CHAPTER ONE

      “I BEG YOUR PARDON, sir,” his secretary said in the pointedly diffident way that always managed to convey the full range of his feelings.

      Pascal Furlani shared them.

      And he was not a man who ordinarilyf accepted the existence of feelings, unless they suited him. Or benefited him in some way.

      “I have taken the liberty of compiling yet another slate of candidates,” Guglielmo continued in that same tone, because he was not the sort of secretary who was afraid to share his opinions, feelings, or thoughts, however he might dress them up. “As the last several met with disfavor.”

      There was a dig in that, Pascal knew. He stood, not at the window that looked out over one of Rome’s wealthiest neighborhoods, but at the glass partition that separated him from the rest of his sleek, modern office. It was the perfect antidote to the fussiness and great weight of Roman history everywhere else in the city.

      Pascal knew too well what the three-thousand-year-old city looked like, from its forgotten streets to its most renowned piazzas. He knew how it felt to grow up rough and ignored in the shadow of the ruins of former great glories. And what life in this city had made him, the cast-off bastard son of a man who acknowledged only his legitimate issue and turned his back entirely on his mistakes.

      He had earned every inch of the sweeping views his office commanded, but he was far prouder of what he’d done inside the walls of The Furlani Company.

      Pascal had considered it a decent start when his personal wealth exceeded not only that of his father, but of all his father’s legitimate children, too. Combined. He’d achieved that milestone in the first year after the accident.

      The accident.

      Pascal’s lips thinned in inevitable displeasure as his mind tugged him back to the period of his life he most wanted to forget. The one stretch of his life where he’d lost focus. Where he’d come this close to forgetting himself completely.

      He would never forget that his father had thrown him away like so much trash. He refused to forgive it. He did not hunger for revenge, necessarily—he wanted his life to be its own reckoning. Pascal chose to dominate from afar and show his father precisely as much interest as had been shown to him. And he had not wavered in this purpose since he’d been a small boy—save for that one regrettable winter.

      It was not every man who could say that his rise from the ashes was not metaphoric, but entirely literal. The way they always did, Pascal’s fingers found the grooves on his jaw that told the tale of the car crash that had left him scarred forever.

      He quite liked them. The scars reminded him who he was and where he’d been, and how close he’d come to walking away from his purpose and ambition for what was, in the end, such a small temptation.

      Not that his memories of that time were…small, exactly.

      Nonetheless, the office reminded him where he was going. What he’d built with his own hands and force of will. It reinforced his goals. All of them sleek, moneyed, and each a pointed jab at the father who had never claimed him and the memory of a lost mother who had left him to his fate with no more than a shrug.

      He had no intention of forgetting every last moment of how he’d come to be here.

      “If you’ll turn your attention to your tablet, sir,” came his secretary’s voice, excessively placid. Its own pointed jab, as usual. “I have arranged a selection of heiresses for your viewing pleasure, ordered in terms of their social standing.”

      Pascal turned away from his offices, all that granite and steel that he found so comforting here in the middle of ancient Rome. The building was filled to bursting with his vision. His money. His people acting to bring his dreams to fruition.

      It was time for him to take the next step and find a wife.

      Whether Pascal wanted to be married had little to do with it. A wife would make him look more stable, more settled, which some of the more conservative accounts preferred. A wife would conceivably keep him out of the tabloids, which his board would certainly prefer. And a wife would give Pascal legitimate heirs to his fortune and power.

      Pascal would die before he consigned a child of his to the things he’d suffered, first and foremost being the lack of his father’s name.

      In addition, getting married would put an end to the mutterings of his board. That Pascal, as a single man with healthy appetites, was an embarrassment to his own company. That Pascal was somehow less trustworthy than other CEOs, imbued as they all were with wives and children, all legitimate and legal.

      No one ever mentioned the mistresses and unclaimed bastards on the side, of course. No one ever did.

      Pascal dropped his hand from his jaw. Something about his scars—which he knew were faded now to white instead of the angry red they’d been at first—was making him maudlin today.

      Welcome to December, a voice inside him said. Snidely.

      He knew what time of year it was. And why his thoughts kept returning to the crash and the flames that had very nearly been the end of him. But he had no intention of celebrating that anniversary. He never did.

      He eyed his secretary, waiting with obvious impatience, instead.

      “What makes you think that this collection of desperate, grasping socialites will be more appealing than the last?” he asked.

      “Are we looking for appealing, sir? I’m not sure I had that on my list. I was looking more for suitable.”

      Pascal was sure he saw the hint of a smirk on his secretary’s face, though the other man knew better than to succumb in full.

      “Careful, Guglielmo,” he murmured. “Or I may begin to suspect that you do not take this enterprise as seriously as you should.”

      He walked back to his desk, a massive slab of granite that looked like what it was. A throne and a monument to Pascal’s hard-won power and influence. Guglielmo gestured toward the tablet computer that lay in the center, and Pascal checked a sigh as he picked it up and scrolled through the offerings.

      Lady