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Unlike many grooms the night before they wed, Vincenzo Borgia, Vin to his friends, had slept very well last night.
He knew what he was doing today. He was marrying the perfect woman. His courtship of Anne Dumaine had been easy, and so had their engagement. No discord. No messy emotion. No sex, even, at least not yet.
But today, their lives would be joined, as would their families—and more to the point, their companies. When Vin’s SkyWorld Airways merged with her father’s Air Transatlantique, Vin would gain thirty new transatlantic routes at a stroke, including the lucrative routes of New York–London and Boston–Paris. Vin’s company would nearly double in size, at very advantageous terms. Why would Jacques Dumaine be anything but generous to his future son-in-law?
After today, there would be no more surprises in Vin’s life. No more uncertainty or questions about the future. He liked that thought.
Yes, Vin had slept well last night, and tonight, after he finally made love to his very traditional bride, who’d insisted on remaining a virgin until they married, he expected to sleep even better. And for every other night for the rest of his well-ordered, enjoyably controllable life.
If he wasn’t overwhelmingly attracted to his bride, what of it? Passion died soon after marriage, he’d been told, so perhaps it was a good thing. You couldn’t miss what you’d never had.
And if he and Anne seemed to have little in common other than the wedding and the merger, well, what difference did that make? Men and women had different interests. They weren’t supposed to be the same. He would cover her weaknesses. She would cover his.
Because whatever his enemies and former lovers might accuse, Vin knew he had a few. A lack of patience. A lack of empathy. In the business world, those were strengths, but once he had children, he knew greater sources of patience and empathy would be required.
He was ready to settle down. He wanted a family. Other than building his empire it was his primary reason for getting married, but not his only. After his last sexual encounter, an explosive night with a gorgeous redhead who’d given him the most amazing sex of his life, then disappeared, he decided he was fed up with unpredictable love affairs.
So, a few months later, he’d sensibly proposed to Anne Dumaine.
Born in Montreal, Anne was beautiful, with an impeccable pedigree, certain to be a good mother and corporate wife. She spoke several languages, including French and Italian, and held a degree in international business. Best of all she came with an irresistible dowry—Air Transatlantique.
Vin smiled at Anne now, standing across from him as they waited to speak their vows. She looked like Princess Grace, he thought, blonde and grave, with a modest white gown and a long lace veil that had been handmade by Belgian nuns. Flawless. A picture-perfect bride.
“If anyone here today has reason,” the archbishop presiding over their marriage said solemnly, “why these two may not lawfully be joined...”
There was a scuffle, a loud bang. Footsteps. From the corner of his eye he saw heads in the audience turn. He refused to look—that would be undisciplined—but his smile grew a little strained.
“...speak now,” the minister finished, “or forever hold your peace.”
“Please! Stop!”
A woman’s voice. Vin’s jaw tightened. Who would dare interrupt their wedding? One of his despondent ex-lovers? How had she gotten past the bodyguards? Furious, he turned.
Vin froze when he saw green eyes fringed with black lashes in a lovely heart-shaped face, and vivid red hair cascading down her shoulders, bright as heart’s blood. She stood in the gray stone cathedral, his dream come to life.
Scarlett. The woman who had haunted his dreams for the last eight months. The flame-haired virgin who’d shared a single night with him he could not forget, then fled the next morning before he could get her number—or even her last name! No woman had ever treated him so badly. She’d inflamed his blood, then disappeared like Cinderella, without so much as a damned glass slipper.
She was dressed completely in black. And barefoot? Her breasts overflowed the neckline of her dress. His gaze returned sharply to her belly. She couldn’t be...
“Please, Vin, you have to help me,” she choked out, her voice echoing against the cool gray stone. “My boss is trying to steal our baby!”
For a moment, Vin stared at her in shock, unable to comprehend her words.
Our baby?
Our?
There was a collective gasp as two thousand people turned to stare at him, waiting for his reaction.
Vin’s body flashed hot, then cold as he felt all control—over the wedding, over his privacy, over his life—ripped from his grasp. Nearby, he saw the glower of Anne’s red-faced father, saw her mother’s shocked eyes. Fortunately he had no family of his own to disappoint.
He turned to his bride, expecting to see tears or at least agonized hurt, expecting to have to explain that he hadn’t cheated on her, of course not, that this had all happened months before they’d met. But Anne’s beautiful face was carefully blank.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I need a moment.”
“Take all the time you want.”
Vin went slowly down the aisle toward Scarlett. The people watching from the pews seemed to fall away, their faces smearing into mere smudges of color.
His heart was pounding as he stopped in front of the woman he’d almost convinced himself didn’t exist. Looking at her belly, he said in a low voice, “You’re pregnant?”
She met his eyes. “Yes.”
“The baby’s mine?”
Her chin lifted. “You think I would lie?”
Vin remembered her soft gasp of pain when he’d first taken her, holding her virgin body so hot and hard and tight against his own in the darkness of his bedroom. Remembered how he’d kissed her tears away until her pain melted away to something very different...
“You couldn’t have told me before now?” he bit out.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t...” Then she glanced behind her, and her expression changed to fear.
Three men were striding up the aisle, the leader’s face a mask of cold fury.
“There you are, you little...” He roughly grabbed Scarlett’s wrist. “This is a private matter,” he snarled at Vin, barely looking at him. “Return to your ceremony.”
Vin almost did. It would have been easy to let them go. He felt the pressure of his waiting bride, of the pending merger, of her family, of the cathedral and the archbishop and the many guests, some of whom had flown around the world to be here. He could have told himself that Scarlett was lying and turned his back on her. He could have walked back to calmly speak the vows that would bind his life to Anne.
But something stopped him.
Maybe it was the man’s iron-like grip on Scarlett’s slender wrist. Or the way he and his two goons were dragging her back down the aisle, in spite of her helpless struggles. Maybe it was the panicked, stricken expression on her lovely face as all those wealthy, powerful guests silently watched, doing nothing to intervene.
Or maybe it was the ghost of his own memory, long repressed, of how it had once felt to be powerless and unloved, dragged from his only home against his will.
Whatever it was, Vin found himself doing something he hadn’t done in a long, long time.
Getting involved.
“Stop right there,” he ordered.
The other man’s face snapped toward him. “Stay out of this.”
Vin stalked toward him. “The lady doesn’t want to leave with you.”
“She’s distraught. Not to mention crazy.” The man, sleek and overfed as a Persian cat, yanked on her wrist. “I’m taking her to my psychiatrist. She’s going to be locked away for a long, long time.”
“No!” Scarlett whimpered. She looked up at Vin, her eyes shining with tears. “I’m not crazy. He used to be my boss. He’s trying to force me to marry him and give our baby away.”
Give our baby away.
The four words cut through Vin’s heart like a knife. His whole body became still.
And he knew there was no way he was going to let this man take her.
His voice was ice-cold. “Let her go.”
“You think you can make me?”
“Do you know my name?” Vin said quietly.
The man looked at him contemptuously. “I have no...” His voice trailed off, then he sucked in his breath. “Borgia.” He exhaled the two syllables through his teeth. Vin saw the fear in the man’s eyes. It was a reaction he’d grown accustomed to. “I...I didn’t realize...”
Vin glanced at his own bodyguards, who’d entered the cathedral and surrounded the other men with surgical precision, ready to strike. He gave his chief of security a slight shake of his head, telling them to keep their distance. Then he looked at the man holding Scarlett. “Get. Out. Now.”
He obeyed, abruptly releasing her. He turned and fled, his two bodyguards swiftly following him out of the cathedral.
Noise suddenly rose on all sides. Scarlett fell with a sob into Vin’s arms, against the front of his tuxedo.
And a young man leaped up from a middle pew.
“Anne, I told you! Don’t marry him! Who cares if you’re disinherited?” Looking around the nave, the stranger proclaimed fiercely and loudly, “I’ve been sleeping with the bride for the last six months!”
Total chaos broke out then. The father of the bride started yelling, the mother of the bride wept noisily and, faced with such turmoil, the bride quietly and carefully fainted into a puffy heap of white tulle.
But Vin barely noticed. His world had shrunk to two things. Scarlett’s tears as she wept in relief against his chest. And the tremble of her pregnant body, cradled beneath the protection of his arms.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e91e497c-640c-5f99-b61a-631cc7fdbb1e)
OUT OF THE frying pan, into the fire.
Scarlett had escaped Blaise, but at what price?
For the last hour, she’d tried to calm the fearful beat of her heart as she sat in a faded floral chair next to a window overlooking a private garden. Vin had brought her to the private sitting room in the rectory behind the cathedral and told her to wait while he sorted things out. A kindly old lady—a housekeeper of some sort?—had pushed a hot cup of tea into her trembling hand.
But the tea had grown cold. She set the china cup into the saucer with a clatter.
Scarlett didn’t know which scared her more. The memory of Blaise’s snarling face. Or the fear of what Vin Borgia might do now to take over her future—and her baby’s.
She should run.
She should run now.
Running was the only way to ensure their freedom.
Growing up, Scarlett had lived in over twenty different places, tiny towns hidden in forests and mountains, sometimes in shacks without electricity or running water. She’d rarely been able to go to school, and when she did, she’d had to dye her red hair brown and use a different name. Things that normal kids took for granted, such as having a real home, friends, going to the same school for a whole year, were luxuries Scarlett had only dreamed of. She’d never played sports, or sung in the school choir, or gone to prom. She’d never even gone on a real date.
Until she was twenty-four. The day she’d met Vin Borgia, she’d been weak, emotional, vulnerable. And he’d caught her up like a butterfly in a net.
She looked out the window with its view of the back garden, full of roses and ivy. A secret garden, surrounded by New York skyscrapers. A strangely calm, verdant place that seemed miles from the noisy traffic and honking cabs of Fifth Avenue. Rising to her feet, she started to pace.
A frosty gray afternoon last February, she’d been picking up a medicine prescription for Mrs. Falkner when she received a text from an old Boston friend of her father’s with news that had staggered her.
Alan Berry had just died in an inconsequential knife fight in a Southie bar. The man who’d betrayed her father seventeen years before, who’d cut a deal for his own freedom and forced Harry Ravenwood to go on the run with his sick wife and young daughter, had died a meaningless death after a meaningless life. All for nothing.
Standing in the drugstore, Scarlett’s knees had gone weak. She’d felt sick.
Five minutes later, she’d found herself at a dive bar across the street, ordering her first drink. The sharp pungent taste had made her cough.
“Let me guess.” A low, amused voice had spoken from the red leather banquette in the corner. “It’s your first time.”
She’d turned. The man came out of the shadows slowly. Black eyes. Dark hair. Powerful broad shoulders. A black suit. Hard edges everywhere. Five-o’clock shadow. He was like a hero—or a handsome villain—from a movie, so masculine and powerful and handsome that he’d affected her even more than the vodka shot.
“I had a...bad day.” Her voice trembled.
An ironic smile lifted the corners of his cruel, sensual mouth. “Why else would you be drinking in the afternoon?”
She wiped her eyes with a laugh. “For fun?”
“Fun. That’s an idea.” The man had come close enough to see her red-rimmed eyes and tear-streaked cheeks in the shadowy dive bar. She’d braced herself for questions, but he just slid onto the bar stool beside her and raised his hand to the bartender. “Let’s see if the second shot goes down easier.”
In spite of what she knew about him now, Vin Borgia still affected her like that. When Scarlett had seen him standing at the altar with his beautiful bride, all the memories had come back of their night together in February, when he’d taken her back to his elegant, Spartan, wildly expensive penthouse. He’d seduced her easily, claiming her virginity as if he owned it. He’d made her life explode with color and joy.
She’d known Vin’s name, since his doorman had greeted him with the utmost respect as “Mr. Borgia.” But she’d never told Vin her last name. Some habits were hard to break.
A phone call from Mrs. Falkner’s nurse had woken Scarlett when Vin still slept. Only her sense of duty had forced her to wrench herself from the warmth of his bed. She’d returned to the Falkner mansion and handed over the prescription, then dreamily looked up her one and only lover online.
That had woken her up fast. She’d been horrified by what she found.
Vincenzo Borgia was a ruthless airline billionaire who’d risen from nothing and didn’t give a damn who got hurt in his pursuit of world domination. She couldn’t imagine why a man like that had seduced her, when he usually had liaisons with socialites and supermodels. But she was grateful she hadn’t given him her last name. She wouldn’t give him the chance to hurt her.
Later, when she’d discovered she was pregnant, she’d wondered whether she’d made the right decision. But seeing Vin’s engagement announcement in the paper had clinched it.
Scarlett had never expected to see Vin again. She’d planned to raise her baby alone.
She wasn’t scared to be alone. She’d grown up on the run, and her fugitive father had secretly taught her skills after her mother got too sick to notice. How to pick pockets. How to pick locks. And most of all, how to be invisible and survive on almost nothing.
Compared to what she’d already lived through, raising a child as a single parent would be easy. She wasn’t a fugitive. She’d never committed any crimes. She had a marketable skill as a nurse’s aide. She’d even saved some money. She no longer had to hide.
Or did she?
Scarlett stopped pacing the thick rug of the cathedral rectory, staring blankly at the faded floral furniture. Did she really want to take the chance that Vin Borgia, the man she’d read such horrible things about, could be a good father? Did she dare take that risk, just because she’d loved her own father so much?
She could see the soft shimmer of dust motes through a beam of fading golden sunlight from the window. She put her hands gently on her belly.
Vin had saved her from Blaise, but rich, powerful men all had one thing in common: they wanted to be in control. And Vin Borgia was richer and more powerful than most.
