In minutes they were cleared to leave by the control tower. Mina had never felt so light-headed in all her life as they taxied down the runway and took off, lifting sharply as a gust of wind buoyed them higher.
Dread consumed her. “It was Silvio, wasn’t it?” She turned to look at Nate as her stomach rose and fell with the ascending aircraft. “Who sent those men?”
NATE SURVEYED MINA’S panicked expression, her fear as she curled her hands around the armrests, knuckles white, overriding the fury he felt at his now excessively complicated life. The fury he felt toward the abusive man who had just tried to come after her.
“I suspect so,” he said grimly. “I will find out for certain. But there’s no need to worry. He can’t touch you now.”
Her eyes flashed. “What if he sends his men after me? Pasquale could give him all our information.”
“Then he will know I am not a man to be messed with. That it’s fruitless to come after you.”
“You’re only one man. You saw the men he sent.”
“He won’t get past my security detail.”
“Security detail?”
“I’m a rich man, Mina. It’s a prerequisite.”
She sat back in her chair, looking so chalk white he feared she might pass out. When the attendant came around to offer them drinks he asked for two glasses of brandy and put one in front of Mina.
“I don’t drink liquor.”
“Today you do.” He nodded toward the glass. “Drink. It’ll help your nerves.”
She stared dubiously at the amber liquid. Took a little sip and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like it.”
“Keep drinking.”
He leaned back against the seat, resting his brandy on his thigh. His temporary wife was now his wife for a year, a year, a state of being he had never once contemplated entering into nor wanted. That was if he chose to go through with the deal he and Mina had made, a vastly different one than he had signed on for.
He took in the stunning, innocent creature who was now his wife. Her disheveled hair, streaked makeup and worry lined face. His cynical side suggested she might have known about the year-long clause in the will, perhaps had seen an opportunity for escape in him that had been sweetened by the idea of a rich husband. But his gut told him that wasn’t the case. Mina hadn’t even blinked when he’d said the word prenup. She’d looked as frozen, as in shock, as he’d been when Pasquale Tomei had unveiled that condition. It could not have been manufactured.
With that stipulation, the key to her escape had been stripped from her, the ability to start a life away from her clearly uncaring mother and abusive ex-fiancé. He had been the one walking into the middle of things offering solutions. And now he had a much bigger one to find.
What was he going to do with a wife? With Mina? He couldn’t just dump her in Capri and tell her to contact him when she could sell him the ring. Marchetti was too likely to get to her there.
She needed his protection. He needed that ring to show Giovanni before he died. To give him a chance to reconnect with the past. Which meant his wife was now his responsibility. For a year.
“When you talked about obtaining your freedom,” he said, “what did you envision yourself doing?”
“I speak multiple languages. I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps. Become a businesswoman.”
“Do you have a business degree?”
“No.” She pressed her lips together, her dark gaze dropping away from his. “I went to a finishing school in France.”
A finishing school. Did those still exist? “And your father. What business was he in?”
“He was the CEO of our family chocolate company—Felicia. It was one of the biggest in Europe before my mother sold it to an American conglomerate.”
He took a sip of his drink. “Most people who want to get into business today have studied it in school. It’s very difficult to find a position without a degree or a diploma.”
Her chin rose. “I expect to start out at the bottom. I’d thought maybe I could work as a chambermaid at the Giarruso, then find a higher position.”
Admirable if wishful thinking. Unless, of course, a superior was willing to give her a shot in the business as Giovanni had given him.
He thought back to Mina’s quick, well-thought-out answers that day at the Giarruso. She had the natural business instincts he himself had once had. A moldable brain. Was it time for him to pay it forward? To give her the same chance he had been given?
He had been eighteen, working the night shift at a food warehouse, when Alex had tracked him down to save Giovanni. Eighteen and angry. His mother had managed to straighten him out after his run-in with the dark side in his midteens, begging him to stop running errands for the neighborhood enforcer before he got himself shot or killed. But she hadn’t been able to convince him to go back to school. They needed the money and he couldn’t just stand by and watch her work herself into her grave while he studied in a useless English lit class.
He’d taken a job at the warehouse where he’d discovered what hell truly felt like. Eight-hour night shifts in the dank, cavernous space, the fluorescent lights beating into his temples as he broke his back hauling flat after flat of produce into place.
He remembered leaving work one morning a few months after he’d started, the faint light of dawn creeping across the sky. Back killing him, lungs tight, he’d stopped and leaned against the building, wondering if this miserable existence was life. Because if this was what it was, he didn’t want it. At least when he’d been working the streets he’d had money in his pocket. He’d had his self-respect. He’d been somebody.
For the first time in years, he’d allowed his hatred toward his father loose, driving his fist into the concrete facade of the warehouse, leaving him with two broken fingers and no less bitterness. He hadn’t wanted a life like his half siblings’ lives—but to be the result of his father’s slumming? To not even be worthy of acknowledgment? It festered in him like a slow-moving disease.
When Alex had sought him out weeks later, he had been teetering on the edge of darkness and light, his old life a seductive siren’s call. Giovanni had made him choose. Embrace the chance you’ve been offered, he’d said, or forever cling to your anger. There is no in between.
The darkness he’d sensed in his grandfather, the raw acknowledgment he knew the dark side because he hadn’t been able to pull his own son from it, had touched something inside Nate, perhaps the tiny sliver of hope he had left in him. He had chosen the light.
Blinking, he pulled himself out of the memory to focus on Mina’s big dark eyes, the expression in them as adrift, as fear-driven, as his had been. She had no money, nowhere to go. She was as lost a soul as he had been. He couldn’t let her fall through the cracks.
By the time they had landed in Capri a short while later, a plan had formed in his head. It would solve all his issues, except, of course, the ring on his finger. That, unfortunately, wasn’t going anywhere.
* * *
Mina stood on the terrace of the penthouse suite of the Grand Hotel Emelia, the Bay of Marina Piccola sparkling in the distance. She had been to the glamorous island of Capri once with her family when she had been very young, six or seven. She only remembered bits and pieces of the holiday, but it was one of her best memories.
The beautiful beaches and the lovely walks along the