Bound By Their Nine-Month Scandal

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 becauseshe 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 (#u1f009972-8bc5-5018-bc77-764a6bc53a81)

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.