The Italian's Bride Worth Billions
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Lynne Graham
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HarlequinCHAPTER ONE
GIANNI RENZETTI SWALLOWED a curse when he was informed that his father, Federico, awaited him in his office. He knew what that was about, wished he didn’t. But that was life and Gianni always met adversity head-on. As the phenomenally successful and youngest ever CEO of Renzetti Inc, he was determined to stand by his convictions.
His PA couldn’t quite meet his eyes when she relayed the news about his father’s arrival and the faintest trace of colour edged Gianni’s hard-edged cheekbones, throwing into prominence the striking bone structure and stunning dark good looks that usually granted him a second and even a third glance from women. Of course, his PA would have seen the photos in the newspaper and, momentarily, Gianni was embarrassed rather than powered by the anger that had exploded in him the instant he saw that grubby article.
Here he was, evidently, labelled for life by a moment of sexual idiocy. His wide sensual mouth compressed. Yet his strongest conviction was that his private life—for that read sex life—was an entirely confidential matter. Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the lines had become blurred. Gianni had been set up and he had, regrettably, succumbed to temptation in a private room at a nightclub. That had resulted in attempted blackmail and the involvement of the police followed by a very sleazy spread of photos in a downmarket tabloid. When the extortion attempt failed, the story had been sold instead.
A resigned blankness in his dazzling dark eyes, Gianni entered his office. He had always had a toxic relationship with his father. His late mother had excluded his father from her will and left her vast wealth in trust for her son and Gianni was well aware of his father’s resentment on that score. What relationship the two men had had, however, had nosedived the instant that Gianni stepped into his father’s shoes at Renzetti Inc. Federico Renzetti had made several poor business decisions and the board of directors, which included his father’s two older brothers, had voted him out, preferring his son, who already ran a highly profitable company of his own. Although at the time Federico had insisted that he was keen to retire, his bitterness had only seemed to increase when his son had lifted the family company into the Fortune 500 category.
‘Federico.’ Gianni greeted his only surviving parent with the name and formality the older man preferred and extended a stiff hand.
The older man, tall but a little portly in shape from good living, surveyed his son with tight-mouthed censure. ‘I’m only here to tell you that when the board of directors vote you out at the end of the month, neither I nor your uncles will be supporting you,’ he spelt out.
Gianni froze, taken aback by that declaration of intent. He had not been aware that there was any risk of him being voted out. In his experience the directors always put profit first. But evidently, the jungle drums in the family had been busily beating behind his back. A cold chill ran down his spine. Gianni cared about few things beyond work because he was the overachiever he had been raised to be. He ate, breathed, and slept business and he not only thrived as CEO of the family company, but also deeply valued his position of responsibility.
‘This sordid episode has brought the company’s reputation into disrepute,’ Federico Renzetti ground out thinly. ‘It cannot be overlooked.’
‘It has brought me into disrepute,’ Gianni contradicted steadily. ‘I made a foolish misjudgement, and I won’t even try to defend myself.’
‘You had sex with a woman in a nightclub!’ his father slashed back at him in disgust. ‘With a camera on you!’
‘Naturally, I was not aware of the hidden camera,’ Gianni said drily. ‘But neither was I willing to give way to blackmail.’
‘You were in the wrong. You should’ve paid that scheming slut off to protect the company name!’
‘Too late now,’ Gianni responded, seeing no reason to argue and prolong the meeting. He saw in his father’s eyes that the older man was reaping a certain amount of enjoyment from his downfall and as always that cut him deep. It made him wonder, as he so often had growing up, what he had done to deserve that lack of affection.
‘You have always refused to listen to me and take my advice!’ the older man denounced bitterly. ‘If you kept a mistress, it would be discreet. There would be no surprises, no scandals.’
Gianni gritted his teeth because he had always believed that a mistress would be as suffocating an addition to his life as a wife. One exclusive woman to satisfy his every desire? Gianni enjoyed freedom and variety but even a mistress would be entitled to expect a fair degree of fidelity. Why would he sign up for that option when most of the young women he met were content to settle for a casual encounter? Furthermore, that kind of detached lifestyle reminded him too strongly of his father and he refused to make such a choice, particularly as the son of a mother who had felt humiliated by her husband’s mistresses.
‘Better still had you married by now and settled down!’ Federico Renzetti continued grimly.
‘Why on earth would I want to get married at twenty-eight?’ Gianni demanded with incredulity.
‘I was a married man at twenty-three.’
‘Back in the day,’ Gianni scoffed, resisting a cutting urge to remark that his mother had been the richest heiress in Europe and too good a prospect for his impoverished father to pass up. ‘Few adults want to settle down that young now.’
‘Had you been married, even engaged, the board would have seen some sign of hope and better behaviour on the horizon for you. But you just won’t grow up!’ Federico told him in furious condemnation. ‘What have you got against settling down?’
‘Like my mother and you were so happy settling down,’ Gianni breathed with emphatic distaste.
The older man paled at that unwelcome reminder and stepped back. ‘I am sorry that you were so aware of our difficulties.’
Discomfiture filled Gianni, for he had not intended to get that personal with his parent and he rarely referred to the mother, who had died when he was thirteen. His memories of her were too private and painful. A charged silence fell for several uneasy seconds.
‘Look.’ Federico spread his hands in hesitant appeal. ‘You could still turn this whole ghastly situation around by just choosing the right woman to marry. However, do you even know any decent women? You’re unlikely to meet them at the raunchy private clubs and wild parties you frequent,’ Federico declared with frustration. ‘She would be mature and respectable, and she would have an unblemished reputation.’
‘Bearing in mind the headlines I attracted over the weekend, I would imagine that a decent woman would be the very last one willing to marry me at the moment,’ Gianni countered ruefully.
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ his father advised him impatiently. ‘You’re richer than Croesus. Even the most moral woman would be tempted by all that you have to offer...although, to be frank, she might not be tempted by your conduct.’
‘And I’m not tempted by the idea of a gold-digging wife,’ Gianni responded with finality. ‘Let’s not discuss the impossible. I can’t credit that a wedding ring on my finger would silence the board’s concerns.’
‘We’re all old men on the board, Gianni. We equate settling down with growing up, with maturity and stability,’ his father fielded drily. ‘Surely even you could contemplate the picket fence if it delivers the results you want?’
Gianni gritted his teeth and said nothing. He knew party girls, bored socialites and aspiring models. But then he wasn’t seriously considering his father’s advice, was he? No, he wasn’t. He had made a misstep and he would learn by it, even if that meant learning the hard way. He wasn’t about to entangle himself in a miserable marriage to satisfy other people’s moral scruples. No, not for anything, he swore vehemently.
Her fingers crumpling the letter of refusal from the bank, Josephine Hamilton stared out of the attic window towards Belvedere, the palatial mansion adjacent to her own family home. It belonged to the Renzetti family and Gianni Renzetti was the biggest landowner and employer in the area. Technically, he was also their next-door neighbour. He owned almost every scrap of ground around them and what remained was the size of a postage stamp.
Dating back to Tudor times, Ladymead, the Hamilton family home, was dilapidated. While the Hamilton family fortunes had waned, the Renzettis’ fortunes had steadily risen. Over a century ago, someone on the maternal side of Gianni’s family tree had bought land from the Ladymead estate to build their lavish Edwardian property. Piece by piece over the years, Gianni’s ancestors had bought almost all of Ladymead’s original land. Only the walled garden, the outbuildings and the strip along the lakeshore still belonged to them, she reflected sadly, wondering if Gianni would now step in like the predator he essentially was to scoop up what was left of her home once debt forced them to sell. Ladymead would sell at a knockdown price, she conceded unhappily.
Slowly descending the rickety and narrow servant staircase, idly wondering when there had last been a servant in her dusty home, she suppressed her overwhelming sense of failure before straightening her shoulders and composing her face. She had to be strong for the sake of her nearest and dearest.
Jo settled the bank’s letter on the kitchen table in front of her grandmother and her two great-aunts, Sybil and Beatrix, better known as Trixie. It was a Hamilton family meeting.
‘Another refusal,’ her grandmother, Liz, registered in dismay, her creased and kindly face troubled beneath her halo of white hair.
‘But I lit a candle for success!’ Her witchy great-aunt, Trixie, exclaimed in furious disappointment, her earrings and bracelets clattering noisily, her long greying hair flying round her face as she shook her head. ‘Why didn’t it work?’
The third and youngest sister, Sybil, rolled her blue eyes and lifted her false eyelashes high in true femme-fatale style. ‘It didn’t work because we’re a bad financial bet for a loan,’ she said with the innate practicality that was as much a part of her as her glamorous image. ‘So, what now?’
One hand toying anxiously with the end of the long braid of her blonde hair, Jo winced, her dark blue eyes strained in her delicate pointed face. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve made an appointment to see Gianni and ask if he’s willing to loan us the money. I’ve tried all the banks. He’s our last hope.’
‘Not sure you’ll be safe seeing him alone,’ Sybil quipped, referring to the shocking newspaper article that everyone local had read and devoured.
Jo ignored that crack. ‘I’m seeing him this evening when he’s at home for the weekend. I thought it was best to keep it casual.’
‘I bet you’re wishing now that you’d said yes to dinner when he asked you out again last Christmas.’ Sybil sighed. ‘After all, it was the second time he’d asked you and you rejected him. I shouldn’t think those rejections will dispose him to generosity.’
‘I think he would have been more shocked if I’d said yes,’ Jo countered, keen to kill that subject.
Jo knew herself well and she had always refused to allow herself to be tempted by the man she suspected was probably her equivalent of Kryptonite. Gianni was the original bad boy and she had been determined not to become another notch on his heavily marked bedpost. He tempted her when no other man had contrived to do so and she was painfully conscious that she was vulnerable with him. But she had also known Gianni since she was a child and she valued even their casual friendship too much to risk losing that unique link.
‘In some cultures, they believe that if you save a life, that person’s life belongs to you,’ Trixie mused absently. ‘Gianni hasn’t got much return from the effort he put in that day.’
Sybil’s eyes flared. ‘It didn’t happen that way, even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it. Jo saved him from drowning, not the other way round!’ she argued.
Jo wrinkled her nose. ‘I was nine years old and he was thirteen,’ she reminded her great-aunts gently. ‘We were both stupid and we both survived. That’s all that really matters.’
Sybil parted her lips to argue and then glimpsed her eldest sister’s taut face and closed her mouth again. Liz Hamilton’s son, Abraham, had drowned himself in the lake and nobody liked to discuss that thorny subject around his mother.
Uncomfortably flushed by that reminder of the uneasy link she had formed with Gianni and the secret they had suppressed when they were both too young to do otherwise, Jo rose from the table. She had first met Gianni the year before that incident. Her grandmother had gone to visit his mother, who had endured a long struggle with cancer. Federico Renzetti had been less to everyone’s taste than his charming, friendly wife, Isabella, who had borne her illness with such stoicism. Gianni’s father had been a cold, distant man with no desire to mix in any way with the locals.
Liz Hamilton had brought roses, which Isabella had adored. High tea with all the trimmings had been served in a sunlit drawing room. Jo had been bored listening to the adult conversation and then Gianni had come in, a tall, rangy twelve-year-old with a shock of glossy blue-black hair and olive skin. Jo had seen the love in his eyes when he’d looked at his frail mother, a love that had been fully reciprocated as his mother had drawn him forward to introduce him, her pride in him patent.
He had been very polite and hadn’t grimaced when Isabella had asked him to take Jo outside to entertain her. He had asked her some awkward questions to fill the silence between them, such as why she lived with her grandparents. And she had told him that her mother was dead and that she didn’t remember her and that nobody knew who her father was. Gianni had been disconcerted by such honesty, but she had been too naïve to dissemble.
She had told him that she would rather see the library than the garden and he had shown her a shelf with English books and in no time at all she had been curled up in an armchair reading a children’s book that had once been his.
‘What age are you?’ he had finally asked her.
‘Eight,’ she had told him proudly.
‘You’re absolutely tiny,’ he had remarked.
‘I’m not. You’re just very tall. My goodness, you can read English as well as Italian,’ she had gathered, impressed to death by such an accomplishment.
‘If I speak English, I can read it,’ Gianni had pointed out. ‘My grandmother was English. My mother wanted me to be bilingual. That’s why I go to an English school.’
He had attended an elite boarding school, rubbing shoulders with the rich, the titled and the royal. In spite of his mother’s illness, he was rarely at Belvedere, and it was the following year before Jo saw him again and in circumstances she would have preferred to forget.
‘That poor boy,’ she recalled her grandmother saying to her sisters. ‘His mother has died and he never got to spend any time with her. He’s only home from school and it’s too late... She’s gone. Isabella said his father was extremely strict about his schooling and wouldn’t let him take time out to be with her during her last weeks.’
Jo had been sitting in a tree in the front garden when she saw Gianni in the distance striding down to the lake. Aware that he was grieving, she had not even thought of trying to approach him. She wouldn’t have known what to say in such circumstances and it wasn’t as though they were friends. There was too big an age gap for that. She had watched as he’d walked into the lake and she had leapt down from the tree, wondering if he knew that there was a very steep drop several yards out, wondering why he wasn’t wearing swimwear.
And as he had walked, she had remembered a conversation between her great-aunts that she had overheard, a conversation about her uncle Abraham’s death the year before.
‘She saw him do it!’ Trixie had sobbed. ‘How could he do that to his mother? She saw him drown from her bedroom window. She watched him walk into the water and keep on walking until he vanished below the surface. She started running and she was screaming.
‘But she was too late. It was all over by the time we got down there.’
At the time, Jo hadn’t understood that her uncle had taken his own life, distraught at having lost his family’s money in dodgy investments. But she had understood that he had drowned and worry about Gianni had made her break the rule that she was never ever to go near the lake without an adult with her. She had run faster than she had ever run in her life and then she had raced straight into the water to reach Gianni. An accomplished swimmer, she had had no fear.
She had shouted at him just as he’d dipped below the surface but assumed he hadn’t heard her. In an effort to help him she had moved in deeper, starting to swim just as her feet had got tangled in the weeds below the surface. As panic had taken hold of her, she’d forgotten everything she had ever learned about how to handle herself in water. She’d struggled, flailing her arms wildly as she’d tried to free her legs and she’d only sunk deeper and faster into the murky depths.
That was all she remembered until she’d surfaced again, spluttering and gasping on the shore. Gianni’s eyes had been wild and desperate above hers, a fierce burning gold as he’d turned her over and urged her to breathe.
So, who had saved whom? she still wondered. It had never been discussed because she had never told anyone the truth of what she had suspected: that Gianni, devastated by his mother’s death, had gone into the lake with no plan to come out of it again alive. Certainly, she would have drowned had he not grabbed her and dragged her out of the water to get her breathing again. Ever since then she had given the lake a wide berth, reluctant to revisit those memories.
She had no appetite for her evening meal and her grandmother scolded her, telling her that she was already thin enough. To keep the older woman happy, she agreed to have some soup but, in reality, when Jo was apprehensive all appetite deserted her.
‘I suppose you’ll offer Gianni the lakeshore land in return,’ Liz Hamilton assumed quietly. ‘You might as well. Nobody here has fished the lake since your uncle died.’
‘I have to offer him something. Our roof won’t go through another winter,’ Jo pointed out ruefully.
‘The roof on my shop needs attention as well,’ Trixie piped up.
‘The roof of the house is more important,’ Sybil countered. ‘And then there’s the rewiring. That’s next on the list before we get disconnected for failing safety standards.’
‘Yes, one thing does lead to another.’ Liz sighed heavily. ‘The wiring stymied Jo’s plans to open a bed and breakfast here. Everything demands money and we don’t have any. We only bring in enough cash to pay the weekly bills.’
Her shoulders down-curving, Jo pushed her soup plate away. Sometimes it all got on top of her: the sheer weight of responsibility, the robbing Peter to pay Paul outlook she had to maintain, the need to stretch every penny until it squeaked. Essentially the family had coped until her uncle had lost the family savings and then her grandfather, who had had a good business head on his shoulders, had died. Jo had planned to use her business degree to find a job but supporting Ladymead and her family had had to come first. And she had had some good ideas to bring in an income from the unused buildings in the rear courtyard. Unfortunately, any changes or improvements required to make money also cost money.
Trixie now had a little shop selling crystals, candles and handicrafts. She was also much in demand for tarot readings locally. Sybil’s heart was in the small animal shelter she ran in the barn, but she also sold the organic vegetables grown in the walled garden via their one surviving employee, Maurice, who was as old as the hills, lived in the courtyard and refused to retire.
Duffy flew in and landed on the chair in front of Jo and began to sing the song from a popular musical about money making the world go around.
‘You said money, the fatal word, and he heard it,’ Sybil reproved her big sister.
‘It’s better than the biblical quotes, although he’s amazingly soulful when he starts reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ Trixie said fondly.
‘He’s a very well-educated parrot,’ Liz Hamilton murmured with quiet pride.
Jo left them to it and went to freshen up, Fairy, a graceful greyhound, gliding upstairs with her. Their Scottie, McTavish, who hated everyone but Jo, was out chasing rabbits, which was just as well when she was planning to visit Belvedere. He had a particular vicious dislike of Gianni, and his housekeeper had had to phone her twice recently to come and retrieve the little animal when McTavish had lain in hopeful wait for Gianni.
She smoothed down her faded blue sundress and sighed, loosening her long hair from its untidy fraying braid and deciding simply to brush it to save time. Gianni was such a stickler for punctuality. She couldn’t afford to get off on the wrong foot with him, could she?
Fairy by her side, she climbed into the pickup truck that was the only vehicle left at Ladymead, its usage on a strict schedule to allow all of them a chance to take advantage of the freedom it brought. Gianni had a huge garage full of cars of all descriptions, most of them of the fast, sports variety. Her smile dimmed as she recalled their most significant meeting in recent times.
It had been very awkward. Gianni had attended Ralph’s funeral, lingering long enough to offer her his personal condolences on her ‘loss’. Ralph Scott had died in a military helicopter crash. He had been a friend, but just about everyone, with the exception of her family, had believed that Jo and Ralph were unofficially engaged. In reality, the engagement had been a story put around by Ralph to save face when he’d discovered that his former fiancée, Jane, was cheating on him with his best friend. Jo had been shocked when Ralph died but she had grieved only over the loss of a dear friend, not over the loss of a man she loved. She would have liked to explain that to Gianni but with so many people standing nearby she hadn’t had the opportunity.
Even so, Gianni had tried to offer her comfort in his own unique way, declaring that loving someone only got you hurt, and when she’d queried that statement, he had admitted that he had had his heart broken when he was younger and had learned a useful lesson from the experience. She had been stunned that he should have told her something that personal even though she hadn’t agreed with his outlook. Ever since she had wondered who the woman was and what had happened between them.
Suppressing those untimely and inappropriate reflections, Jo parked at the front of the house, crunching over the gravel in her grass-stained canvas sandals to the imposing front entrance. The door opened, Gianni’s plump housekeeper, Abigail, bestowing a smile on her before ushering her in.
‘Mr Renzetti is in the orangery. It’s lovely there at this time of year with the terrace doors wide and the evening sunshine flooding in,’ she said, showing Jo through the big echoing hall out to the leafy splendour of the orangery. ‘How have you been? I ran into your grandmother yesterday and she said you’d been terribly busy.’
‘There’s never enough hours in my day,’ Jo admitted rather breathlessly as she heard footsteps crossing the tiled floor, strong, sure, like the man himself.
‘Jojo,’ Gianni purred. ‘What are you collecting for this evening?’
He had told her once that Josephine was too much of a mouthful and that Jo made her sound like a boy and he had begun calling her Jojo even though she frowned every time he utilised it.
‘C-collecting?’ She stammered out the word, colour rising in her cheeks as she stared at him.
At the worst possible moment, she was remembering that grainy image of him in a suit in that room with that half-naked woman. Her tummy flipped, butterflies breaking free. Her grandmother had told her that Gianni was their neighbour and acquaintance and that it was disrespectful to have that rag of a newspaper in their home when he had been extorted and unaware of the camera. She had been ashamed of herself for devouring every dirty detail. And she was even more ashamed to feel the prickling of her nipples as they tightened and the heat rising between her thighs. But at the end of the day, she was a woman like any other and her body betrayed her in his presence because he was that irresistible.
Standing only bare feet away from him, she was shockingly aware of how incredibly handsome he was, how tall, how well built. His beautifully tailored dark pinstriped suit fitted him perfectly and it was designer fashionable, cut to enhance his broad chest and lean muscular thighs. Unaffected by Jo’s self-consciousness, Fairy located a rug, turned three times and settled down happily for a snooze.
‘For charity. When you visit you’re always collecting for something but you don’t usually go for the formality of making an appointment,’ Gianni clarified lazily, studying her with veiled eyes, the stirring sexual pulse at his groin all too familiar and fiercely resisted.
Josephine Hamilton was exquisite. There was no other word. The pretty child had grown into an incredibly beautiful woman with a mane of golden hair, sapphire-blue eyes, a delicate little nose and a luscious pink mouth. She was a slender five feet four or so with the grace of a ballet dancer and sometimes when he saw her, she could still take his breath away. A member of the church choir, she had been among the carol singers that had called at Belvedere the previous Christmas, her lovely face the only one he’d noticed in the crowd, her jewelled eyes shining, golden hair rumpled and, for once, she had been smiling at him.
Gianni laughed at her blank look. ‘You were collecting for the homeless last time you were here, and you did very well out of my dinner guests. Your speech could have wrung water from a stone.’
Jo coloured again. ‘Yes, they were very generous, but I wouldn’t have called in had I known that you were entertaining.’
‘Come and sit down,’ he suggested as his housekeeper bustled in with a tray of coffee and cakes.
‘Nothing for me,’ Jo said tightly, both nervous and embarrassed as she sank down into a basketwork cushioned chair.
‘You usually eat like a horse,’ Gianni remarked in surprise. ‘What’s wrong? You seem very tense.’
Jo stiffened. ‘You’re treating me like a welcome visitor and that doesn’t feel right when I’ve come to ask you for a loan,’ she confided uncomfortably.
It was so Jojo to just blurt it out like that and he was wryly amused. ‘I’m not a bank,’ he said quietly.
‘The banks said no.’
Gianni concealed his amusement with difficulty. ‘You really shouldn’t be telling me that in advance.’
Jo lifted her chin. ‘I’m not stupid. I know you would check that out.’
‘What do you need the loan for? The money pit?’
Jojo compressed her lips, offended by that label being attached to her home. ‘The roof is in a bad way and the wiring is causing problems. I want to set up a bed and breakfast and the regulations are extremely strict.’
Gianni schooled his shrewd gaze. His father had been obsessed with acquiring Ladymead and ridding the neighbourhood of the eccentric Hamiltons and the folksy business operations they had cobbled together to stay afloat. Officially, Gianni had owned Belvedere since he was thirteen and the presence of a Tudor dump on the other side of the screening wall his parent had erected bothered him not at all.
‘Of course, I’m not expecting you to help out of the goodness of your heart.’
‘Well, you know I have none of that,’ Gianni inserted drily.
‘You didn’t report McTavish for biting you,’ Jo reminded him in disagreement.
‘You’d never have forgiven me.’
‘I know you don’t like long-winded speeches, so I’ll get straight to the point. We’re willing to sell the lakeshore land to you.’
Gianni gritted his teeth and groaned. How did he tell her that when the Hamiltons eventually went bust he would buy Ladymead on the cheap, close the shops and install tenants? It was an historic building, as he had reminded his father, and it couldn’t be demolished. But what exasperated him the most was Jo’s admission that she was planning a bed and breakfast operation.
‘How on earth could you cope with guests in the house? You’re already run ragged trying to keep the place going,’ Gianni demanded impatiently. ‘You would have to renovate the entire house and you would need staff. Trixie would need to stop worshipping at her shrine to nature in the back garden. Sybil would have to stop taking in every stray animal that comes along. Your grandmother, who isn’t getting any younger, would never get out of the kitchen. It’s not a viable proposition.’
‘I didn’t ask for your opinion,’ Jo told him tartly.
Gianni sprang up restively. ‘Too bad...you’re getting it. It’s a totally impractical ambition.’
‘And you just expect me to accept your judgement on that score, do you?’ Jo slung back at him angrily.
‘I do,’ Gianni delivered succinctly. ‘I know you have a business degree, but you’ve not used it or been out in the world. You don’t have the experience to—’
‘If being out in the world means shagging some trollop in a questionable club and making sleazy headlines, then I don’t think I want to be out in the world as you put it!’ Her face flushed, her hands knotted into fists, her sapphire eyes alight with fury, Jo stared him down in challenge.
