His breath caught as he noticed a woman across the room. She was tall—probably almost five-nine, and had hair the color of ebony. Her skin was pale, like moonlight on the Mediterranean. Her eyes…well, it was too far for him to be certain, but they seemed deep and limitless as he gazed at her across the room.
She wore a subtly sexy dress, in the same sky-blue color as his racing uniform. Her hair was caught up and a few curls hung down, framing her face.
Marco slid around the booth to stand up. He was used to letting women come to him, but he needed to meet this woman. Had to find out who she was and claim her as his own.
As he stood up and took two steps toward her, she turned away, disappearing into the crowd. His heart raced as he started after her. But a hand on his arm stopped him.
He turned to see his older brother, Dominic. They were of a height, and both had the same classic Roman features—at least, according to Capital, an Italian business magazine. Something that Antonio, their middle brother, liked to tease them about.
“Not now,” Marco said, intent on finding the mystery woman.
“Yes, now. It’s urgent. Antonio has just arrived and we have to talk.” Dominic was very much the leader of their fraternity. Not just because he was the head of the company, but also because he was the engineer of this new wave of prosperity for Moretti Motors.
“Can’t it wait? I just won the first race of the season, Dom. I think I’m entitled to one night’s celebration.”
“You can celebrate later. This won’t take long.”
Marco glanced back to where the woman had been, but there was no trace of her. She was gone. Maybe he’d imagined her.
“What’s up, and where is Antonio?”
“On his way. Let’s go to the VIP section to talk. I don’t trust this crowd.”
Marco wasn’t surprised. Dom took no chances when it came to Moretti Motors. He’d been the one to realize that the curse put on their grandfather, Lorenzo, when he was a young man was responsible for their parents losing their wealth. Marco didn’t put much stock in curses made by old Italian witches, but his father believed the curse was responsible for their family’s change in fortune.
When they were teenagers, he and his brothers had taken a blood oath never to fall in love. They vowed to restore the glory and power of the Moretti name.
Marco and Dom made their way through the crowd to the velvet-rope section of the room. Marco was stopped many times by well-wishers congratulating him on his victory, but he kept looking for that dark-haired woman. He didn’t find her. They reached the VIP section and found a quiet area toward the back of the room. It was walled in on three sides and had a curtain for privacy.
Antonio was waiting there for them. “Took you long enough.”
“Marco is the champion. Everyone wants a piece of him tonight,” Dom said.
“What is the problem?” Marco asked, not interested in having one of their brotherly discussions that led nowhere.
“The problem is the Vallerio family is adamant that we can’t use their name on the new production car.”
The Vallerio was Moretti Motors’ signature car and had been out of production since the sixties. Bringing the model back was Dominic’s plan to firmly reestablish their dominance in the marketplace.
“How can I help?” Marco asked. “Keke or I can take the stock car to Le Mans and win the Twenty-Four Hours with it.”
“Impossible. Their lawyer sent a cease and desist letter to us.”
“We need to get to the Vallerio family and convince them to let us use the name,” Dominic said.
“What do we know about them?” Marco asked, his interest in the dark-haired woman momentarily abated. He knew how important it was that Moretti Motors go ahead with their plans.
“That Pierre Henri Vallerio hated Nonno and is probably jumping for joy in the afterworld at the thought that his descendants have something we need,” Antonio said.
“So a family feud…”
“Of a sort. I think they’d say no just to prove they can,” Dom said.
“Well, then, I will have to offer them something they can’t refuse,” Antonio said.
“Like what?” Marco asked. His middle brother was used to winning. Hell, they all were.
“I’ll figure it out,” Antonio said. “Leave this one to me.”
“We can’t let this derail us,” Dom said.
“We won’t,” Antonio said.
And Marco knew it wouldn’t be a problem for long. The Vallerio’s lawyer would be surprised when he had to deal with Antonio.
Virginia Festa had had a moment’s panic when Marco left his seat and started walking toward her. She knew enough about him to realize that he liked his women interested, but not obvious. So she turned away hoping…oh, hell, she had turned away due to panic.
Melbourne, Australia, was steamy in March—something that she had anticipated before she’d left her home on Long Island. In fact, she’d planned every detail of this trip with excruciating precision, knowing that timing was everything. But she hadn’t anticipated the human element. A mistake she was sure her grandmother had made, as well, when she’d placed the curse on the Moretti men.
She suspected that her grandmother—who had only a rudimentary knowledge of the ancient strega witchcraft—hadn’t realized that when she’d cursed her lover, Lorenzo Moretti, and his family she was also cursing the Festa women. Virginia had spent a lifetime studying the curse her grandmother had used, trying to unravel the words so she could break it. There was no way to just take the curse back, since her grandmother had been the one who’d spoken the words and she was now deceased.
It totally ticked her off that she had panicked after coming this far. She was putting into action the plan she’d been thinking about since she was sixteen, since the moment she’d discovered the curse her grandmother had placed on the Moretti men and, by accident, the Festa women.
She wiped her damp hands on her classic Chanel gown. She was going to have to try to find Marco again—find him and charm him without giving away her plan. The key was to be vague. She had spent hours studying books on the strega spell her grandmother had used to curse the Morettis and looking for a way to break it. She’d determined through her research that to put the plan in action, she had to be anonymous.
She had only her grandmother’s memory of the words she’d spoken—words that Cassia had written in her journal and that Virginia had studied. Her grandmother had demanded retribution for her own broken heart, and in doing so, she’d doomed the Festa women to always have broken hearts.
There could be no joining of Festa and Moretti hearts. They had to stay forever apart. But their blood…As she’d studied curses, Virginia found a loophole. Separately, both families were doomed forever. But a child of Festa and Moretti blood could break the curse. A child given to her freely from a Moretti would repay the broken heart her grandmother had received from Lorenzo Moretti two generations ago and lift the curse on the Morettis and the Festas.
Now that the moment was here, she was really nervous. It was one thing to sit in her condo and make plans to seduce a man. It was something else entirely to actually fly around the world and put the plan into action.
She stepped out of the crowded room and onto the terrace that overlooked downtown Melbourne. Until now, the places she’d seen had been only the small town in Italy where her grandmother had grown up and her own home on Long Island.
Tonight,