Page 1 of Marrying the Enemy

CHAPTER ONE

Five years ago...

EVELINA VISCONTI PICKED up a text from her middle brother asking which club she and her friends were visiting tonight.

She texted back.

Tell Mom I’ll call her tomorrow.

Their mother would have called him the second Eve refused to pick up her call, texting instead that she was out for the night.

Seconds later, her friend, Hailey, looked up from her own phone.

“Your brother wants to know which club we’re at. He wants to drive down from Naples to join us. Should I tell him we’re actually in Budapest?”

“No,” Eve said with beleaguered annoyance. Why was her family like this?

Eve was twenty-one, celebrating the end of her university years and the beginning of life as an adult, not that any of her family saw her as such. It wasn’t as though she had a history of getting into trouble, either. She’d been determined to prove herself academically so her partying had been confined to inviting friends onto her parents’ yacht between semesters. Drinking a glass of wine during reading break was her version of bacchanalian excess.

When she had finished her latest exams, these friends from boarding school had urged her to come to the Amalfi Coast with them. Hours after arrival, Hailey had coaxed her uncle into flying them to Budapest for a pub crawl through the ruin bars.

Eve’s mother had been chilly about her coming as far as the Amalfi Coast, having planned an introduction between Eve and her future husband. Or, a contender at least.

Allowing Eve to finish her degree before marrying her off had been an exercise in patience for Ginny Visconti, an American heiress herself. Ginny had been matched by her own mother in a very advantageous and comfortable arrangement when she was nineteen. If she or Eve’s father had ever cheated, they’d hidden it well, but they weren’t soulmates. They were partners in the business of securing and advancing Visconti Group, primarily a hotel and resort conglomerate with holdings and interests in related industries. Ginny had done her part by producing three sons, one every two years, before she closed up shop. A girl arrived unexpectedly, seven years later.

In many ways, Eve had been the overprotected, spoiled baby, always trying to catch up to her much older brothers. Her mother had discouraged her from horseplay and other tomboyish activities, constantly putting her in dresses and insisting she “act like a lady.” The very second that Eve grew breasts, her mother had begun talking about her prospects and seeing her “settled.”

Eve’s entire purpose for existing seemed to revolve around the link she would forge between the Visconti dynasty and one of their cohort families. The fact her mother was going so far as to try sending her brother to chaperone her, to ensure her plan stayed on track, provoked a massive case of delayed adolescent rebellion in Eve.

She texted her brother.

Leave my friends alone. I’ll fly back to New York Monday.

She turned off notifications and tucked her phone into the wallet that hung from a cross-body shoulder strap and let it drop against her hip.

“Isn’t it time to go dancing?” she asked.

Everyone nodded. They’d started their evening in a quaint garden café for dinner, then made their way to a billiards bar to enjoy a cocktail. They had listened to a band for an hour in another outdoor bar and now headed into a stone factory built in the late eighteen hundreds. It was renowned for being converted into a labyrinth of bars, music venues and dance floors.

“If you decide to leave with someone, text the rest of us, yeah?” Hailey said, then tucked her chin to add playfully, “But assume that’s what I’ve done. I’ll see you sluts on the walk of shame tomorrow.”

Everyone laughed, but Eve only smiled weakly. She didn’t know how to hook up and had never really aspired to. She occasionally dated—mostly men her mother threw at her—and had kissed far too many toads, but she hadn’t found anyone who tempted her into a long-term relationship, let alone his bed. Besides, her mother expected her to remain a virgin until she married, which Eve knew was grossly outdated, but she had been busy with her double major in marketing and hospitality management so that’s exactly what she was.

Her lack of sexual experience made her feel like a terrific spinster against her friends. They were all sending speculative looks around the crowd as they entered the first bar, where a heartbeat of syncopated electronica seemed to pulse from the stone walls. Flashing lights rotated to spill color across the bouncing bodies on the floor.

Eve skipped ordering a drink. She loved good wine or a tangy, refreshing cocktail on a hot day, but she didn’t enjoy feeling drugged or the cotton-headed nausea of a hangover so she always paced herself.

“Are you still playing dorm mother?” one of her friends teased.

Eve laughed off the remark and began to sway her hips as she moved onto the dance floor. She genuinely loved dancing and stayed there for several songs before breathlessly visiting the bar for a sparkling water.

A boisterous noise drew her attention as she moved to the end of the bar where she could watch the dancing.

A group of young men were coming in, a bachelor party, judging by the plastic shackle on one man’s ankle. The chain was long enough to drape over his arm and the ball must have been full of alcohol because he brought it to his mouth and popped open a cap like a water bottle to pour something into his mouth, eliciting approval from his friends.

Their antics reminded her of her brothers except that one was different.

A visceral tugging sensation accosted the pit of her belly as she studied the one who wasn’t laughing. He was older than the rest, close to thirty, and definitely came from money.

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