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CHAPTER THREE

MARRY ME...

Marry Dante...

Ali’s mind went into a loop over that one phrase, like one of those gramophone records her mama had had.

Marry Dante, marry Dante...

Dante, who thought she was selfish and spoiled.

Dante, with whom she reverted back to that lonely girl come to live with a distant father, distracted brother and a resented changeling, after her mama’s sudden death.

With Dante she would always be her worst self.

Panic skittled over her skin like a line of fire ants crawling up her legs. She needed to marry Dante like she needed a hole in her head. It would be like all the bad decisions she’d ever made steamrolled into one giant boulder that would chase her for the rest of her life.

A hysterical sound released from her mouth.

“Alisha?”

She brought her gaze to his, stood up from the booth, picked up her clutch and turned. “You’ve gone mad.”

“Alisha, wait.”

Nope.

She didn’t want to hear more. If she did, he would rope her into it.

As a master strategist, he wouldn’t have sought her out across the world, wouldn’t have approached her if he hadn’t already figured out a way to make her agree. And she needed to flee before that happened. Before their lives were even more tangled. Before she betrayed herself in the worst way possible.

Dear God, when it came to him, all she had left was her pride.

“Alisha, stop!” His arm shot out just as Ali got ready to sprint across the restaurant if necessary.

Long fingers roped around her wrist and because of her desperate forward momentum, her foot jerked to the side. Pain shot up through her ankle and she fell back against him.

The breath punched out of her as he anchored her by throwing his arm around her midriff.

Unstoppable force meets immovable object...

“What happens when they crash, Alisha? Who gets destroyed?”

The world stopped tilting at that silky whisper as she realized she’d spoken out loud. And yet, the explosion his touch evoked continued to rock through her body.

The scent of him was all over her skin, filling each pore, drowning her in masculine heat. His legs were thrown wide, the tensile power of his thighs just grazing the back of hers, his chest pushed up tight against her back. Her chest expanded as she tried to stop the panic. On the exhale, the underside of her breasts fell against his steely arm. A soft hiss of warm air bathed her neck, making it a thousand times worse. Or was that pleasure skittering across her skin?

An onslaught of sensations poured through her, her skin prickling tight, and yet, a strange lethargy crawled through her limbs. She wanted to lean into him completely, until her bottom was resting against his hips. She wanted to feel him from chest to toe against her back, she wanted to rub herself against that hard body until he was as mindlessly aroused as her. Until that iron will of his snapped like a thinly stretched rubber band.

As if he could guess the direction of her thoughts, his fingers tightened around her hip, digging into her slightly to keep her still; to keep her from leaning back and learning his body’s reaction to her.

Because, really, in what universe did she imagine Dante would want her back with this same madness?

She groaned—a feral, desperate sound. Why was it that everything she did came back to taunt her a thousand times worse?

“Because you don’t think before you do,” came the voice at her ear. Ah...perfect! Of course, she’d said that out loud too. “You’re impulsive, brash and if I hadn’t caught you, you would have fallen flat on your face.”

“Kissing the floor sounds like a better alternative,” she said, her words throaty and whispery.

“Will you sit down and listen if I let you go?”

As if operating on an instinct that defied rationality, her fingers clenched over his wrist.

She opened her eyes and swallowed hard. Since he’d undone his cuffs earlier, her palm rested against a hair-roughened wrist. She rubbed the skin—the rough texture, the plump veins on the back of his hand—the startlingly sensual contrast between her and him inviting her along further and further.

It was the sharp inhale followed by another curse that pulled her out of the fog.

Her chin flopped down to her chest. “No. I don’t want to hear anything you say. I don’t want to be near...you in this moment, much less in the future.”

The vulnerability she fought every waking minute, the longing for a deeper connection in her past, with anyone related to her past, pervaded her in his presence.

This was what would happen if she agreed: every look, every touch would wind her up; lines between want and hate, reality and fantasy would blur...until she attacked him—claws and all—just to keep herself tethered, to keep herself together. Or until she gave in to this inexplicable yearning she had felt for him for so long.

The stiffness of her posture drained away and she leaned back against his chest. She let herself be weak and vulnerable for five seconds.

Both of his arms wound around her. He held her gently, tenderly and that...that was more than Ali could bear. That uncharacteristic moment between them, the mere thought that he could pity her uncontrollable attraction to him, snapped her out of it.

She wriggled in his embrace and he instantly let her go.

Pushing her hair back, she fought for composure. The glass of cold water down her throat was a much needed burst of reality. When he sat down, when she had her wits together again, she looked back at him. “Tell me why.”

“Vikram’s been declared legally dead.”

Gray gaze drinking her in, he paused. Ali looked away.

That he knew what her brother meant to her, that he had seen firsthand that night her grief, her regrets, it was something she couldn’t erase. This nebulous connection between her and Dante—despite the knotted history of it—was the only thing she had of her past. And however far she ran, it seemed she would never be free of it. “And?”

“Your uncle will contest for his voting shares and might win. I’d like to crush his little rebellion with as few resources and as little time as possible. I have a huge merger coming up with a Japanese manufacturing company that I need all my energies focused on. Thousands of jobs and thousands more livelihoods depend on that merger. He’s well-known for his ability to create PR damage.”

So that was what he’d been counting on—that Ali’s loathing of her uncle was greater than her combined loathing of her papa and Dante.

Her uncle had driven a wedge between her parents, though Ali knew it had been her father that had finally broken them apart.

Her father’s ambition. Her father’s unending hunger for success.

Just like the breathtakingly stunning man sitting across from her.

“I never realized what a true legacy you are of papa. Not Vicky, but you.”

“Vicky always blazed his own path.”

She nodded, the depth of her grief for her brother a hole in her chest. At least that was one thing she couldn’t blame Dante for. Her brother had been a technical genius with no interest in his papa’s company.

“If I marry you, I can transfer my shares to you and the eventual fate of Vicky’s shares won’t really matter. You can continue to be the master of Matta Steel.” Even she couldn’t dispute the trailblazing new heights that Dante had taken the company to since her father’s death.

“Si. Your vow not to touch a penny of your father’s fortune will not be broken since the voting shares are yours through your mother. Monetarily, they don’t have much value, since they can’t be sold off, or transferred to anyone outside marriage. So this is a good deal for you.”

He had a well-rehearsed answer for every contentious point she could raise. “What do I get in return?”

“Money to throw into the drain that is the Lonely Hearts Foundation.”

She refused to bite into that judgmental tone. “As much as I want?”

“A pre-agreed upon amount, si.”

“I want a check—from your own personal fortune,” she added, determined to wring every drop of blood from him, “for that amount. If I agree.”

There was a glint in his eye and a slick smile around his mouth, arrogant confidence dripping from every pore. “Bene.” A regal nod to her request. “From my personal fortune, si?”

And whatever she demanded would be a drop in the ocean for him.

“We can’t annul or end the marriage for three years or they will revert back to you. We’ll both sign a prenup. At the end of the three years, a substantial amount of money will be settled on you.”

“I don’t want a settlement, I don’t want a penny from you. And I won’t—”

“Don’t be foolish, Alisha. Throwing away your inheritance when you were eighteen was one thing but—”

“—under any circumstances sign a prenup,” she delivered that with all the satisfaction of a well-placed right hook.

Shock etched onto those arrogantly handsome features.

It wasn’t wise tweaking the tail of a tiger, especially when he was so royally wound up. But if she expected an outburst, a small glimpse of his infamous Sicilian temper that cowed all his employees, Ali was disappointed. Only a small tic in that granite jaw even betrayed how...thrown he was by her coup de grâce. Since he had dropped the whole thing on her with the sensitivity of a bulldozer, she’d pulled that out pretty fast based on that instinct she’d honed for years to annoy the heck out of him.

But now she realized how much she needed that illusion of control over...this. The only way she could keep the balance in this relationship of theirs was not to give him everything he wanted.

“Why not sign the prenup? All it does is give you money I know you won’t touch.”

She smiled, thoroughly enjoying herself. “Is that praise I hear for my principles?”

“If you think mucking around through life, running from your own shadow is principled, all power to you. I call it a juvenile need for petty revenge you’ve yet to outgrow. And I keep waiting for you to wake up from this...protracted dream of yours, for the thud of reality to hit you.

“I know spoiled princesses like you like the back of my hand. There will be a day when you’ll crawl back to the luxury of your old life with your tail tucked between your legs. Because, really, what have you achieved in the last six years, except to sell off your mama’s jewelry piece by priceless piece?

“Sign the prenup. When that day comes, you’ll be thankful to me for giving you that option to fall back on.”

Wow, he wasn’t pulling his punches. Somehow, Ali kept her smile from sliding off her face.

His matter-of-fact assessment of her stung more than it should. She’d seen that same lack of respect, that same exaggerated patience in her father’s eyes on the eve of her eighteenth birthday.

As if dressing like a skank and making out with a former junkie rock star in front of their esteemed guests was all he had expected of Ali. And before she could change his impression of her, before she could apologize for her share of mistakes, he’d been lost to her.

But, if it was the last thing she did, she resolved to change Dante’s opinion of her.

Not because she wanted his approval—okay, she did, in some throwback to her angsty, unwise, earlier self—but because she wanted to prove him wrong. She needed to bring that arrogance down more than a peg or two. Really, she was doing a public service on behalf of all the women of the planet.

She needed to find some kind of closure for all the painful history between them. She longed for the day when she could look him in the eye and feel nothing.

No attraction. No wistful ache. No emotional connection whatsoever.

“No. No prenup. Let’s not forget I’m doing you a favor. I know you’re used to people bending over backward for you but I—”

Dark heat flared in his gray eyes. “Do you really want to threaten me about what I can or can’t do with you, Alisha?”

Ali jerked back, the temperature cocoon soaring from arctic cold to desert hot within seconds. Red-hot images of herself doing his bidding, forbidden images of their limbs tangling...the heat between them was a near tangible thing in the air.

Did that mean he felt it too?

Walk away now, Ali. Walk away before you’re far too tempted to resist.

But the thought of being able to save the charity that meant so much to her mother, the thought of returning to London, the thoughts of being grounded for a while, the thought of proving to Dante that she wasn’t a car crash in the making won out. “I want your word that this agreement is only on paper. That you won’t use it to manage me, to manage my life in any way.”

* * *

His fingers roped over her wrists like a gnarly vine. That accent slipped in through his soft words. “Do not think to play those silly games with me that you did with your father, Alisha. I will not let you drag my name through mud like you did his. No splashing yourself all over the media with some ex-junkie. No sneaking out behind my back with another man. At least not when you’re in London.”

“If you’re not careful with your threats, you’re going to sound like a real fiancé, Dante.” Whatever his conditions, she knew she’d have no problem keeping them. Like she’d already told him, her days of doing things to wind him up were over.

But she wouldn’t let Dante have all the power in this relationship. “Let me get this straight. If I give up men for three years, will you do the same? Will you be celibate for three years?”

“I won’t be the reason my name or this agreement of ours gets dragged through the mud.”

“That’s not really answering the question.”

“My name, my reputation...they mean everything to me, Alisha. I built them brick by brick from nothing. Away from the shadow of my father’s crime.

“I created a new life from the ground up. I built my fortune, I made my reputation anew after everything I had was destroyed in a matter of days.” Ali shivered at the dark intensity of his words, the specter of his past almost a live thing between them. With his ruthless ambition coating every word, it was easy to forget what had brought Dante to her father at all. What had built him up to be this man she saw now.

“You put one toe out of line during any of this and your precious charity won’t get a penny.”