“How dare you threaten me? Who the hell are you?”
Anna dug into her pocket, took out a small leather case and extracted a business card. Nonchalantly she plucked a pen from his desk, scribbled the name of her hotel on the back, then flipped the card at him. He caught it, read the black engraving and looked at her through narrowed eyes.
“Anna Orsini,” he said softly. “Well, well, well.”
“That’s me,” Anna said cheerfully. “Anna Orsini. Cesare’s daughter.” Her voice became cold and flat. “In other words, a full-blooded member of the Orsini famiglia. I urge you to keep that in mind.”
It seemed the right line, the closing line, especially when your enemy looked as if he might spring across the desk and throttle you …
Especially when your own heart was banging so hard you were afraid it might leap from your chest.
Anna pivoted on her heel, picked up her briefcase and walked out.
DRACO watched Anna Orsini march to the door.
Head up, shoulders back, spine straight, her long-legged stride on those amazing stilettos clearly sending a to-hell-with-you message.
Almost.
The shoes changed her walk, ever so slightly. Balancing on them made her hips sway, changing what she surely meant to be a brisk march into something feminine and damned near feline.
Golden-haired seductress. Cold-blooded consigliere. Which was the real Anna Orsini?
For a dangerous couple of seconds Draco came close to demanding the answer.
He would go after her, swing her toward him, look down into those blue eyes and say, Hell, woman, how dare you threaten me! Are you fool enough to think I can be brought to heel by you and your hoodlum father?
Or he’d say nothing at all.
He’d pull her into his arms, lower his head to hers and kiss her hard and deep until she forgot about being her father’s mouthpiece and became the woman he’d known on the plane, the one who’d come within a heartbeat of giving herself up to him.
Instead, he stood his ground. He didn’t even breathe until she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle.
He had to move carefully. No rash decisions. No letting the emotions within him overtake logic.
Draco went to his desk and sat in the massive chair behind it.
No question, he had a problem. Anna’s threat had teeth.
Teeth?
Hell, it had fangs, fangs that could sink into his throat and destroy him. There were some businesses that sought publicity, that thrived on it.
Not Valenti Investments.
Even being mentioned in the same breath as a crook like Cesare Orsini could mean the end of everything he had worked for. Not just money, although the amount he might lose, for himself and for his clients, was staggering.
But there was more at stake than money. If Anna forced a public confrontation, Draco would lose that which mattered most to him.
The honor of his name. The respect it once again carried.
A muscle jumped in his cheek.
To think he’d almost had sex with her. With Cesare Orsini’s consigliere.
Cristo, he wanted to laugh!
Not that this was a laughing matter, Draco thought grimly as he took the gangster’s letters from his briefcase and stacked them on the desk in front of him. Nothing about the situation was even remotely amusing.
If only he’d known who she was last night, he’d never have let things go so far.
Actually, the more he thought about it, the less he understood why he had become involved with her at all.
Her name could be Jane Doe, and he wouldn’t want her.
She wasn’t his type. She was too tall, too blonde, too slender. His tastes ran to petite women. Brunettes, with voluptuous bodies.
And that attitude of hers, that feminist chip she carried on her shoulder …
What man in his right mind would be attracted to a woman who argued over everything?
Calmer now, he could see that it had been the situation, not the woman, that had turned him on. The hushed darkness. The isolation that came of being five miles above the earth. The added rush of knowing you were in a public setting.
Draco sat back in his chair.
Given all that, what man would not want to take things to their natural conclusion when he awoke with a woman draped over him like a blanket?
In a way, he owed Anna Orsini his thanks. Men thought with parts of their anatomy that had nothing to do with their brains. She had saved them both from making an embarrassing mistake.
Imagine if he’d actually had sex with the Orsini consigliere …
Draco did laugh this time.
There was a solution to the problem. There always was. And he would find it—something he could do to get the Orsinis, father and daughter, out of his life.
He was, above all else, a logical man. A pragmatist. And pragmatism, not emotion, would save the day. Control over your emotions was everything.
His father and those before him had never understood that.
They drank to excess. Gambled with money they didn’t have. They went from woman to woman, losing themselves in the kind of passion and intensity that could only lead to trouble.
The Valenti family history was a minefield of greed, infidelity, abandonment and divorce.
Absolutely, a man had to learn to curb his emotions. And Draco had learned early how to curb his.
His boyhood had been filled with scenes that still made him grimace. His mother had taken a string of lovers who helped themselves to what little remained of the family’s money. Still, she’d apparently found her life boring and abandoned her husband and Draco when he was a toddler.
His father might as well have done the same. He was too busy whoring and gambling to pay attention to his son. Draco’s early memories were of big, silent rooms, most of them stripped of what had once been elegant furnishings. The few servants who remained, overworked and underpaid, ignored him.
He had been a solitary and lonely child; it had never occurred to him other children might have had different existences from his.
One winter, his father stayed sober long enough to figure out that the last of what he’d still referred to as his staff had abandoned ship, leaving nine-year-old Draco to fend for himself.
The prince had given his young son orders to bathe and dress in his best clothes. Then he’d taken him to a school run by nuns.
The Mother Superior, who was also the principal, had eyed Draco and wrinkled her nose, as if he gave off a bad smell. She’d tested him in math. In science. In French and English.
Draco had known the answers to all her questions. He was a bright boy. An omnivorous reader. From age five he’d sought solace by immersing himself in the few remaining volumes in the once-proud Valenti library.
But he’d been struck speechless.
The nun’s voice had been sharp; he’d been able to see his own reflection in her eyeglasses, and that was somehow disorienting. Her coif had made her round face with its pointed nose look like an owl’s.
She had been, in his eyes, an alien creature, and he’d been terrified.