Читать книгу Bound By The Billionaire's Vows - Clare Connelly - Страница 9

PROLOGUE

Six years earlier

‘CAN YOU SEE IT, Matteo?’

The newspapers loved to say that Matteo Vin Santo didn’t have a heart, but they were wrong.

Observing his grandfather lying weak and pale against the ordinary hospital bed-sheets was making that very organ clutch and grip painfully. The certainty that the man had only hours left to live was ripping it apart completely.

‘See what, Nonno?’

‘Nonno?’ Alfonso Vin Santo smiled, but his lips were chapped and the pain turned the instinctive gesture into a wince. ‘You haven’t called me that in a long time.’

Matteo didn’t respond. His eyes fell to his grandfather’s hands. Hands that had shaped a corporate empire; hands that had been at the helm during its demise. He looked away, focusing on the uninspiring view of the outskirts of Florence.

‘See the water? You always loved the way the sun bounced off it, no?’

Matteo’s eyes swept shut. Though they were in a linoleum-floored hospital room, he pictured exactly what his grandfather was seeing. The view from the terrace of Il Grande Fortuna, the hotel they’d once owned in Rome, overlooking the Tiber in one direction and the Vatican in the other.

Anger—a familiar response when he thought of the hotel—churned his gut. It was fierce in that moment, so fierce it almost took his breath away.

‘Yes. It’s beautiful.’

‘It is more than beautiful. It is perfect.’ Alfonso sighed and then a ghost flickered across his face. A moment of clarity that brought with it pain. ‘It was my fault.’

‘No, Nonno.’ Matteo didn’t mention that bastard Johnson’s name. There was no need to hurt his grandfather further at the end of his life. But he was the man who was to blame. He was the cause of Alfonso’s sadness now—him and his stubborn refusal to sell the hotel back. A refusal he’d taken with him to the grave.

But Matteo could fix it.

He would fix it.

‘I will get it back for you,’ he said, and the words were spoken with such soft determination that it wasn’t clear if Alfonso had even heard. It didn’t matter, though.

The promise was one Matteo made to himself as much as the old man.

No matter what, no matter how, he would return the hotel to his family.

At any cost.