The Italian in Need of an Heir
Auteur
Lynne Graham
Lezers
16,3K
Hoofdstukken
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CHAPTER ONE
SILHOUETTED AGAINST THE moonlit sky, the huge house outside Naples looked as if it belonged in a gothic horror movie. All it lacked was the ubiquitous thunderstorm to set the scene as it already had bats flying around the turrets, Raffaele Manzini conceded with wry amusement as he climbed out of his car and his bodyguards clambered out of the car behind him.
‘Some place,’ Sal, the middle-aged head of Raffaele’s protection team, remarked, with the privilege of a man who had been responsible for Raffaele’s physical safety since he was a child. ‘I’m going to stick to you like glue tonight whether you like it or not. I don’t trust your great-grandfather. Back in the day, the word is he was a ruthless killer.’
‘Probably all smoke and mirrors.’ Raffaele laughed.
‘He treated your father badly. A man who casts his own grandson out of the family isn’t doing right by his own blood and I’d believe him capable of anything.’
Raffaele said nothing, knowing the older man well enough to know that he had always been a fervent believer in the strength and importance of family ties. But the concept of family was meaningless to Raffaele. His mother had suffered brain damage in an adolescent accident and in spite of her unpredictable rages, obsessional behaviour and wild impulses she had still been allowed to raise him, her only child. Not that she, a Spanish billionairess, had done any of the actual raising. Naturally not. Raffaele had been brought up by nannies, few of whom had endured his volatile mother’s employment for long. He had never known a hug, physical affection being something his mother had put on the ‘grounds for dismissal’ list. He had never known his father until he grew into a man. And he had nothing in common with him either.
To be fair, Raffaele had long known that he wasn’t quite normal. There was a giant black hole in him where other people had emotion. Very little touched him. Only business, profit and power revved his engines. And just as he knew that, he knew that all that had brought him to his great-grandfather’s doorstep was curiosity.
Aldo Manzini might be ninety-one, but he had retained his sinister reputation. Rumours of Mafia connections, corruption and killings, not to mention brutal business tactics, still clung to his name. Even though his son had died, Aldo had still cut his grandson, Tommaso, out of his life for defying him and he had never forgiven him, which made it all the stranger that he should have extended an invitation for Tommaso’s son, Raffaele, to visit him at his fortified estate.
And if Raffaele hadn’t been bored, he wouldn’t have come. It was that simple. Family ties had nothing whatsoever to do with Raffaele’s arrival. His heiress mother’s death from an epileptic seizure had left him wealthy beyond avarice at eighteen and his own business achievements since then had made him untouchable. On the international stage, he was an infinitely more powerful man than Aldo Manzini had ever been in his Italian home. He was feared, flattered and feted wherever he went. Needless to say, that got tedious.
Boredom set Raffaele’s teeth on edge. He had tried to combat it every way he knew how. The turnover of women in his bed had moved even faster. He had skydived, scaled mountains, deep sea–dived, always searching to find what he needed to stop being bored. Because he knew how lucky he was to be born healthy and rich and to have the power to get just about anything he wanted. And at the age of twenty-eight, he had had it all: the beautiful women, the decadent parties, the travel, the ultimate of life’s experiences. And yet, he was still bored...
An ancient manservant ushered them into the creepy mansion. The giant hall rejoiced in the antiquated splendour of a bygone age, the very antithesis of what Raffaele liked but, for the first time in a very long time, Raffaele was not bored. A long wood-panelled corridor ornamented with a line of grim family portraits led into what the old man called the ‘master’s office’. Raffaele was surprised to register that he would have liked a moment or two to study his paternal ancestors but he suppressed that startling impulse, every skin cell in his very tall and powerful body firing as he saw the even older man seated behind the desk with an assistant hovering by his side. He had drawn hawkish features, but his dark eyes were still as keen as a raptor’s.
‘You’re very tall for a Manzini,’ Aldo remarked in Italian.
‘Must have caught the tall gene,’ Raffaele responded in the same language, which he spoke as fluently as he spoke half a dozen other languages.
‘Your mother was taller than your father. Couldn’t have abided that in a woman,’ Aldo admitted.
Raffaele shifted a broad shoulder clad in a casual cotton shirt. ‘Presumably you didn’t invite me here to get sentimental about my antecedents.’
‘Your hair’s too long as well,’ Aldo commented, unconcerned. ‘And you should have dressed for the occasion. Dismiss your bodyguard and I will dismiss mine. What I have to tell you is confidential.’
Raffaele angled his head at Sal, who frowned but backed out of the door again obediently, closely followed by Aldo’s companion.
‘Better,’ Aldo pronounced. ‘You can pour us a drink if you like.’ A gnarled hand indicated the drinks cabinet by the wall. ‘A brandy for me.’
Mouth quirking at the old man’s strength of character and imperious attitude, which defied the frail shell of a body trapped in a wheelchair, Raffaele crossed the room and it was one of those very rare occasions when he did as someone else told.
‘Do you see much of your father?’ Aldo enquired as his great-grandson set a brandy goblet down within his reach.
‘No. By the time I had access to him, I was an adult. I see him a couple of times a year,’ Raffaele responded carelessly.
‘Tommaso’s a disgrace to the Manzini family, as spineless as a jellyfish!’ Aldo proclaimed bitterly.
‘He’s happy,’ Raffaele replied with complete assurance. ‘And that, his small business and his family are all he wants out of life. We all have different dreams.’
‘I would hazard a guess that a white picket fence and a bunch of kids isn’t your dream,’ the old man murmured very drily.
‘It’s not, but I don’t begrudge my father his,’ Raffaele countered, his dark eyes a brilliant gold that flared in warning as he studied his great-grandfather, wanting the miserable old codger to get the message that while he might not be exactly close to his father, Tommaso, his father’s second wife or his three little half-sisters, he would protect both him and them from anyone who sought to harm them.
‘Let me bring you up to date on old history.’ Aldo leant back in his wheelchair.
A whiskey cradled in an elegant brown hand, Raffaele sprawled down in an armchair, hoping it wasn’t going to be a long story because he was already beginning to regret the impulse that had brought him.
‘When I was twenty-one I was engaged to Giulia Parisi. Our family businesses were competitors. Both our fathers wanted the marriage to take place but, make no mistake—’ Aldo lifted his bony chin to punctuate the point ‘—I was very much in love with her. The week before the wedding I discovered that she was sleeping with one of her cousins and was not the decent young woman I believed. I was young, hurt... I jilted her at the altar because I wanted to shame her the way she had shamed me.’
‘And?’ Raffaele pressed when the old man seemed to be drifting back into the past.
‘Her father was enraged by my disrespect and he changed his will. The Parisi business could never be bought or otherwise acquired by a Manzini. It could only pass through a marriage between the two families and the birth of a child.’
Raffaele rolled his eyes. ‘A bit short-sighted to say the least—’
‘That business is now one of the biggest technology companies in the world,’ Aldo informed him, having reached his punchline. ‘And if you do what I want you to do it will be yours—’
‘Which company?’ Raffaele prompted, his interest finally engaged as he ran through various names before Aldo nodded confirmation. ‘Seriously? And it could be mine? For the price of a wife and a kid?’ His lean bronzed features snapped taut with distaste. ‘As you guessed, not my style.’
‘Ever since Giulia, it has been my ambition to acquire that company. The question didn’t arise with my son’s generation because the Parisi clan had no daughters to target but by the time my grandson, Tommaso, was of age, there was a daughter called Lucia available.’
‘And my father blew his opportunity,’ Raffaele filled in. ‘He’s already told me that part of the story. You wanted him to marry Lucia but he was already in love with my mother and picked her instead.’
‘Great foresight there,’ Aldo quipped with a curled lip. ‘She only stayed married to him long enough to have you and then dumped him. How many stepfathers did you have?’
Raffaele shrugged. ‘Half a dozen. My father may not have been the sharpest tool in the box, but he was the best of a bad bunch.’
‘You don’t know the whole story,’ Aldo condemned. ‘Not only did Tommaso not marry Lucia, but he also paid for Lucia and her lover to run off to the UK and escape the wrath of her family using my money!’
Raffaele compressed his wide sensual mouth, almost betrayed into laughter by that dire announcement, which still, even after all the years that had passed, seemed to rankle the most with the old man. ‘That was enterprising of him,’ he pronounced stiffly. ‘However, I believe she was already pregnant by her lover and you can hardly have expected my father to still marry her in—’
‘Why not?’ the old man shrilled at him with lancing bitterness. ‘Any child would have met the terms of the will if he’d married Lucia Parisi!’
Raffaele registered that he was not dealing with a reasonable man and was not at all surprised that his father had fled to the UK and a humble lifestyle far removed from his wealthy beginnings. A quiet, gentle man, Tommaso could never have stood up to the force of his domineering grandfather’s personality or his demands. In much the same way, Raffaele’s mother, Julieta, had run over Tommaso like a steamroller. ‘That was unfortunate,’ he said, setting his glass down, resolving to get himself back out of the mansion again without further time wastage.
‘But not half as unfortunate as it would be if you were equally blind to the possibilities of marrying a Parisi.’
‘I’m not prepared to marry anyone,’ Raffaele spelt out with cool finality.
‘This one’s a beauty though, and you wouldn’t have to stay married to her,’ Aldo Manzini pointed out, tossing a file across the desk. ‘Have a look...’
Raffaele had no intention of having a look at some scion of the Parisi clan. The old man was unbalanced and obsessional and Raffaele had had quite sufficient experience of such personalities growing up with his tragically damaged mother. ‘I’m not interested. I need neither the money nor the company,’ he responded smoothly, rising from his chair.
‘Agree to consider it and I will sign over my business empire to you here and now. My lawyer is waiting in the next room,’ Aldo told him. ‘As for the former Lucia Parisi and her family, I already own them lock, stock and barrel.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Lucia married a fool. They’re in debt to their eyeballs and I own their debts. What do you think I intend to do with them?’
‘I couldn’t care less,’ Raffaele countered truthfully while thinking about that offer of Aldo’s business empire. A fading technology company in need of a fresh innovative makeover, the sort of business challenge he most enjoyed. That attracted him, not the money, no, it was the sheer challenge of rebuilding, redesigning, reenergising that kicked his shrewd brain into activity for the first time since he had entered the room. He enjoyed order, structure, after the chaotic nature of his childhood.
‘And if you want to acquire the other company, which will dovetail perfectly with mine, you marry the beauty. I know that nothing less than a beauty would tempt a man of your...shall we say...appetites?’ Aldo savoured, delighted by the reality that he had contrived to freeze Raffaele in his tracks and that the homework he had done on the nature of his great-grandson had paid off.
Like Aldo, Raffaele was a ruthless bastard in business, a tough and demanding employer and bone-deep ambitious. As Aldo had once been, he was a connoisseur of beautiful women. Like Aldo, what excited Raffaele the most was a challenge in the business field. But Raffaele had had too much too soon and too young, too much money, too much success, too many women. He needed something or someone to ground him back in the real world. Inwardly chuckling, Aldo watched Raffaele lifting the file he had, moments earlier, refused to even look at: the honey trap.
Raffaele stared down at the colour photograph. She was tall and she was naturally fair with long silky hair to her waist, flawless porcelain skin and eyes the fresh colour of spring ferns. Her features were...perfect, classical. But beautiful women were two a penny in his world and he would sooner have cut off his right arm than marry anyone and have a child. He flipped past the photo and discovered that she had an IQ higher than his own and Raffaele was twice as clever as most people. Now the thought of an intelligent beauty had considerable appeal to a man long convinced that all truly beautiful women were either mad as hatters like his late mother or insipid and shallow and so in love with their own looks that they had never bothered to work on having anything else to offer the world. Maya Campbell, Lucia Parisi’s daughter, however, would be another experience entirely...
‘I’m handing her to you on a plate. My representatives are already calling in the debts her family owes. You can ride in like a white knight and offer her a rescue package.’
‘To be blunt, I’m not the “white knight” type,’ Raffaele interposed drily. ‘If I go for this, I’ll be straight all the way. I don’t put on an act. I refuse to be anyone other than who I am.’
‘So speaks an immensely privileged young man,’ Aldo commented.
A carelessly graceful shrug was Raffaele’s response. He had few illusions about his own character but there were few people alive who knew what he had suffered as a child and adolescent, a live toy for a woman with mental health issues to play with, abused one day, over-indulged the next. He didn’t do self-pity any more than he did compassion. He didn’t trust people and it hadn’t harmed him. He didn’t care about people and it had kept him safe as an adult from the nightmares that had haunted his childhood. If you had no expectations, you didn’t get disappointed. That approach worked efficiently for him.
He hoped it would work for Maya Campbell as well because he wanted those companies. He would take them and, whatever it took, he would whip them into shape again, restoring both business enterprises to fresh growth and profitability.
‘I’m getting tired,’ Aldo was forced to admit, his head starting to droop. ‘Will I call in my lawyer?’
Raffaele smiled his very rare smile. ‘Thank you for an entertaining experience, Aldo. And the prospect of even more entertainment on the horizon.’
‘She is a beauty.’
‘Not the woman, the businesses!’ his great-grandson contradicted in impatient rebuttal.
The papers for the handover of Aldo’s estate were already prepared for signature. The lawyer appeared, accompanied by two witnesses, both of whom were doctors.
Only on exiting the mansion did Raffaele learn what had driven Aldo Manzini to his decision to sign over his empire before he passed away.
‘Dementia,’ one of the doctors told him with a shake of his head. ‘In a few months, who knows what he will still be capable of doing? At his age, the degeneration can be rapid, and he knows that.’
And an utterly unexpected pang of regret stung Raffaele and he knew he would visit again, whether he married to acquire the second company or not.
‘Oh, my word, I’ve never seen a more beautiful man!’ Nicola, the bride-to-be, carolled at Maya’s side.
‘Where?’ One of Maya’s other companions demanded to know.
‘Over by the bar...isn’t he just dreamy?’ Nicola sighed in a languishing tone.
Maya flicked an instinctive glance over to the bar and saw him. Man whore, her brain labelled instantly. There he was, at least six feet four inches tall, powerfully built but somehow lean and lithe at the same time, lounging back against the bar of the VIP section of the club with a glittering confidence that blazed like an angel’s halo. A man supremely comfortable with being the cynosure of every female eye in the room, coolly accustomed to attention and appreciation in spite of the fact that he was dressed down in ripped jeans, a black tee shirt and what looked like motorcycle boots. It was a certainty that he got admired every place he went.
And it showed. He knew exactly how gorgeous he was.
Luxuriant black hair brushed his shoulders, a dark shadow of stubble accentuating his strong jaw line and perfect mouth, throwing his swoon-worthy high cheekbones into prominence. Without the stubble, the muscular development and the tousled hair, he might have looked too pretty or clean-cut as some male supermodels did. Nice wallpaper, she categorised him, but very probably highly promiscuous and definitely not her type. That fast, she dismissed him from her interest and glanced away.
But then she didn’t ‘do’ men in the same way as her university friends did. Maya didn’t have time to date, and sleeping around for the sake of a quick physical thrill had never appealed to her either. Life was too short to waste on a man. Her soft mouth curled at the thought and she wondered if her utterly hopeless nice guy of a father had ruined her for all other men and embittered her to a certain extent.
After all, her father was a lovely man, loving, good-natured and caring, but when he went into business, he was a disaster and that truth, matched with the debts he had accrued, had dominated Maya’s life for far longer than she cared to recall. Her teenaged years had been a blur of bailiffs, debt collectors and threatening letters and the constant worry of how to keep her family fed and safe. She had her parents, her twin sister, Izzy, and Matt, her eleven-year-old brother in a wheelchair, to look after. Izzy never seemed to resent the harsher realities of their lives and the part their feckless parents had played in depriving their daughters of a normal youth. But Maya had often wondered what it would be like to have ordinary self-sufficient parents, who did the caring, rather than relying on their kids to look after them.
And then, just as quickly, she felt like a bad person for even thinking that way, for being mean and selfish and resentful.
It wasn’t her parents’ fault that they had always been poor. Neither of them had the desirable talents or educational achievements required by employers and, in any case, her mother had only ever been able to work part-time hours with a disabled son to look after. Indeed, Maya had never contrived to work out how any of her father’s car-crash businesses could ever have done well enough to enable her parents to buy a house in London, but they had had the house before she and Izzy were born and that small property was the only stable element in their catastrophic financial world. It was the one plus they had as a family.
Maya had completed two doctorates in mathematics at university after first graduating at eighteen. Being a prodigy from an early age had only two benefits that she recognised. Firstly, academic brilliance had enabled her to finance her studies by allowing her to win scholarships and prizes and, secondly, it had given her higher earning powers in part-time jobs and projects that required a maths whizz. Extra work had always been available to Maya but had she had a choice she would have gone into academic research because, aside of her family’s needs, money didn’t mean that much to her. There were so many more important, lasting things than cash, she thought ruefully on the dance floor, wondering why Nicole was giving her meaningful glances until a hand lightly touched her shoulder to attract her attention.
Maya spun round and, even in her very high heels which took her to five feet eleven, she had the unfamiliar experience of having to tip her head back to see the man who had approached her. And it was him, the guy from the bar, and she was stunned because she was not a good bet and she would have assumed such a man would have already worked that out for himself. Her outfit was conservative, her demeanour quiet and she didn’t drink, all of which should have loudly signalled her unavailability in the ‘fun for a night’ stakes.
‘Join me for a drink,’ he told her. He definitely didn’t ask; it was a command.
Maya simply laughed, plucking an explanatory hand at the silly pink sash she had been forced to wear. ‘Sorry, I’m on a girls’ night. No men allowed.’
He had dark deep-set eyes as hard as black granite with little gold highlights and he couldn’t hide the fact that the rejection had disconcerted him because for a split second those eyes flared like fireworks against a night sky. And she forgave him because close up he was even more devastatingly gorgeous than he had looked at a distance and she assumed that he had little experience of meeting with female dismissal. He emanated an aura of golden vibrancy comprised of bronzed skin, vital good health and leashed masculine energy. And like all men, he had an ego and she had briefly dented it.
‘Are you crazy?’ Nicole hissed in her ear, grabbing her arm to march her back to their table and tell the rest of the hens what Maya had done.
And there was a whole chorus of voluble protests. The mood did not go in the direction Maya expected. Indeed, her companions were ready to gift-wrap her for him and hand her over. A bunch of arguments in that line came her way unasked for: she was single, allowed to stray from the hen party, should grab male opportunity when it beckoned and was far too much of a nerd to appreciate that a man like that only came along once in a lifetime.
‘He said, “Join me for a drink.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ Maya told them defensively when she could finally get a word in. ‘He’s an arrogant bastard.’
‘Got to expect some flaws in all that perfection,’ someone gibed, unimpressed.
‘Are you seriously telling me that a guy like that isn’t worth more than sitting in swotting prissily every night over your computer like you do?’ someone else piped up.
And Maya’s polite smile froze a little because there was envy in those comments and she was, sadly, used to dealing with that, after being horribly bullied at school for her scholastic attainments. Her peers preferred to believe that she had to swot from dawn to dusk to gain the results she did, and she let them believe that even if it was a lie. Evidently a nerdy swot was more acceptable than someone gifted at birth with a photographic memory and an IQ that ran into the highest possible triple figures. Maya had been doing algebra at the age of three; she didn’t need to swot.
Raffaele returned to the bar, seriously unsettled. He had wanted to meet her on level ground on his own terms but from the first glimpse she had not met his expectations. She dressed badly: there was no avoiding that obvious flaw. The high-necked black dress she wore had as much shape as a sack but still couldn’t hide the length of her show-stopping long legs or the delicacy of her curves at breast and hip. As for her face, she was, unbelievably to Raffaele, a cosmetics-free zone. Her face was bare, not even liner or mascara applied. Lucky for her that her porcelain-pale skin was smooth and faultless, he mused irritably, and her green eyes so arresting that she could get away without artificial definition. But she had turned him away. Ordering up a rare second drink, Raffaele gritted his perfect white teeth.
Women didn’t walk away from Raffaele Manzini. It didn’t happen. He was as bemused as if a tame dog had suddenly bitten the hand off him. Other guys got blown off by women, Raffaele didn’t. She had barely glanced at him, dismissing him instantly, he reasoned, his jaw line clenching even harder. He ordered her a fancy cocktail and sent it over to the table. She waved a bottle of sparkling water in an apologetic gesture in his direction and passed the cocktail over to another woman at the table. By that point Raffaele was ready to strangle her because she wasn’t the pushover he had assumed she would be. It annoyed him when those around him refused to fit the frame he had set them in. He departed from the club in a brooding mood, raging frustration bubbling only an inch beneath it as he stole a last lingering glance at her.
Madre di Cristo... For some peculiar reason she looked even more beautiful now, light blonde hair shimmering in a veil down her back as she shimmied her curvy little bottom to the music beat with one of the other women, long perfect legs flashing, that determined little chin at an upward angle, signalling that she didn’t give a damn about anything, anyone. Well, she would learn different, Raffaele swore to himself soothingly, denying the all too ready pulse at his groin that had a mind of its own; she would learn not to tangle with Raffaele Manzini and expect to walk away free and undamaged.
‘I think she’s a nice girl...didn’t mean any harm.’ Sal broke into speech unexpectedly on the pavement as the limo door was flipped open for Raffaele’s entry. ‘Not your usual hook-up. Nothing flirtatious about her, nothing suggestive in her dress, just not your usual type.’
Raffaele bit out a curse in Italian, enraged by that comforting assurance from a man who was probably closer to a father than any he had ever known.
‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a nice girl.’
‘Most of us marry the nice ones,’ Sal riposted cheerfully.
Of course, Sal knew she was a Parisi from the investigation agency he had employed to track her down for Raffaele to meet. And yet they hadn’t officially met as yet. Maya Parisi... Raffaele savoured the name. It suited her better than Campbell, which was too ordinary for a blonde that could catch his eye garbed in a dress like a sack and without make-up or silicone or Botox or, indeed, any of the artificial enhancements that Raffaele was more accustomed to finding featured in the women he bedded.
But if he married Maya, it wouldn’t be to keep her as Sal implied. It would be to bed her and get her pregnant, Raffaele reflected coldly, and strangely enough that idea no longer repulsed him in the way it had only a week earlier. In fact, he discovered it was more of a turn-on for his jaded libido because it was something new, something different. But only for a short time until the task was accomplished. And no, he wouldn’t be keeping her, he would be corrupting her with pleasure and then discarding her again, which was pretty much the norm for him. After all, the window of his attention span for a woman was notoriously short.
