‘Because you’re a sensible, mature woman,’ he said. ‘And I believe you capable of seeing that business is separate to the personal.’
‘There is no business here!’ she roared. ‘We just had sex! Not even an hour ago! You took my virginity and it was...just a way to soften me up towards you, so that I’d agree to anything you wanted.’
He swore in Spanish and shook his head. His face was deathly serious, his face harsh with intent. When he spoke, the words were slow and grated from him, indignation heavy in each accented syllable. ‘If you think I would ever stoop to something so low, then you have no idea who you’re dealing with.’
‘No, clearly I don’t,’ she agreed scathingly. ‘Now, please go.’
‘You do not want me to leave without those contracts,’ he said, the words softly menacing.
It took a moment for the penny to drop, to make sense of the words he’d just issued. ‘Are you threatening me?’
Something like sympathy crossed his face. ‘No. I am threatening your brother.’
Now Amelia was frozen still, her breath coming in fits and spurts, her eyes holding his as she tried to make sense of what he meant.
‘Carlo foolishly picked up our families’ rivalry some years ago.’ Antonio spoke calmly, emotions carefully blanked from his voice. ‘In truth, I’m surprised he never spoke to you of it.’
‘He knew I had no interest in that side of things.’ She wrapped her arms around her chest.
Antonio’s expression tightened. ‘He wanted to ruin my father once and for all, to destroy my family’s legacy as the final step in this feud. By the time I took over the company it was a shambles; my father was destroyed, his life’s work ruined.’ His eyes glinted with the harsh recollection, and there was something else there too. A grief that threatened to shake her sympathetic heart to the core. ‘It has taken me a long time to rebuild Herrera Incorporated, but I have done it, querida, and then some.’
And then some.
The words sat between them and a frisson of tension ran down her spine because there was a threat in that word, surely. A threat and a promise.
‘What does that mean?’
He seemed to be waging a war within himself, as though there was a part of him that wanted to spit the salient facts at her feet and a part of him that wanted to protect what they’d just shared. The former won, apparently.
‘I have invested wisely these last few years, steadily amassing shares in diSalvo business interests so that I now find I own more than half of your brother’s various companies.’
She sucked in a breath. Surely it was a lie, an exaggeration?
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said after a beat had passed, her mind working fast to keep up. ‘Carlo would never have allowed that to happen.’
‘It is easy to acquire anything if you are prepared to bide your time.’
Her stomach twisted into dozens of knots. ‘To what end, though?’ The depth of his hatred made no sense to Amelia. ‘Surely you don’t want diSalvo investments?’
‘Want them? No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I want to destroy them. I want to take your brother’s legacy and crush it into the ground, as he did my father’s. Only I will destroy him beyond any hope of redemption. I will only rest when he is destitute and starving, so that the memory of having a wallet full of money is all he has to warm him in his old age.’
She stared at this passionate man who had only a short time earlier taught her body what it was capable of feeling, the pleasures he’d lavished her with! And now she saw the beast of hatred that moved within him and shivered, for there was such coldness there, such determination, that she didn’t doubt him capable of carrying out what he’d threatened.
‘You honestly think that’s going to fix what happened to your father?’
He stayed quiet for a moment and then shrugged his broad, powerful shoulders. Her traitorous body gave a little jerk of awareness and she wanted to slap herself for feeling anything for this man except disgust. ‘Carlo played with fire. I am simply making him feel the heat of those flames.’
She gaped. ‘That’s preposterous!’
But he was, apparently, beyond arguing. He spoke with a calm insistence. ‘There are two options here, querida. Sell me your shares in Prim’Aqua and it is over. Done. I will release the grip I have on his empire and he will be safe. Or, if you keep your shares and deny me ownership of a company that is rightfully mine, I will destroy the rest of your family’s businesses. I have the power to tank them, and I will do it. And, what’s more, I will damned well enjoy it.’
Her heart was thumping. ‘You’ll destroy a huge proportion of your wealth if you do that.’
‘I have more than enough money,’ he said carelessly.
‘You’re unbelievable.’
‘Believe it.’ His eyes locked onto hers and she shivered with the force of his power. ‘And make a decision.’
‘A decision? My decision is for you to get out of my house!’ She wrenched the door open. ‘Or I’ll call the police!’
He stared at her for several moments, towering over her, and his breathing matched her own, then he shook his head. ‘I do not want to fight with you.’
‘I don’t want to fight with you either,’ she said and she shoved at his chest. ‘Get out of my house! Right now!’
She didn’t think he was going to go. And she hated that there was a very small part of her that didn’t want him to go, that wanted him to stay and fight and plead with her. To apologise for what he’d done, or tried to do. To take it all back and say he didn’t hate her family, that he wasn’t actively working to bring down her brother and father’s commercial interests.
But that was a very, very small part. Most of Amelia diSalvo hated Antonio Ferrara with every single bone in her body in that moment and couldn’t wait to see the back of him.
‘This isn’t over,’ he said, but it was soft, almost apologetic, and then he stalked out of the door and, she hoped, out of her life.
* * *
Antonio wasn’t surprised to receive a call from Carlo diSalvo the next day, but he was surprised at the effect the call had on him.
He could not speak to Carlo without thinking of Amelia, and the way her body had responded to his. He couldn’t close his eyes without seeing her tiny cottage and the fairy lights she’d decorated almost every surface with—and there was something so her about that design choice.
‘You’re a bastard,’ Carlo snapped down the phone line. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?’
Antonio stared at the view of London he had from his penthouse, Mayfair sprawling with all its Georgian beauty before him, opening up to a verdant Hyde Park. ‘I didn’t much care,’ Antonio said, not completely honest. Because he did care about something.
Amelia.
It was ridiculous, but he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head since leaving Bumblebee Cottage the night before. Nor could he shake the feeling that, for the first time in his life, he might not have handled things in the best possible way. He hadn’t achieved his aim, and he’d made things monumentally more difficult by sleeping with the enemy.
‘So what’s your plan?’ Carlo demanded, switching to his native Italian.
Antonio followed him effortlessly. ‘To destroy you. No, to do more than destroy you. I will eviscerate you.