‘More like Daniele?’
‘Pieta was intense and thoughtful.’ At her darkening colour he added, ‘You’ve an energy about you. You’re impulsive and, I think, competitive. Daniele struck me as the same.’
She nodded slowly, her pupils moving fast as she thought. ‘Yes. Daniele’s highly competitive. He has to be first with everything and he hates losing.’
‘And you? Am I right that you’re also competitive?’
She grinned. ‘I grew up wanting to be better than my brothers in everything.’
‘Have you ever beaten them?’
‘My aim throughout my education was to smash all their exam results.’ She gave a mischievous smile. ‘Which I achieved. It was very fulfilling. I even skipped a year. I like to tell people I’m the clever one of the family.’
Not so clever when it came to negotiating and agreeing bribes, he thought but didn’t say. For the first time since they’d met they’d found relative harmony and he wasn’t ready to break it.
‘But when it comes to true competitiveness, Daniele’s worse,’ she continued. ‘He’s ferocious.’
‘Has he always been like that?’
‘As long as I’ve been alive. He grew up knowing the family wealth would pass on to Pieta—’
‘Only to Pieta?’
‘The oldest inherits the estate. It’s always been like that, for centuries. Pieta inherited when our father died.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She has rights to the income during her lifetime but the physical assets transferred directly to Pieta.’
‘Will it go to Daniele now?’
‘Everything that’s family wealth will so long as Natasha isn’t pregnant.’
‘Do you think she could be?’
‘I don’t know and none of us can bear to ask her. It would be cruel. We’ll have to wait and see.’
‘So if she is pregnant...?’
‘Then we have the first in the next generation of Pellegrinis.’ A sad smile played on her lips. ‘If it’s a boy he will inherit, if it’s a girl then Daniele will inherit.’
‘That doesn’t sound fair.’
‘Natasha will inherit Pieta’s personal wealth whether she’s pregnant or not. She will have enough to provide for a child and we will all love and cherish it whatever its gender.’
‘And what do you get from your family estate?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s not right either.’
‘Right or not, that’s how it is.’
‘Doesn’t it make you angry?’ He didn’t know why he was asking. Francesca’s personal life was none of his concern.
Her second cocktail was brought to the table and she took it with a grateful smile and immediately sucked half of it up her straw. Done, she put the glass on the table. ‘It’s not just the wealth that’s inherited, it’s the responsibility. I was glad not to have it as it meant I could do whatever I wanted with my life without having to consider anyone else and, believe me, the life I’ve chosen is very different to the one expected for me.’
‘In what way?’
She pulled a rueful face. ‘I was expected to marry young and have babies, like all the women in my family have done for generations. It isn’t supposed to matter that us weak females don’t inherit anything because we’re supposed to be provided for by our husbands.’
‘You didn’t want that?’
‘I wanted to provide for myself and have a career, like my brothers.’ The thought of being a kept woman filled Francesca with horror. Her mother had inherited money but had blithely given it to her husband to invest for her, believing herself too stupid to manage it herself.
She remembered being a small child and her mother casually asking her father for money to buy some new shoes. It had been a nothing incident, her father going straight into his wallet and handing the money over, but it had crystallised in Francesca’s mind as the years passed. What if he’d said no? What would her mother have done then? Why should her mother not manage her own money? And why should she, Francesca, not be expected to go out and make a living of her own just because she was born a girl? Why could she not be like her brothers?
‘I’ve no idea how Daniele will handle having the future of the Pellegrini family on his shoulders if it comes to it,’ she carried on, shrugging off the old memories. ‘He was so competitive with Pieta that he drove himself to make a fortune that was twice what Pieta would have inherited just to show that he could, but was able to live his life as he wanted without the responsibilities Pieta had. If he does inherit he’ll have to marry so he’ll say goodbye to his freedom too.’
Francesca’s chest tightened, all this talk of her family reminding her of her mother stumbling at Pieta’s funeral. She’d spoken to her briefly the night before, letting her know she’d arrived in the Caribbean safely. Her mother had been too used to Francesca’s stubbornness to try and talk her out of going but had made her swear she wouldn’t put herself in any unnecessary danger.
‘Forget your brothers, I’m curious about you. Do you even have a trust fund?’
‘No, but all my education was paid for and I never wanted for anything when I was growing up. That’s enough for me. I want to forge my own life.’ One where she didn’t have to ask for money to buy essentials.
‘By following in Pieta’s footsteps?’ he said with obvious scepticism.
She paused, considering. ‘There are—were—no better footsteps for me to follow in but don’t think I wanted to make myself into his female clone. I saw the good Pieta was doing with his law degree and wanted to do it too.’
‘Corporate law?’
She grimaced. ‘No. I meant how he used it for the benefit of his philanthropy. Corporate law was a means to an end for him and that’s what it is for me while I complete my traineeship.’
‘What will you do when you’re fully qualified?’
‘I’m going to specialise in human rights.’ She looked back up at him, straining to stifle the lump pressing in her chest. ‘Can we stop talking about me and my family now? Just talk about nonsense? Otherwise I’m going to embarrass both of us by crying.’
* * *
A couple of hours later, Francesca’s belly was full and her melancholy gone. The quick meal she’d intended to have before retiring to the unwelcome solitude of her suite had extended over three courses.
As time had passed, her animosity towards Felipe had melted, which she thought the handful of cocktails she’d consumed might have helped with.
A jazz band was playing on the stage, thankfully uplifting tunes, and there was a buzzing atmosphere she’d enthusiastically embraced. After the trauma of the past week it felt good to be letting her hair down. The gorgeous company helped.
Felipe was proving to be not quite the dictator she’d painted in her mind. But still arrogant, although not in the entitled way most men she’d come across in her life were. Felipe’s arrogance came with an authority earned and built over an adulthood of having orders obeyed without question.
His apology had shocked her. She’d never known a man to apologise before, was quite sure the word ‘sorry’ didn’t exist in any of the male Pellegrinis’ vocabulary. Or her own, she had to admit.
She thought the more of him for it. A man who could hold his hands up