Italian Bachelors: Unforgotten Lovers: The Change in Di Navarra's Plan / Bound by the Italian's Contract / Visconti's Forgotten Heir

Worse, he’d probably decide she was trying to deceive him again, and then her chances of earning any money to take care of her baby would be nullified before she ever stepped in front of a camera. He’d throw her and Nicky to the wolves without a second thought, and then he’d step into his fancy limo and be ferried away to the next amazingly expensive location on his To See list.

No, she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t take the chance when there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

The car pulled to a stop in front of her shabby apartment building. Drago looked out the window—at the yellow lights staining everything in a sickly glow, the fresh graffiti sprayed across the wall of a building opposite, the overflowing garbage bins waiting for tomorrow’s pickup, the skinny dog pulling trash from one of them—and stiffened.

“You cannot stay here,” he said, his voice low and filled with horror.

Holly sucked in a humiliated breath. It looked bad, yes, but the residents here were good, honest people. There were drugs in the neighborhood, but not in this building. Mr. Boudreaux ran it with an iron fist. It was the safest thing she could afford. Shame crawled down her spine at the look on Drago’s face.

“I am staying here,” she said quietly. “And I thank you for the ride home.”

His gaze swung toward her. “It’s not safe here, bella mia.”

Holly gritted her teeth. “I’ve been living here for the past seven months,” she said. “It’s where I live. It’s what I can afford. And you have no idea about safe. You’re only assuming it’s not because it’s not a fancy New York neighborhood like you’re used to.”

He studied her for a long moment. And then he pressed an intercom button and spoke to the driver in Italian. After that, he swung the door open and stepped out.

“Come then. I will walk you to your apartment.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she protested, joining him on the pavement with her duffel in tow. “The door is right here.”

The building was two stories tall, with three entrances along its front. Each stairwell had two apartments on each floor. Hers was on the second floor, center stairwell. And the driver had parked the limo right in front of it. A dog barked—not the one in the garbage, but a different one—and a curtain slid back. She could see Mrs. Landry’s face peering outside. When her gaze landed on the limousine, the light switched out and Holly knew the old woman had turned it off so she could see better.

She was a nosy lady, but a sweet one.

“I insist,” Drago said, and Holly’s heart skipped a beat. She had to take her things to her apartment, and then she had to go to Mrs. Turner’s across the hall and get Nicky.

“Fine,” she said, realizing he wasn’t going away otherwise. If she let him walk her to the door, he’d be satisfied, even if he walked her up the steps to her apartment. And it wasn’t as if her baby was home.

She turned and led the way to the door. She reached to yank it open, but he was there first, pulling it wide and motioning for her to go inside.

“Better be careful you don’t get your fancy suit dirty coming inside here,” she said.

“I know a good cleaner,” he replied, and she started up the stairs—quietly, so as not to alert Mrs. Turner, who might just come to the door with her baby if she heard Holly arrive.

He followed her in silence until she reached the landing and turned around to face him. He was two steps behind her, and it put him on eye level with her. The light from the stairwell was sickly, but she didn’t think there was a light on this earth that wouldn’t love Drago di Navarra. It caressed his cheekbones, the aristocratic blade of his nose, shone off the dark curls of his hair. His mouth was flat and sensual, his lips full, and she remembered with a jolt what it had felt like to press her lips to his.

Dammit.

“This is it,” she whispered. “You can go now.”

He didn’t move. “Open the door, Holly. I want to make certain you get inside.”

He didn’t whisper, and she shot a worried glance at Mrs. Turner’s door. She could hear the television, and she knew her neighbor was awake.

“Shh,” she told him. “People are sleeping. These walls are thin, which I am sure you aren’t accustomed to, but—”

He moved then, startling her into silence as he came up to the landing and took her key from her limp hand. “You’d be surprised what I have been accustomed to, cara,” he said shortly. “Now, tell me which door before I choose one.”

Her skin burned. She pointed to her door and stood silently by while he unlocked it and stepped inside. Humiliation was a sharp dagger in her gut then. A year ago, he’d dressed her in beautiful clothes, made her the center of attention, taken her to a restaurant she could never in a million years afford and then taken her back to his amazing Park Avenue apartment with the expansive view of Central Park. None of those things was even remotely like what he would see inside her apartment and she burned with mortification at what he must be thinking.

He turned back to her, his silvery eyes giving nothing away. “It appears to be safe,” he told her, standing back so she could enter her own home. A home that, she knew, would have fit into the foyer of his New York apartment.

She slid the door quietly closed behind her, not because she wanted to shut him in, but because she wanted to keep her presence from Mrs. Turner until he was gone.

Fury slid into her bones, permeating her, making her shake with its force. She spun on him and jerked her keys from his hand. “How dare you?” she sputtered. “How dare you assume that because I live in a place that doesn’t meet with your approval, you have a right to think I need your help to enter my own home?”

“Just because you’ve entered without incident in the past doesn’t mean there won’t come a night when someone has broken in to wait for you,” he grated. “You’re on the second floor, cara. You’re a beautiful woman, living alone, and—” here he pointed “—these windows aren’t precisely security windows, are they? So forgive me if I wanted to make sure you were safe. I could no more allow you to come in here alone than I could jump out that window and fly. It’s not what a man does.”

“First of all, I don’t see why you care. And second, I don’t live alone,” she grated in return, her heart thrumming at everything he’d just said.

He blinked. “You have a boyfriend?”

“A best friend, if you must know. And she’s at work right now.”

He glanced around the room again. Gabi had left a lamp burning, as she always did, but it was a dim one in order to save electricity. Drago flicked a switch on the wall, and the overhead light popped on, revealing the apartment in all its shabby glory.

It was clean, but worn. And there was no way to hide that. His gaze slid over the room—and landed squarely on the package of diapers and jars of baby food sitting on the dinette. Holly closed her eyes and cursed herself for not putting everything away this afternoon. She’d been too caught up with her fragrances in the little free time she’d had after returning from the store.

Drago’s brows drew down as he turned his head toward her. “You have a baby in this apartment?”

Before she could answer him, tell him she was collecting for charity or something, there was a knock on the door.

“Holly?” Mrs. Turner called. “Are you home, sweetie?”

CHAPTER FOUR (#u7a4c4a26-b33e-537e-bdd9-bc5118cd1434)

DRAGO WATCHED AS the color drained from Holly Craig’s face. She pushed her hair behind her ear and turned away from him, toward the door.

“Coming, Mrs. Turner,” she said sweetly, and he felt a flicker of annoyance. She’d been nothing but cross with him since the moment he’d first spoken to her in the casino. He understood why she would be angry with him, since he’d ruined her plans last year, but she should be perfectly amenable now that he was offering her the job of modeling for Sky. If she was ambitious, and she must be to undergo the deception she had, why wasn’t she softening toward him?

His gaze landed on a table tucked into one corner of the room. It was lined with testers and other paraphernalia she must use to make her fragrance. Clearly, she was serious about it. And her grandmother was from Grasse, the perfume capital of the world. That didn’t mean the woman had had any talent, or that she’d been a nez. Those were highly prized. If she’d been a nose, she would have gone to work in the industry, husband or no.

But Holly was certainly convinced she had what it took to succeed in his business. He glanced at the shabby furnishings and wasn’t persuaded. If she had talent, why was she here? Why hadn’t she kept trying even after he’d turned her down? There were other companies, other opportunities. They weren’t the best, but they were a leg up.

Which she desperately seemed to need, he admitted. He refused to feel any remorse for that. She might have spent all her money coming to New York, but he was not responsible for her choices.

And yet, this place depressed him. Made him feel jumpy and angry and insignificant in ways he’d thought he’d forgotten long ago. He hadn’t always lived the way he did now—with everything money could buy at his fingertips—and this dingy apartment was far too familiar. He thought of his mother and her insane quest for something he’d never understood—something she’d never understood, either, he’d finally come to realize years after the fact.

Donatella Benedetti had been looking for enlightenment, the best he could figure. And she’d been willing to drag her only son from foreign location to foreign location, some of them without electricity or running water or any means of communicating with the world at large. He’d held a hat while she’d busked on the streets, playing a violin with adequate-enough skill to gain a few coins for a meal. He’d curled up in a canoe while they’d floated down an Asian river, moving toward a village of mud huts and deprivation. He’d learned to beg for money by looking pitiful and small and hungry. He’d known how to count coins before he’d ever learned to read.

Holly took a deep breath and opened the door to greet an older woman standing on the other side. The woman held a baby carrier, presumably containing a baby, if the way Holly bent down and looked at it was any indication.

The beginnings of a headache started to throb in Drago’s temple. Babies were definitely not his thing. They were tiny and mysterious and needy, and he hadn’t a clue what to do with them.

“I thought I heard you come up,” the woman was saying. “He was a good baby tonight. Such a sweetie.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Turner. I really appreciate you helping out like this.”