Shock: One-Night Heir

She faced him with a set mouth, her shoulders pulled back in determination. ‘I have an interview for a teaching position at a fee paying school. I am on the shortlist.’

A frown brought his brows together. ‘Are you going to take it if it is offered to you?’

She let her arms drop by her sides in an effort to look composed. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, sending him a pointed look. ‘I have nothing to keep me in Italy.’

A muscle moved up and down in his jaw, as if he were chewing on something hard and distasteful. ‘What about Gonzo?’ he asked.

Maya felt her heart squeeze at the thought of saying goodbye to the dog she had brought up from puppyhood. But no pets were allowed in her apartment block in London, and she knew the big ragamuffin hound would miss Giorgio too much in any case. As it was, the dog had been like a naughty child ever since she and Giorgio had separated. ‘I have decided he is better off with you,’ she said.

His top lip curled. ‘That’s quite a turnaround. You were arguing the point for weeks over who should have him. I was about to get my lawyer to file a pet custody suit.’

Maya lifted one of her shoulders in a shrug of feigned indifference. ‘I am sure he will forget all about me once he moves into your newly renovated villa,’ she said. ‘When do you move back in, by the way?’

Giorgio raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that tugged on something deep inside Maya’s chest. There were so many of his mannerisms she had found herself thinking about lately: how he rationed his smiles as if he found life not all that amusing, how his brow furrowed when he was deep in concentration, and how his eyes glinted and darkened meaningfully when he was in the mood for sex. She skirted away from that errant thought. It brought back too many erotic memories of that forbidden night.

‘I’m not sure. A week or two, I think,’ he said. ‘The painters haven’t quite finished. There was a delay with some of the fabrics for the curtains or some such thing.’

Maya didn’t want to think of how she had chosen the colours and fabrics for all of those rooms in the past. She had done it with such enthusiasm and hope for the future. When she had heard he was renovating the villa, adding rooms and knocking down walls and redeveloping the garden, she had been crushed to think he obviously wanted to rid the place of every trace of her presence. It tore her apart to think of how those rooms might one day be filled with his children by some other woman. She thought of the nursery she had so lovingly decorated the first time she had fallen pregnant. After five years of dashed hopes, in the end she had not been able to even open the door.

‘When do you leave?’ Giorgio asked into the pulsing silence.

With an effort she met his gaze. ‘Next Monday.’

‘This is all rather sudden, is it not?’ he asked, frowning darkly. ‘I thought you had decided long ago you weren’t going to go back to teaching. Or are you trying to imply to outsiders that I’m not paying you enough in our divorce settlement?’

Maya refused to rise to the bait. ‘I don’t care what people think, Giorgio. I want to go back to teaching because I have a brain that longs to be used. I was never cut out for the ladies-who-do-lunch set. I should never have given up my career in the first place. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking.’

He continued to study her with his dark unreadable gaze. ‘You seemed pretty happy with the arrangement to begin with,’ he said. ‘You said your career was not as important as mine. You jumped at the chance to become a full time wife.’

Maya mentally cringed at how romantically deluded she had been back then. Although she hadn’t for a moment thought he was marrying her for love, she had longed for it to happen all the same. His marrying her had more to do with tradition and expectation from his family. He had reached the age of thirty and, in the tradition of the Sabbatini blood line, he’d needed a wife and heir. Giorgio had showered her with diamonds and she had been fooled into believing in the whole fairy tale that one day they would get their happy ever after. How young and naive she had been! Just twenty-two years old, fresh out of university, she had fallen in love on her first trip abroad. It had taken her five heartbreaking years to finally grow up and realise not all fairy tales had a happy ending.

‘I had stars in my eyes,’ she said, knowing it would feed his opinion of her as a gold-digger but doing it anyway. ‘All that money, all that fame, all those luxury hotels and villas and exotic holidays. What girl could possibly resist?’

His brows snapped together and that leaping knot of tension appeared again at the corner of his mouth. ‘If you think for even a moment that you are getting half of all I own, then think again,’ he bit out. ‘I don’t care if it takes my legal team a decade to thrash this out in court, I will not roll over for you.’

Maya raised her chin at him. It was always about money with Giorgio. She had been yet another business transaction and the thing that rankled with him was it had failed. The truth was they had both failed. She hadn’t made him any happier than he had made her. Money had cushioned things for a while but she had come to see the only way to move forward was to part.

‘You will only delay the divorce even further,’ she said. ‘I am not after much, in any case.’

Giorgio gave a snort. ‘Not much? Come on, Maya. You want the villa at Bellagio. That has been in my family for seven generations. It is priceless to my family. I suppose that’s why you want to take it away from us.’

Maya steeled her resolve. ‘The place should have been sold years ago and you know it. We’ve only been there the once and you acted like a caged lion the whole time. Both of your brothers haven’t been there for months and in the whole time we’ve been married your mother has never once gone there. For most of the year it lies empty, apart from the staff. It’s such an obscene waste.’

His eyes moved away from hers, as she knew they would. He absolutely refused to discuss the tragic event that had occurred during his childhood, and every time she had tried to draw him out over his baby sister’s death he put up a wall of resistance that was impenetrable. She hated the way he always locked her out. She hated the way it made her feel as if she was not entitled to know how he felt about even the simplest things. But then all he had wanted from her was a cardboard cut-out wife, a showpiece to hang off his arm and do all the things a corporate wife was supposed to do—all the things except unlock the secret pain of his heart.

He turned his back and paced back and forth, his hands clenching and unclenching by his sides. ‘My mother might one day feel the need to go back to the villa,’ he said. ‘But, until she does, the place is not to be sold.’

Maya shifted her tongue inside her cheek, still intent on needling him. ‘Are you planning to go there any time soon?’ she asked. ‘How long’s it been, Giorgio? Two or three years, or is it four?’

He turned and faced her, his eyes blazing with something hot and hard and dangerous. ‘Don’t push it, Maya,’ he said. ‘You are not getting the villa. Anyway, Luca and Bronte will most probably use it now they are married. It’s a perfect place for Ella to spend her childhood holidays.’

Maya felt her insides clench as she thought of the dark-haired, blue-eyed toddler Luca had introduced to his family a few weeks ago. His new wife, Bronte, a fellow Australian, had met Luca two years ago in London, but Luca had broken off the relationship before he had realised Bronte was carrying his child. Their reunion and marriage had been one of the most romantic and poignant events Maya had ever witnessed.

Being around gorgeous little Ella on the day of the wedding had been a torturous reminder of how Maya had failed to produce an heir. She wondered if that was why she had acted so stupidly and recklessly once the reception had ended. She had been so emotionally overwrought, so desperately lonely and sad at the breakdown of her own marriage that she had weakened when Giorgio had suggested a nightcap.

Going back to his room at the Sabbatini hotel in Milan where the reception was held had been her first mistake. Her second had been to let him kiss her. And her third…well, she was deeply ashamed of falling into his arms like that. She had acted like a slut and he had walked away from her when it was over as if he had paid for her services like a street worker.

‘I want the villa, Giorgio,’ she said, holding his diamond-hard gaze. ‘I surely deserve some compensation. I could ask for a whole lot more and you know it.’

His jaw moved forward in an uncompromising manner, his eyes now darker than ink. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Maya. I want this divorce just as much as you do. But the villa is not negotiable. I am not going to budge on this.’

His intransigence fuelled Maya’s defiance, so too did his all too ready acceptance of the divorce. Surely, if he had ever felt anything for her, wouldn’t he have fought to keep her by his side no matter what? The only reason he was dragging the chain a bit was over the settlement.

Her bitterness was like a hot flood inside her, scorching its way through her veins. ‘You bastard,’ she threw at him. ‘You’re rich beyond belief and you won’t give me the only thing I want.’

‘Why do you want it?’ he asked. ‘You’re moving to London within days. What use would you have for a thirty-room villa?’

‘I want to develop it,’ she said with a combative toss of her head. ‘It would make a fabulous hotel and health spa. It would provide a supplementary income to my teaching. It would be an investment, a great investment in fact.’

His eyes flashed like lightning. ‘Are you deliberately goading me?’ he asked. ‘Dio, Maya, I’ve already warned you not to push me too far.’

‘Why?’ she tossed back at him. ‘Are you worried you might show some human feelings for once? Some anger, some passion, or maybe even some vulnerability for a change?’

The air pulsed with a current of energy that made the skin on the back of Maya’s neck start to tingle. His eyes were so black she could not tell where his pupils ended and his irises began. He had stopped clenching his hands as soon as he saw her eyes flick to them but she could sense the tension in him all the same. His face was carved from stone, his lips flat and tight. She wondered if he was going to close the distance between their bodies and take her in his arms the way he had done the night of his brother’s wedding. They had argued just like this and then suddenly, instead of shouting at each other, they were locked in a passionate embrace. Her body quivered at the memory and when she met Giorgio’s eyes she could almost swear he was recalling exactly the same shamelessly erotic moment when his mouth had crashed down on hers.

‘Is that what you want, Maya?’ he asked in a low and deep and silky tone as his hand snaked out and captured one of hers. ‘You want me to lose control and take you just like the last time?’

Maya’s body flared with heat, her wrist burning like a ring of fire where his fingers curled around it like a handcuff. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she bit out.

He pulled her up against him, his body hot and hard and unmistakably male against her soft femininity. ‘I dared before,’ he reminded her. ‘And you enjoyed every second of it.’

Shame flooded her cheeks but she put up her chin haughtily all the same. ‘I’d had too much champagne to drink.’

His mouth turned up derisively. ‘Is that the only way you can absolve yourself for sleeping with me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on, Maya, you were begging for it even before you had your first sip of champagne. I saw it in your eyes the moment you stepped into the church and looked at me.’

Maya remembered the moment all too well. That first glimpse of him standing there beside his brother after not seeing him for months had knocked her sideways. She had pointedly avoided him as much as possible prior to the wedding. The arrangement over Gonzo being picked up and dropped off by a neutral party had been at her insistence because she didn’t trust herself in his company. Going into the church that day and seeing Giorgio, she had felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. All the bitterness and ill feeling had somehow vaporised, all she could see was a tall, commanding and handsome man with impossibly dark brown eyes which at that moment had been centred right on her. The message in his eyes had been as scorching as his touch was right now. ‘Your imagination is getting as big as your ego,’ she said. ‘You think any woman who looks at you wants you.’

She pulled out of his hold and stepped away from him, tossing over her shoulder, ‘You should probably take Gonzo with you now. His lead is hanging on the hall stand.’

‘I am not going anywhere, Maya,’ Giorgio said through gritted teeth.

Maya turned, trying to ignore the flutter of unease that passed through her belly at the dark glittering heat of his gaze as it meshed with hers. ‘Giorgio…’ She ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden dryness. ‘We’ve said all that needs to be said. The rest is in the hands of our lawyers.’

There was another beat or two of heavily charged silence.

‘I didn’t come here to discuss the divorce,’ Giorgio said.

Maya ran her tongue over her parched lips, her stomach freefalling. ‘You…you didn’t?’