Power Games

‘Meet Dino, my eldest.’ Carmine clapped him on the back. ‘Dino, you remember Don Silvers … and this, of course, is the gorgeous Angela.’

There was a long silence.

Dino was like something out of a catalogue—coffee hair, twinkling eyes, and a stacked body that was suited to perfection. He was an ad for mob fashion, gold rings glinting on his fingers, collar crisp, jacket pressed. Angela guessed he was in his thirties, indisputably handsome but so far from her type that even in a radically different context she could never have considered him a match.

It didn’t matter who Dino Zenetti was. He wasn’t Noah.

Her heart sank. How am I going to tell him?

She played out her defence, each claim more ridiculous than the last.

We can still see each other; it won’t change a thing. Dino means nothing to me. I’m doing it for the business, a transaction, no emotions, I swear …

Even Noah Lawson’s boundless patience wouldn’t stretch that far.

‘Aren’t you kids gonna say hello?’ Carmine boomed, breaking the tension with a guffaw. ‘I tell ya, Donnie, this is like being back in the sixth grade!’

‘Good to meet you,’ said Dino, in a gravelly husk. He put out his hand. Angela shook it. She said nothing. Every instinct recoiled. It wasn’t too late, she could still back out of this; she could still change her mind.

‘I guess you two’re gonna want to get t’know each other, huh?’ Carmine thrust a glass into his son’s hand and supplied a wink. Their conspiracy filled her with horror. She wanted to run, never stop and never look back, until she reached his arms.

If only that was all there was to it …

‘I want you to listen carefully,’ her father had said that night in his office, ‘for if you choose to accept, our empire is yours. Everything. You take over.’

The words Angela had waited her whole life to hear.

Her father’s confidence, his respect, his finally recognising what she was capable of, a bond between them of trust and belief, nothing to do with her brothers.

But she could never have guessed at what cost.

‘The business is dying,’ Donald had explained. ‘I’ve been shielding you from it. I haven’t told Orlando, or Luca, or any of the board. I haven’t even told your mother. I’m telling you, Angela, because you’re the one I am counting on to help. We’re in bad shape. Real bad shape.’ He had wiped a hand across his face and she’d heard him swallow, a dry, sickening sound, coarse with regret. ‘Twelve months ago I put money into a sideline I believed was a dead cert. I was wrong.’

Donald Silvers was never wrong. He had made a fortune on those grounds.

‘But—’

‘Let me finish. That’s only the start.’

And then he had confessed the awful truth.

Her father had been diagnosed weeks ago. The doctors had given him mere months to live. Isabella had been protected from that blow as well.

‘No,’ Angela had spoken with someone else’s voice, tinny and strange in an upturned world, ‘you won’t,’ she fumbled for sense, ‘you can’t—’

‘I am.’

‘They’re wrong. You’ll get through it—’

‘The Zenettis can pull us out,’ said Donald, matter-of-fact, no time for weakness. ‘They’re our last hope. They can give us back our future. Your future, Angela, should you decide to commit.’

Her chest tightened. ‘Commit to what?’

He had laid it out in basic terms. The proposed marriage to Dino, the combined fortunes bailing them out of debt, the mutual interests to both parties as they embarked on a super-empire merging the last word in leisure and retail.

The Silvers would take a cut, thirty per cent against the Zenettis’ seventy, but the brand would survive. Given time, it might even grow.

And she would be there to rebuild it. Her business. Her chance.

Her chance.

Carmine Zenetti wanted to make it official, cement the allegiance via a union with his son. Angela was the key. Donald hadn’t been in a position to negotiate.

Her heart in exchange for her family—not just the dying wish of her father but her own wish, too: to step out from the wings and inherit the trophy.

She couldn’t. She must. She wouldn’t. She had to …

‘Wanna take a walk?’

Dino lifted an eyebrow. Everything about him was suggestive. His knuckles were peppered with hair and he wore a signet on his pinkie. His nails were clean, his hands smooth, as if he had done nothing more in his life than to change a light bulb.

Angela stood. She could feel her father’s gaze drilling into her but she could not return it. She could not look at him. Any other disclosure she would have welcomed, but not this. Never this. She was running on autopilot, ignoring Noah’s attempts to make contact, cancelling his calls for fear she would lose control as soon as she heard his voice, trying to find some space while she figured out what on earth she was going to do. Every way she looked at it, there was an impossible penalty to pay. Refusing her father was unthinkable.

So was sacrificing Noah.

Selfish as it was, it came to this: Angela did want the title. She did want the job. She did want to claim what was hers because she had earned it.

‘C’mon,’ encouraged Dino. ‘Let me give you a tour of our little hotel,’ he put the emphasis on our, ‘see if you like it.’

Angela followed. She could hear Carmine preparing to pop the champagne, the murmur of approval that passed between him and her father. She felt trapped in a nineteenth-century drawing room; engaged to be married against every belief her heart held true. Her head told her different. Her head told her this was a done deal.

Perhaps Noah would understand. Perhaps he would let her explain and then he would see that this was the only way. They could still be together—they were already forced to meet in secret, what real difference would it make?

One promise she could make him utterly: that she would never be with Dino Zenetti in the proper way. Their partnership was for show; that was all.

Noah would understand. She would make him.

Dino led the way. It reminded Angela of a walk she had taken a long time ago.

A boy she had fallen for, and nine years later still unable to set him free.

Boston2005

‘Noah, oh yes, right there, that’s it!’

Noah Lawson obliged, driving deep into the woman who was lying spread-eagled across her expensively upholstered sunlounger. He was sixteen, nailing his boss’s wife in the pool house he was meant to be cleaning, and what’s more he was getting paid for it. Getting paid for getting laid … What boy wouldn’t?

Mrs Mason wasn’t bad either, tall and buxom with the greatest pair of tits this side of Vermont. Noah dipped his head to them, licking and grazing as she arched beneath him, grabbing tufts of his corn-blond hair and raking her scarlet manicure down his back. He tucked one hand behind her knee, pushing his cock harder and harder until she screamed. Mrs Mason’s lipstick was smudged, her mouth parted in ecstasy.