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Worse, she’d complicated everything when she’d fallen for his seduction. She knew very well how it must have looked to him, a powerful man who held the key to her dream in his hand.
He’d thought her the worst kind of liar and gold digger—and the evidence had been stacked against her.
She gazed at her son and her heart felt so full with all the love swelling inside it. Yes, she should have told Drago who she was and what she wanted. But if she’d opened her mouth sooner, she wouldn’t have Nicky. What a thought that was. Life might have been easier, but it certainly wouldn’t have been sweeter.
Holly’s eyes prickled with tears. Gran would have told her that the past was just that and it did no good to dwell on it, because you couldn’t change it without a time machine. Holly knuckled her tears away with a little laugh—but then her gaze caught on the digital display on the microwave.
“I have to get to work,” she said to Gabi. “Will you be all right until Mrs. Turner comes to collect him?”
Gabi looked up from where she was still cradling Nicky. “It’s a couple of hours before my shift yet. Don’t worry.”
Holly always worried, but she didn’t say that to Gabi. She worried about providing for her baby, worried that he was only three months old and she had to work so much. She worried that she’d been unable to breast-feed him—some women couldn’t, the nurse had told her after the zillionth failed attempt—and he had to drink formula, and she worried that he needed so many things and she could barely provide any of them.
Holly kissed her son’s sweet soft skin before changing into her uniform of white shirt, bow tie and tight black skirt. Then she stuffed her heels into her duffel and slipped on her tennis shoes. She made it to the bus stop in record time. With twenty minutes to spare, she got to the casino, put on her heels and touched up her makeup before stashing her things and heading to the floor for her shift.
In all her wildest imaginings, she’d never pictured herself serving drinks in a casino. But here she was, arranging her tray with cocktail napkins, pen and pad, stirrers, and then gliding through the crowd of people hovering around tables and machines, asking for drink orders—and enduring a few pats to the bottom in the process.
Holly gritted her teeth, hating that part of the job but unwilling to react, because she needed the money too badly. The rent was due next week, and it was always a struggle to make up her portion along with buying diapers and formula and groceries.
Holly pushed a hand through her hair, anchoring it behind her ears, and approached the group of men hovering around one of the baccarat tables. They were rapt on the game, and most especially on a man who sat at one end of the table, a dark-haired beauty hanging over his shoulder and whispering something in his ear. His face was remarkable, beautiful and perfectly formed—and all too familiar.
For a moment, Holly was stunned into immobility. What were the chances Drago di Navarra would walk into this casino and sit at a table in her section? She’d have guessed they were something like a million to one—but here he was in all his arrogant, rotten glory.
Just her miserable luck. She glanced behind her, looking for Phyllis, hoping to ask the other waitress to take this table. Holly’s belly churned and panic rose in her throat at the thought of waiting on Drago and his mistress.
But Phyllis was nowhere to be seen, and Holly had no choice. The moment she accepted that, another feeling began to boil inside her: anger.
She suddenly wanted to march over to Drago’s side and slap his handsome face. She’d endured a twenty-three-hour labor, with Gabi as the only friend by her side. Other women had happy husbands in the delivery room, and masses of family in the waiting room. But not her. She’d been alone, with only Gabi holding her hand and coaching her through.
By the time Nicky had been born and someone handed him to her, she’d felt as if the little crying bundle was an alien life-form. But she’d fallen into deep love in the next moment. She had seen Drago in her son’s face, and she’d felt a keen despair that he’d tossed her out the way he had. That he’d refused to take her calls. He was missing out on something amazing and perfect, and he would never know it.
Now, seeing him in this casino, sitting there so arrogant and sure with a woman hanging on him, all Holly felt was righteous anger. Her heart throbbed in her chest. Her blood beat in her brain. She knew she should turn around and walk away, find Phyllis no matter how long these people had to wait for drinks, but she couldn’t seem to do it. Instead, she moved around the table until she was standing beside the man who sat at a right angle to Drago.
“Something from the bar, sir?” she asked when the play had finished. She pitched her voice louder than she normally would and looked over at Drago. The woman with him sensed a disturbance in the perfumed air around her—much too heavy a scent, Holly thought derisively, like something one would use in a brothel to cover the smells of sex and sweat—and brought her head up to meet Holly’s stare.
Sweat and sex. Holly swallowed as a pinprick of hot jealousy speared into her at the thought of this woman and Drago tangling together in a bed.
Holly sniffed. No, not jealousy. As if she cared. Honestly.
She was irritated, that was what. Irritated by the haughty look of this woman, and the outrageous presence of the man sitting at the table, oblivious to the currents whipping in the air around him.
The woman’s dark eyes raked over her. And then she did the one thing Holly had both hoped and feared she would do. She said something to Drago. He looked up, his gaze colliding with Holly’s. Her heart dived into her toes at the intensity of that gray stare. A hot well of hate bubbled inside her soul. It took everything she had not to throw her tray at him and curse him for the arrogant bastard he was.
“Dry martini,” the man beside her said, and Holly dragged her attention back to him.
“Yes, sir,” she said, writing the drink on her pad.
When she looked up again, Drago was still looking at her, his brows drawn together as if he were trying to place her. He didn’t know her? He couldn’t remember?
That was not at all the reaction she’d expected, and it pierced her to the core. She’d had his baby, and he couldn’t even remember her face....
That, Holly decided, stiffening her spine, was the last straw. She turned and marched away from the table, perilously close to hyperventilating because she was so angry—and because the adrenaline rush of fear was still swirling inside her. She went over to the bar and placed her orders, telling herself to calm down and breathe.
So he didn’t recognize her. So what? Had she really thought he would?
Yes.
She shook her head angrily. He was a rich, arrogant, low-down, lying son of a bitch anyway. He’d wined her and dined her and seduced her. Yes, she’d fallen for it. She wasn’t blameless.
But he’d promised to take care of the birth control, and she’d trusted him to do it right. But he must have done something wrong, because she’d gotten pregnant. And he hadn’t cared enough about the possibility to take her calls.
Rotten, selfish, self-serving bastard!
Holly grabbed her tray once the drinks were ready. She would march back over there and deliver her drinks as usual. She would not pour them in Drago’s lap, no matter how much she wanted to.
“Thanks, Jerry,” she said to the bartender. She turned to go—and nearly collided with the slickly expensive fabric of Drago di Navarra’s tailored suit.
* * *
Drago’s nostrils flared as he looked at the woman before him. The color in her cheeks was high as she righted her tray before spilling the contents down the front of his Savile Row suit. Her eyes snapped fire at him and her mouth twisted in a frown.
“If you will excuse me, sir, I have drinks to deliver.”
Her voice was harder than he remembered it. Her face and body were plumper, but in a good way. She’d needed to round out her curves, though he’d thought she was perfectly well formed at the time. This extra weight, however, made her into a sultry, beautiful woman rather than a naive girl.
A girl who’d tried to trick him. He hadn’t forgotten that part. His jaw hardened as he remembered the way she’d so blissfully confessed her deception to him. She’d come to New York armed with perfume samples that she hoped to sell to his company, and she’d cost him valuable time and money with her pretense. It wasn’t the first time a woman had tried to use him for her own ends, but it had been a pretty spectacular failure on his part. He’d had to scrap every picture from the photo shoot and start again with a new model, which had been a shame when he’d seen the photos and realized how perfect she’d been in the role.
He’d wondered in the weeks after she’d gone if he’d overreacted. But she’d scraped a raw nerve inside him, a nerve that had never healed, and throwing her out had been the right thing to do. How dare she remind him of the things he most wanted to forget?
Still, it had taken him weeks to find the right model. Even then, he hadn’t actually been the one to do it. He’d been so discouraged that he’d delegated the task to his marketing director. It wasn’t like him to let anything derail him for long, but every time he’d tried to find someone, he kept thinking about this woman and how she’d nearly made a fool of him.
How she’d taken him back to a dark, lonely place in his life, for the barest of moments, and made him remember what it was like to be a pawn in another’s game. He shook those feelings off and studied her.
The model they’d hired to replace her was beautiful, and the fragrance was selling well, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He should be, but he wasn’t.
There was something about this woman. Something he hadn’t quite forgotten over the past year. Even now, his body responded with a mild current of heat that he did not feel when Bridgett, whom he’d left fuming at the baccarat table, draped herself over him.
“The perfume business did not work out for you, I take it?” he asked mildly, his veins humming with predatory excitement. She was still beautiful, still the perfect woman for his ad campaign. It irritated him immensely.
And intrigued him, as well.
Her pretty blue eyes were hard beneath the dark eye makeup and black liner, but they widened when he spoke. She narrowed them again. “Not yet,” she said coolly. “I’m surprised you remembered.”
“I never forget a face.” He let his gaze fall to her lush breasts, straining beneath the fabric of the tight white shirt the casino made her wear. “Or a body.”
Her chin lifted imperiously. He would have laughed had he not sensed the loathing behind that gaze. Her plan hadn’t worked and now she hated him. How droll.
“Well, isn’t that fortunate for you?” she said, her Southern accent drawing out the word you. “If you will excuse me, sir, I have work to do.”
“Still angry with me, cara? How odd.”
She blinked. “Odd? You seduced me,” she said, lowering her voice to a hiss. “And then you threw me out.”
Drago lifted an eyebrow. She was a daring little thing. “You cost me a lot of money with your deception, bella mia. I also had to throw out a day’s worth of photos and start over. Far more regrettable than tossing you out the door, I must admit.”
The corners of her mouth looked pinched. But then she snorted. “I’m waiting tables in a casino and you talk to me about money? Please.”
“Money is still money,” he said. “And I don’t like to lose it.”
She was trembling, but he knew it wasn’t fear that caused it. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Di Navarra,” she began in a diamond-edged voice. “I made a mistake, but it cost me far more than it cost you. When you spend every last penny you have to get somewhere, because you’ve staked your entire future on one meeting with someone important, and then you fail in your goal and lose your home, and then have to provide for your—”
She stopped, closed her eyes and swallowed. When she opened them again, they were hot and glittering. “When you fail so spectacularly that you’ve lost everything and then find yourself at rock bottom, working in a casino to make ends meet, then you can be indignant, okay? Until then, spare me your wounded act.”
She brushed past him, her tray balanced on one hand as she navigated the crowd to deliver her drinks. Drago watched her go, his blood sizzling. She was hot and beautiful and defiant, and she intrigued him more than he cared to admit.
In fact, she excited him in a way that Bridgett, and any of the other women he’d dated recently, did not. And, damn her, she was still perfect for the ad campaign. She wasn’t quite as fresh-faced as she’d been a year ago, but she now had something more. Some quality he couldn’t quite place his finger on but that he wanted nevertheless.
And he always got what he wanted, no matter the cost. He stood there with eyes narrowed, watching her deliver drinks with a false smile pasted on her face. There was something appealing about Holly Craig, something exciting.
He intended to find out what it was. And then he intended to harness it for his own purposes.
CHAPTER THREE
HOLLY’S SHIFT ENDED at one in the morning. She changed her shoes and grabbed her duffel before heading out to catch the streetcar. Once she’d ridden the streetcar as far as she could go, she would catch the bus the rest of the way home. It was a long, tiring ride, but she had no choice. It was what she could afford.
She exited the casino and started down the street. A car passed her, and then another pulled alongside. Her heart picked up, but she refused to look. The streetcar wasn’t far and she didn’t want to cause trouble for herself by glaring at a jerk in a sedan. It wasn’t the first time some guy thought he could pick her up, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
“Would you like a ride?”
Holly’s heart lurched. She stopped and turned to stare at the occupant of the gleaming limousine. He sat in the back, the window down, an arm resting casually on the sill.
“No,” she said, starting to walk again. Her blood simmered. So many things she’d wanted to say to this arrogant bastard earlier, but she’d held her tongue.
Which was necessary, she realized. It would do no good to antagonize Drago di Navarra. Not only that, but there was also a little prickle of dread growing in her belly at the thought of him learning about Nicky. No doubt he would think she’d done that on purpose, too.
Which was ridiculous, considering he’d been the one to assure her that birth control was taken care of.
“It’s late and you must be tired,” he said, his voice so smooth and cultured. Oh, how she hated those dulcet Italian tones!
“I am tired,” she told him without looking at him. The limo kept pace with her as she walked, and it irritated her to think of him sitting there so comfortably while she trod on aching feet across the pavement. “But I’m tired every night and I manage. So thanks anyway.”
Drago laughed softly. “So spirited, Holly. Nothing at all like the girl who came to New York with starry-eyed dreams of success.”
A bubble of helpless anger popped low in her belly. She stopped and spun around, marching over to the car. It was completely unlike her, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. The urge to confront him was unbearable. The limo halted.
“I might have been naive then, but I’m not now. I know the world is a cruel place and that some people who have absolutely everything they could ever want are even crueler than that.” She tossed a stray lock of hair over her shoulder with trembling fingers. “So if I’m spirited, as you say, I had to learn to be that way. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I don’t want to be eaten.”
Spirited? She hardly thought of herself that way at all. No, more like she was a survivor because she had to be. Because someone else depended on her. Someone tiny and helpless.
Drago opened the car door and stepped out, and Holly took a step back. He was so tall, so broad, so perfect.
No, not perfect. A jerk!
“Get in the car, Holly,” he said, his voice deep and commanding. “Don’t be so stubborn.”
Holly folded her arms beneath her breasts and cocked a hip. “I don’t have to do what you order me to do, Drago,” she said, using his name on purpose. Reminding him they’d once been intimate and that she wasn’t an employee—or, heaven forbid, a girlfriend—to be ordered around. It felt bold and wicked and brave, and that was precisely what she needed to be in order to face him right now. “Besides, won’t your lady friend be angry if you drag me along for the ride?”
His nostrils flared in irritation. One thing she remembered about Drago di Navarra was that he was not accustomed to anything less than blind obedience. It gave her a sense of supreme satisfaction to thwart that expectation.
“Bridgett is no longer an issue,” he said haughtily, and Holly laughed. He looked surprised.
“Poor Bridgett, tossed out on her gorgeous derriere without a clue as to what she did wrong.”
Drago left the door open and came over to her. He was so tall she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. Her first instinct was to flee, but she refused to give in to it. Not happening. She’d been through too much to run away at the first sign of trouble. She told herself that she was far stronger than she’d been a year ago. She had to be.
She was.
“Get in the car, Holly, or I’ll pick you up and toss you in it,” he growled. It surprised her to realize that she could smell his anger. It was sharp and hot, with the distinct smell of a lit match.
“I’d like to see you try,” she threw at him, heedless of the sizzle in his glare. “This is America, buddy, and you can’t just kidnap people off the street.”
Holly didn’t quite know what happened next, but suddenly she was in the air, slung over his shoulder before she could do a thing to stop him.
“Put me down!” she yelled, beating her fists against his back as he carried her over to the car. The next instant, she was tilting downward again, and she clung to him as if he was going to drop her. But he tossed her into the car instead, tossed her bag in after her, and then he was inside and the door slammed shut.
Holly flung herself at the opposite door, but it was locked tight. The limo began to speed down Canal Street. Holly turned and slammed her back against the seat, glaring at the arrogant Italian billionaire sitting at the opposite end. He looked smug. And he didn’t have a hair out of place, while she had to scrape a tangle of hair from her face and shove it back over her ears.
“How dare you?” she seethed. Her heart pounded and adrenaline shoved itself into her limbs, her nerves, until she felt as if she were wound so tight she would split at the seams. If his anger was a lit match, hers was a raging fire. “If anyone saw that, you’re in big trouble.”
“I doubt it,” he said. He leaned forward then, gray eyes glittering in the darkened car. “Now, tell me where you live, Holly Craig, and my driver will take you home. Much easier, no?”
Holly glared.
“Come, Holly. It’s late and you look tired.”
She wanted to refuse—but then she rattled off her address. What choice did she have? It was late, she was tired, and she needed to get Nicky from Mrs. Turner. If she had to let this man take her there, so be it. At least she would arrive far earlier than if she took the bus. And that would make Mrs. Turner happy, no doubt.
“Do you have a guilty conscience?” she asked when he’d given the driver the address.
He laughed. “Hardly.”
That stung, but she told herself she should hardly be surprised. He’d thrown her out without a shred of remorse, and then refused all attempts to contact him. Heartless man.
“Then why the sudden chivalrous offer of a ride home?”
His gaze slid over her, and her skin prickled with telltale heat. She gritted her teeth, determined not to feel even a sliver of attraction for this man. Before she’d met Drago di Navarra, she’d thought she was a sensible woman in control of her own emotions. He’d rather exploded that notion in her face.
And continued to explode it as her body reacted to his presence without regard to her feelings for him. Feelings of loathing, she reminded herself. Feelings of sheer dislike.
