Ruthlessly Bedded by the Italian Billionaire

‘Thank you. No need for you to escort me, Lucia.’

She stuck to his side. ‘I want to know what’s going on.’

‘He called me, not you.’

She flashed him a resentful look. ‘I’m just as much family as you, Dante.’

She’d eavesdropped on the call. He kept walking, saying nothing for her to get her teeth into. They entered the villa, moving towards the atrium, a central gathering place that connected the wings spreading out from it and led to the front courtyard.

Frustrated by his silence, Lucia offered information to tempt some speculation. ‘A man came yesterday afternoon. He didn’t give a name. He brought a briefcase with him and had a private meeting with Nonno. It left Nonno looking even more ill. I’m worried about him.’

‘I’m sure you’re doing your best to brighten him up, Lucia,’ he said blandly.

‘If I know what the problem is…’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Don’t play dumb with me, Dante. You always have an idea.’ The bite in her voice softened to a sweet wheedle. ‘I just want to help. Whatever Nonno heard from that man yesterday has knocked the life out of him. It’s awful seeing him so sunk into himself.’

Bad news, Dante thought, steeling himself to deal with the fallout as best he could. ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said, ‘but I can’t tell you what I don’t know, Lucia. You’ll have to wait until Nonno chooses to reveal what’s on his mind.’

‘You’ll tell me after you’ve talked with him?’ she pressed.

He shrugged. ‘Depends on whether it’s confidential or not.’

‘I’m the one here looking after him. I need to know.’

His grandfather had a private nurse and a whole body of servants looking after him. He shot his cousin a mocking look. ‘You’re here looking after your own interests, Lucia. Let’s not pretend otherwise.’

‘Oh, you…you…’ Her mouth clamped down on whatever epithet she would have liked to fling at him.

It was clear to Dante she hated him for seeing through her artifices, always had, but open enmity was not her game.

‘I love Nonno and he loves me,’ she stated tightly. ‘You might do well to remember that, Dante.’

An empty threat, but it probably gave her some satisfaction to leave him with it. They’d reached the atrium and she sheered off to the right, probably heading for the main entertainment room from where she could view what went on in the courtyard, though she wouldn’t be able to hear what was said.

Dante continued on, only pausing when he stepped outside, taking in the scene before announcing his arrival. His grandfather was resting in a well-cushioned chaise lounge, his face shaded by an umbrella, the rest of his brutally wasted body soaking up the natural warmth of the sun.

He wore navy silk pyjamas, their looseness emphasising rather than hiding the loss of his once powerful physique. His eyes were closed. Sunken cheeks made his cheekbones too prominent, his proud Roman nose too big, but there was still an indomitable air about his jutting chin. His skin had tanned, probably from many mornings spent like this. It made his thick, wavy hair look shockingly whiter.

The nurse sat on a chair beside him, ready to attend to his every need. She was reading a book. A pitcher of fruit juice and a set of glasses stood on a table within easy reach. Tubs of flowers provided pleasing cascades of colour, and the brilliant blue vista of sea and sky generated a peaceful ambience. But Dante knew the sense of peace had to be a lie. Something was wrong and he had to fix it.

His footsteps on the terrace flagstones as he moved forward alerted the nurse to his presence, and his grandfather’s eyelids snapped open. The nurse rose to her feet. His grandfather directed a dismissive wave at her and gestured for Dante to take the chair she had vacated. He didn’t speak until she had gone and his grandson was settled close to him. Greetings were unnecessary and any inquiry about his health was unwelcome, so Dante waited in silence to hear what he’d been summoned to hear.

‘I have kept many things from you, Dante. Private things, Personal things. Painful things.’ A rueful grimace expressed his grandfather’s reluctance to confide them. ‘Now is the time to tell you.’

‘As you wish, Nonno,’ Dante said quietly, not liking the all too evident distress.

The usually bright dark eyes were clouded as his grandfather bluntly stated, ‘Your grandmother, the only woman I ever really loved, my beautiful Isabella, died in this villa.’

His voice faltered, choked with emotion. Dante waited for him to recover, feeling oddly embarrassed by so much feeling, never openly expressed before. The only knowledge he’d had of his grandmother was the occasional reference in newspapers of Marco’s one and only wife having died of a drug overdose. It had happened before he was born, and when he’d queried the story, his grandfather had vehemently forbidden any further mention of it.

Dante had privately assumed he had felt some guilt over his wife’s untimely and scandalous death, but given she was the only woman he had ever really loved, perhaps there had been a deep and abiding grief that he couldn’t bear to touch upon. It did answer why Marco had chosen to die here, too.

A deep sigh ended in another grimace. ‘We had a third son.’

The missing Rossini ‘wild child’—another sensational story occasionally popping up in newspapers, full of lurid speculation about the rebellious black sheep who’d obviously refused to knuckle under to what Marco wanted of him, dropping completely out of his father’s world—speculation that was never answered by the Rossinis—a family skeleton kept so firmly in the cupboard, Dante’s curiosity about the uncle he’d never known had always been frustrated. His jerk of surprise at the totally unexpected opening of this door evoked a sharply dismissive gesture from his grandfather, demanding forebearance.

‘Just listen.’ The command held no patience for questions. ‘I banished Antonio from our lives. No one in the family was to even speak his name. Because of him, my Isabella died. He killed his mother, not deliberately, but he gave her the designer drug that led to her death. It was his fault and I couldn’t forgive him.’

Dante’s mind reeled with shock. It took him several moments to attach some current significance to the revelations of this traumatic family history. Had his exiled uncle resurfaced? Was this the problem?

‘He was the youngest of our four children. Your father, Alessandro—’ his grandfather sighed, shaking his head, still grieved by the loss of his eldest son ‘—he was my boy in every way. As you are, Dante.’

Yes, Dante thought. Even in looks, both he and his father had inherited Marco’s thick wavy hair, his deeply set dark-chocolate eyes, strong Roman nose, and the slight cleft centring their squarish chins.

‘Roberto…he was softer,’ his grandfather went on in a tone of rueful reminiscence. ‘It was obvious from early on he would not be a competitor like Alessandro, but he does well enough with his artistic talent. And Sophia, our first girl…we spoilt her, gave her too much, indulged her every whim. I cannot really blame her for the behaviour I now have to pay for. Then came Antonio…’

His eyes closed, as though the memory of his youngest son was still cloaked in darkness. It took a visible effort to speak of him. ‘He was a very bright child, mischievous, merry, given to creating amusing mayhem. He made us laugh. Isabella adored him. Of our four children, he looked most like her. He was…her joy.’

Dante heard the pain in every word and knew that Marco had shared his wife’s joy in the boy.

‘School was too easy for him. He wasn’t challenged enough. He looked for other excitement, adventures, parties, physical thrills, experimenting with drugs. I didn’t know about the drugs, but Isabella did. She kept it from me. When she died, Antonio confessed that she had been trying to make him stop and he had urged her to try the drug, to see for herself how marvellous it would make her feel and how completely harmless it was.’

His eyes opened and black derision flashed from them as he bitterly repeated, ‘Harmless…’

‘Tragic,’ Dante murmured, imagining the horror of discovering how his wife’s death had occurred, and the double grief his grandfather had suffered.

‘Antonio should have died, not my Isabella. So I made him dead as far as my world was concerned.’

Dante nodded sympathetic understanding. None of this had touched his life and he still felt somewhat stunned that so much had been kept totally suppressed by the family. No doubt it was a measure of his grandfather’s dominating and singularly ruthless power that not one word of the mother/son drug connection had leaked out, not privately nor publicly.

A mirthless little laugh gravelled from his grandfather’s throat. His eyes seemed to mock himself as he said, ‘I thought I might make peace with him. It’s bad enough for any man to have one son die before him. Losing Alessandro was…but at least I had you, my son’s son, filling that gap. Antonio was completely lost. And is completely lost. There can be no making peace with him.’

Dante frowned. ‘Do you mean…?’

‘I hired a firm of private investigators to find him, bring me news of the life he’d made for himself, information that would tell me if it was viable to set up a meeting between us. The owner of the firm called on me yesterday. Antonio and his wife died in a plane crash two years ago—a small private plane he was flying himself. Bad weather, pilot error…’

‘I’m sorry, Nonno.’

‘Too late for making peace,’ he muttered. ‘But he did leave a daughter, Dante. A daughter whom he named Isabella, after his mother, and I want you to fly to Australia and bring her here to me.’ His eyes suddenly blazed with a concentration of life. ‘I want you to do it, Dante, because I know you’ll do everything in your power to make her come with you. And there is so little time…’

‘Of course I’ll do it for you, Nonno. Do you know where she is?’

‘Sydney.’ His mouth twisted with irony. ‘She even works in the Venetian Forum we built there. You will have no trouble finding her.’ He leaned over, picked up a manila folder which was lying on the low table beside his chaise. ‘All the information you need is in here.’

He held it out and Dante took it.