The Orsini Brides. Sandra Marton
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he believed was that she was lying. To him. To herself. If he wanted her, he could have her. Now. Here. But he didn’t. Damnit, he didn’t. What he wanted was to get everything to do with Cesare Orsini out of his life.
“Enough of these games,” he growled. “What is your name? And what do you want?”
“I want you to face facts.” Anna’s voice was steady. Amazing, because her pulse was ragged. “No matter what you claim, I can make an excellent case for you knowing my identity all along.” She smiled brightly. “So if you want to talk about compromising one’s legal position …”
“An excellent speech. Unfortunately, it’s also meaningless. I didn’t know your name on that plane. I still don’t.”
Anna gave a negligent shrug. “He said, she said. Stuff like that is bread and butter in courts of law.”
“Which brings me to the second reason your little speech is meaningless.” He smiled. “This would never get adjudicated in a court of law.”
“I’m an attorney.”
Another quick smile, this one pure venom. “Not in Italy.”
Damnit, he was quick, and he was right. She had no legal standing here. She’d tried telling that to her father. You want a lawyer, find one who’s Italian, she’d said, but Cesare had been adamant. This was a family matter. A personal matter. He didn’t need a stranger to speak for him, for Sofia. He needed her.
“So,” the Prince of All He Surveyed said, “we have a—what would you call it? A situation. I am the rightful owner of land your client would like to claim is his.”
“The land in question belongs to my client’s wife. She is the rightful owner.”
Draco shrugged, walked to his impressive desk, hitched a hip onto its edge.
“I agreed to meet with Cesare Orsini’s representative as a courtesy.”
“You agreed,” Anna said coolly, “because you know you have a problem on your hands.”
She wasn’t wrong. There were those in the judiciary who would be more than happy to see a Valenti prince trapped in endless legal wrangling over a mess like this. The land was indisputably his, but thanks to the way things worked in Sicily, it could take years to put the case to rest.
Assuming there was a case, and there wouldn’t be.
He knew enough about Cesare Orsini and men like him to understand they had only two methods of settling debts.
One involved blood.
The other …
Draco sighed. His plane was back in service; his pilot was already en route to Rome so he could fly him back to Hawaii, the sea, the sun and the warm bed of his mistress—a woman who would not play hot then cold, as this one did.
“Very well.” He went behind the desk, sat down in a chair, pulled open a drawer, took out a gold pen and a leather checkbook. “How much?”
“I beg your pardon? How much what?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m tired of playing games. How much does Orsini want?”
“To buy his land?”
A muscle knotted in Draco’s jaw. “The land is not his to sell.”
The woman gave him a smile that would have sent a diabetic to the hospital. She was going to drive him crazy!
“I am not offering to buy it, I am offering—”
“A payoff?”
“Compensation. What does your client want to end this insane charade?”
Anna tossed her briefcase on a chair and strolled to the enormous desk. It was probably very old, and obviously hand carved. Mythological griffins dove on falcons, falcons dove on rabbits, wolves sank their fangs into the hindquarters of stags and brought them to their knees.
The history of the landed gentry, she thought coldly. She knew a lot about that history. She’d made a point of studying it when she’d first realized her father’s true profession, hoping against hope that understanding the old Sicilian antagonisms would help her understand him.
What she’d ended up understanding was that the world could be a brutally unfair place, but the world of her father was more than brutal.
Right now, though, what she was seeing firsthand went a long way toward validating her opinion of princes who thought they could take whatever they wanted from mere mortals, and get away with it.
“Well?”
She looked up. The prince, gold pen poised, was watching her much as the wolves carved into his desk had surely watched the creatures they hunted. He looked intent. Determined. Coldly analytical, and certain of how the chase would end.
Not so fast, big boy, she thought, and she took a long breath.
“Well, what?”
“You’re pushing your luck,” Draco said softly.
“And you’re making foolish assumptions if you think you can buy your way out of this.” Anna jerked her chin toward the checkbook. “You can put that thing away.”
Draco said nothing for a long minute. A muscle knotted and unknotted in his jaw. Then he dropped the pen and checkbook back into the drawer and slammed it shut with enough force to send the sound bouncing around the room.
“Let’s get down to basics,” he snapped. “If you don’t want money, what do you want?”
“You know what I want. The land, of course.”
“That’s impossible. The land is mine. I have the deed to it. No court in Sicily will—”
“Perhaps not.”
“Then, how—”
Anna gave him her best look of wide-eyed innocence.
“Roman Aristocrat Steals Land from Helpless Grandmother,” she said sweetly, and batted her lashes. “Maybe they can work the words puppies and kittens into that headline, too.”
“You left something out. Sicilian Citizen Protects Land from Theft by American Hoodlum.” Draco flashed a smug smile. “Or don’t you like that wording?”
“You’re no more Sicilian than I am!”
“My ancestors settled in Sicily five hundred years ago.”
“You mean they invaded it five hundred years ago. The Orsinis were already there.”
“I asked you a question. What do you want?”
“And I answered it. I want the land. If you think my client will run from a newspaper calling him a gangster …” Anna showed her teeth in a brilliant smile. “Trust me, Valenti. It won’t be the first time.”
“Do not address me that way,” Draco said, hating himself for sounding ridiculous, hating the woman for pushing him to it. “As for headlines …” He shrugged. “They come and go.”
She smiled. It was the kind of smile that made him want to shoot to his feet and toss her out of his office …
Or take her in his arms and remind her of just how easily he could change her cold contempt to hot desire.
“The thing is, oh powerful prince, we love that kind of stuff in the States. We give it all our attention. Page Six of the Post. People. US. The Star. All those juicy tabloids, the even juicier internet blogs. The cable news channels.”
“You’re pushing your luck again,” he said in a soft voice.
She knew she was, but it was too late to back down now.
“Even the real newspapers—the New