Czytaj książkę: «The Sicilian's Bought Cinderella»

CHAPTER ONE

DANTE MONCADA JUMPED into the car beside his driver, two of his men clambering in behind him. This was all he needed, someone breaking into the old cottage that had been in the Moncada family’s possession for generations.

As his driver navigated Palermo’s narrow streets and headed into the rolling countryside, Dante thought back to his earlier conversation with Riccardo D’Amore. The head of the D’Amore family had put the brakes on a deal Dante had been negotiating for the past six months. Riccardo ran a clean, wholesome business and was concerned Dante’s reputation would tarnish it.

He muttered a curse under his breath and resisted the urge to punch the dashboard.

What reputation? So he liked the ladies. That was no crime. His business empire was built on legitimate money. He did not play the games many Sicilian men liked to play. He kept his nose clean literally and figuratively. He liked to drink and party, but so what? He didn’t touch drugs, never gambled and avoided the circles where arms, drug dealing and people trafficking were considered profitable business enterprises. He worked hard. Building a multi-billion-euro technology empire from a modest million-euro inheritance, and with an accountancy trail even the most hardened auditor would fail to find fault with, took dedication. For sure, he cut the odd corner here and there, and his Sicilian heritage meant he did not suffer fools, but every cent he’d earned he’d earned legitimately.

But the legitimacy of his business was not the factor behind Riccardo’s foot coming down on the deal that Dante and Alessio, Riccardo’s eldest son, had spent months working on. The D’Amores had developed the next-generation safety system for smartphones that had proven itself hack-proof, out-performing all rivals. Alessio and Dante were all set to sign an exclusivity agreement for Dante to install the system in the smartphones and tablets his company was Europe’s leader in. This system would give him the tools to penetrate America, the only continent Dante was still to get a decent foothold in.

Riccardo’s talk about reputations boiled down to one thing. Dante’s parentage. His recently deceased father, Salvatore, had been a heavy gambler and the ultimate playboy. His mother, Immacolata, was known unaffectionately as the Black Widow, a moniker Dante had always thought unfair, as she had never actually killed any of her husbands, merely leeched them for money when she divorced them. His father had been her first husband. She was currently on number five. His mother lived like a queen.

Riccardo, on the other hand, had had one wife, eleven children, thought gambling the work of the devil and sex outside the confines of marriage a sin. Riccardo was concerned Dante was the apple that hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Riccardo wanted proof that Dante was not the mere sum of his parents’ parts and would not bring Amore Systems and by extension Riccardo himself into disrepute. Riccardo was now in advanced talks with Dante’s biggest rival about contracting the system to them instead.

Damn him. The old fool was supposed to have retired.

He had one chance to prove his respectability before the deal was lost for good, Alessio’s forthcoming wedding.

Dante’s angry ruminations on his business problems were put to one side when his driver pulled the car to a stop in a small opening amidst the dense woodland that ran along the driveway to the cottage. A few metres away, also cunningly hidden in the woodland, was a much smaller city car...

Dante reached into the footwell for the baseball bat he hoped he wouldn’t have to use.

Flanked by his bodyguards, he neared the run-down farmer’s cottage through the thick trees that hid their approach from watching eyes and rubbed his arms against the bracing chill under the cloudless night sky. The remnants of what had been an unusually cold winter still lingered in the air.

The small cottage with its peeling whitewashed exterior walls came into view. All the shutters were closed but smoke curled out of the chimney that hadn’t been used in two decades, wisping upwards into the still darkness of this early spring Sicilian evening. Marcello, who managed the land, had been correct that someone was there.

Keeping to the shadows, Dante and his men approached it.

The door was locked.

Brow furrowing, he pulled his key out and unlocked it.

He winced as the sounds of the creaking hinges echoed through the walls, and stepped inside for the first time since his teenage years, when he would sneak girls there. It hadn’t been his father he’d worried about catching him, it had been the girls’ fathers. Sicilian men did not take kindly to their daughters having a sex life before marriage; at least, they hadn’t twenty years ago.

The open-plan interior was much smaller than he remembered. The lights already on, he scanned it quickly, looking for damage. The window above the sink had been boarded in cardboard. He guessed that was where the intruder had gained entry, but there was no other visible damage, nothing to suggest his unwelcome visitor had come here intent on vandalising or robbing them. Not that there was anything to take unless the intruder had a penchant for decades-old musty furniture. An air of neglect permeated the walls, mingling with the black smoke billowing from the log fire. A pile of what looked like educational books was stacked on the small table.

He stared at those books, brow furrowed again at their incongruity.

A floorboard creaked above his head.

Adrenaline surged through him.

Keeping a tight hold on the baseball bat, Dante nodded at his men to follow and treaded slowly up the narrow staircase, cursing that each step was received with yet another creak. He could have left his men to deal with the intruder but he wanted to see the face of the man who’d had the nerve to break into his property before deciding what to do with him.

Like all men with his wealth and power, Dante had enemies. The question he asked himself was if it was one of those enemies hiding behind this door plotting against him or just a cold vagrant chancing his luck.

He nodded at his men one more time and pushed the door open.

His first thought as he entered the empty bedroom was that he was too late and the intruder had escaped. There was no second thought, for a figure suddenly burst through from the en suite bathroom and charged at him, screaming, with what looked like a showerhead in hand.

It took a long beat before his brain recognised the screeching figure for what it was—a woman.

Before the showerhead in her hand could connect with Dante’s head, Lino, the quicker of his men, grabbed hold of the woman and engulfed her in his meaty arms.

Immediately she started kicking out, hurling a string of obscenities in what sounded like English, but with a strong accent he had trouble placing.

Dante stared with amazement at this struggling intruder dressed only in a thick maroon robe.

Her eyes fell on him. There was a wild terror in the returning stare.

‘Let her go,’ he ordered.

Lino removed the showerhead from her hand and released her.

As soon as she was free from his hold, she backed away from them, her eyes going from Dante, to Lino, to Vincenzo and back to Dante, the terror still there.

He quite understood her fear. Dante was tall and physically imposing. Lino and Vincenzo were mountains.

‘Leave,’ he barked at his men. ‘Wait downstairs for me.’

Her eyes settled on him.

This woman might be an intruder, her reasons for being there to be revealed but, unless she had a gun hiding beneath that robe, which she would have already used if she’d had one, she posed no danger.

His men were too well trained to argue and left the room. Stealth no longer being needed, they thumped down the stairs like a herd of wildebeest.

Now that he was alone with her, Dante’s senses became more attuned. A wonderful scent filled the room, a soft floral smell that clung around the intruder, who had backed herself into the corner of the room. The only sound to be heard was her ragged breathing.

He stepped slowly towards her.

She pressed herself more tightly into the corner of the room and hugged her arms across her seemingly ample chest, strikingly angled eyes ringing with fear at him. If she hadn’t broken into his property and made herself at home, he could feel sorry for her.

He guessed her to be in her early twenties, petite yet curvy, snub nose, plump lips, freckles covering a face that was either naturally pale or white from fright. The colour of her long, wet hair was impossible to judge. Whatever the colour, nothing could detract from the fact that this was one beautiful woman.

Under any other circumstance he would be tempted to let a whistle escape his lips.

Her long, swanlike neck moved but she didn’t speak. Those strange eyes did not leave his face.

He stopped a foot away from her and asked in English, ‘Who are you?’

Her lips tightened and she hugged herself even harder, giving a quick shake of her head.

‘Why are you here?’

But still she didn’t speak. If he hadn’t caught the obscenities she’d screeched when she’d exploded out of the bathroom, he could believe she was mute.

If she hadn’t broken into his property, he would feel bad for her obvious fright.

‘You know this is private property? Sì?’ he tried again, speaking slowly. Dante’s English was fluent but his accent thick. ‘This cottage is empty but it belongs to me.’

The strange yet beautiful eyes suddenly narrowed and in that slight movement he realised fear wasn’t the primary emotion being thrown at him, it was loathing.

‘My backside does it belong to you.’ She straightened. Her strong accent registered in his brain as Irish. ‘This cottage is part of your father’s estate and should be shared with your sister.’

Anger swelled in him.

So that was what this was all about? Another charlatan pretending to be Salvatore Moncada’s secret love-child in the hope of grabbing a portion of Dante’s inheritance. What did this make? Eight or nine fraudsters since his father’s death three months ago? Or was this someone Dante’s lawyer had already sent packing but thought they would chance their luck one more time and try and convince Salvatore’s legitimate child herself?

As a means of getting his attention this woman had played a master stroke.

What a shame for her that it would end in her arrest and deportation.

‘If I had a secret sister I’m sure I would be open to sharing a portion of my father’s estate with her, but—’

‘There’s no if about it,’ she interrupted. ‘You do have a sister and I have the proof with me.’

Something in her tone cut the retort from his tongue.

Dante stared even harder at the beautiful face before him as his veins slowly turned to ice.

Did this truculently sexy woman really believe she was his...sister?

* * *

So this was Dante?

Aislin had seen many pictures of the cruel Sicilian intent on denying her sister what was morally hers but nothing could have prepared her for the sculptured reality stood before her.

In the flesh he was much taller than she’d expected, his hair thicker and darker. He had a lean, wiry muscularity she hadn’t expected either. Nor had the pictures done justice to the rest of him. His thick, dark beard couldn’t hide the chiselled jawline or downplay the firm, sensuous lips resting below a straight nose that could have been carved by a professional sculptor. Thick black brows rested above green eyes that could only be described as beautiful, and those eyes were staring at her with a combination of disgust and disbelief.

It hadn’t escaped her attention that Dante was a good-looking man but she had not been prepared in the slightest for the raw sexiness that oozed from him.

His black shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and, while she kept her gaze fixed on his eyes, she’d glimpsed the dark hair poking through at the base of his throat.

Dante Moncada was the sexiest, most handsome man she had ever set eyes on and it thrilled with the same intensity that it repelled.

Despite the warmth she’d managed to inject into the walls from the log fire, a shiver ran up her spine, and she drew her towelling robe more tightly around her, wishing she could glue it to her body. It fell to her ankles but, with that green stare on her, she might as well have forgone it. She felt naked.

Beneath it she was naked.

It had been two days since she’d broken into this cottage. Two days she’d been living here, waiting for her presence to be noted and for the certain confrontation with this man to take place. But, seriously, did it have to occur the minute she stepped out of the shower?

So much for the cool, calm, no-nonsense first impression she’d hoped to make. In her head she’d created a scene where he stormed into the cottage and found her sitting serenely at the table studying, preferably wearing her reading glasses. Whenever Aislin wore those glasses, men tended to speak to her as if she had more than a single brain cell floating in her head.

Hearing the creak of the floorboards as Dante and his two goons had climbed the stairs had terrified her. She’d been instantly aware of the vulnerability of her position, thrown her still-wet body into the robe and wrenched the showerhead off as her only means of defence.

Dante must think he was dealing with a wailing banshee, an impression it was essential she correct immediately.

He took a step back, his left brow rising up and down. ‘You believe you are my sister?’

She jutted her chin out to hide her discomfort at her nakedness beneath the robe. ‘If you will be good enough to let me get dressed, I will explain everything. The kitchen is stocked with coffee.’

He gave a grunt of surprised laughter. ‘You break into my home and want me to make you a drink?’

‘I’m asking you to give me some privacy so I can make myself decent before we start arguing about the inheritance you are trying to keep for your greedy self. I’m simply pointing out that there is coffee if you wish to have one while you wait, and that I take mine with milk and one sugar.’

The green eyes flickered over her, taking in every inch of her body, before he blinked, gave the slightest of shudders and took another step back.

‘I will leave you to dress,’ he said curtly.

He closed the door behind him.

Aislin took a moment to force huge lungfuls of oxygen down her throat but Dante’s departure seemed to have taken all the air with him. All that was left were the remnants of his cologne that even her non-perfumer self could tell with one sniff was expensive. Expensive and...sexy, just like the man it adhered to.

Knowing she needed to calm her thoughts or Dante would eat her alive, she pulled a pair of jeans, a silver jumper and underwear out of the wardrobe and hurried into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She dressed quickly, ran her fingers through her damp hair then took one last fortifying breath before leaving the room to find Dante.

This confrontation was one she had prepared for. In theory, she had prepared for all eventualities, even if those eventualities had been cobbled together in a rush when they had learned Dante had sold the hundred acres in Florence and pocketed the proceeds into his already bulging bank account.

All she had to do was hold her nerve against this physically imposing man. His looks and scent did not count for jack. This man, a billionaire in his own right, had ridden roughshod over her sister’s efforts to claim a share of their father’s estate.

The stairs led into the cosy open-plan living area, where she found him sat on one of the sagging sofas, flicking through one of her university books. Two steaming mugs of coffee were laid on the table before him. His Goliath-proportioned sidekicks were nowhere to be seen.

His eyes narrowed at her approach and he waited in silence until she had sat herself in the farthest spot from him she could find.

He jabbed a finger onto the opened page of the textbook, the place where she had marked her name, as she had done since her school days. ‘Tell me about yourself, Aislin O’Reilly.’

He pronounced her name ‘Ass-lin’, which under normal circumstances would have made her laugh.

She shook her head. For some reason her tongue struggled to work around this man.

He slammed the book on the table, making her jump. ‘You claim to be my sister, so tell me about yourself. Show me your proof.’

She crossed her legs and met the intense green stare head-on. ‘I’m not your sister. My sister, Orla, is your sister. I’m here as her representative.’

His brow furrowed. She could see him trying to work out what that made them in relation to each other.

‘Orla and I have the same mother,’ she supplied. ‘You and Orla have the same father.’

Dante’s lungs loosened at the confirmation that this intruder was not of his blood. The mere sway of her hips as she’d walked down the stairs had sent his senses springing to life. Dante was not particularly fussy when it came to women. He liked them in all shapes and sizes but to think he could find someone who was possibly his own sister desirable would have been enough to drive him straight to the nearest therapist.

‘Where is the proof of this, Aislin?’

The lighting in the cottage against the darkly painted walls left much to be desired but now she sat close enough for him to see that the colour of the eyes ringing their loathing at him was grey. The black outer rim of the eyeballs contrasted starkly, making the grey appear translucent. Along with the angled tilt of her eyes, it gave the most extraordinary effect.

‘It’s Aislin,’ she corrected, pronouncing it ‘Ashling’.

‘Ashling.’ He practised it aloud. ‘Aislin... An unusual name.’

The striking eyes held his without blinking. ‘Not in Ireland it isn’t.’

He shrugged. As unusual and interesting as her name was, there were far more important things to discuss. ‘You say you have proof that... Orla? Is that her name?’

She nodded.

‘That Orla is my sister. Let me see that proof.’

She got to her feet and walked to the small kitchen area, the curve of her bottom in her tight jeans a momentary distraction. From a small bag on the counter she took out an envelope and opened it on her walk back to him.

Pulling a sheet of paper out of the envelope, she handed it to him with a curt, ‘Orla’s birth certificate.’

Dante took the sheet from her with blood roaring in his ears. Slowly, he unfolded it.

He blinked a number of times to clear the filmy fog that had developed in his eyes.

The birth certificate was dated twenty-seven years ago. On the box labelled ‘father’ were the words Salvatore Moncada.

He rubbed his temples.

This didn’t prove anything. This could be a forgery. Or, more likely, Aislin and Orla’s mother—he scanned the certificate again and found Sinead O’Reilly named as the mother—had lied.

From the envelope still in her hand, Aislin plucked out a photograph and held it out to him.

He didn’t want to look at it.

He had to look at it.

The photo was a headshot of two people, a young woman and a toddler boy.

A violent swell clenched and retracted in his stomach.

Both subjects in the photo had thick, dark-brown hair, the exact shade of Dante’s.

The woman had green eyes the exact shade of Dante’s.