“The boy is retarded,” she’d said. Her fingers had clamped hard on Draco’s shoulder. “Leave him with us, Prince Valenti. We will, if nothing else, teach him to fear his God.”
That was the theology he’d received at the hands of the sisters.
The other boys had taught him more earthly things to fear.
Beatings, on what was supposed to be the playground. Beatings at night, in the sour-smelling dormitory rooms. Humiliation after humiliation.
It had been the equivalent of tossing a puppy into a cage of hungry wolves.
Draco had been skinny and pale. His clothes were threadbare, but their style had marked him as a member of a despised upper class, as had the way in which he spoke. He was quiet, shy and bookish, with the formal manners of a boy who had never before dealt with other children.
It had been a recipe for disaster, either unnoticed or ignored by the sisters until one day, almost a year later, when Draco had decided he could not take any more.
It was lunchtime, and everyone had been on the playground. Draco saw one of his tormenters closing in.
All the hurt, the fear, the emotions he’d kept bottled inside him burst free.
He’d sprung at the other boy. The fight had turned ugly, but when it was over, the other kid was on the ground, sobbing. Draco, bloodied and bruised but victorious, had stood over him.
His reputation was made. And if keeping it meant stepping up to the challenge of other boys from time to time, beating them and, occasionally, being beaten in return, so be it.
The Mother Superior had said she’d always known he would come to no good.
The day he turned seventeen, one of the senior boys decided to give him a very special gift. He’d come to Draco during the night while he slept, slapped a hand over his mouth and yanked down his pajama bottoms.
Draco was no longer small or skinny. He had grown into manhood; he was six foot three inches of fight-hardened muscle.
With a roar, he’d shot up in bed, grabbed his attacker by the throat and if the other boys hadn’t pulled him off, he might have killed him.
The Mother Superior asked no questions.
“You are,” she told Draco, “a monster. You will never amount to anything. And you are unwanted here.”
He hadn’t argued. As far as he knew, she was right on all counts.
She’d expelled him, told him to be gone the next morning, and he’d thought, So be it.
That night he’d jimmied the lock on the door to her office and taken four hundred euros from her desk. Going home was not an option. He had no home, not really. The castle was in a state of near disaster and his father, who had visited him once the first year and then never again, meant nothing to him.
The next day he’d flown to New York with the clothes on his back, a determination to make something of himself, and a philosophy by which to live.
Never show weakness.
Never show emotion.
Trust no one but yourself.
New York was big, brash and unforgiving. It was also a place where anything was possible. For Draco, that “anything” meant finding a way to make sure he’d seen the last of hunger, poverty and humiliation.
He’d found jobs. In construction. As a waiter. A cab driver. He’d worked his royal ass off—not that anybody knew he was a royal. And in the dark of night, in a roach-infested room in a part of Brooklyn that was beyond any hope of gentrification, he’d lie awake and admit to himself that he was going nowhere.
A man needed a goal. A purpose. He’d had neither.
Until, purely by accident, he’d learned that his father had died.
Prince Mario Valenti, a one-inch item buried in the New York Post said, died yesterday in a shooting accident involving former movie star …
The details didn’t matter. His father had died a shameful death, broke and in debt. And in that moment Draco had known what he would do with his life.
He would redeem the Valenti name.
That meant paying off his father’s debts. Restoring the castle. Making the family name, even the accursedly ridiculous title, stand for something again.
He’d wanted a new start. To get it, he’d worked his way across the vast expanse of the United States. He liked Los Angeles, but San Francisco struck him as not just beautiful but the kind of place that rewarded individuality. He’d talked himself into San Francisco State University, chosen classes in mathematics and finance because he found them interesting. Writing a term paper, he’d stumbled upon an idea. An investment plan. It worked in theory but would it in real life?
Only one way to find out.
Draco took everything he’d set aside for the next year’s tuition and sank it in the stock market.
His money doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled. He quit school, devoted himself to investing.
And parlayed what he had into a not-so-small fortune.
“Draco Valenti,” the Wall Street Journal said the first time it mentioned him, “a new investor on the scene, who plays the market with icy skill.”
Was there any other way to play the market or, in fact, to play the game of life?
Eventually he founded his own company. Valenti Investments. He made mistakes, but mostly he made choices that led to dazzling successes.
He knew the dot com ride would not last forever, and acted accordingly. He thought packaged mortgages sold by banks made no sense and he bet his money, instead, on their eventual failure. He found small tech firms with big ideas and invested in them.
He made more money than seemed humanly possible, enough to buy the San Francisco condo, the Roman villa. Enough to restore the Valenti castle.
And enough to fund a school for poor kids in Rome and others in Sicily, New York and San Francisco, though he kept those endeavors strictly private.
He was tough, he was hard, he was not sentimental. The schools were simply a practical way of using up some of his money, and he’d be damned if he’d let anybody try to put a different spin on it.
Draco shoved aside the Orsini documents and swung his chair toward the window behind him.
There had to be a way around the Orsini problem.
Valenti Investments could not, must not, go under. He could live through the financial loss—hell, life was, at best, an uphill battle—but to tarnish the Valenti name …
He could not bear the thought of that happening again.
He turned from the window.
There was a solution, and he would find it, but not by concentrating on it. He would, instead, do what he always did at moments of stress. He would think about anything but the problem at hand. He would think logically. Rid his thoughts of emotion.
Draco rang the intercom. His PA answered.
“I have some letters to dictate,” he said.
But, damnit, Anna Orsini would not stay in the mental file drawer in which he’d placed her. She kept appearing in his mind, front and center.
Ridiculous, because she was not really the problem. Her father was.
Then why did he keep seeing her face, that sleepy, sexy look in her eyes when she’d lain in his arms last night?
Why did he keep remembering the way she dressed, the conservative suit, the do-me