.” His hand cupped the back of her neck and his breath pooled hotly against her throat. “But this can’t happen.” He scraped his teeth against her nape, making her nipples pinch into sharp sensitivity. “I can’t start something. I was never here.”

“Neither was I,” she said with a choke of rusty laughter. “Keep going.”

Her greedy hands went down to his butt. She had never done such a thing, never realized that the hard flex of his glutes could offer such a thrill as she squeezed.

He did the same to her, his strength pulling her so close she felt the shape of his erection through his trousers and the velvet of her dress, hard against her belly. Her brain distantly processed his arousal as potentially alarming, but her body fairly melted under a hot flush of desire.

“Yes. Like that,” she said in an agonized whisper. She had never been more thrilled by anything in her life.

He muttered something about wrong time and place, but he pressed her beneath him onto the lounger, his cloak falling heavily around them. He kissed across her bare collarbone, whiskers abrading her skin. When his hand sought beneath her, she arched so he could lower her zipper and loosen her bodice.

She was braless and he groaned with gratitude as he cupped her naked breast and lightly scoured her skin with his stubbled cheek before he closed his mouth over her nipple.

Desire was such a knifing ache in her that she swallowed a cry and arched again, unable to get close enough. She struggled against the confines of her skirt, ground herself against the ridge of his erection, yearning for the pressure of him there. Between. Where she was damp, her pulse throbbing like a signal.

“This is insane.” He lifted his head, looming like a gothic shadow over her, dangerous and fierce—but she wasn’t terrified at all.

“It’s a memory,” she murmured. “A good one.”

His breath cascaded across her cheek in a rasp of disbelief. Agreement. He caught her earlobe in his teeth, sending delicious shivers through her whole body.

When he lifted himself again to drag her skirt upward, she bent her knee to help, embracing the chilly air against her naked thigh, excited by the fabric of his trousers as he settled between her legs.

“I don’t have anything.”

“A condom?” She hadn’t thought of that. This was the point when they ought to stop. She knew that.

“Are you on anything? I don’t have any health issues.”

She wasn’t, but she had thrown supplies in her clutch this evening, thinking her cycle was due and didn’t it always arrive at the least convenient time.

“I’m okay. It’s fine.” She didn’t want to stop. There would never be another moment like this one. She needed him more than she needed air.

His hand cupped her cheek. “Thank you.” It was the growl of an animal loosed from a cage and threatening to consume her. His busy mouth went across her jaw and down her throat and back to her breast while she ran her hands over and over the layers of clothing across his back.

When he stroked his broad hand up her thigh, she got her hands beneath his clothing, too; found the hot, smooth skin of his waist and the hollow of his spine. She would have tried to work her hand around to open his belt, but his thumb slid inward to graze over the silk between her legs.

She gasped and went very still.

“No?” He froze.

“Yes.” She could barely speak, the yearning in her grew so sharp.

“Mmm...” He did it again and caught her light cries with his kiss, making love to her mouth with his tongue as he teased and caressed and his thumb found its way beneath silk to stroke into slippery heat.

She shuddered as she kissed him back, flagrant and uninhibited, playing her tongue against his, her hands roaming everywhere she could reach. She was trying to convey how much pleasure he was giving her. Trying to reciprocate it.

“You’re gorgeous,” he told her as he lifted himself just enough to unbuckle and release his fly.

“You can’t see me.” She searched the dark, trying to make out the shadowed features so close to her own, but there was only the black cutout of his silhouette against the blanket of stars above them.

“I see you.” His eyes glittered despite the lack of light, making it seem as though he saw all the way into her soul. “Sensual. Curious. Pensive. And courageous enough to steal what you want.” He kissed her with a smile on his lips.

“I’m not courageous at all—Oh.”

He slid her panties to the side and settled his hot, hard, naked flesh against hers.

She throbbed with anticipation. Ached. She knew he was about to ruin her for whatever husband lay in her future, not because he would take her virginity, but because no man would ever make her feel this way again. Elemental and beautiful. Free.

“I see power.” She let her fingers move through the short, silky strands of his hair, petting this dangerous wolf who could devour her, but held her in thrall instead. “Self-discipline and patience and intelligence.”

“I’m none of those things. Not right now.” His voice skimmed across her cheek while the crown of him, fierce and hot and hard searched against her damp, untried folds.

“You’re perfect,” she insisted.

The party was a distant soundtrack, her self-control long thrown away.

She had no regrets as she felt the press of him, the pinch and sting of his shape forging into her. She didn’t even care if she orgasmed. She was thrilled enough by this—the act of finding a lover who pleased her. Of choosing him and by extension choosing herself. It was selfishness in the extreme and a moment of physical connection that would always be hers—something she would reach for to soothe the bleak isolation that would continue to be her constant companion through the rest of her life.

He nibbled at her jaw as he rocked his hips, settling himself fully inside her. “You feel incredible.”

“You, too,” she murmured, dazed by the intensity of lying with him this way. Clothed and joined, his weight crushing her lower half while his arms cradled her. His scent was a drug, his lips tender and teasing.

On instinct, she sought his mouth, perhaps looking for reassurance, but it turned passionate quickly. It was such a remarkable, glorious feeling to kiss like this while their bodies were locked. She wished they were naked. He was so gloriously, beautifully wonderful.

With a growl, he shifted, braced on an elbow as he withdrew and returned in a slow, testing stroke.

The friction caused an acute stab of pleasure that left ripples of shivery sensations in its wake. She gasped and dug her fingernails into his shoulders, astonished.

He chuckled softly. Roughly.

“That was something, wasn’t it? Perhaps we’re being spared by the gods. If I had met you any other time, I would chain you to my bed forever,” he threatened.

If only...

He moved again, making all of her sing. She clutched at him, trying to make sense of the sensations overtaking her, but it was far too engulfing. She found it impossible to think, only feel. There was a sting and heat and a kind of tension she had never experienced. She wanted to absorb herself into his skin, but there were so many barriers. All she could do was hang on as he cast off restraint and moved with more purpose. Their breaths grew more jagged, each stroke making her fight cries of increasing pleasure.

She didn’t know how to communicate to him how dazzling and wonderful this was except to allow animal instinct to overtake her. She licked his throat and offered her hips for the driving force of his. She stroked her hands beneath his shirt against his lower back, encouraging his rough possession while she brazenly sucked at his bottom lip.

And just when she thought she couldn’t rise one more degree of arousal, couldn’t take one more second of this onslaught of sensation, nature took over again and her climax swept her up into the heavens above them.

He stiffened, tightened his grip on her and stopped breathing exactly as she did. Then he shuddered and ragged cries sounded against her neck while she opened her mouth in a silent scream, all of her world shattering around her, leaving her destroyed, never to be the same again.

Angelo touched a kiss to the top of her spine as he finished zipping her dress.

She let her hair fall and adjusted her mask as she turned to offer her mouth to his.

He took a final, lingering taste of her, trying to memorize the exact plump shape of her lips with the sweep of his tongue. When he drew back, he searched through the faint light cast by the party on the far side of the house, aware that he would spend the rest of his life looking for this pointed chin, that wide mouth and elegant forehead framed by this fall of dark hair.

Against his better judgment, he almost asked for her name, but she spoke first.

“We should get back.” There was a creak of misery in her voice. She caught at his hand and pressed his knuckles to the hot pulse in her throat. “Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

It was an impossible situation. He wasn’t supposed to be here. And much as he was enthralled by her sexually, he didn’t know if he could trust her. It was best to leave this as a torrid, dream-like encounter.

“I’ll go first and distract the guards. They won’t be alarmed I’ve been up here.”

“Because you’re a woman?” Females could be treacherous. His grandmother had been one of the cruelest. But the guards might be tempted to frisk him if they caught him leaving a private area. He appreciated her giving him a clear path of escape.

“Until we meet again,” he said as he adjusted his mask and hat.

“In another life,” she said with a melancholy pang in her voice, turning away to begin her descent.

With one ear cocked for voices or a return of her footsteps, he moved into the corner of the patio. He flicked on his cell phone for light and noted that, aside from a thorough cleaning of the moss that took root every winter, the new owners had left the bricks exactly as he remembered them. He only had to move a planter of dormant flowers to expose the familiar, hexagonal brick beneath. He pried it up with the blade of his pocketknife and shone a light in to check for vermin or prevent a nasty spider bite.

The space was dry and empty—except for the tobacco tin. He drew it out and opened it long enough to see the glitter of jewels and the head of a small plastic wolf—one of his own treasures tucked away so his brothers wouldn’t steal it, melt it, or otherwise use it to torment him.

In the distance, the music stopped. A male voice said something about costume judging.

With a well-practiced move, Angelo smoothly set the brick back into place. He slid the tin into the pocket of his cloak as he straightened.

Moments later, as he slipped down the stairs and past the sign that read Family Only, his brain quit replaying the most exquisite lovemaking of his life and made the connection.

The guards wouldn’t be alarmed at her presence in a private area because she was family.

He swallowed an imprecation and waited to look at his phone until he had melted past the party perimeter and hiked through the orange grove to his car. It took two swipes to bring up a photo of the new owner of the estate, Rico Montero. Another swipe and there was Rico’s sister, Pia.

Angelo knew that pillowy bottom lip. Intimately. He knew how her vanilla skin tasted. The silk of her hair against his brow still tickled him with sensual memory.

His lover wasn’t a cast-off mistress of a playboy or a daughter of a businessman trying to elevate her circumstances. Her forlorn, It’s a memory. A good one had made him think she lived some sort of deprived existence, but how rough could her life be?

He knew women could be in an abusive situation without it being apparent to the world, but Pia held a lot of aces. She earned dividends from the family corporation run by her brothers, lived in a small but elegant house in a very exclusive neighborhood. Her social media page was covered in photos of exotic landscapes.

She came from a family exactly like Angelo’s father and brothers—titled and entitled. Angelo already knew the Montero brothers’ scandalous affairs with vulnerable women, a PA and a housemaid, had been papered over with quickie marriages, the Duque’s political career and the family’s positions of power and wealth left unscathed.

As for Pia, her fine-boned features were even more patrician and elegant without the mask. She was photographed at the occasional gala, her smiles unapproachable, her poses as deliberately nonchalant as a fashion model showing off a runway gown.

That lissome figure had been delightfully supple. He experienced a latent pulse of heat recalling the feel of her writhing beneath him, but she wasn’t his type. He preferred bubbly, outgoing women with real jobs. Ones whose motives and interest in him were crystal clear. He had learned the hard way that his wealth made him a target for the decidedly mercenary members of either sex.

He threw his phone onto the passenger seat and pulled away, disgusted with himself for giving in to impulse with someone so wrong.

It wasn’t the snobbery of an upstart toward the bastion of old money or the petulance of being shut out of that privileged life and therefore wanting to tear it down. His contempt went far deeper. Someone must have known what had gone on in that cottage on the Gomez estate all those years ago, but they had chosen to ignore it. They had continued associating with monsters, enabling Angelo’s father and brothers to enjoy a level of status they had no right to. His father should have been jailed and, when the old baron died, Angelo should have received a portion of his estate.

Despite being fourteen and away at boarding school, still grieving his mother’s suicide, Angelo had been abandoned and turned onto the street. Angelo was convinced his brothers had deliberately burned down his mother’s cottage, both for the insurance money and to prevent him returning to live there.

Angelo had scrambled to survive and if his brothers had left him to make his new life, he might have left them to living their old one. Instead, when they realized a cache of jewelry was missing, they had come after Angelo, accusing him and his mother of theft.

Given the way Angelo had been living, his brothers had believed him when he’d said he didn’t have anything but the shirt on his back, but they had been convinced he knew where the jewelry was hidden.

As he proved tonight, Angelo had had a very good idea where his mother had buried the treasure, but no amount of being knocked around or intimidated had got that secret out of him. Instead, he had bit his split lip and resolved to destroy them, no matter how long it took.

Angelo could have come forward as the baron’s bastard anytime in the last decade and a half, demanding his share of their father’s estate through legal channels. Aside from having no desire to acknowledge that half of his DNA, it would have been expensive. Until the last few years, he hadn’t been able to afford that sort of fight. It also would have turned his mother’s anguish into nothing more than sordid muckraking in the press. He couldn’t do that to her memory.

Besides, he had perversely enjoyed his brothers’ fruitless search. If they had ever managed to unearth the jewels, he would have staked his claim. It was, after all, compensation his mother had taken with the knowledge she would never be left anything by Angelo’s father beyond the use of a run-down cottage.

As far as Angelo was concerned, this tin of jewelry was his inheritance, fair and square.

He might have let his brothers go to their graves thinking the fortune well and truly lost if the masquerade ball hadn’t presented such a perfect opportunity to collect it. If they hadn’t sold the estate in such an underhanded deal and put his mother up for auction as if they were philanthropists for doing so...

They made him sick.

As he reached the field where his helicopter waited and climbed aboard with the weight of the tin in the pocket of his cloak, he considered when and how he would reveal to them that he did indeed possess what his mother had taken.

He wanted them in the weakest possible position, fully on the ropes, when he dealt this blow. Currently, they were still living off the proceeds of selling the estate to Rico Montero. Those funds would run out quickly, given Darius’s gambling habits and Tomas’s recent divorce. When they began to look hungry, Angelo would tip his hand.

It would drive them crazy. They would want to stake a claim, but doing so would force them to admit their family connection. They would have to admit how Angelo had come to exist and how his mother had got her hands on these diamonds and pearls.

Angelo would enjoy seeing them twist and turn against each other when that happened.

Like every nearly perfect caper, however, there was one witness who could blow the whole thing apart. Pia Montero.

She could place Angelo on the estate this evening.

If she discovered who he was.

CHAPTER THREE
Six weeks later...

“WOULD YOU EXCUSE me a moment?” Pia said to her mother and Sebastián.

She didn’t wait for her mother’s permission or even glance to read what was likely an expression of disapproval. Her mother probably thought she was giving in to nerves, but Pia didn’t care. She rose abruptly from the table and hurried to the toilet, where she lost every bite of the lunch she’d just eaten.

What on earth?

She wrung out a cloth and dabbed the perspiration from her wan face, shocked at the violence of her sudden illness. She’d been feeling odd all week, thinking she might be coming down with something, but she wasn’t running a fever. She wouldn’t dare accuse her mother’s chef of anything less than using the freshest ingredients.

That left one obvious explanation before she went down the road of blood panels for exotic diseases.

But it was impossible. Her cycle had arrived the day after the masquerade ball. That ought to mean she wasn’t pregnant. However, she realized with another roll of her tender stomach, she hadn’t had a period since.

She couldn’t be pregnant. Couldn’t. Her mother’s top tier, preferred choice for Pia’s husband was in the dining room right now.

Think, she commanded her rattled brain, but she was too shaken and confused to even recall the dates and count the weeks properly.

She would put off reacting until she’d had it confirmed, she resolved. And she would take a test immediately.

She fought her composure back into place and returned to the dining room, but didn’t retake her seat.

“I’m very sorry, Mother. I’m not feeling well and have to go home. May I call you later in the week to try this again, Sebastián?”

“Let me drive you home.” He rose and set aside his napkin.

“I wouldn’t want to impose. Mother’s driver collected me. I’ll have him run me back.”

“Not at all. Thank you for lunch, La Reina. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”

Pia’s mother offered a meaningless smile and tilted her cheek for his air-kiss, but her glance toward Pia warned that a lecture would be forthcoming.

Moments later, Pia was beside Sebastián in his sports car.

Through lunch they had established that they both enjoyed scuba diving and beachcombing. He mostly worked out of Madrid, but had holidayed as a child in Valencia and would love to settle in this area once he was raising a family. His mother bred show dogs and he had taken a runt out of pity. He admitted to shamelessly spoiling it, which had made her mother smile stiffly while Pia had experienced a weak ray of optimism. Perhaps they could have a successful marriage after all.

“I’m very sorry,” she apologized again. “I’ve been fighting something all week and should have canceled.”

“In sickness and in health, right?” His bold calling out of today’s less than subtle agenda made her stomach roil all over again. She couldn’t lead him on if she was carrying another man’s child.

“Sebastián, I think we should slow down.”

He took his foot off the accelerator, instantly alert. “Oh, you mean—” He glanced at her, then made an abrupt turn into the parking lot of a mechanic’s garage. “Did I say something to offend you?”

“Not at all. But something has come up that makes me think it’s best if we put off discussions until the new year.”

She tried for a polite smile and a poker face, but the longer he searched her expression, the more culpable she felt. She had to look away.

He cleared his throat, then spoke carefully. “It may surprise you to hear there are very few circumstances that would put me off what we’re contemplating.”

She licked her numb lips. “You don’t realize how serious this circumstance might be.”

“I think I do.” He sounded so grave, so sure, she closed her eyes in dread.

Was it obvious? Would rumors circulate before she’d had a chance to confirm it? To discover the identity of the father and tell him?

For the first time since she was a child, her eyes grew hot and her throat swelled with the urge to cry.

“My family wants this alliance quite badly, Pia. I’m not without a checkered past that you would have to accept. Offering solutions and protection to one another is the point of this sort of partnership. Please talk to me about anything you view as an impediment to our moving forward. I’m quite sure I can accommodate you.”

She wanted to goggle at him, unable to believe he would be willing to take on another man’s child, but he reached across and squeezed her hand with reassurance.

She swallowed and found a faint smile. “Let me call you later in the week, after I’ve had time to think some things through.”

“Of course.”

He took her home, but she only stayed long enough to double-check her dates and call her sister-in-law.

An hour later, she was halfway up the coast. She stopped at a village market and bought an off-the-shelf pregnancy test, took it into a service station restroom and sat in her car a long time afterward, absorbing the fact that she was carrying a baby.

The baby of a man she didn’t know. At all.

She was a smart, responsible woman. How could she have been so careless?

She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that both her brothers had been through this. That maybe some dark and desperate part of her had sabotaged herself into this position, hoping to find a version of the happiness Cesar and Rico had both found.

That sort of thinking was beyond illogical. It was self-destructive.

And genuinely impossible when she didn’t even know her lover’s name.

But that was why she wanted to see Poppy.

She put her car in Drive and returned to the scene of the crime.

Half an hour of mutual admiration with her two-year-old niece restored a little of Pia’s equilibrium.

Despite the circumstances, she looked forward to motherhood, she realized with a small bubble of optimism. She wouldn’t be a distant, coldly practical woman like her mother, even though she already knew La Reina would judge her harshly for showing affection toward her child. She scolded Sorcha and Poppy for it often and Pia could still hear her mother rebuking her own nanny for hugging her.

Don’t spoil her. She’ll become dependent.

Yes, it must have been the early hugs, not the lack of them thereafter that had turned Pia into the withdrawn, insecure, social-phobic person that she was.

“Will you go with Nanny while I talk to your mamà?” Pia asked Lily.

Lily gave Pia’s neck a fierce hug and said, “I yuv you,” in English, bringing tears to Pia’s eyes as the small girl waved bye-bye on her way out the door.

She would have that soon—someone who would say those words and mean it, every day.

“I think I got some good ones,” Poppy said, setting aside her camera as they entered the lounge. “Thank you. I’m making an album for Rico for Christmas. I don’t know what else to get the man who has everything.”

Pia’s brother Rico had been in a bad place after his brief first marriage had ended in tragedy. Then he had discovered that Poppy had had his daughter in secret. Since locating them, he’d become more like the brother Pia recollected from her earliest years, before he left for school; the one who was patient and protective, willing to sit with an arm around her so she felt safe as she watched an evil witch in a children’s movie.

“Coffee? Wine?” Poppy offered.

Pia faltered as she realized she was off alcohol and likely coffee, as well. Good thing she had barely touched what her mother had served.

“I came from lunch at Mother’s. Nothing for now, thank you.”

“Did she say something about the auction? Is that why you’re here?” Poppy winced as she sat. “When you said you wanted to ask me about it, I thought you wanted the auctioneer’s card.” She picked it up from a side table. “Am I in trouble?”

“No. But I would like that, if you don’t mind.” Pia pocketed the card. “No, Mother is quite pleased you broke records on the fund-raising, even if she doesn’t agree with your methods.”

“Because of the painting,” Poppy said heavily, shoulders slumping.

“I meant the costumes. Mother thinks that sort of thing is a gimmick. What are you talking about? Which painting?”

“The one from the attic. The young woman. She’s the reason I raised so much. The bidder paid a ridiculous sum.”

“I remember it. Who bought it?” She held her breath.

“That’s the trouble. I don’t know.”

“The auctioneer didn’t tell you?”

“Wouldn’t,” Poppy said flatly. “I tried. The previous owners were upset and wanted to know.”

“Baron Gomez?”

“And his brother, yes. Do you know them?”

“Only vaguely by reputation.” Not a good one. The family had fallen on hard times after the previous baron’s death. One brother was a womanizer, the other a gambler. Neither was particularly adept at business. Both were too old to be her mystery man and too young to have fathered him. “Why were they upset?”

“Good question! They sold us the property as is, with all sorts of furniture and other items left behind. When I found the painting in the attic, I thought it was rather good so I called the family as a courtesy, to be sure they wouldn’t mind my auctioning it for the fund-raiser.”

“Did they say who she was?”

“Their stepsister, the daughter of their father’s second wife. She lived in a cottage at the corner of the property. It burned down after she died. She must have passed at a young age. She looks about fifteen in the portrait and it was painted thirty years ago. In any case, the new baron struck me as rather callous when he laughed and said, ‘Sure, see what you can get for her.’”

“Was he at the ball?”

“They declined the invitation. But he asked me to note that he had donated the painting.”

Pia wanted to roll her eyes at the man’s “generosity,” but was too well-bred.

“I should have told Rico that something felt off, but I thought I was being sensitive.”

“Why? What happened?”

“The painting went for a hundred thousand euros! Someone quadrupled the final bid to ensure they would get it.”

Pia hadn’t known it had gone for that much. “What was the painting assessed at?”

“Five hundred euros.”

“I see.” She didn’t. At all. But it was nice to know her baby’s father had a generous streak.

“I know. I wanted to thank him personally, but the auctioneer said the purchaser specifically requested I send my thank-you to the Gomez family for donating it and that I should tell them how much I got for it. Your mother said it was crass to mention the figure, but that since it was such a substantial donation I should honor his wishes.” Poppy’s eyes went wide again. “Huge mistake.”

“Why?”

“For starters, I don’t think the Gomez family would have let me sell it if they’d realized I would get that sort of money for it. First the younger one, Darius, called me and went crazy. He was swearing and making threats, trying to get me to tell him who bought the painting. He wouldn’t believe I didn’t know. I was upset and told Rico. He called the older one and tore such a strip off him. My Spanish vocabulary was deeply enriched, let me tell you.” Poppy was making light of it, but Pia could tell she was still unsettled.

“I wonder if the purchaser knew what kind of hornet’s nest he was stirring up,” Pia said, even though she instinctively knew he must have. The man she’d met had seemed extremely sure of himself.

“I’m quite sure I was pushed into the middle of a battlefield. When Rico hung up, he asked if someone named Angelo Navarro had been on the guest list. I guess that was the name of the person the Gomez brothers suspected was behind the purchase. I checked and he wasn’t on it, but anyone could have placed that bid on his behalf.”

I was never here.

A cold prickle left all the hairs on Pia’s body standing on end.

“Angelo Navarro,” she murmured. “Do you know who he is?”

“Rico did some research. He’s a tech billionaire who came up very recently. Quite predatory. He’s targeting the Gomez interests... ‘Picking off the low-hanging fruit,’ Rico said. Rico told your mother’s assistant to bar all of them from any future events. I didn’t realize there was a central registry for offenders.” Poppy chuckled dryly.

“Sorcha set it up when she was Cesar’s PA,” Pia recalled, trying to hide her shock and alarm. “It’s the kiss of death.” A firmly closed door by the Monteros was a firmly closed door against the social and financial advantages that came from circulating in Spain’s wealthiest circles.

Pia had presumed that her baby’s father had been an invited guest to the ball and therefore had been vetted for casual association. Given his willingness to pay so much for the painting, he had to be wealthy. That meant he might not be her mother’s first choice, but he was of suitable rank and standing that he would be accepted despite the unconventional circumstances.

Instead, he was an outsider who’d just been blacklisted.

“So what are you auctioning?” Poppy asked.

“Pardon? Oh.” Pia wasn’t one to lie. She rarely got herself into a situation where it was necessary, only the occasional prevarication over whether a meal had been enjoyed or a dress suited. “I have a few art pieces I want to place in their next catalog,” she hedged. “My life will change as my academic career ends.”

As she sat with her upturned hands stacked in her lap, cupping the air where her belly would swell in a few months, she debated whether to confide fully in Poppy. Poppy had been in nearly this exact position when she’d been pregnant with Lily.

But Pia had learned a long time ago that whining about a problem didn’t solve it. Obstacles weren’t to be mentioned until she had formulated a plan to overcome them—at which point her solution would be critiqued for merit and edited as necessary.

She wanted to cry, but rose instead.

“It’s growing late. I’d rather not drive in the dark. Would you mind not mentioning to Mother that I came out today? I cut our lunch short, said I wasn’t feeling well.”

“The lunch with...?” Poppy gave a little sigh as she rose. “Pia, I don’t want to speak out of turn, but are you sure an arranged marriage is right for you? Look at your brothers.”

Pia couldn’t help her small snort of irony.

“Please don’t take offense, Poppy, but yes. Look at them. When Cesar married Sorcha, he threw over a long-standing agreement that would have paid a family debt.” That relationship was in tatters and so was the one from Rico’s first marriage, not that she had the poor taste to mention it, but everything Rico should have gained from that marriage had since been lost when it was discovered he had had Lily with Poppy.

Poppy paled anyway, forcing Pia to do something completely uncharacteristic and reach out to squeeze Poppy’s arm.

“I consider both of you dear friends. Your children are a gift,” Pia told her sincerely. “I’m pleased my brothers are in fulfilling relationships, but you’ve seen enough of our family’s inner workings to understand the expectations placed upon all of us. On me to be the last bastion of rational behavior. I have to make a good marriage or brand the Monteros as impulsive and inconstant forever.”

“You’re expected to pay the price for our happiness?” Poppy asked. “That’s not fair. Or rational.”

“Perhaps not.” But she wasn’t supposed to bring further detriments to the table, either. “I’m not like my brothers, Poppy. I’m not built to go against the grain.” One wild night notwithstanding.

“Women never are,” Poppy said with a spark of defiance. “I didn’t tell Rico about Lily for a lot of reasons, but deep down I know fear was the biggest thing that held me back. This...?” She waved at the mansion she had restored with impeccable taste. “Fitting into your world has been hard and terrifying and I know I’m making mistakes every single day. But it’s worth pushing myself to be more than I ever imagined I could be to have what I have with Rico. My only regret is that I didn’t tell him sooner, so we could have been happier sooner.”

Pia forced a careless laugh. “Happiness is fleeting, Poppy.” Where had she heard that before?

“I mean that we could have been together sooner. In love sooner. Which makes us happy.” Poppy frowned with concern. “I know you weren’t raised to expect a marriage based on love, but it is possible to find it, Pia. Do you want to be married to someone else when you do?”

“Food for thought,” Pia said to end a discussion that was a lot more complex than Poppy realized. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

But she drove home with white knuckles, mind churning over words that had struck particularly deep.

My only regret is that I didn’t tell him sooner.

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