Page 30 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

She didn’t seem to mind this time. In fact, lying like this in my arms, well pleasured and now fed, she was nothing but passion and sensuality, her hard veneer gone.

She was magical like this.

‘Not initially, no.’ I wound a lock of her hair around my finger, watching the candlelight gloss it gold. ‘After the car accident, it took me some time to get my resources together.’

She glanced up at me. ‘What happened, Val?’

What to tell her?

Perhaps the truth?

Yes, but what truth?

I’d never cared what other people thought of me. Why would a lion concern himself with the opinions of sheep? Especially back then, in those early days after the accident, when I’d had to do what I could to survive.

But isn’t that what you’ve always done? Whatever you have to?

There had been no other choice. My childhood had been a battleground that had left few survivors and I’d always made sure that my brother would be one of them.

‘What happened?’ I echoed. ‘Well, like I told you, there was only one way to escape Domingo and that was to let everyone assume I was dead. So that’s what I did. I managed to get into Italy and found some under-the-table work for a time. Then I...’ How to put it? Would she accept that I’d fallen in with a mentor who was part of a crime network? And that I’d become one of them because I’d had nowhere else to go and no way to earn a living? Would she judge the company I’d built after taking over that crime network and turned it legitimate?

Would she judgeme?

Dios, why did the thought of her judgement matter?

‘You what?’ she prompted.

I stared back at her, letting her see a bit of the truth in my eyes. ‘If you’re thinking mine is a plucky David Copperfield story, then you should think again.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

Uneasiness shifted inside me. I didn’t want to tell her, which was ridiculous.

She sat up in my lap all of a sudden, the silk of her tunic sliding over my skin as she faced me. Her pretty eyes were only inches away and I could see that there were still tiny grains of sand in her hairline. I liked her like this, all tumbled and ruffled, less poised and perfect.

‘I think you did whatever you could to survive,’ she said, lifting my own thoughts straight out of my head. ‘You’re a ruthless man, Val. I can see that now. And whatever you had to do, it probably wasn’t easy.’ She paused a moment, searching my face. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

I didn’t like that she could see so much of me, that she could read me so easily. No one else could. Then again, no one knew me the way she did.

She knew the boy. She doesn’t know the man.

I stared into her grey eyes. ‘I fell in with a man who ran a major crime empire in the south of Italy. Mafia connections, that kind of thing. I helped him run it and then, when he was killed in a car bomb, I took it over.’

Again, a flicker of some emotion I didn’t recognise passed over her face, a shadow that made her eyes darken.

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I couldn’t hide the edge in my voice. ‘I took it all legitimate years ago. You’re not soiling yourself with some evil crime lord.’

If she found the sharp note in the words an issue, she didn’t show it. She only frowned. ‘It doesn’t matter to me what you did. I’m just sorry that you had to do it.’

I let go of her curl, lifted my hand and wound all my fingers in her hair, not liking the strange, heavy feeling of regret that sat on my chest like a stone; wanting to feel softness against my skin instead.

‘I needed money and power if I wanted to protect you and that was the quickest way to get both.’ I closed my hand in a fist and said both to her and to myself, ‘And I don’t regret it.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Olivia

HEDIDREGRETIT. I could see it in his eyes. Whatever he’d done to get that money and that power, he hadn’t wanted to do it.

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