Italian Bachelors: Brooding Billionaires: Ravelli's Defiant Bride / Enthralled by Moretti / The Playboy's Proposition

‘I’d appreciate the opportunity to have a private word with you here tomorrow morning,’ Cristo murmured smoothly as she emerged again. ‘Shall we say at ten?’

Belle nodded agreement. ‘When will you want to meet the children?’ she prompted.

Cristo froze, his facial bones locking tight. ‘I don’t...wish to meet them, that is,’ he extended unapologetically, dark eyes cold as black ice.

Belle paled, uncertain of how to take that statement. Was his lack of interest good or bad news for her siblings? Did that mean that the adoption idea was just a silly rumour? She scrutinised his lean, handsome features with frowning green eyes, unnerved by his icy reserve and lack of humanity. Did he think nothing of the blood tie? A lot of people would just have agreed to meet the children for the sake of it, even if they weren’t particularly interested in them, but Cristo Ravelli had chosen to spurn even that polite pretence.

In acknowledging that, Belle felt sheer loathing suddenly leap through her in a fierce wave of antagonism because she was gutted on her siblings’ behalf by his detachment. Was he refusing to accept that the children were part of the Ravelli family? Obviously. Clearly, Mary Brophy’s children were not good enough to make the grade, just as Mary had never been good enough for Gaetano to marry. Bile scoured Belle’s throat as she sped downstairs to clean up the kitchen and go home. She hoped he wasn’t expecting her to come up and cook breakfast when she found the meal she had cooked thrown in its entirety into the bin. Her face burned but her chin came up. So, it hadn’t been one of her best efforts but in her opinion it had been as much as he deserved!

After spending half the summer with Mary over twenty years earlier, Gaetano had confided that he was unhappily unmarried and Mary’s hopes of a happy ending for her romance had risen high. But Gaetano had not asked his Arabic wife for a divorce or even a separation. Over the years the media had published several stories about his extramarital affairs. Her mother had refused to believe the stories, even after Belle had shown her revealing pictures on the Internet. Mary had always been very quick to make excuses in Gaetano’s defence.

‘He feels trapped and lonely in his marriage. It’s only a business arrangement. She was a friend for years before he married her and he doesn’t love her. He needed a hostess to entertain his business colleagues and she comes from an old-fashioned country where a woman needs a husband if she wants any freedom,’ Mary had reasoned. ‘I can’t hold his marriage against him, Belle. I’m not even an educated woman. I couldn’t do what his princess can do for him.’

Mary Brophy had been hopelessly infatuated with Gaetano Ravelli from the moment she first met him and she had allowed nothing to interfere with her rosy view of their relationship. Her grief in the wake of the helicopter crash that had taken Gaetano’s life had been all-consuming.

‘I know you don’t understand,’ she had said to Belle, ‘but Gaetano was the love of my life. I know he wasn’t interested in marrying me but nothing’s perfect. I wasn’t his match in money or background and I can’t blame him for that. When you love someone, Belle, you accept their flaws and he was too much of a snob to want to marry an ordinary woman like me.’

A woman like me, Belle recalled painfully. It was little wonder that Mary had suffered from low self-esteem. She had travelled from a shotgun wedding at the age of seventeen straight into an abusive marriage and had finally ended up as a married man’s mistress. Life had always been tough for her mother, but then, as Isa was prone to reminding Belle, Mary had always made the wrong choices when it came to the men in her life.

Isa was waiting up for Belle when she got back to the Lodge.

‘Well?’ her grandmother pressed. ‘Did he actually credit the idea that you were a woman in her forties?’

‘No, he assumed I must have got involved with his father when I was very young,’ Belle advanced with a dismissive toss of her head. ‘He did do a lot of staring, though. He’s invited me up to the house to talk to him tomorrow at ten, so presumably the kids’ future will be discussed then.’

The older woman released a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t like the way you’re going about this, Belle. Honesty is always the best policy.’

‘But I won’t be dealing with a nice, honest guy.’

‘You hated Gaetano. Don’t take it out on his son.’

Belle folded her lips at that unwelcome advice. ‘He doesn’t even want to meet the kids.’

Her grandmother shook her greying head, her unhappiness at that news palpable. ‘If only your mother had thought about what she was doing and how much the children would be resented by the rest of Gaetano’s family.’

* * *

Cristo had a troubled night of sleep. He dreamt that he was pursuing a woman with the longest legs possible across a misty landscape. Every time he got close she pulled away and laughed and her resistance made him want her more than ever, lust pounding through his veins like an explosive charge. But when he finally caught up with her, she was a different woman, pale blonde hair falling back from her piquant face to highlight big blue enquiring eyes and instantaneous recoil wakened him. He had broken out in a cold sweat, angry frustration and guilt slicing through him for the one woman he couldn’t enjoy having even in his dreams...Betsy, his brother Nik’s estranged wife. His jawline rigid, Cristo sprang out of bed and went for a shower.

His eyes closed tight shut below the refreshing blast of the power shower. He hadn’t meant to wreck his brother’s marriage. There had been no intent on his part to inflict damage, he reasoned painfully. Betsy had come to him for support, devastated by what she had learned from Zarif. But, unhappily, it had been Cristo who first gave Zarif the destructive news that had ruined Nik’s relationship with his wife. Cristo had broken his brother’s confidence and spoken out of turn, but he had never ever at any stage planned to harm Nik or hoped to steal Betsy from him.

For his own benefit, however, he listed the sins he had committed. He had thought that Nik didn’t deserve a woman like Betsy. He had stood by watching while his brother took his wife for granted and he had not warned him of what he was doing. With the basest disloyalty, he had cherished feelings for his brother’s wife. That was why Gaetano’s mess in Ireland was his mess to clean up, Cristo reflected grimly. Nik already had enough on his plate to deal with and Zarif was still suffering the fallout from the loose-tongued confession that had wrecked Nik’s marriage because ever since then the three brothers had barely spoken to each other.

* * *

‘Very mumsy,’ Isa pronounced the next morning with a raised brow when she saw what Belle was wearing. ‘Did that skirt belong to your mother?’

Belle paled. ‘Yes, I kept a couple of things just to remember Mum by. It’s a little big but it looks all right with the belt.’

‘Which is more than you can say about that flapping cardigan and the beads round your neck with that fussy blouse,’ Isa groaned disapprovingly. ‘You look like a young woman trying to look older.’

‘Yes but that’s because you know the truth. It’s daylight now and I need to make a better impression than I did last night,’ Belle pointed out anxiously.

‘Even daylight couldn’t penetrate the amount of make-up you’ve got on,’ her grandmother said drily. ‘But you’re right—it does age you.’

‘Look, I accept that Cristo is eventually going to find out the truth but I want that adoption idea off the table first,’ Belle told her.

‘Even at the cost of infuriating him?’ Isa asked. ‘Gaetano had a very low threshold for provocation.’

‘Whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.’

‘I can’t see how,’ Isa said bluntly. ‘You’re pretty much powerless up against his wealth and intellect.’

Belle trudged up the drive in her high heels, striving not to feel like someone got up in fancy dress. She was not powerless. Money wasn’t everything, nor was intellect. She was not stupid. She had a first-class degree in business and economics and she had the power of the unexpected on her side. He thought she was who she had said she was and, whether he knew it or not, that meant he would be fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Where her mother would have rolled over on command for a Ravelli and said thank you very much for the attention, Belle was programmed to fight dirty.

Cristo watched her approach from the window in the drawing room. No miniskirt in evidence today, but high-heeled court shoes with pointy toes embellished those award-winning legs. He gritted his even white teeth together, stamping out that inappropriate thought. So, she was an attractive woman. It was par for the course: his father’s lovers had always been beauties even while his wives were more of the plain variety. Gaetano had always rated wealth and class above looks. Cristo wondered how much money it would take to persuade the older woman into his way of thinking. He was a skilled negotiator and envisaged few problems because Mary Brophy had not been enriched in any way by her relationship with his father and was currently penniless. Furthermore she couldn’t be the brightest star in the firmament when she had given the wily older man five children he could never have wanted and kept on slogging away for him as a humble housekeeper.

Surprisingly a rare shard of pity stabbed Cristo at that acknowledgement, making him register that where Mary Brophy was concerned he didn’t want to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. He didn’t want to threaten or intimidate her into doing his bidding; he simply wanted a neat and tidy solution to a very messy and potentially embarrassing problem for all their sakes.

CHAPTER THREE

‘MR RAVELLI IS in the drawing room,’ Rafe informed her.

Breathing in deeply and slowly to maintain her calm front, Belle walked into the over-furnished room where the ornate drapes and blinds cut out much of the daylight. Cristo swung round to study her and instantly her every sense went on high alert, her backbone stiffening, her slim legs bracing, her soft pink lips parting as she dragged in a sudden extra shot of oxygen.

Cristo scanned her appearance, his nostrils flaring with sudden impatience. She was dressed in a frumpy skirt and cardigan that a maiden aunt might have worn and she had inexplicably teamed that look with the kind of bold make-up a streetwalker might have flaunted like a signpost. And he realised then that there was something he wasn’t seeing, something he wasn’t grasping about this woman, because so far her long-term affair with his father wasn’t adding up at all. Whatever else might have been said about Gaetano, he had been a connoisseur of women and a sophisticate and there was no way his father had returned again and again to Ireland in order to take advantage of the charms of the woman currently standing in front of him.

‘Mr Ravelli...’ she said breathily and she turned her head away to glance out of the window, her hair a sunburst of colour, her fine profile delineated against the light, soft, glossy mouth full and pouting peach pink, long lashes fluttering up on big eyes as green and verdant as Irish grass.

And Cristo ground his perfect white teeth together on the smoulderingly sexual pull of her in that instant, recognising that she had buckets of that inexpressible quality that reduced the male mind to mush and turned a man on hard and fast. For a split second, he wanted to snatch her up into his arms and crush every line of the remarkable body concealed by the unattractive clothing to his own while he discovered if that voluptuous mouth of hers tasted as impossibly good as it looked. His hands closed into fists of restraint while he fought off the erection threatening, struggling to think of something, anything, that would take his thoughts off her mouth and her breasts and her legs and, even worse, what lay between them. That she could be affecting him on such a level outraged his every principle.

Trying to avoid direct contact with those spectacular dark-as-night eyes of his, Belle could feel her colour heightening, awareness of him leaping and pounding through her in an uncontrollable surge. She stared at him, breathless, frozen like someone cornered by a wild animal, and all the time she was noticing things about him: the way his sleek ebony brows defined his eyes, the way the faint line of colour accentuated the hard masculine angle of his high cheekbones, the way the pared-down hollows below enhanced his wide, sensual mouth. Very, very good-looking but, yes, she had noticed that before, certainly didn’t need to keep on noticing it. The atmosphere thickened and the silence screamed at her nerves as every muscle in her body tightened defensively. It was as if there were nobody else in the world but them and what she was feeling: the insidious warmth blossoming in her pelvis, the sudden tightening discomfort of her nipples.

Lean, strong face rigid, Cristo expelled his breath in a sudden hiss and took a measured step back from her and away from such treacherous ruminations as to what she might taste like, what her skin would feel and smell like. He was appalled that she could drag such a strong physical reaction from him against his will, but even more annoyed that she could somehow cloud his usual crystal-clear clarity of thought.

‘Miss Brophy.’

‘It’s Mrs actually.’

Cristo frowned. ‘You’re married?’

‘I’ve been a widow for many years,’ Belle replied tightly, straying over to the window, partially turning her back to him while she fought to regain her mental focus. The deception she had entered on demanded her whole concentration. She was Mary Brophy, Gaetano’s former mistress and the mother of five of his children, she reminded herself doggedly.

‘I invited you here today to discuss your future and your children’s,’ Cristo delivered smoothly.

Lifted by that solid assurance, Belle’s spirits perked up. ‘Yes...Gaetano has left us in a pretty awkward position.’

‘Naturally, you’re referring to your financial situation. My father was most remiss in not making provision for you in the event of his death.’

‘Yes...but he did sign the house over to me,’ Belle pointed out, keen to sound like a loyal woman in Gaetano’s defence because she could not afford to let an ounce of her loathing for the man betray her true identity in his son’s presence.

Cristo went very still, allowing her to take in the faultless cut of the dark business suit he wore teamed with a bland white shirt and blue silk tie. His brows drew together in a frown. ‘Which house?’

‘The Lodge...he signed it over to me years ago to ensure that we would always have a home.’ Belle’s voice faltered slightly because he seemed so taken aback by the news, yet surely he should’ve known that already as the executor of the estate. ‘But bearing in mind the running costs and the children’s current needs I’ll probably be selling it now.’

‘Excuse me for a moment,’ Cristo urged, striding out of the room into the one next door and pulling out his phone to call his father’s lawyer, Robert Ludlow. If she owned part of the property, he should’ve been informed of the fact.

Robert’s initial disconcertion over Cristo’s query trailed away as he trawled through Gaetano’s files and then emerged with the facts of a minor legal agreement drawn up about fifteen years earlier, which Robert’s elder brother had apparently handled shortly before his retirement. Robert was volubly apologetic for the oversight. Brought up to date, Cristo was triumphantly aware that he knew something Mary Brophy did not appear to know. Under no circumstances would she be selling the Lodge.

Conscious that Cristo Ravelli clearly had not known about the ownership of the Lodge, Belle paced and wondered anxiously why he had not been aware of the fact. She was trying not to recall the fact that the solicitor who had dealt with her mother’s estate had found no paperwork confirming the older woman’s ownership. He had brushed off the matter and said he would look into it, and at the time Belle had had so many other things on her plate that she hadn’t pursued it.

Cristo strolled back into the drawing room with the lithe, unconscious grace of a male who was confident that he was in the strongest position. ‘I’m afraid you don’t own the Lodge,’ he spelt out softly, his Italian accent edging his vowel sounds.

‘That’s not possible,’ Belle countered, her chin rising in challenge. ‘Your father told me it was mine—’

‘But for your lifetime only, after which it reverts back to the Mayhill estate,’ Cristo qualified smoothly.

Suddenly Belle felt as if the ground below her feet had opened to swallow her up. ‘That’s not what Gaetano led me to believe.’

‘My father had a way with words and may have wished you to believe that you owned the Lodge but, in fact, you only have the use of it.’

A shot of rage flamed through Belle like a lightning strike. That hateful, manipulative man whom her wretched mother had loved! How could he have misled her like that over something so important? Hot colour sprang into her cheeks as she parted her dry lips. ‘And this right to live there while...er I am alive, does it devolve to the children after my...er death?’ she prompted sickly.

‘I’m afraid not.’ Cristo Ravelli gave her a specious smile of sympathy, which wouldn’t have fooled her in any mood, least of all the one she was in. ‘But to all intents and purposes, the Lodge does belong to you for the present. You can’t, of course, sell it, use it as security for a loan or indeed make any extensive alterations to it, but you do have the right to live there for as long as you wish.’

Belle had lost every scrap of her angry colour by the time he had finished speaking. It was appalling news, the very worst she could have heard. Her mother was dead and the right to live in the Lodge had died with her, which meant that Belle and her siblings were illegally occupying the house. Indeed, her pretence that she was her mother could be seen by some people as an attempt to defraud. She had taken their ability to live at the Lodge for granted, she registered, stricken. Now she was being punished for it because, in reality, they were about to be made homeless.

‘My father was very...astute with regard to money and property,’ Cristo murmured softly, watching her standing there, white with shock below the garish make-up, eyes wide and stunned by what he had revealed. ‘But I’m willing to find you another property and put it into your name.’

With difficulty, Belle struggled to concentrate. ‘And why would you be willing to do that?’

‘It will be easier to sell this estate without what would be...in effect...a sitting tenant in the Lodge,’ Cristo admitted.

‘That...’ Belle made a valiant attempt to swallow the massive surge of fury heating her to boiling point and utterly failed to hold it in. ‘That...bastard! How could he do that to his own children?’ she gasped.

‘My father wasn’t a sentimental man,’ Cristo said drily. ‘And he has left a mess in his wake. I have a proposition to put to you which could solve all your problems...’

Belle was rigid, furious that she had cursed Gaetano to Cristo’s face but unable to overcome the bitter resentment threatening to consume her like a living flame. He was so calm, so assured, so very much in control that she hated him with every fibre in her straining body.

Cristo watched her snatch in another audible breath, eyes green as emeralds in sunlight and literally alight with fury. She was highly volatile, a woman with strong emotions she couldn’t hide and everything he had always avoided in her sex. But she looked magnificent and the seductive shimmy of her lush rounded breasts below the silky blouse every time she moved was incredibly attention-grabbing.

‘Pro-proposition?’ Belle framed shakily, fighting like mad to maintain control over her temper. So, she’d had bad news and she was going to have to deal with it. She stared stonily back at Cristo, clashing with stunning dark eyes nailed to her with unsettling intensity. In the rushing silence that had fallen, her throat closed over and her mouth ran dry.

‘I want to ask you to consider the idea of having your children adopted,’ Cristo suggested quietly. ‘It would surely be best for them to leave their troubled and questionable parentage behind them and have the opportunity to live a normal life.’

‘I can’t believe you just said that to my face,’ Belle confided between gritted teeth of restraint.

‘I would make the sacrifice very well worth your while,’ Cristo continued evenly as if what he was suggesting were perfectly normal and acceptable. ‘My father should have ensured that you have a home and an income but since he hasn’t done it, I will take care of it instead.’

‘No decent mother would surrender her children for financial gain,’ Belle declared in a raw undertone while shooting him a look of scorn that he could even suggest otherwise. ‘What sort of women are you used to dealing with?’

‘That’s not your affair. I am not my father and I have no children,’ Cristo replied with cold dignity.

‘And don’t deserve any either!’ Belle lashed back at him. ‘For goodness’ sake, those children you’re talking about are your own brothers and sisters!’

‘I do not, and will not, acknowledge them as such,’ Cristo retorted with icy hauteur.

‘Why? Aren’t they good enough to be Ravellis?’ Belle shot back at him resentfully. ‘The housekeeper’s kids...not very posh, is it? Not quite the right background, am I right? Well, let me tell you something—’

‘No. I don’t want you to tell me anything while your temper is out of control,’ Cristo cut in with the cutting edge of an icy scalpel.

‘And you pride yourself on being an iceberg, don’t you?’ Belle launched back fearlessly, her generous mouth curling with contempt. ‘Well, I’m not ashamed to be an emotional person and ready to do what’s right no matter how unwelcome or difficult it is!’

‘Does your ranting ever get you to the point?’ Cristo enquired witheringly.

Belle’s slender hands coiled into tight fists. She had never wanted to hit another living person before and she was shocked by the fact that she would very much have liked to slap him. How dared he stand there looking down on her and her siblings as if they were so much lesser than him? How dared he suggest that her brothers and sisters be torn away from the people they loved and settled in another home with adoptive parents? Couldn’t he appreciate that the children were living, breathing people with emotions and attachments and a desperate need for security after the losses they had already sustained? And couldn’t he accept that while Mary Brophy might have had her flaws when it came to picking reliable men, she had also been a wonderful loving mother every day of Belle and her siblings’ lives?

‘The point is...’ Belle breathed in a voice that literally shook with the force of her feelings. ‘My mother may only have been a housekeeper and she may have been your father’s mistress for years, but she was also a very special, kind and caring person and, having lost her, her children deserve the very best that I can give them.’

‘Your...mother?’ Cristo repeated flatly. ‘Mary Brophy was your mother?’

And Belle froze there, her skin slowly turning cold and clammy with shock as she realised what she had revealed in her passionate attempt to bring Cristo round to her point of view. For a moment, she had totally forgotten that she was pretending to be her mother in her desperate need to defend the older woman’s memory.

‘So, if you’re not Mary Brophy...where is she? And who are you?’ Cristo framed doggedly, incensed that she had dared to try and fool him.

‘I’m Belle Brophy. My mother died about a month after your father. She had a heart attack,’ Belle admitted with pained green eyes, accepting that she could no longer continue the pretence and that her own unruly temper had betrayed her when she could least afford for it to do so. Unfortunately Cristo Ravelli’s unfeeling detachment and innate air of command and superiority were like vinegar poured on an already raw wound.