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Nothing but the best for Stefan Bianco.
But every time she walked in through the doors of the Chatsfield, saw the eager staff greet Stefan, Clio was reminded of the fact that Stefan didn’t own a home. Anywhere in the world. He lived aboard his private jet, flying across the globe as his business dictated, without any connection to the world.
And here in New York, of all places, he hadn’t even intended to stay past the week.
They had decided they would just leave it as an open-ended engagement. Scary prospect as it had been, she had even started looking for a new job.
The walls felt like they would cave in on them and trap them in the tension forever as the steel doors of the elevator closed and they were carried to the penthouse suite.
The unobstructed panoramic views of Manhattan from the suite’s glass balconies didn’t fascinate her as they usually did. The glittering diamond skylights, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the unique artwork alongside stunning artifacts...nothing held her interest tonight.
It was the silent man who did.
Without taking his gaze off of her, he undid his cuffs. Next came the buttons on his dress shirt. Clio held his gaze, even as the shadow of his olive skin under the shirt beckoned.
The column of his throat was a visual feast as were the chiseled angles of his face.
“Damn it, Stefan. Say something.”
Not even Jackson’s ugly name-calling shredded her composure as Stefan’s silence did.
His olive green gaze was hard, flinty even. “I have never been maneuvered into a corner so publicly and so irrevocably, bella. I think I have been rendered mute.”
Maneuvered? Her stomach tying in knots, Clio blinked. There was no anger in his words, no resentment in his tone. Something else lingered there on a razor’s edge, waiting to strike.
“Stefan, I don’t know what came over me. I have never lost my temper like that.”
His posture screamed careless lounging but Clio knew he noticed every breath she took, every nuance that crossed her face.
“I know it’s not something you ask a friend over dinner, but I would owe you...” Shaking her head, Clio caught the words in her mouth. In her wildest dreams, she had never thought she would beg a man to marry her, to ask someone to turn such a big lie into reality.
She reconsidered it in her own head.
If she didn’t value herself, no one else would. Not Jackson, not the world and definitely not Stefan.
And she needed Stefan to value her, to respect her. Suddenly, it felt like the most important thing in the world that he did, that she become at least half the person he had known a decade ago.
“I’ll bring you everything I can on him, Stefan. This is my city, and my life. I will not let him steal any more from me.”
“Think carefully, Clio. You might only be exchanging one awful man for another. Because I’ll not change anything in my life for a woman, cara. Not even a surprise wife.”
Now there was no taunting smile, there was no lazy charm, only utter seriousness in his gaze. Urgency pounding through her, she reached him and grabbed the lapels of his shirt. Thrust her face so close to his that the masculine heat of him swathed her, pinging across her skin, infiltrating every cell and pore. “What do you mean?”
The rhythmic whir of the fax machine in the open study as it cranked out documents filled the cavernous lounge. The sound chafed against her skin as Clio waited for an answer, her breath suspended in her throat.
Grasping her wrists, he pushed her back. Prowled to the fax machine and returned with a sheaf of papers.
He produced a gold-tipped fountain pen from somewhere and nodded toward the sheaf of papers.
“It means the marriage will be only in name, Clio, a contractual agreement that we will both sign. It means all you will get from me is a peanut allowance. It means you’ll sign a prenuptial contract and a nondisclosure agreement that you won’t reveal any of this to another soul or sell the story or write a memoir of our life together at a later time.
“It means you won’t dictate who occupies my bed after we’re both through with Jackson, and you’ll not throw allegations of love at me.
“If you accept and then violate any of the above, the consequences will be far-reaching.”
Clio gasped for breath, as if someone had kicked her in the gut, as if something icy and vicious had been stuck in her chest. Tears pricked behind her eyelids, her lungs struggling to breathe.
“You think...you actually think I planned all this?” she poked him in the chest, hurt splintering into a millions shards. “You think I orchestrated it so that our farcical engagement turns into a real marriage and I can mooch off your millions?”
“The thought crossed my mind, sì,” he said, without blinking, without a beat, without wondering how much pain he was causing her with his casually elegant shrug.
Clio slapped him so hard that her arm jerked at the impact. Her entire body shuddered but it was still nothing compared to the sharp pain in her chest.
Before she could draw another breath, she was plastered against his hard body, her arms twisted behind her in a firm grip, her breasts crushed against his chest, her lungs filled with the scent of him.
* * *
Stefan didn’t know what shocked him more. The fact that Clio had actually slapped him, or his outrageous reaction to it.
He had to have truly become a twisted bastard because the sight of her—out of control with anger, her elegance all ruffled, her composure fraying, her lithe body vibrating, turned him on as if a fire had been lit inside his very blood.
That he had driven her to be that old Clio again felt like a win more than anything.
He turned rock hard and she was like heaven in his arms.
He held her hands tight with one hand and shuddered as her breasts rubbed against his chest. The tight tips of her nipples visible against the flimsy silk she had on drew his gaze. The scent of her perfume drenched his pores.
Dio, the woman smelled absolutely divine.
He moved his free hand over his own cheek, and then over hers. She was so silky soft that his mind instantly wandered to other areas. “Corner me into marriage first, then slap me second...no woman has even come close to what you have achieved today, tesoro.”
She pushed at him again with her hands, not that he budged at her attack. “Don’t you dare call me that, whatever the hell it means.”
“Then do not push me into retaliating the only way I know, bella.”
The more she struggled against him, the more aroused he became. He gave himself over to the moment and enjoyed the novelty of his own reaction.
Most of the women he had dated the past few years had been simpering, talking him up, catering to his every need before he even knew it. Until one face blended into another, until he was nothing but a carefully constructed projection of himself in their eyes, until there was nothing but emptiness inside him...
No one knew who he was, no woman was herself with him...
That Clio wouldn’t hesitate to be herself with him was an aphrodisiac unlike anything. It morphed his physical hunger for her into something else...
“I always wondered about that even temper of yours, bella. That first year at Columbia I would spend hours wondering if you ever lost it and how you would look if you did,” he drawled, and tugged at her hair.
Her gorgeous hair tumbled down to her shoulders like amber fire. Still holding her with one hand, he twisted the hair around his fingers. Wondered for the millionth time how she would look wearing nothing.
“I’ve never in my life even hurt a fly,” she muttered, but it came out husky and uneven.
An atavistic satisfaction filled him. She was just as turned on as he was, struggling with her want even as she despised him for doubting her.
“That makes me feel extra special.”
“That’s because you’re an utter bastard.”
“Now you’re learning, Clio.”
He buried his face in her hair and breathed deeply.
There was a freedom that she understood him now. That she had finally learned he was not the friend she remembered with such fondness. That the man he was now could distrust her motives and yet still want her with a feral need that knew no reason.
That she realized he was not doing this for her but because of his desperate need to bring down Jackson.
She would not trust him now, would not expect anything from him and there was a relief in it.
Suddenly, she sagged against him, as if the fight depleted out of her. And he relaxed his arms around her.
“Why are you doing this?” she finally said in such a small voice that it shook him more than her slap had.
“Because it’s impossible for me to trust your motive, unbearable for me to give a woman place in my life, even temporarily. Isn’t that clear enough, bella? The fact that I’m even contemplating doing this is because I need that proof, Clio. But make sure you don’t up the price any more.
“If you accept, we’ll be married next week. Here at the Chatsfield, just as you want. We will show Jackson and New York a wedding they won’t forget soon. You’ll be the most beautiful bride New York has ever seen.”
A shiver racked Clio and instantly his hold on her tightened, his body a deceptively warm fortress around her.
“I will sign wherever you want me to, I will follow every condition of yours. I have...lost so much already, I... You’ll have your revenge,” she said bitterly. “There’s definitely something fishy with Jackson’s numbers.”
“Good,” he replied, stepping away from her.
He had shown her his true self and yet, it felt as if he was the one who had been burned.
* * *
“Good night, Stefan,” Clio whispered, her throat aching, her gut churning in panic.
What had she done? Oh, God, what had she done? How could she have not seen what her enraged, impulsive declaration would turn him into?
Without casting another glance at him, she walked away, her head held high.
* * *
For the first time in a decade, Stefan felt the landscape of his life slip from his fingers and all because of a woman. Again.
The only way he knew to protect Clio and himself from this was to set rules, to remove her from his mind, to wipe and forget the taste of her from his thoughts and definitely decouple her from his lust.
To set expectations that neither of them could falter over. Crushing the overwhelming urge to kiss the hurt away from her mouth, he walked into his office and turned on the huge plasma screens mounted over the far wall.
Walking into the closet, he stripped and dressed in his workout shorts. Cranked up the rowing machine he’d had specially installed in his study and went to work on it.
He was not only seething against the course he had set tonight, but he had sexual frustration added to the mix.
Just the cranking of the machine and the burn of his thigh and arm muscles went a long way toward calming him down.
The news would already be spreading, he knew.
The fact that he—the quintessential third bachelor among the Columbia Four—was finally getting married, and in just a week, so soon after Rocco’s and Christian’s fairy-tale weddings, would unleash a storm he couldn’t contain.
A picture of him and Clio entering the Chatsfield tonight, immediately followed by a shot of them from a decade ago, lounging on the steps of University Hall at Columbia with wide smiles on their faces, flashed on the screen.
Not everyone trusts a corporation with a predatory playboy at its helm, he had heard his board bemoan more than once when he had questioned why they hadn’t made a particular deal.
An evening of being an affianced man—and to Clio—had already changed the business world’s perception of him. And stealing Clio from Jackson, as the media was calling it, meant that the focus stayed on his business and him.
It worked for his business and his brand to have a wife, and Clio at that, who was sophisticated and levelheaded and, more important, had no expectations of him. Even if she had, he had made sure he had destroyed them tonight.
It worked every which way he looked at it except for his heart.
Hearing the phrase “Reunited College Sweethearts” stuck in his craw. He was the last man who should have a fairy-tale love story come true line attached to his name. He was the last man Clio should have come to for help, he acknowledged now with bitter resignation.
Because, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t change himself now. The poison Serena had brought into his life had infused his very blood.
All he cared about now was destroying Jackson and keeping himself and Clio intact until the end of this marriage.
* * *
“If you want to leave all this behind, leave Stefan behind,” Zayed whispered in her ear even as he amiably tucked her bare arm along his under the watchful, hawk-like gaze of Stefan at the end of the vast hall on the other side, “then all you have to do is say so, Clio. I shall signal Rocco and a limousine will appear outside the hotel in a matter of seconds. In a few hours, you can be in Milan, or Hong Kong, or even Gazbiyaa if you don’t mind the stark and beautiful desert land of a country on the brink of war.”
Blinking, Clio tore her gaze away from Stefan’s olive green one. The Chatsfield glittered, and the hungry hush of designer-clad guests, a power list of New York’s Who’s Who, reached her in stifling waves.
They were all here to witness her union with one of the most sought-after bachelors in the world. Reminding herself to smile like a woman madly in love, she pasted a smile and turned toward Zayed.
And caught the scowl on her fiancé’s face in the infinitesimal moment before she turned.
They were standing at the entrance to the Terrace Room, as it was called, just beyond the French doors of the courtyard of the Chatsfield, a room steeped in history and charm.
The room boasted some of the most impressive historical detailing, created in the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Exquisite crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, bathing the vast room in a golden glow.
Swallowing at the hard knot in her throat, she clutched Zayed’s fingers tightly and he returned the pressure. “I thought your loyalty would be to Stefan, Your Highness.”
“Not you, too, Clio,” Zayed warned her, still a glimmer of the playboy prince in his smile. In just a matter of days, Zayed had gone from second son to the ruler of Gazbiyaa. And Clio couldn’t even begin to imagine what must be going on in his head.
“I thought you would warn Stefan away from me, not the opposite.”
His deep brown eyes shining with kindness, his mouth set into that diplomatic half smile, Zayed shook his head. Why hadn’t she gone to him for help instead of the stubborn Sicilian?
“You forget that Rocco, Christian and I know you as well as Stefan does. And Stefan...he is more than a brother to me, but we have seen him become jaded and more hardened than the rest of us. I wouldn’t want my enemy’s daughter to be caught in that disdain of his. And you...you’re a friend, Clio.”
Clio hugged the warmth in his tone. “He did not force me into anything, Zayed,” she said, wanting to make sure they all understood. Every step of the way, Stefan had only prepared her for what was coming, including his disdain.
