Czytaj książkę: «Defying Her Billionaire Protector»

CHAPTER ONE

‘MAMMA MIA! HERE they come.’

Marietta’s hands stilled over the keys of her computer, her assistant’s warning—low-voiced yet laced with an unmistakable thread of anticipation—shattering her train of thought like crystal under a hammer. She looked up in time to see the courier pushing open the glass doors of the gallery she managed in the heart of Rome’s affluent Parioli district. In his arms he cradled a huge, hand-tied bouquet of roses.

‘Bellissimo.’ Lina moved from the storeroom doorway and stood by Marietta’s desk at the rear of the gallery. ‘They are the best yet!’

Marietta would have liked to disagree with that assessment, but Lina was right. The long-stemmed roses were beautiful, each head—at least two dozen of them—exquisite, the velvety petals a vivid red that in the whiteness of the gallery made Marietta think, perversely, of blood.

Her thoughts snapped to the elegant spray of white orchids that had been delivered earlier in the week—surprisingly, because until then the flowers had always arrived on a Friday. Pretty and delicate, the orchids, like the roses, had been lovely to look at, but their sweet, cloying scent had lingered in her nostrils and left her feeling faintly ill long after she had disposed of them.

Even the note that had come with them had been heavily perfumed, and she’d wanted to destroy that too. Had wanted to rip the card and its intimate typewritten message into tiny, indecipherable pieces and flush them down the toilet.

But she’d been told to keep the notes in case they held any clues, so she’d shoved the card into a drawer, along with all the others, and vowed that when this was over—when her secret-admirer-turned-stalker was caught or simply grew tired of his antics—she would set a match to those cards and enjoy watching them burn.

The courier strode over the polished concrete towards them, and Marietta felt her stomach doing a little surge and roll. She didn’t want to touch the roses. She definitely didn’t want them near enough for her to smell.

‘Ciao.’

The young courier’s broad smile did nothing to quell her dread. His gaze shifted sideways—drawn, unsurprisingly, to Lina’s tall, willowy form—and Marietta saw the predictable flare of male appreciation on his face give way to surprise—or maybe shock was a better word—the moment the man sitting behind her stood.

He strode around her desk, straight into the courier’s path, and she imagined she heard the young man’s jaw crack, his mouth dropped open so fast. His face lost its colour, paling several shades as he took in the large, imposing man before him. She felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy; Nicolas César, ex-legionnaire, head of the widely revered global conglomerate César Security and her brother’s good friend, could scare the wits out of most people—and that was on the days he didn’t look hell-bent on throttling someone.

He stared down at the courier from his massive height and extended a large, capable-looking hand. A hand that appeared elegant and bone-crushingly strong all at the same time. ‘Give them to me.’

Nico’s deep voice rumbled with the kind of natural authority only a fool with no thought for self-preservation would dare to challenge. Wisely, the younger man didn’t hesitate. He handed over the roses with a haste that might have amused Marietta had anything about this situation been remotely funny. His eyes darted back to Lina, but her attention was firmly fixed on the other man, and, as if understanding he couldn’t possibly compete with all that eye-popping masculinity, the courier shot Marietta a bemused look and hurried out of the gallery.

She gripped the titanium hand rims on the wheels of her custom-made chair and reversed a few feet from her desk. Although Nico stood on the other side, with a great slab of horizontal glass between them, she needed the comfort of the extra distance before she looked at him.

Not, she told herself, because she wasn’t used to looking up at people. Thirteen years in a wheelchair had accustomed her to seeing the world from a diminished height, and she’d long ago reconciled herself to that aspect of her disability. And although able-bodied people often thought of her as being confined to a wheelchair—as though the chair and not her paralysed legs were the prison—for Marietta the use of her modern, ultralight chair for mobility was a choice. One that gave her the freedom to work and travel. To live her life with a level of independence any single, career-focused woman of thirty would wish to enjoy.

But Nicolas César wasn’t anything like the people Marietta encountered on an ordinary day, and it wasn’t only his unique physicality that set him apart—wasn’t only the impressive breadth of his shoulders, the fact that he stood taller than most. On par with her six-foot-four brother—or the fact that his dark trousers and close-fitting black shirt moulded the kind of lean, hard-muscled physique that spoke of discipline and sweat and the good fortune of strong, resilient genes. Rather, it was the raw power he exuded from every inch of that undeniably masculine frame—the overriding impression that here was a man few others dared trifle with—that made Marietta’s hormones sit up and take notice.

Which irritated her enormously.

Sexual attraction was a complication she didn’t need in her life right now—or ever, for that matter. Especially to a man so far out of her physical league her pride smarted just to look at him.

‘Are you not going to interrogate him?’ she asked, and her annoyance with herself—with that hot, inescapable lick of feminine awareness—lent her words a much pithier edge than she’d intended.

Dark blue eyes thinned and settled on her, making her aware that her sarcasm wasn’t lost on Nico, and guilt instantly pricked her. He was here to help because her brother had asked him to. That Leo had done so without consulting her first was no fault of Nico’s. Unleashing her frustration on him was childish. Unfair.

He held her gaze, his silent, prolonged eye contact causing her skin to flush and her insides to squirm with something far more unsettling than guilt. She didn’t look away and wasn’t sure she could even if she wanted to. His eyes were such a dark, mesmerising blue. Staring into them made her feel as if she’d been dragged beneath the surface of a vast, bottomless sea and could no longer breathe.

She opened her mouth to offer an apology—and drag some much-needed air into her lungs—but Nico spoke first.

‘Bruno has cleared the staff at the florist’s shop and vetted the couriers they use. There is no need for me to...’ he paused for a fraction of a beat ‘...interrogate him.’

That slight yet deliberate emphasis on the word interrogate elevated Marietta’s discomfort. Looking at him, it wasn’t at all difficult for her to visualise Nicolas César in the role of interrogator—nor did she have any trouble imagining that anyone on the wrong side of that arrangement would quickly find themselves either pleading for mercy or spilling their deepest, darkest secrets to him. Or both.

At the same time, she imagined any man who possessed that degree of dark, potent magnetism would rarely, if ever, want for female companionship. Women flocked to him wherever he went, no doubt, drawn like hummingbirds to nectar by his hard-edged looks and his big, powerful body.

And that would be before he opened his mouth.

Before that deep-timbre voice, with its French accent and slight North American inflection, poured over them like heated syrup and turned their insides all gooey.

Marietta suppressed a little shiver.

Did Nico make his lovers plead?

Did he make them scream?

The shiver turned into a hot flush that cascaded through Marietta’s body and scalded her from the inside out. Madre di Dio. What was wrong with her? She had no business allowing her thoughts to veer in that direction. No business entertaining hot, lurid fantasies about her brother’s friend. Life had taught her some harsh lessons—lessons that had moulded her into a realist—and realists like her did not waste their time fantasising about things they would never have.

And yet she wasn’t without aspirations. Cementing her place in the art world, achieving success and recognition as an artist in her own right, supporting herself independently of her brother’s wealth and generosity—those were her goals, the dreams that got her out of bed in the mornings.

Plus she had a wish list tucked away—a ‘bucket list’, some people called it. Everyone had one, didn’t they? Everyone wanted to see things and do things that breathed some excitement, some magic into their ordinary lives.

Marietta was no different. As an incomplete paraplegic she could no longer walk, but living with a spinal cord injury didn’t mean she couldn’t push her own boundaries, do things that were a little adventurous or wild.

Paraplegics around the world skydived and flew planes and competed in rigorous sports.

Every item on Marietta’s wish list was doable. Some more challenging than others, given her physical limitations, but all of them realistic. She certainly didn’t have her head in the clouds. She knew what was possible and what wasn’t. And there was no reason whatsoever that she couldn’t tandem skydive. Or float in a hot air balloon. Or travel to Egypt to see the pyramids.

But what were the chances of a man who could crook his finger and have any woman in the world—any able-bodied woman in the world—he wanted desiring her?

Now that was pure fantasy—a pointless, fanciful daydream she needn’t waste her time indulging.

What she did need to do was stay focused, remember what was important: her job, her independence, her art.

Especially her art.

But now all of that was under threat. In danger of being disrupted by some anonymous admirer who must be mentally unstable, or, if she were being less kind, completely deranged.

Six weeks. That was how long she’d been receiving the bunches of flowers and the notes she’d thought quaint and amusing—even flattering—at first. But over the weeks the messages had gone from sweet to intense, their content growing more personal, more intimate. More possessive.

It was the note that had come with a bouquet of thirteen crimson tulips on a Friday two weeks ago, however, that had for the first time left her truly spooked.

Such a beautiful dress you wore yesterday, amore mio. Red is perfect on you—and my favourite colour. You see? We were made for each other! S.

Those words had clamped a cold fist around her throat and squeezed hard as their import had slowly sunk in. And she had realised something she hadn’t considered before then—that he, whoever he was, was following her, watching her, stalking her.

Gooseflesh rose on Marietta’s forearms and she resisted the urge to rub them, to scrub away the sensation of something unpleasant crawling over her skin.

She’d been so shaken she’d confided in her sister-in-law, Helena—which in hindsight had been a mistake. Helena, in spite of Marietta’s pleas for her not to, had told her husband—Marietta’s brother—who had, of course, flipped. Within minutes Leo had been on the phone, severely chastising her for not going directly to him and urging her to involve the police.

Advice she’d promptly ignored. She hadn’t wanted to create a fuss and her big brother was, as always, being over-protective. The fact he’d waited an entire forty-eight hours before calling on his friend Nico for assistance was, she reflected now, nothing short of astonishing.

That Nico, whom she’d last seen at Leo and Helena’s wedding two years before, had, in the first instance, sent his man Bruno rather than handle the matter himself, was something Marietta had not, she’d assured herself, been a little disappointed about.

Nicolas César was, after all, a busy man—CEO of a renowned global network that provided security and protection services to some of the world’s most powerful corporations and influential figureheads. Dealing with an overzealous admirer was never going to figure high on his priority list, no matter how solid his friendship with her brother.

And yet...here he stood. Or perhaps towered was the better word, she thought, conscious of a crick in her neck. Of the warm pulse of blood beneath her skin. Her heartbeat had not quite settled back into its normal rhythm since he’d walked, unannounced, into the gallery some forty minutes earlier.

After a brief, polite greeting he’d asked to see the cards Bruno had told her to keep, and then, despite the fact they were written in Italian, had proceeded to read every intimate word until Marietta’s face had burned with mortified heat. Then—since it was mid-afternoon on a Friday, and that meant another bouquet was likely on its way—he’d commandeered one of the soft chairs reserved for the gallery’s clientele and artists and waited for the flowers she had silently prayed wouldn’t come.

‘Where’s Bruno?’ she asked now. Not because she missed the rigid presence of the dark-suited man, but rather because she could see the small white envelope attached to the roses and wanted to delay, if only for a minute longer, having to open it.

‘Following up a lead.’

A lead. That sounded vague. ‘What sort of lead?’

He didn’t answer her. Instead he turned to Lina, as if he’d not heard the question or had simply chosen to ignore it.

Marietta tamped down her annoyance—only to feel it flare again when she glanced at her assistant. Santo cielo! Had the girl no pride? No sense of dignity? Marietta wanted to snap her fingers at her. Tell her to wipe that silly doe-eyed look off her face. To straighten up and pull her hip back in, instead of jutting it sideways in a come-hither pose she probably wasn’t even aware she’d adopted.

Nico detached the envelope from the roses, his strong fingers snapping the straw ribbon like a strand of cotton, and handed the bouquet to Lina. ‘Get rid of them.’

Lina—foolish girl—beamed at him as if he’d paid her a compliment rather than barked an order at her. Marietta bristled on her assistant’s behalf. Lina, however, was oblivious. Without so much as glancing at Marietta for confirmation, she took the roses and disappeared out to the back—heading, presumably, for the outdoor dumpster behind the building.

Marietta couldn’t help herself. ‘That was rude.’

Nico’s eyes narrowed on her again...so blue. So disconcerting. ‘Pardon?’

‘Lina,’ she clarified. ‘You could have asked nicely. Barking commands at people is rude.’

One heavy eyebrow arced, ever so slightly, towards his dark brown hairline. ‘She did not look upset.’

Of course she hadn’t looked upset. She’d looked smitten and flushed and...ravenous. As if she’d wanted to drag Nico into the storeroom, bolt the door shut and tear his clothes off—with her teeth.

Marietta was sure Nico knew it, too.

And yet, to his credit, he hadn’t encouraged her attentions. Hadn’t seemed to give out any inappropriate cues. In fact he’d seemed barely to notice her—unlike some of the male visitors to the gallery, who appeared more entranced by Lina’s legs than by the sculptures and paintings on display.

And the girl had good legs—long and shapely—and a good body that she dressed, or on occasion underdressed, to showcase. Why shouldn’t she? She was tall and graceful. Feminine, yet lithe.

Unbroken.

Everything Marietta might have been and wasn’t, thanks to one fateful split-second decision. One irreversible moment of teenage stupidity. A moment that had altered the course of her life and shattered what little had remained of her childhood innocence.

Still—as a few well-intentioned if slightly insensitive people had pointed out during the long, excruciating months of her rehabilitation—she’d been lucky.

She had survived.

The three teens in the car with her—including the alcohol-impaired driver—had not. Two had died on impact with the concrete median barrier, the third on a gurney surrounded by the trauma team trying desperately to save her.

For Marietta, the sole survivor of that tragic car crash, a long string of dark, torturous days had followed. Days when she’d lain unable or sometimes unwilling to move, staring at the ceiling of the hated rehab unit. Reliving those final moments with her friends and wishing, in her darkest moments, that she had died alongside them.

But she had not died.

She had fought her way back.

For the brother whom she knew had taken the burden of responsibility—and blame—upon himself. For the second chance at life she’d been given that her friends had not. For her mother—God rest her soul—who would have wanted Marietta to fight with the same courage and determination with which she’d battled the cancer that had, in the end, cruelly won. And—even though she’d stayed angry with him for a long time after he’d died—for her father, who’d fought his own grief-fuelled demons after his wife’s death and tragically lost.

Her chin went up a notch.

She had faced down every brutal obstacle the universe had thrown at her and she was still here. She would not let some stranger, some clearly unhinged individual, disrupt the life she’d worked so long and hard to rebuild. And she certainly wasn’t afraid of some pathetic words on a little white card.

She held out her hand for the envelope. Nico hesitated, then handed it over. Willing her hands not to shake, she tore open the flap and pulled out the card. She sucked in a deep breath and started to read—and felt the cold pasta salad she’d had for lunch threaten to vacate her stomach.

* * *

Marietta’s hands had started to shake.

She glanced up, her espresso-coloured eyes so dark Nico couldn’t differentiate between iris and pupil. They were glassy, enormous—larger than usual—and, he noted, unblinking. Combined with her sudden pallor, the tremor in her slim hands, they conveyed an emotion Nico had more than once in his life been intimately acquainted with.

Fear.

He cursed under his breath, reached over the glass-topped desk and whipped the card out of her hands.

His Italian wasn’t impeccable, like his native French or his English, but he had no trouble reading the typewritten words. His fingers tightened on the card but he took care to keep his face expressionless. Marietta was a strong woman—something he’d intuited the first time they’d met in passing at her brother’s office, and again at Leo’s wedding—but right now she was shaken and he needed her to be calm. Reassured. Safe.

Anything less would be a disservice to her brother, and Leo was a good friend—had been ever since their paths had crossed via a mutual client eight years ago. Nico had recognised in the Italian the qualities of a man he could like and respect. Leo’s company specialised in cyber security, and his people occasionally lent their technical expertise to Nico’s own. Outside of business the two men had become firm friends—and Nico did not intend to let his friend down.

He slipped the card into a plastic folder along with the others. Aside from an insight into their composer’s mind, the notes offered nothing of real value and no means by which they could track the original sender. The flowers were always ordered online, the cards printed by the florist, the words simply copied from the order’s electronic message field.

Bruno had been confident at first. Online orders meant a traceable digital trail to IP addresses and credit cards. But whoever Marietta’s stalker was he was careful—and clever. Their tech guys had chased their tails through a series of redirected addresses and discovered the account with the florist had been opened using bogus details. The invoices were sent to a rented mailbox and payments were received in cash via mail.

It all indicated a level of premeditation and intent neither Nico nor Bruno had anticipated. And Nico didn’t like it. Didn’t like it that he’d underestimated the threat—assuming, at first, that they’d be dealing with nothing more troublesome than a jilted boyfriend. It galled him now to accept that he’d been wrong because he knew better than to assume.

But he was here now, in Rome, with the meetings he’d had scheduled for today in New York cancelled after Bruno’s call twenty-four hours earlier.

And they would find this guy. They’d break some rules, sidestep some local bureaucracy, and they would find him.

He strode around the desk and dropped to his haunches in front of Marietta’s chair, bringing his eyes level with hers. She jerked back a little, as if she wasn’t used to such an action, and he wondered briefly if it were not the accepted thing to do. But he’d have done the same with any woman he sought to reassure, conscious that his height, his sheer size, might intimidate.

‘We will stop him, Marietta.’

Her eyes remained huge in her face, her olive complexion stripped of colour. ‘He’s been in my home...’

Nico ground his jaw. ‘Perhaps.’

‘But the note—’

‘Could be nothing more than a scare tactic,’ he cut in. Yet the tension in his gut, the premonitory prickle at his nape, told him the truth was something far less palatable. More sinister.

I have left you a gift, tesoro. On your bed. Think of me when you unwrap it. Sleep well, amore mio. S.

On impulse he took her hand—small compared to his, and yet strong rather than dainty or delicate. Her fingers were slender and long, her nails short and neat, manicured at home, he guessed, rather than by a professional.

Incredibly, Nico could still remember clasping her hand on their very first introduction—four, maybe five years ago at her brother’s office. Their handshake had been brief but he’d noted that her skin felt cool, pleasant to the touch, her palm soft and smooth in places, callused in others. He remembered, too, seeing her at Leo’s wedding a couple of years later. Remembered watching her, intrigued and impressed with the way she handled her wheelchair—as if it were a natural extension of her body.

In the church she’d glided down the aisle before the bride, composed and confident, unselfconscious—or at least that was the impression she’d given. Her sister-in-law, a beautiful English woman, had looked stunning in a simple white gown, but it was Marietta to whom Nico’s attention had been repeatedly drawn throughout the ceremony.

In his thirty-six years he’d attended two other weddings—his own, which he preferred not to dwell upon, and an equally lavish affair in the Bahamas to which he had, regrettably, allowed a former lover to drag him—but he could not recall a bridesmaid at either who might have outshone Marietta in looks or elegance.

With her thick mahogany hair piled high on her head, the golden skin of her shoulders and décolletage bare above the turquoise silk of her long bridesmaid’s sheath, the fact she was in a wheelchair had not diminished the impact of her beauty.

And then there were the shoes.

Nico could not forget the shoes.

Stilettos.

Sexy, feminine, four-inch stilettos in a bright turquoise to match the gown.

That Marietta could not walk in those shoes had made him admire her all the more for wearing them. It was a statement—a bold one—as though she were flipping the bird to her disability...or rather to anyone who thought a woman who couldn’t walk was wasting her time wearing sexy shoes, and it had made him want to smile.

Hell, it had made him want to grin.

And that was an urge he rarely experienced.

‘Nico?’

Marietta’s hand twitched in his, jerking his thoughts back to the present. He refocused, realised his thumb was stroking small circles over her skin. Abruptly he broke contact and stood. ‘Stay here. Keep Lina with you.’

She wheeled back and looked up at him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Your apartment.’

She frowned, a smudge of colour returning to her face. ‘Not without me, you’re not.’

‘It is better that you stay here,’ he said evenly.

‘Why?’

When he hesitated a fraction too long, her fine-boned features twisted into a look of horror.

‘Mio Dio. You think he might be there, don’t you?’ She stared at him accusingly. ‘But you said the note was just a scare tactic.’

‘Could be,’ he corrected. ‘I won’t know for certain until I’ve checked it out.’

‘Then I’ll come with you.’

‘I’d prefer you didn’t.’

Her shoulders snapped back, her eyes, wide with shock and fear only seconds before, now narrowing. ‘It’s my apartment. I’m coming whether you prefer it or not.’ Her delicate chin lifted. ‘Besides, you need me. You won’t get in without my security code and key.’

‘Both of which you are about to give to me,’ he told her, keeping his voice reasonable even as he felt his patience slipping. He was unaccustomed to people arguing with him—especially women.