Page 7 of Innocent's Wedding Day with the Italian

But she would not scream. She would not show emotions. Not any more. She would maintain this dispassionate front until she had all the answers she needed and then walk out of his life for good.

‘At the beginning. When did you go into business with my grandfather?’

‘Thirteen years ago.’

She blinked in surprise. Their partnership went much further back than she’d imagined. ‘How did it come about?’

‘Do you remember me telling you how my first jewellery shop was a learning curve for me?’

She thought of their second date when he’d self-deprecatingly laughed as he’d explained how his business had almost ended before it had begun.

‘I was naive and expected instant success but to compete with the big boys, I needed a unique selling point.’

‘Man-made diamonds,’ she supplied in a whisper, the penny starting to drop as she remembered Enzo saying how he’d figured the growing movement for ethically sourced products had meant an opening for ethically sourced diamonds.

‘Sì,’he agreed tautly. ‘Man-made diamonds. Your grandfather was a visionary who’d seen long before me that there would be a market for them, and invested heavily in it. But he was ahead of his time. When I came along, he was in major financial difficulties.’

The dropping penny landed in Rebecca’s brain with a loud clang. The diamonds used in the jewellery Enzo’s stores sold came from a laboratory. The technique used made their purity, which Beresi was famous for, indistinguishable from naturally occurring ones.

‘You invested in Claflin Diamonds.’

‘Yes. I bought fifty per cent of it.’

Thinking hard, she narrowed her eyes. ‘How could you afford that? You could only have been twenty then...unless you were lying when you told me you didn’t hit the big time until you were twenty-five.’

‘No lie,’ he said steadily. ‘The diamonds from the laboratory played a big part in my success. The biggest part. A prominent company offered to buy the whole business from him. If he’d taken their offer, all his debts would have been paid and he’d have had cash left over to live comfortably for the rest of his life. Instead of taking it, he took a leap of faith with me and sold me the shares at a cut price. The price was enough to get him off the hook with his creditors but that was it. I paid for my half with what was left of my father’s inheritance and took a personal loan for the rest.’

Rebecca would not let the mention of Enzo’s father play on her heartstrings. His father had died at the age of twenty-eight when Enzo was six from a brain aneurysm, leaving an insurance policy for his son to inherit when he turned eighteen. She distinctly remembered Enzo telling her he’d used that inheritance to pay for the lease and stock of his first store. He’d made it sound as if the entire inheritance had been swallowed up by that first store. Another lie.

‘And now you want all of Claflin Diamonds for yourself.’

He gave no reaction to her contempt. ‘Your grandfather founded it but it belonged to both of us equally. We both made it what it is today and reaped the rewards. Without that partnership, your grandfather would have been made bankrupt and there would be no Beresi. It was agreed that when he died—and your grandfather knew he was dying—that his shares would pass to me.’

That threw her off course. ‘He knew he was dying?’

His shoulders rose heavily. ‘Sì. He was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer last October. Believe me, it came as a shock to us both. In all the years we’d been partners, his health had always been excellent. Your grandfather was sixty-eight but until the cancer he had the energy of a man my own age.’

Rebecca couldn’t explain why this made her heart pang. She’d never met the grandfather who’d disowned her mother for marrying a man he’d deemed beneath her. His first ever contact with her had come a few weeks after her parents’ deaths, a letter of condolence in which he’d asked to meet her. She’d replied with a terse, ‘No thank you.’ Despite her refusal, he’d taken to sending her birthday and Christmas cards with cheques enclosed. She’d returned them all, including the cheques. Just to imagine cashing them made her feel sick.

Unsure why tears were welling behind her eyes, she forced the conversation back to what really mattered at this moment. ‘Okay, so he promised you his share of the business but instead of doing that, he made it conditional that you had to marry me to get it.’

And that’s why it had all been one big fat lie.

Under the terms of her grandfather’s will, Enzo only received the shares if he married Rebecca. If he failed to marry her before she turned twenty-five, then the shares—half of Claflin Diamonds—automatically became hers.

Rebecca turned twenty-five in approximately five hours.

‘That condition my grandfather put into his will was unconscionable,’ she stated into the silence. ‘I don’t see how any judge would have allowed it to stand.’

Enzo drained his Scotch with a grimace. ‘If I’d contested it, litigation could have dragged on for years. We’re talking different jurisdictions too, and there was no guarantee I would win.’

She shrugged. ‘You could have waited until my birthday and just bought the shares off me. It wasn’t as if you had to wait for long and you must have known I wouldn’t want anything to do with the business. I’m a primary schoolteacher for cripes sake!’Wasa primary schoolteacher, she corrected herself. She’d quit her job at the end of the summer term, which was also the end of the school year, nine days ago.

To think she’d believed Enzo had encouraged her to quit before the school year ended because he couldn’t wait to make her his wife when all along he’d been working on a deadline to stop her grandfather’s shares slipping out of his hands and into hers. That deadline had been her birthday.

For the first time since their conversation started, she spotted a flash of anger on the too-handsome features. ‘Do you not think I went through every scenario and eventuality before settling on this path?’

‘Let me throw this out there—it’s a radical idea, I know—but did it ever occur to you to just be honest with me and explain the situation?’

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