Page 183 of Modern Romance Collection May 2024 Books 1-4

Billionaire’s Runaway Wife

Rosie Maxwell

CHAPTER ONE

DOMENICORICCIWASin pain. His body was heavy with it, as if his bones had been lined with lead. Even the simple act of drawing in a breath was an effort, causing his chest to burn and his stomach muscles to sharply contract.

Grief, he thought disdainfully. It had always been his considered point of view that those who cited the crippling effects of grief were simply too weak to contend with the realities of life. Death was, after all, inevitable. A basic fact of life. It was far better to celebrate a person than wallow in mournful and distressed emotion upon their passing.

But now it was his adored aunt Elena who had departed the world and all Domenico could feel was the burden of sorrow. Even the sight of his beloved Venice—home since his scandalous and uncelebrated birth—in the mauve and indigo shadows of the approaching evening offered little comfort.

In spite of Elena’s advanced age, he hadn’t been prepared for it. For the loss of the only woman who had never rejected him and who had spent her life guiding and encouraging him. The woman who had given him a home and the embrace of a family when those who should have loved and cared for him had been set on deserting him to a crueller fate. And now she was gone.

Just like all those other people in his life, Elena had left him too.

In the faint reflection in the window Domenico watched his lips firm and lines of strain stream from the corners of his mouth as his meandering thoughts forced him to relive the rejections and desertions he had suffered over the years, beginning with his birth family and ending with his wife, Rae.

Rae.

His big body clenched as he thought of her, with her heart-shaped face, her tumble of chestnut hair and eyes so startlingly, beautifully blue they could penetrate even the coldest soul, compelling Domenico to raise the glass cradled between his fingers to his lips and numb the sudden sharp pinch of bitter feeling with a long swallow of the bright amber liquid. Out of all the women who had inflicted a scar, Rae had cut him the deepest. Because he hadchosenher. He had invited her into his life, placed a ring on her finger and made a binding vow, and she had walked out on him. That desertion burned him far more than anything he had endured from his blood relatives.

Which made it all the more inexplicable that in his moment of sadness it was her comforting touch he craved. That out of all the mourners currently in his palazzo, hers was the only face he wanted to see, only she hadn’t bothered to come and pay her respects...

Domenico raised the glass to his lips again, castigating his melancholic mood for turning him into a sentimental fool. Of course she hadn’t come! Rae had left him. Rejected him. She hadn’t even had the decency to tell him that she was unhappy in their marriage. Hadn’t offered him the chance to fix whatever it was that was making her unhappy. She’d simply walked out of the door one day and left him to find the pathetic one-sentence note she had deigned to write to explain her sudden absence.

She was the last person deserving of room in his thoughts. The very last woman he should desire. If he needed comfort, there were countless others he could turn to, women who would appreciate him and be happy to share his bed. Because that was all that would be on offer. A night. An encounter. Never again would he open up his life to another soulless, treacherous female.

The floorboard behind him creaked in a way that told him someone was outside the door to his third-floor private study and then he heard the soft squeak of his partially closed door being nudged open. He remained still. Those who knew him knew better than to disturb him, which meant it was a stranger, someone seeking something he was probably in no mood to give. A reporter possibly, looking for a quote about Elena’s passing, or some grossly nosy individual...

But then the skin on the back of his neck prickled, and his nose caught a light, barely-there scent and in defiance of the command issued straight from his brain, his heart missed a beat.

And he knew it was her.

‘Domenico?’

Saying his name felt strange. After such a long period of not saying it, of determinedly keeping him out of her mind, it sent a quiver through Rae Dunbar’s blood.

And as for laying eyes on him for the first time in months...

Her view was only of his rear as he faced away from her, his attention fixed on the timeless elegance and twilight romance of the city that rose from the water beyond the window, but with his strong back and shoulders so broad that they threatened to bust the seams of every item of clothing he wore, he was still magnificent to behold. So magnificent that her throat was suddenly sandpaper dry and it felt as if a swarm of butterflies had been unleashed in her chest.

Not that she had expected him to have changed, to suddenly have become lesser than the Adonis it was widely agreed he was, but Rae had hoped, quite ardently, that his effect on her would have lessened. Preferably to nothing at all. But with that single initial glance, it was painfully clear that wasn’t the case.

‘So you have bothered to show up. Late though you are,’ he said, a visible surge of tension making the lines of his solid body even more distinct. Beneath the tailored black shirt he wore, Rae could make out the sharp definition of his powerful back muscles—muscles she had never tired of stroking her hands over—and without warning the need to feel his hot, smooth skin beneath her hands gushed through her veins, a torrent of helpless, burning longing.

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ Rae stammered, having to push past that overpowering compulsion to touch him in order to locate her voice. ‘I’ve been trying to get here for days, ever since I read about Elena’s passing, but an arctic storm was sat right over us. All trains and flights were cancelled. They only resumed today and I made sure that I was on the first plane out.’

The words raced out of her mouth and into one another in her haste to explain and exonerate herself of the aggravation he’d made no attempt to mask.

‘I’m surprised you tried so hard.’

‘I wanted to be here,’ Rae responded immediately. ‘To say goodbye to Elena and pay my respects to her—the wonderful woman she was.’ Her words caught as she was pierced again by guilt over how long it had been since she’d seen or spoken to the older woman. And now it was too late. ‘If I’d known she was ill...’

Domenico spun around, his face set in a thousand furious shadows. ‘And how would you have known that, Rae? Given that you walked out on this family.’

‘Please, Domenico,’ Rae said, feeling his anger slam into her and almost knock her sideways, but after leaving him the way she had, she knew she deserved it. ‘I didn’t come here to argue.’

‘Why come at all?’ he demanded, some untethered emotion leaping dangerously in his darkened gaze as his stare closed around her. His fury only sharpened the chiselled planes of his face, making him more striking, and the dryness of Rae’s throat intensified to an almost painful degree. ‘You were under no obligation to, you made sure of that.’

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