Page 146 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Was it an effort for him as well? Siena wondered. His voice sounded stilted, but he was answering her all the same.

‘I cannot claim to be a country boy—I grew up in the suburbs of Milan. My background was not as...’ She heard him hesitate suddenly, then continue. ‘Not as affluent as my life is now. I have improved it since then.’

Siena looked across at him. There had been an edge to his voice as he’d finished that sentence—she’d have had to be deaf not to hear it.

‘How?’ she asked.

His wealth was clearly of prime importance to him, and he guarded it from wannabe pregnant gold-diggers, so presumably it was a subject dear to his heart—and his ego.

And his fears...

Just in case I get my sticky, greedy little fingers into it...

‘Hard work,’ he came back succinctly. ‘I studied, took an interest in economics and finance—because that, after all, is where the money is. I worked to earn money during the day and studied by night. I got my qualifications, and went to work for one of Milan’s finance houses—it is the financial centre of Italy, as well as its fashion capital—and then, when I felt I had learnt enough to try and make my own fortune, I set up for myself.’

She looked at him, frowning slightly. ‘What is it exactly that you do?’

‘I make investments,’ he said. ‘I started by using my own money to accumulate sufficient funds by making investments on the Milan stock exchange. Then I used profits from that to invest in other companies, other ventures. I persuaded others to contribute as well, and made money for them as well as myself. Money,’ he said, and now Siena could hear not just an edge, but a dryness to his voice, ‘makes money. Once you have it, it is easy to make more of it.’

His voice changed, and now the dryness had gone, but not the edge. The dryness was replaced by something that might even have been bitterness.

‘The challenge is the initial capital formation,’ he said. ‘That is where the hardest work is.’

‘You started from nothing?’ she asked.

She saw him reach for his wine, take a mouthful, set the glass back with a decided click.

‘More or less,’ he said.

There was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice now. She let her eyes rest on him. His face had closed—that was the only word for it. Instinctively, she moved the subject away.

‘You asked about my family,’ she said. ‘What about yours?’

But his expression remained closed and he turned his attention to his lamb.

‘None worth mentioning,’ he answered tersely.

Then he set his knife and fork down abruptly, looked straight across at her. There was a strange expression in his eyes now, one she could not make out.

‘Apparently,’ he said, ‘we have something in common. Neither of us comes with a large family around us.’

Words rose in Siena’s head. Words she did not want to hear and would not say. But they said themselves inside her head for all that.

Yet between us we are making a family.

Immediately, instantly, she refuted them—rejected them. No, that wasnotwhat they were doing. There was nothing of ‘family’ about their situation. Nothing at all.

We are strangers who fell into bed in a moment of reckless, unthinking lust—and that does not, cannot, must not, should not have anything at all to do with ‘family’!

She broke eye contact, dipped her head again. She got stuck back into her sole Veronique...stabbed a potato with the tines of her fork.

As if she could stab the words that had just forced their impossible, unnecessary and totallywrongway into her head.

Vincenzo heard his own words echo in his head.

‘Apparently we have something in common.’

His mouth tightened.

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