Page 38 of Bound By The Italian’s 'I Do'

They’d reached the grounds of the second chalet. Leading her up the path to reach it, he explained, ‘I work an average of eighty-hour weeks. I’ve worked those kind of hours since I was a kid. At some point in the future I will want to take my foot off the brake.’

‘My heart’s bleeding. Still, it’s your money. You can spend it how you want.’

‘You’re too kind.’

‘I know... Although I do wonder how you can be so free with it knowing everything you have came from stealing from my father.’

‘We didn’t steal from your father,’ he bit back.

‘Yes, you did.’ She wanted to glare at him but her face wouldn’t cooperate, the swell of emotions rising through her made her chin wobble and her voice tremble. ‘I was there, Gianni. You invited yourself into our home and took everything we had from us. You ripped the business my father had spent his life building away from him and belittled and humiliated him. You didn’t just steal his business—you destroyed everything.’

The darkness of his stare almost made her quail. When he finally spoke, there was an ice in his tone she’d never heard before. ‘Your father stole fromus. He sold us land unfit for development and bribed surveyors and officials to cover it up. It was our first business deal and we’d worked our backsides off from the age of twelve to pay for itandtook a loan to make up the shortfall. Thanks to your father, we were left with crippling repayment charges for land that was worthless. It took us years of working every hour God sent to make those repayments and build a nest with which to start again, and the day we took control of your father’s business and kicked him into the long grass remains the best day of my life. He deserved everything, had had it coming for years, not just for how he treated us but all the other businesses and individuals he’d ripped off over the years.’ He threw the chalet door open. ‘This is for your personal use. Do as you please.’

And with that, he strode back down the path, tension practically vibrating from his taut gait.

Gianni was too angry to appreciate anything about the sprawling lodge he one day intended to spend half of each year living in. He toured it fighting to stop himself from snarling at the housekeeper, who must have spent hours making everything shine so brightly and kept giving him anxious looks as if afraid he was about to explode.

It took a lot to make him lose his temper. His father was a squat bundle of aggression who used his fists as weapons and his tongue as a whip. Gianni had lived with him for eighteen years, but that aggression had neither been inherited nor rubbed off on him. If it had, he would have fought it with every fibre of his being. That didn’t mean he disliked or avoided confrontation, just that the anger that could make a person’s face go red and voice rise and words—often regretted after—splutter from his mouth rarely worked its way through him.

Issy’s accusation that he’d stolen her father’s business had slashed open a wound that had been sealed a decade ago when he and Alessandro had ousted him. It had taken every ounce of control to stop his voice from rising and to stop himself leaning right into Issy’s face to shout his home truths and rip the blinkers from her eyes.

There had been no stealing. If Thomas Seymore had run his business legitimately they would never have been able to take it from him. They would never have needed to.

It had been the contempt in her stare while she’d thrown the accusation at him that had bit more than her words. Contempt laced with pain. Biting more than that had been the absolute certainty that she believed it. That Isabelle Seymore believed him a thief, that she believed himcapableof being a thief. And corrupt. Mustn’t forget that. He hoped like hell Alessandro had got to the bottom of the slanderous proof of corruption Amelia had messaged Issy about.

Alone in his master suite, he sat on the bed and rubbed his temples.

It shouldn’t matter what Issy thought of him. It shouldn’t matter that she hated him. He had no business feeling sick to the pit of his stomach that taking the business from Thomas Seymore had affected his youngest daughter so greatly. That was on Seymore. He was the father. It had been his duty to protect his children.

Gianni grunted a morose laugh and fell back. Spreading his arms out over the mattress, he gazed up at the ceiling. Fathers were supposed to protect their children. Mothers were too. The only person Gianni and his mother had needed protecting from was his father, and then his mother had run away and left him to take the blows and bullying alone.

Issy was refusing to leave her cabin. She’d asked the staff to provide her with food she could cook for herself and then locked the door. All this had been reported to Gianni, who was glad of it. In the short space of time that he’d known Isabelle Seymore she’d managed to get under his skin and dredge up memories of a past he preferred not to remember in any detail.

The tourist part of St Lovells was an exclusive resort he’d had built when he bought the island. Already it had gained a reputation as the ultimate luxury retreat for wealthy young things looking for a good time. Gianni was on his one full holiday of the year, the break he took annually to recharge his batteries and he was damned if he was going to let Issy’s sulking prevent him from enjoying himself, not when it was her connivance that had stopped him making the usual plans in the Caribbean. On a normal holiday, he would hook up with a group of friends who spent their summers bumming around the Caribbean, invite along his latest lover to join them and generally have a great time doing nothing but enjoy himself for fourteen days.

He’d had a good night’s sleep and now he was ready to enjoy himself and party. Issy could stay in her cabin and sulk for the duration of their stay here if she so wished but he was not going to let it stop him having fun.

The number of visitors was kept strictly limited, not as a means of keeping people out but as a means of preserving the island’s natural beauty. One thing he’d learned in his career as a property developer was that there was always a trade-off when making a development between what humans needed and what the planet’s other inhabitants needed. He much preferred developing on sites that had already been in use or on land that was ecologically worthless. The land they’d bought off Thomas Seymore was in the latter category, although just how worthless had been kept hidden from them until it was too late to do anything about it. The land Gianni’s father and uncle owned containing the vineyards Gianni and his cousin had been forced to toil on throughout their childhood was heading the same way. Their fathers were ravaging the land, literally running their business into the ground.

When Gianni bought St Lovells he’d had a clear idea of how it would be developed: minimally. The work on both the tourist part and his private complex had been completed with ninety-five percent of the island left untouched. It was a tropical paradise alive with noisy, colourful wildlife, and as he took a golf buggy—his four-by-four was the only full-size motor vehicle allowed on the island—to the tourist part on his second day there, the darkness of his mood lifted.

One day, he would force his cousin to visit. Alessandro never took time off. The man was a machine. It still amazed him how two boys who were born only months apart, shared so much of the same DNA and had been raised like brothers could be so different and yet remain so close. Gianni would take a bullet for his cousin and he knew Alessandro would do the same for him.

He suspected Issy’s relationship with her sister was similar. He didn’t know Amelia well but knew she was a different kind of personality to her sister, more focused and analytical, more introverted. Issy had tried to hide her real self beneath the fake, polished exterior she’d projected to entrap him and portray herself as someone completely different to who she was, but he’d caught enough glimpses of the real Issy and studied enough of her photos and messages to know she was a smiley, kind, good person.

He stopped the buggy and rested his head back. Closing his eyes, he took a long breath. Issy had dedicated many years of her life to working against him, building a plan to ensnare him into a distraction so her sister could bring down his company. Good, kind people did not behave in that way. Just because she was a nurse who worked with sick children did not make her an angel.

Snapping his eyes back open, he continued his drive to the tourist resort.

The main resort pool was edged with beautiful people sunbathing and drinking cocktails. He rubbed his growing beard, fixed a grin to his face, and set off to join them.

The beach party went on until the early hours. Having had too much to drink to safely drive, Gianni got one of the resort staff to drive him back to his complex. Needing air to clear his head, he walked from the security gate and reflected on what a great day it had been. As he’d expected, he was already acquainted with a number of the vacationers: a supermodel whose best friend he’d once had a fling with and her latest beau, a genius app creator who frequented many of the same clubs and bars as him in London. They’d greeted him like an old friend and quickly introduced him to the rest of the party they were vacationing with, bright shiny, rich and beautiful twenty-somethings. One of them had been an American television actress he’d vaguely recognised, a tall, slender blonde with come-to-bed eyes she’d kept firmly fixed on him. She was exactly Gianni’s type and he’d flirted with her for hours before realising his heart wasn’t in it and that she didn’t do anything for him. When she’d whispered in his ear on the beach about slipping away to her chalet, he’d graciously turned her down and called it a night.

He was still mulling over what it was about the actress he’d failed to respond to considering she ticked every box he wanted in a lover when he reached Issy’s cabin. One of the lights was on. His heart turned over then rose up his throat, and he had to tread his feet firmly to stop them taking the path to her door.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEKITCHENINIssy’s chalet was, in comparison with the rest of the place, tiny. Compared to the kitchen she shared with Amelia, it was humungous. Obviously installed with no expectation the occupier would ever use it—the staff had been astounded that she wanted to cook for herself, and had kept reiterating that there were world-class chefs on site who could whip up anything she desired—it nonetheless contained everything she needed.

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