Page 5 of Bound By The Italian’s 'I Do'

‘Next Friday.’

‘That soon?’

‘I did warn you that when the time came, I would need it to happen quickly.’

He sighed. ‘You still need it for two weeks?’

‘Yes.’

‘With a full crew?’

She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Yes. And a minimum of forty feet. As we agreed when I spent six months working for you for free.’

David liked to call himself a broker but really, he was a fixer to the rich. Want the use of a private jet for a weekend? Then David is your man. Need to throw a last-minute party on an obscure island with exquisite catering and hedonistic entertainment? Give David a call. In the mood for chartering a fully crewed superyacht? That’s right—call David.

Issy had taken a six-month sabbatical from her job as an auxiliary nurse to work as David’s girl Friday two years ago, when Amelia had first got the job at Rossi Industries. Six months of free labour at roughly one hundred hours a week, and all for this moment. If she hadn’t once been best friends with David’s little sister he’d have made her work a full year.

No one could accuse the Seymore sisters of slacking in their preparation. Or their research.

The cab pulled up outside the run-down block of flats she and Amelia called home.

Wedging her swollen feet back into the vices, she walked as gingerly as she could up the stairwell to her flat—the lift was, as always, broken—and Issy’s mind drifted back to the day she’d learned monsters really did exist. She remembered it so clearly.

It had been a Sunday. Her mother had cooked a traditional English roast. Issy had been in charge of prepping the vegetables, Amelia in charge of making the batter for the Yorkshire puddings and the cheese sauce. During the meal, their parents had allowed thirteen-year-old Issy and fifteen-year-old Amelia to have a small glass of red wine each. Their parents had argued whether or not to take the girls out of school a week early so they could enjoy their Tuscan home a little longer than planned. None of them had known that in a matter of weeks the girls would be pulled out of their school permanently because the wealth that paid the fees would be gone.

When the doorbell rang, none of them had suspected what was about to happen.

Brenda, their housekeeper, was on her day off so the girls’ mother, a vivid, beautiful woman with suchpresence, had answered the door. She’d returned shortly, anxiety on her face, and whispered to their father, who’d then excused himself.

Issy had just put a roast potato in her mouth when raised voices echoed from their father’s study into the dining room. Without a word, the Seymore sisters and their mother slipped from the table and hovered outside it.

Male voices, heavily accented but with a precise pronunciation that meant the three of them heard every scornful, abusive word sounded through the crack in the study door.

‘You’re finished, old man. The sooner you accept that the better—for your sake.’

‘What was yours is now ours, you washed-up, sorry excuse of a man. Accept it.’

‘Everythingis ours.’

‘Everything. Say goodbye to your company...and hello to Lucifer. He’s been waiting for you.’

Footsteps had neared the door. Issy and Amelia had held each other tightly as the door swung open and two tall, dark-haired men in impeccably tailored suits sauntered out of their father’s study with all the swagger of a pair of gangsters in the films she was forbidden to watch. They failed to see the wife and daughters of the man they’d just ripped to shreds cowering behind the door. But the daughters had seen them.

Time had frozen. When their father finally appeared in the study doorway he’d aged two decades. The next morning, the frightened adolescent girls, who’d shared a bed that night, had woken from a fitful sleep to find his thinning dark hair had turned white overnight. A year later he was dead. A decade on, their mother was nothing but an empty shell of the vibrant woman she’d once been, distraught to wake each day, reliant on stimulants to get her out of bed.

Issy and Amelia had never been particularly close before that awful day. Close in age, yes, but nothing else. They’d have sooner scratched each other’s eyes out than pay the other a compliment. That day, though, had pulled them together in a way the Rossi cousins could never have dreamed if they’d even bothered to consider the two innocent girls caught up in the collateral damage of their heinous actions. It had drawn them into a solid unit with only one purpose—revenge.

For the first time in a decade, Issy had the faint hint of what that revenge would taste like on her tongue.

CHAPTER TWO

THEPALAZZODELLEFESTEgleamed under the dazzling Caribbean sun. It would have dazzled Issy even if it had been raining.

Blinking back her disbelief, she looked at David’s deadpan face. ‘How on earth did you manage to get this for me?’

He waved an airy hand. ‘Just call me a magician.’

She turned her stare back to the humungous vessel docked before her. ‘A magician? David, this is way beyond anything I asked for.’ Their agreement had been six months free labour in exchange for the use of a sleek, modern yacht of at least forty feet, something a young, independently wealthy or trust-funded woman would reasonably own. This yacht had to be three times that size!

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