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CHAPTER SEVEN

A WEEK INTO his and Olivia’s return to Milan, every aspect of Rocco’s plan seemed to be falling into perfect strategic place. The announcement of his fiancée as the new face of Mondelli was making waves across fashion circles, her sudden return to modeling an angle it seemed no media outlet could resist. And although some media chose to speculate on the reason behind Olivia’s disappearance from modeling, most were universally positive about the union, choosing, as Savanna had predicted, to focus on the glamorous engagement of two high-profile personalities and brands rather than speculate on a story for which they had no answers.

He glanced down at the front page of the weekly gossip magazine that typically featured royalty on the cover, but instead this week featured the kiss, as the press had dubbed it. The one he and Olivia had shared at the press conference.

He’d seen more of the vivid, easy smile on Olivia’s face the tabloid had featured in the after shot since they’d returned to Milan, his fiancée seeming to relax as soon as they’d cleared New York airspace. The staff at Villa Mondelli appeared to love her, and she seemed at peace roaming the beautiful grounds. It was only at night when they retired to the master suite that the tension ratcheted up between them. He’d taken to going to bed even later than he normally did, working in his office until he was sure Olivia was asleep. Because to do otherwise was asking for trouble.

He took the last sip of his espresso and pushed the cup away. His efforts to harness his potent attraction toward his pretend fiancée had been successful. If he didn’t see, touch or hear her, he was okay. And he intended to keep it that way. Particularly when he was now sure he’d been right. His grandfather would never have had a relationship with her. He must have been out of his head to think it possible.

The knowledge removed a barrier he instead needed to be ten times thicker.

Gabriella stuck her head in his office. “You need to leave now if you’re going to make it to your lunch.”

His mouth curved. “Even with my driving?”

“Even with your driving,” she acknowledged drily.

“On my way.”

His nemesis was seated at a prime table near the windows when Rocco entered the popular seafood restaurant, the chairman’s quick glance at his watch as he sat down indicating he was five minutes late. Rocco didn’t bother to acknowledge it. Rialto pointed at his glass. “I’ve ordered a bottle of merlot. I thought we could toast your very successful week.”

A satisfied rush blanketed him. “I thought it so.”

“Landing Olivia Fitzgerald as a face and a wife? I almost feel you’ve taken my advice to heart. Although I am surprised given your thoughts on the matter the last time we spoke.”

“I’ve reconsidered.” Rocco waited while the cameriera uncorked then served their wine, before fixing Renzo with an even look. “You wanted me to think about what is best for Mondelli. I have.”

“It’s the speed with which you have done so that worries me,” the chairman said drily. “This is not a chess match, Rocco. This is the future of the company your grandfather built. When we spoke last time about witnessing some long-term stability with you, I was asking for a true commitment, not smoke and mirrors.”

Rocco’s blood heated to a dangerous level. “You forget it was I who quadrupled the market value of Mondelli. I do have this company’s best interests at heart. Which is why I have executed a strategic merger that is pure brilliance.”

Renzo eyed him. “Olivia Fitzgerald is undeniably breathtaking, and I’m sure provides a wealth of distraction in the bedroom, but not necessarily what I intended when I suggested marriage. She is unpredictable given her recent past. A wild child.”

“It is a perfect union from every angle,” Rocco countered flatly. “A dynasty of two great brands.”

Renzo took a long, deliberate sip of his wine, set his glass down and sat back, arms folded across his chest. “You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

“The Mondelli men’s weakness when it comes to women. Pensare con quello che hai in mezzo alle gambe al posto della testa...”

Thinking with what’s between your legs and not your head... Rocco ground his back teeth together. “That...”

Renzo waved a hand at him. “Giovanni made a fool out of himself over Tatum Fitzgerald. He forgot his priorities, let his head get swelled by having her even though he was a happily married man, and the company stuttered. Your father’s career imploded over the love of a woman.” He shook his head. “Make a smart decision, Rocco, not one in which you’re thumbing your nose at all of us.”

Blood thudded through his head in a deafening rush. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on the table and met the chairman’s gaze. “I am not my father, nor my grandfather, Renzo. I am the man who took a struggling company and raised it to a higher level. You need me. Don’t forget that important fact.”

“And you need me,” Renzo countered deliberately. “You have taken Mondelli to great heights, Rocco. No one can dispute that. I’m simply giving you some advice.”

Rocco sat back in his seat. “So you have. Are we done on this subject?”

“Set a date.”

Rocco frowned. “Mi scusi?”

“If you want to convince the board you are truly a changed man, set a wedding date.”

The blood thumping against his temples converged in a pool of disbelief. “You’re joking?”

Renzo’s mouth twisted. “It is my job to ensure control is turned over to you when you are well and truly ready. I am responsible to the shareholders, and in this day and age, perception is as important as reality. They think you are a question mark, Rocco—unpredictable at best. So if Olivia Fitzgerald is the choice, marry her. Show your intentions.”

Rocco thought he must be hallucinating. “Olivia and I are far too busy to plan a wedding right now.”

“Undoubtedly.” Renzo’s gaze narrowed on him. “But I suggest you do it. The sooner you prove to the board you can run Mondelli with the measured, mature perspective of a man who’s sown his wild oats, the quicker we will be to hand over control.”

Rocco absorbed the unyielding glint in the chairman’s eyes. “You are actually telling me to speed up my wedding date to pacify shareholder perception?”

The older man’s eyes glittered back at him with something like unmediated glee. “We all sacrifice things, Rocco. I don’t love my wife. I married her because she was the perfect partner for a CEO. Power comes with sacrifice, and if you don’t realize that by now, you will learn.”

He bit back the response that rose in his throat. He didn’t have to explain to Renzo he’d known sacrifice since he was a teenager bringing up his baby sister. Since he’d been fresh out of school, deep in over his head, running a company so vast he’d lain awake at night in the early days, his mind reeling on how to corral it. How to fix it.

He picked up his wine and took a long sip. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but Renzo was right. At the end of the day what mattered was what the analysts said about him. And they thought he was a maverick.

He’d never intended on marrying for love—so why not marry Olivia? It didn’t do anything but cement the plan he’d already put into place.

His hand tightened around the glass as he set it down. Renzo was also right about Olivia. He might think he was in control, but she was a danger to him. He had thought and acted with what was between his legs and not his head. Just like Giovanni had done.

He would not repeat history. He would not be that weak.

* * *

Olivia was chatting over some designs with a gregarious Mario Masini when her fiancé deigned to make an appearance in the design studios. He had pretty much disappeared since they’d returned home from New York, thrown himself into his ridiculous fourteen-hour days and communicated with the short verbiage of a man too busy to converse when they eventually sat down at the dinner table together at the villa.

She was aware he was deliberately putting space between them after their close encounters in New York, and she got it. She was glad for it. So why did she feel barefoot and rejected? Because for one second there, a voice in her head jibed, she’d thought he actually cared. Some delusional part of her brain had conjured that up. When what she really was was an asset to be managed. That was all.

Mario moved to embrace Rocco, his lined old face softening. Her fiancé was drool worthy again today in a silver gray suit and blue tie that never seemed to wrinkle. Elegant and earthy all at the same time, he was a man with so much sex appeal he was drowning in it.

“Ciao,” she murmured as casually as she could, waving a hand to the designs spread out on the table. “Mario and I were just chatting over fabrics. Is it that time already?”

His mouth curved. “Thirty minutes past. It isn’t a problem. We’re eating in tonight. Take your time.”

She almost wished they were staying at Villa Mondelli, where she could put a literal and figurative distance between them at the formal dining room table. Instead, they were staying at the apartment so she could make her 7:00 a.m. photo shoot with Alessandra tomorrow without getting up obscenely early.

Mario pointed at the designs on the table. “She is brilliant, this woman of yours. It’s as if she brings the light inside with her.”

Rocco nodded. “That’s a very apt description.”

Mario smiled broadly. “We are going to make her a star of the design world.”

Olivia’s heart swelled. Instead of accepting her warily into the fold, Mario had seemed incredibly enthusiastic over her designs, as if he, too, welcomed the infusion of creativity as Giovanni had.

She couldn’t help the smile that stretched her lips. It was happening. Her dream was actually happening.

Rocco flicked a look at her. “Do what you need to do. I’ll answer some emails.”

But he didn’t. She tried to concentrate on her conversation with Mario, but with Rocco roaming the room, pulling her pieces off the rack, flicking sketches apart and staring at them with that trademark intensity of his, she was hopelessly distracted. A few minutes later, Mario made an amused comment about her attention span and “young lovers” and announced they were done for the day.

Rocco waited until the older man had left the studio before his gaze slid over her face. “Either your acting skills have kicked in, or my presence is making you nervous.”

She lifted her chin. “You’re looking at my designs properly for the first time. My future rests in your hands... Wouldn’t you expect me to be heart in mouth?”

His mouth twisted. “I thought that was just the general effect I had on you, bella.”

She rested her hands on her hips. “I’m not the one working until 1:00 a.m. to avoid being in a bedroom together. Are your control-freak tendencies on red alert?”

His ebony gaze darkened. “As a matter of fact, they are. Your little stunt in New York wasn’t exactly a cure for a man practicing abstinence. Nor is the provocative way you sleep splayed across my bed.” He shrugged an elegant shoulder. “I keep thinking maybe it’s just easier to get it over with. How simple it would be to slide a hand under the small of your back, tempt you with what I know you’ve been dying to have, then take you long and hard until all you’d be doing is begging me to come to bed. Then maybe we could snuff this out.”

Her insides dissolved into a river of fire, his taunt sending the intimate flesh at the heart of her into an excited, heated pull. She could not believe he’d just said that.

A hard glitter entered his eyes. “But of course, that will never happen.”

She sank her teeth into her bottom lip as her brain crashed rapidly back to earth. Turning, she stacked the designs on the table into neat piles, anger pulsing through her. “Oh, I get it, Rocco. You won’t put a hand on me because you think I was your grandfather’s lover, that I am soiled goods. But you want to, so you use your shock value to send me running.” She straightened the last pile, leaned back against the table and looked up at him. “Have I got it right?”

The in-your-face arrogance faded from his face. “I owe you an apology.”

That caught her off guard. “For what?”

“For assuming things that were not true. I was angry and I made accusations I shouldn’t have about your and Giovanni’s relationship. But the facts were staring me in the face.”

Antagonism replaced her confusion. “What facts? The fact he’d loaned me an apartment?”

“Bought it for you. The fact that he was writing you checks for large sums of money. That he never mentioned you at all. It was not normal behavior for Giovanni. Even your neighbors thought you were lovers.”

“Because he would come visit me at night to work?” She sank her hands deeper into her hips and glared at him. “You assumed a great deal of things, Rocco, and you were dead wrong on all of them.”

He inclined his head. “I was angry. Grieving. To accept that the Giovanni I knew would have cheated on Rosa, that he could be anything but the intensely loyal man I knew him to be, was exceedingly difficult.”

Undoubtedly. Her mouth flattened. “It still didn’t give you the right to treat me like you did.”

His face tightened. “I am apologizing.”

She’d bet he rarely, if ever, did it. It probably made him want to choke. But the relief flaring through her was undeniable. That finally he believed her. It had been like a palpable force between them, stirring mistrust on every level.

She eyed the conflicting emotions shimmering in his eyes. He needed to understand.

She crossed her arms over her chest and held his gaze. “Giovanni told me Rosa was his first love. That he couldn’t imagine ever being with anyone else. Then he met my mother and he was blindsided. She did one of his breakthrough shows in New York. He was on a high from his success, higher than he’d ever been, and my mother was the glittering jewel he couldn’t resist.”

“He should have,” Rocco growled.

“He knew that. He said being with her was like some inescapable force he couldn’t resist. And he wondered if he’d married too early.”

“Rosa was pregnant with my father at eighteen. They had no choice but to marry.”

She nodded. “It was a very different kind of love he had with Rosa—the inviolate pureness of it. What he felt for my mother was passionate, intense. And he was torn.”

“Because he was married,” he ground out, eyes flashing. “Because my grandmother lived for him.”

Her heart constricted. “Giovanni seemed like some mystical force, but he was human, just like we all are. I get how you feel, I do. I watched my father fall apart because his wife was in love with someone else. I lived through it. I hated my mother for my entire teenage years for doing that to us. I still hate her a bit for it. And I wanted to hate Giovanni, too... But when he explained how it was between them, I finally got it. It was never about them deliberately trying to hurt other people. It was about feelings beyond their control.”

His lip curled. “A lovely reiteration of a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story, Liv. Believe me, I do get it—the idea of temptation, how that temptation, that depth of love, can destroy everything around you. It is my father’s life. It’s why I go to such lengths to never let it rule me. It’s a weak man’s poison.”

She frowned. “Giovanni was not weak.”

“I don’t know what he was anymore.” The admission was torn from him in a low, gravelly tone. “But I know he couldn’t have been your lover. That was me projecting my anger onto you.”

She expelled a long breath.

“Who ended it, then?” he asked abruptly. “How did he choose?”

“Rosa. She found out about the affair, told Giovanni he had to choose and, when he did, forbade him ever to see my mother again.”

“It was never in his head to go back to your mother once Rosa died?”

A poignant smile twisted her mouth. “I asked him that. He said once you travel through some doors, you can never go back.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he walked over to the racks where her designs hung and pulled a couple out. “Mario is right. You are insanely talented.”

For a moment she actually didn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” she said finally.

He came back to lean against the table beside her. “There is a change we have to make in the deal.”

Her heart stuttered. Being so close to her dream and having it be plucked away from her would kill her.

“I met with the chairman of the board today. There is a general sentiment among the board and shareholders that I am a wild card in the wake of Giovanni’s death. My tendency to want to do things my way ruffles feathers. My bachelor persona fails to keep those invested in the company tucked securely in their beds at night with sweet dreams of dollar figures running through their heads. They want to see me stable. Married.”

A flicker of unease slanted through her. This made the reasons for their engagement clear. Given the Columbia Four’s rather wild reputation, she could understand why the board might be uneasy with such a young, strong-minded CEO.

“We just announced our engagement,” she said haltingly. “How much more could they want?”

A cynical smile twisted his lips. “They want a date. A marriage.”

Her knees went weak. “As in us walking down the aisle?”

“Exactly like that, cara.” She didn’t like the premeditated look that stretched his olive-skinned face as he turned the full force of his will on her. “Nothing changes, except we tie the knot in six weeks. Our one-year agreement is still in place and Mondelli brings your designs to market just as we said.”

“Six weeks?” The words came out as a high-pitched squeak.

He shrugged. “You told me yourself you never planned to get married. A quick, uncontested divorce with all the terms outlined will be painless.”

Painless? Her fingers caught the side of the table in a death grip. So this was why he’d been softening her up. Complimenting her designs...

She shook her head. “Oh, no. You are not bullying me into this, Rocco. I am not walking down the aisle with you, lying to the world in six weeks. It’s too much.”

“Ah, but you are, sweet Liv.” The smile that curved his lips was far from reassuring. “It’s inconvenient, I agree. The last thing either of us needs to be doing right now is planning a wedding. But it is what it is. And we both continue to get what we want.”

The media circus of last week’s press conference flashed through her head. The horrible, paralyzing, naked feeling of being in the spotlight again. Her stomach swirled with nausea at the thought of it—ten times worse.

“You are out of your mind,” she breathed. “Tell the board I won’t hurry my wedding for them. Tell them whatever you like. But this is not happening.”

This time he wasn’t getting his way.