A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride
Author
Jackie Ashenden
Reads
18.6K
Chapters
23
Chapter 1
A MAN WAS leaning in the doorway that led to the upper floors of the Silvera mansion and, even though his face was in shadow, his head was turned in my direction and I could tell he was watching me.
I could feel the pressure of his gaze like ghostly fingers trailing down my spine.
A shiver whispered across my skin.
I couldn’t make out his features, since he was leaning just out of the light, but I could see already that he was tall and broad-shouldered and powerful.
Unease coiled inside me.
Security had been tight for Domingo Silvera’s funeral and it was even tighter here in Madrid, at the Silvera mansion, for his wake.
But, given Domingo’s fame, how could it not be? He’d been the CEO of Silver Incorporated, one of Europe’s biggest companies, with shares in tech, R&D, manufacturing, finance—you name it, Silver Inc probably had a stake in it. It was a behemoth, making more than a few governments give it a sideways look.
Domingo’s father, Diego, who’d inherited the family traits of ruthlessness and arrogance from the ancient line of Spanish aristocrats they were descended from, had started the company nearly a hundred years earlier, and since then it had grown and prospered. Yet it hadn’t been until Domingo had taken over that it had flourished to become the massive company it was today.
Many people had come this evening and the ornate marbled ballroom of the mansion was full of politicians, business people, heads of state, the rich and the famous...all here to pay their respects to one of Europe’s most powerful men.
Even Domingo’s rivals and enemies, of which there were many, were here.
Perhaps that man in the doorway was one of them. An enemy come to gloat over the corpse of a dead foe. What else could explain the aura of menace I’d felt emanating from him?
Normally I’d never let something as basic as unease get to me, but I still shivered yet again, and found myself shifting closer to my fiancé, Constantine Silvera. He was Domingo’s son, heir to all Domingo’s power, and was now newly crowned CEO of Silver Inc.
I didn’t need his protection, but he was tall and powerfully built, and radiated a certain reassurance that in the moment some part of me craved.
Constantine was cold, arrogant, ferociously intelligent, a wolf when it came to business and frightened people just as his father had. All those aristocratic traits had been distilled in him and he used them to his advantage. Ruthlessly.
He was also the possessor of the famous Silvera beauty—black hair, black eyes and the kind of profile that would have looked good on a coin. He’d been named for an emperor and an emperor he was. One that didn’t bother with the velvet glove. There was only the iron fist.
So, yes, I should have felt safe with him in a mansion surrounded by the tightest security on the planet.
I was the CEO of Wintergreen Fine Diamonds, my family’s old and illustrious jewel company, and had a fairly powerful security team of my own, all of whom were present tonight.
Yet I didn’t feel reassured.
Constantine was probably deciding when the appropriate time was to give his speech, thanking everyone for coming and so on. If he noticed my uneasiness, he gave no sign, his cold, black eyes surveying the guests dispassionately.
Usually nothing could get past the façade of cool competence and poise that I’d cultivated over the years. I’d had to. Being a female CEO of a very traditional company required a certain strength and I didn’t like anything to undermine it.
Things such as the shadowy presence of a stranger.
Constantine would be appalled if he knew. He saw my icy calm as strong, and strength was a quality he admired, as he so often told me.
Though, ours wasn’t a love match.
My own father had died eighteen months earlier, leaving behind him a legacy of terrible financial mismanagement that could have resulted in Wintergreen going bankrupt. It had come as a terrible shock, since I’d always seen him as the consummate businessman. So had the board, and they’d been very clear that they didn’t want me at the helm. It had been a...testing time. Then the past had come calling unexpectedly in the shape of Constantine Silvera.
I knew him from years ago, when I was a child and our families would holiday on the same Caribbean island. While there had been...difficulties back then, that was all water under the bridge now.
He’d said he’d heard about Wintergreen’s financial issues and that he’d like to help. He’d been prepared to help me, to pay my father’s debts and get the company solvent again as long as he took over management of it until the company was on its feet again. Oh, yes, and in return all he’d required was my hand in marriage. He needed heirs, it was time and he’d always appreciated the Wintergreen genes.
Initially I’d been suspicious of his offer. The board already thought I was unsuitable to take over Wintergreen, since they were all traditionalists who didn’t like a woman managing the company. Having Constantine take over management for a time would make me look weak, as would marrying him.
Then again, if I wanted the company to survive, accepting Constantine’s offer had been the best way forward. Also, there was another plus: children.
Wintergreen was a family company, and if I wanted it to remain so I would need heirs, just as Constantine would. My father had always said that I could be CEO of Wintergreen or be a mother but I couldn’t be both, and that when I had children I would have to step down.
He had generally been right about most things when it had come to running Wintergreen but, given his financial mismanagement, I’d begun to question a few things.
I didn’t see why I should have to have to step down from being CEO, for example. I wanted a child, I wanted to be head of Wintergreen and Constantine could definitely give me that.
I’d been told by my doctor that I had a limited window in which to get pregnant, and if I wanted children I had to start now, so it was that in the end that swayed me.
Also, there were worse things than having children with a physically perfect specimen of manhood who also just happened to be one of the most powerful men in Europe. His family history, of course, left a lot to be desired, which might not have made him the best choice to be the father of my children, but I could make it work. The child would have me, after all.
So I hadn’t refused, I’d accepted, and here I was—his fiancée.
‘Something the matter, Olivia?’ Constantine’s deep, cold voice tinged with the soft, musical Spanish accent he hadn’t quite been able to get rid of jolted me. ‘You seem disturbed.’
So, it seemed he had noticed my discomfort after all. How irritating.
I was excellent at projecting the kind of cool strength required of a CEO, but the fact that Constantine had noticed my discomfort meant my usual veneer was slipping.
I didn’t like that. He wasn’t a man who invited deep confidences—not that I’d have felt comfortable sharing them with him even if he had been—and had given me nothing but chilly courtesy for the past three months of our engagement.
I didn’t trust him. He was pure predator, just like his father had been, and if there was one thing I’d learned in the last eighteen months in the boardroom it was that showing weakness of any kind in front of a man like him was a mistake.
‘I’m fine,’ I said coolly, trying not to glance at the dark figure in the doorway yet again. ‘Only wondering when you were going to start the speeches.’
‘In a minute.’
I looked up at him. He sounded distracted, which was unusual. Normally he was all razor-sharp focus, like a shark sniffing blood in the water. When he had a target or a goal, he pursued it relentlessly.
Now, though, with his black eyes sweeping over the crowds like a searchlight, it seemed the target wasn’t his speech but something else.
Strange. Was he looking for someone? Perhaps it was Jenny, his stepsister, who’d promised to be there for the funeral yet hadn’t turned up so far. Or perhaps he’d sensed the guy in the doorway too.
Whatever, he didn’t seem to be bothered by it the way I was. Then again, Constantine had always seemed impervious to any feeling whatsoever. He was like a glacier—cold, glittering and perfect.
I’d known Constantine since I’d been seven years old, but we’d never been close, despite him only being a few years older than me. He’d been cold even then, more interested in his studies and doing whatever Domingo asked him to than playing games with Valentin and I...
Valentin.
An old, worn grief twisted inside me, a grief I thought I’d left behind a long time ago; the edges were somehow still sharp even after all these years.
How ridiculous. I shouldn’t be thinking of him.
I forced my gaze away from the man I was going to marry, the man who was the mirror image of the boy I’d once loved with all of my poor, silly teenaged heart.
The boy who’d died in a car accident fifteen years ago.
He and Constantine were identical twins, and many people had been unable to tell them apart, but never me. I’d always known who was who.
How can you marry him? When all you’ll ever see is everything he’s not? Everything you lost...
I ignored the thought. Really, I should stop listening to the ghost of my fifteen-year-old, overly dramatic self. I’d buried that weepy, hysterical child after Valentin had died and I’d moved on. I was nothing like her now and I didn’t want to be.
Abruptly, Constantine stopping searching and nodded to one of his aides, who immediately called for everyone’s attention.
The buzz of conversation died and I shoved away the echo of a long-ago grief, composing myself, turning myself back into the diamond heiress and Constantine Silvera’s cool and poised fiancée.
‘Friends,’ Constantine began, the ice in his voice searing all the warmth from the word. ‘Thank you all for coming. We are here today to celebrate the life of Domingo Silvera, my father—’
‘That sounds like my cue.’ The words were deep, gravelly, cutting through Constantine’s speech like a hot knife through frozen butter.
A shocked silence fell as everyone in the room turned and looked in the direction of the voice.
It had come from the man in the doorway.
A premonition gripped me, wrapping around my throat and twisting hard.
I had no idea where it had come from or why, but I suddenly knew without a doubt that something terrible was about to happen.
I opened my mouth to warn Constantine but, just at that moment, the man shoved himself away from the door frame and stepped out into the ballroom.
A ripple of sound passed around the room, a kind of gasp and sigh combined, and an abrupt, scorching heat swept over me.
That man... I knew him.
He strolled into the room with the powerful, predatory grace of a panther, his hands thrust casually in his pockets.
He was as tall as Constantine and as broad. He had the same strongly carved, fiercely beautiful face. The same straight nose, high cheekbones and hard, carved mouth. The same coal-black hair, black brows and deeply set black eyes.
Constantine’s mirror image.
Yet there were some slight differences. This man’s hair was slightly longer, grazing the collar of his white shirt, which he wore open with no tie, unlike Constantine. He didn’t have Constantine’s air of icy control, either. No, this man had the opposite.
He burned like a flame.
As suddenly as the heat had swept over me, it vanished, leaving behind it the freeze of a deep, echoing shock.
I’d only ever met one other man who burned like that, and he hadn’t been a man, but a boy. And that boy was dead. He’d died long ago and I’d mourned him with everything in me.
Valentin Silvera, Constantine’s twin.
My poise vanished. My fingers were blocks of ice, and so were my feet, and I could feel the same shock that gripped me wash through the assembled crowd. They were all staring at Constantine Silvera’s duplicate, strolling calmly through their midst as if they weren’t even there.
The man didn’t look at the crowd. He looked only at Constantine, who didn’t move or speak, as if he’d been turned to stone.
‘Hello, little brother,’ the man said in perfect, unaccented English. ‘Long time, no see.’
The entire ballroom was utterly silent.
If I hadn’t heard him speak, I’d have been certain I’d gone deaf.
‘“Why are you here?” I hear you ask,’ the man went on, even though no one had asked. No one had said a word. ‘That’s a good question and I’m glad you mentioned it.’ He smiled, easily and friendly, but for the flames that leapt high in his eyes. ‘I bet you’d forgotten, hadn’t you, that I’m your elder by five minutes? Which of course makes me the oldest son.’ He had a panther’s smile, predatory and white. ‘And, since I am, I’m going to claim the company, Constantine. Because you are not a fit man to run it.’
His smile widened and then his black gaze settled on me, burning far more fiercely than I remembered. Instead of the warm, comforting glow of a hearth fire, this was the wild heat of a forest blaze. ‘Oh, yes, and that pretty fiancée of yours? You’re not a fit man for her either, so she’ll be mine too. Then again, she always was, remember?’
No, he couldn’t be here.
He was dead. It had been a tragedy. A terrible tragedy. And I’d cried endless, dramatic tears at his funeral while Constantine had stood by the grave side, his face so pale it had looked as though it was carved from ice. And Domingo had been beside him, dominating the proceedings, a powerful, terrifying figure betraying no expression whatsoever. As if he hadn’t just lost a son.
The silence in the room was deafening, not that I’d have heard anything anyway, over the blood roaring in my ears.
He wasn’t dead, he was here, large as life and radiating an aura of menace that the boy I remembered had never had.
A hundred times as gorgeous too.
The heart I’d thought I’d buried all those years ago suddenly shuddered to life in my chest, like an old machine starting up. It was beating so hard it felt as if it was going to break all my ribs.
Desperately, I curled my fingers into my palms, my nails digging in, trying to find my poise, my usual strength.
‘What?’ Valentin asked sardonically. ‘Got nothing to say, Con? Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll think of plenty tomorrow. Especially when my lawyers contact you.’ His smile flickered like a flame. ‘So, how would you like to play this? In full view of everyone? Or would you prefer to discuss this in private? Either is fine with me, though I have to tell you now, I do like an audience.’
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I couldn’t breathe.
What was he doing here? What had happened to him? How was he alive? His body had been identified in the burned-out wreck of a car on the outskirts of Madrid. An accident, the police had determined.
There had been rumours he’d been trying to escape from Domingo, about whom rumours of violence had swirled, though everyone knew him to be a perfectly charming if arrogant kind of man. Rumours that perhaps it hadn’t been entirely an accident.
And yet...he was here, right in front of me.
He hadn’t been in that car, had he?
‘You’re dead.’ Constantine’s voice was a dark, icy wind, as if somehow saying the words would make Valentin’s presence less real. ‘You died fifteen years ago.’
Valentin’s sardonic smile remained. ‘Apparently reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. As you can see.’
People were whispering, shock echoing and rebounding through the room.
I dug my nails harder into my palms, the cold seeping through me, unable to keep from staring at him, cataloguing all the changes the years had made.
He wasn’t the same. I could see that now.
There had been a warmth to the boy I’d known and a calm patience I’d found so reassuring and steadying. My father had had no patience with my ‘girlish tantrums’, as he’d termed them, but Valentin had never minded.
We’d met on a secret beach on that Caribbean island and had become friends. And, as we’d grown older, we’d become something more.
He’d always had time for me. He’d always been kind too, and funny. He hadn’t seemed to care that I was only a girl.
But there was no trace of the boy in the man standing there with his hands in the pockets of his black trousers, his expression amused. He appeared casual and yet every line of him blazed with intensity.
He wasn’t a flame now; he was a furnace.
The whispering grew louder.
‘Silence,’ Constantine ordered, that wind becoming a low, howling gale.
The whispering stopped.
The tension that had gathered in the room the moment Valentin had appeared pulled so tight it was nearly unbearable.
I forced my gaze away from Valentin to look at my fiancé instead, because I had the oddest feeling that Constantine wasn’t so much shocked at his brother’s appearance as he was angry.
Incandescently angry.
I wanted to say something, to stop whatever was going to happen next, because I knew it would be terrible; I just knew it. But I felt paralysed by shock, my throat too thick to force words through.
‘You look perturbed,’ Valentin observed casually, strolling closer to his brother. ‘Understandable, what with me coming back like Lazarus, on top of managing this farce of a funeral. Well, don’t worry, I won’t take up too much more of your valuable time. I’ll just take what’s mine and then be on my way.’ That intense black gaze of his flicked back to me and he held out a peremptory hand in my direction. ‘Come, Olivia.’
I stared at him, my head full of memories.
Memories of the last time I’d seen him, on the small hidden beach, the one that no one else had known about; the one that had been our special place. It had been night, the black sky above scattered with jewel-bright stars, and he’d kissed me for the first time.
He’d whispered in the dark that one day, when we were both old enough and free of our families, we’d get married and be together for ever.
I’d never wanted anything so badly.
We’d lain in the sand, still warm from the day’s heat, talking about how our life together would look and what we’d do. Marry, have a family, be free.
I’d loved him so much.
Then the next day he hadn’t come down to the beach as he’d promised and it wasn’t until later that I’d heard he and Constantine had been sent back to Madrid.
I’d never got to say goodbye. I’d been upset about it, but not worried. Because he’d had my mobile number and we could have texted each other and called.
Except he hadn’t called. And he hadn’t texted. And he hadn’t emailed.
I’d never heard from him again.
Six months later, he was dead.
I’d only been fifteen and full of the desperate, dramatic emotions that often fill teenage girls. He’d been my first love, my first heartbreak.
But I was a woman now, not a child, and I’d left all of that behind me. I was stronger, harder and colder, as I’d needed to be to manage my company. So I had no idea why I was suddenly full of emotion, full of a blistering rage that left me shaking.
Because how dared he?
How dared he have left me without saying goodbye? Without a text, a call or even an email? How dared he break my heart like that, knowing how much I’d loved him? How dared he tell me he loved me, only to leave?
And, more than anything else, how dared he pretend to die?
I opened my mouth to tell him where he could stick his, ‘Come, Olivia’.
Then all the lights went out and the ballroom was plunged into darkness.
For an instant, there was only silence.
Then the entire place erupted into chaos, people shouting and screaming.
I stayed where I was, rage and shock still coiling through me, making it difficult to think. Someone called my name, but I couldn’t tell who it was or in what direction it had come from. Then I felt someone grab my hand, their grip large, warm and strong.
Constantine.
Strange that I should feel better with his hand holding mine, since I’d never needed reassurance from him before. Nevertheless, I did now, so I held tightly to him as he gently pulled me along through the blackness.
Light was coming through a doorway, his tall, broad figure momentarily blocking it out as he approached it. Behind me, I could still hear people shouting in confusion and the sound of smashing glass.
My heart was still beating far too fast, though my fear was receding.
What on earth had happened? Had there been a power failure or something? Yet, even as I thought it, I knew the idea was ludicrous.
The lights had gone out with perfect timing, just before Constantine had been about to take charge. Which meant it was no power failure.
Valentin had engineered it, I was sure, but why? To what end?
Constantine drew me through the doorway and I stood for a second, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light. And, as they did, he turned around.
And my heart dropped all the way down into my uncomfortably high stilettos.
Because it wasn’t Constantine.
It was Valentin.
