The Change in Di Navarra's Plan

Worse, she’d complicated everything when she’d fallen for his seduction. She knew very well how it must have looked to him, a powerful man who held the key to her dream in his hand.

He’d thought her the worst kind of liar and gold digger—and the evidence had been stacked against her.

She gazed at her son and her heart felt so full with all the love swelling inside it. Yes, she should have told Drago who she was and what she wanted. But if she’d opened her mouth sooner, she wouldn’t have Nicky. What a thought that was. Life might have been easier, but it certainly wouldn’t have been sweeter.

Holly’s eyes prickled with tears. Gran would have told her that the past was just that and it did no good to dwell on it, because you couldn’t change it without a time machine. Holly knuckled her tears away with a little laugh—but then her gaze caught on the digital display on the microwave.

“I have to get to work,” she said to Gabi. “Will you be all right until Mrs. Turner comes to collect him?”

Gabi looked up from where she was still cradling Nicky. “It’s a couple of hours before my shift yet. Don’t worry.”

Holly always worried, but she didn’t say that to Gabi. She worried about providing for her baby, worried that he was only three months old and she had to work so much. She worried that she’d been unable to breast-feed him—some women couldn’t, the nurse had told her after the zillionth failed attempt—and he had to drink formula, and she worried that he needed so many things and she could barely provide any of them.

Holly kissed her son’s sweet soft skin before changing into her uniform of white shirt, bow tie and tight black skirt. Then she stuffed her heels into her duffel and slipped on her tennis shoes. She made it to the bus stop in record time. With twenty minutes to spare, she got to the casino, put on her heels and touched up her makeup before stashing her things and heading to the floor for her shift.

In all her wildest imaginings, she’d never pictured herself serving drinks in a casino. But here she was, arranging her tray with cocktail napkins, pen and pad, stirrers, and then gliding through the crowd of people hovering around tables and machines, asking for drink orders—and enduring a few pats to the bottom in the process.

Holly gritted her teeth, hating that part of the job but unwilling to react, because she needed the money too badly. The rent was due next week, and it was always a struggle to make up her portion along with buying diapers and formula and groceries.

Holly pushed a hand through her hair, anchoring it behind her ears, and approached the group of men hovering around one of the baccarat tables. They were rapt on the game, and most especially on a man who sat at one end of the table, a dark-haired beauty hanging over his shoulder and whispering something in his ear. His face was remarkable, beautiful and perfectly formed—and all too familiar.

For a moment, Holly was stunned into immobility. What were the chances Drago di Navarra would walk into this casino and sit at a table in her section? She’d have guessed they were something like a million to one—but here he was in all his arrogant, rotten glory.

Just her miserable luck. She glanced behind her, looking for Phyllis, hoping to ask the other waitress to take this table. Holly’s belly churned and panic rose in her throat at the thought of waiting on Drago and his mistress.

But Phyllis was nowhere to be seen, and Holly had no choice. The moment she accepted that, another feeling began to boil inside her: anger.

She suddenly wanted to march over to Drago’s side and slap his handsome face. She’d endured a twenty-three-hour labor, with Gabi as the only friend by her side. Other women had happy husbands in the delivery room, and masses of family in the waiting room. But not her. She’d been alone, with only Gabi holding her hand and coaching her through.

By the time Nicky had been born and someone handed him to her, she’d felt as if the little crying bundle was an alien life-form. But she’d fallen into deep love in the next moment. She had seen Drago in her son’s face, and she’d felt a keen despair that he’d tossed her out the way he had. That he’d refused to take her calls. He was missing out on something amazing and perfect, and he would never know it.

Now, seeing him in this casino, sitting there so arrogant and sure with a woman hanging on him, all Holly felt was righteous anger. Her heart throbbed in her chest. Her blood beat in her brain. She knew she should turn around and walk away, find Phyllis no matter how long these people had to wait for drinks, but she couldn’t seem to do it. Instead, she moved around the table until she was standing beside the man who sat at a right angle to Drago.

“Something from the bar, sir?” she asked when the play had finished. She pitched her voice louder than she normally would and looked over at Drago. The woman with him sensed a disturbance in the perfumed air around her—much too heavy a scent, Holly thought derisively, like something one would use in a brothel to cover the smells of sex and sweat—and brought her head up to meet Holly’s stare.

Sweat and sex. Holly swallowed as a pinprick of hot jealousy speared into her at the thought of this woman and Drago tangling together in a bed.

Holly sniffed. No, not jealousy. As if she cared. Honestly.

She was irritated, that was what. Irritated by the haughty look of this woman, and the outrageous presence of the man sitting at the table, oblivious to the currents whipping in the air around him.

The woman’s dark eyes raked over her. And then she did the one thing Holly had both hoped and feared she would do. She said something to Drago. He looked up, his gaze colliding with Holly’s. Her heart dived into her toes at the intensity of that gray stare. A hot well of hate bubbled inside her soul. It took everything she had not to throw her tray at him and curse him for the arrogant bastard he was.

“Dry martini,” the man beside her said, and Holly dragged her attention back to him.

“Yes, sir,” she said, writing the drink on her pad.

When she looked up again, Drago was still looking at her, his brows drawn together as if he were trying to place her. He didn’t know her? He couldn’t remember?

That was not at all the reaction she’d expected, and it pierced her to the core. She’d had his baby, and he couldn’t even remember her face....

That, Holly decided, stiffening her spine, was the last straw. She turned and marched away from the table, perilously close to hyperventilating because she was so angry—and because the adrenaline rush of fear was still swirling inside her. She went over to the bar and placed her orders, telling herself to calm down and breathe.

So he didn’t recognize her. So what? Had she really thought he would?

Yes.

She shook her head angrily. He was a rich, arrogant, low-down, lying son of a bitch anyway. He’d wined her and dined her and seduced her. Yes, she’d fallen for it. She wasn’t blameless.

But he’d promised to take care of the birth control, and she’d trusted him to do it right. But he must have done something wrong, because she’d gotten pregnant. And he hadn’t cared enough about the possibility to take her calls.

Rotten, selfish, self-serving bastard!

Holly grabbed her tray once the drinks were ready. She would march back over there and deliver her drinks as usual. She would not pour them in Drago’s lap, no matter how much she wanted to.

“Thanks, Jerry,” she said to the bartender. She turned to go—and nearly collided with the slickly expensive fabric of Drago di Navarra’s tailored suit.

* * *

Drago’s nostrils flared as he looked at the woman before him. The color in her cheeks was high as she righted her tray before spilling the contents down the front of his Savile Row suit. Her eyes snapped fire at him and her mouth twisted in a frown.

“If you will excuse me, sir, I have drinks to deliver.”

Her voice was harder than he remembered it. Her face and body were plumper, but in a good way. She’d needed to round out her curves, though he’d thought she was perfectly well formed at the time. This extra weight, however, made her into a sultry, beautiful woman rather than a naive girl.

A girl who’d tried to trick him. He hadn’t forgotten that part. His jaw hardened as he remembered the way she’d so blissfully confessed her deception to him. She’d come to New York armed with perfume samples that she hoped to sell to his company, and she’d cost him valuable time and money with her pretense. It wasn’t the first time a woman had tried to use him for her own ends, but it had been a pretty spectacular failure on his part. He’d had to scrap every picture from the photo shoot and start again with a new model, which had been a shame when he’d seen the photos and realized how perfect she’d been in the role.

He’d wondered in the weeks after she’d gone if he’d overreacted. But she’d scraped a raw nerve inside him, a nerve that had never healed, and throwing her out had been the right thing to do. How dare she remind him of the things he most wanted to forget?

Still, it had taken him weeks to find the right model. Even then, he hadn’t actually been the one to do it. He’d been so discouraged that he’d delegated the task to his marketing director. It wasn’t like him to let anything derail him for long, but every time he’d tried to find someone, he kept thinking about this woman and how she’d nearly made a fool of him.

How she’d taken him back to a dark, lonely place in his life, for the barest of moments, and made him remember what it was like to be a pawn in another’s game. He shook those feelings off and studied her.

The model they’d hired to replace her was beautiful, and the fragrance was selling well, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He should be, but he wasn’t.

There was something about this woman. Something he hadn’t quite forgotten over the past year. Even now, his body responded with a mild current of heat that he did not feel when Bridgett, whom he’d left fuming at the baccarat table, draped herself over him.

“The perfume business did not work out for you, I take it?” he asked mildly, his veins humming with predatory excitement. She was still beautiful, still the perfect woman for his ad campaign. It irritated him immensely.

And intrigued him, as well.

Her pretty blue eyes were hard beneath the dark eye makeup and black liner, but they widened when he spoke. She narrowed them again. “Not yet,” she said coolly. “I’m surprised you remembered.”

“I never forget a face.” He let his gaze fall to her lush breasts, straining beneath the fabric of the tight white shirt the casino made her wear. “Or a body.”

Her chin lifted imperiously. He would have laughed had he not sensed the loathing behind that gaze. Her plan hadn’t worked and now she hated him. How droll.

“Well, isn’t that fortunate for you?” she said, her Southern accent drawing out the word you. “If you will excuse me, sir, I have work to do.”