“So. You admit you knew that someone would be waiting for you. And yet, you left no word of your arrival time, of the airline you would be flying. You did not spend so much as a second looking for my father or his chauffeur inside the terminal, and you did not trouble yourself to telephone the villa when you did not see them. If you had, someone would have called me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry this didn’t go according to royal protocol, princess, but life doesn’t always do what you want.”
“I repeat, I am not a princess. And this has nothing to do with protocol. If you had left your arrival information as part of that useless voice-mail message—”
“If I had, your father would have met me. Or, as it turns out, you’d have met me. And I’m not interested in being taken by the hand and shuttled to your villa while somebody tells me how lucky I am to be given the chance to invest in what’s probably a disaster of a vineyard.”
“I thought it was your gangster father who would be investing. And to so much as suggest the vineyard is a disaster—”
Alessia caught her breath as Nicolo Orsini stepped closer. With him this near, she had to tilt her head back to see his face. Even in these shoes of medieval torture, he towered over her.
“I’m here as my father’s emissary,” he said in a cold, dangerous voice. “And I’d advise you to watch what you say, princess. Insult one Orsini, you insult us all.”
Nick frowned even as he said it. Where had that come from? Insult his brothers or, even worse, his mother or his sisters, and, of course, you insulted them all. But the old man? The don, who was part of something ancient and ugly and immoral? Was an insult to him an offense to all the Orsinis?
“Your father is what he is,” Alessia Antoninni said with dogged determination. “If you expect me to pretend otherwise, you are wrong.”
He looked down into her face. Her hair was an unruly mass of streaked gold, long tendrils dangling free of what had once been some kind of ladylike knot. Her eyes flashed defiance. There was a streak of soot on a cheekbone high enough to entice a man to trace his finger across its angled length.
The rest of her was a mess.
Still, she was stunning. He could see that now. Stunning. And arrogant. And she was looking at him as if he were beneath contempt.
His jaw tightened.
She had pegged him for the same kind of man as his father. He wasn’t—but something in him rebelled at denying it. She was an aristocrat; his father was a peasant. Nick had once delved into the origins of la famiglia, enough to know that though some scholars traced the organization solely to banditry, others traced it to the rebellion of those trapped in poverty by rich, cruel landowners.
It didn’t matter. Whatever the origins of his father’s way of life, Nick despised it.
Still, there was a subtle difference between viewing that way of life from the comfort of America and viewing it here, on such ancient soil. It brought out a feeling new to him.
“Your father is also what he is,” he said, his voice rough. “Or do you choose to forget that your vineyard was created by the sweat of others?”
“I do not need a lesson in socioeconomics! Besides, times have changed.”
“They have, indeed.” Nick smiled coldly. “You and your father must now come to me, an Orsini, to beg for money.”
Alessia stiffened. “The House of Antoninni does not beg! And you forget, we come to Cesare Orsini, not to you.”
She was right, of course. His only function was to report back to his father.…
“Why, signore,” she all but purred, “I see I have silenced you at last.”
She smiled. It made his belly knot. There were hundreds of years of arrogance in that smile; it spoke of the differences between commoners and kings, and in that instant, Nick knew the game had changed.
He smiled, too, but something in it made her expression lose a little of its upper-class defiance. She began to step back but Nick caught her by the wrist and tugged her toward him.
“There’s been a change in plans, princess.”
“Let go of me!”
He did, but only to slip his hand around the nape of her neck. Tendrils of the softest gold tumbled over his fingers.
“I’m the potential investor,” he said softly, “not my old man.”
“That is not what my father told me!”
A muscle knotted in Nick’s jaw. She was staring at him through eyes so deep a blue they were almost violet. He’d stunned her, he could see that. Hell, he’d stunned himself.
He might be a peasant, but he was also a man. And she was a woman. A woman who needed to learn that this was the twenty-first century, not the sixteenth.
Nick’s gaze dropped to her lips, then rose so his eyes met hers.
“Trust me, princess,” he said in a voice as rough as sandpaper. “The only Orsini you’re going to deal with is me.”
Alessia Antoninni, the Princess Antoninni, shook her head. “No,” she said, and he silenced her the only way a man could silence a woman like this.
He thrust his hands into her hair, lifted her face to his and kissed her.
Chapter Three
TIME seemed to stop.
Alessia was too stunned to react.
A stranger’s powerful arms around her. His mouth on hers. The heat of his body, the leanly muscled male strength of it…
Then she gasped. Fury and indignation transformed her into a virago. She twisted her head, slammed her hands against his chest, knotted those hands into fists when he failed to let her go.
A mistake, all of it.
His hand slid up into her hair so that there was no way to turn away from his kiss. One big palm slid down her spine, stopped at its base and brought her tight against him.
Was he insane?
He was kissing her as if he had the right to do it. To take whatever he wanted because of who and what he was, and to hell with propriety or their surroundings or the fact that they’d met only minutes ago and already despised each other.
Her hands flattened against his chest again. She pushed at that wall of hard muscle and when that had no effect, she tried to squirm free.
Another mistake, worse than the first one.
Instantly, she felt the thrust of his aroused flesh against her belly.
Her heart thudded.
She began to tremble, and his lips moved on hers, the angle of the kiss changing so that she had to tilt her head back. Was that why she suddenly felt dizzy and the ground took a delicate tilt beneath her feet?
She heard a sound. Was it she who’d made it, an almost imperceptible whimper overlaid by Nicolo Orsini’s raw, ragged groan?
Her hands moved. Slid to his shoulders. Into his hair. Her lips began to part…
And then it was over.
He clasped her arms with such force that her eyes flew open, and as they did, he set her away from him.
She stared at him. His face was all harsh planes and angles; his eyes were slits of obsidian beneath thick, black lashes. Faint stripes of color ran beneath his high cheekbones as a muscle ticked in his jaw.
Alessia wanted to slap his face. More than that, she wanted to run.
But she wouldn’t. She knew better than to show fear to a predatory animal. It was a lesson