The Orsini Brides: The Ice Prince / The Real Rio D'Aquila

It had been a recipe for disaster, either unnoticed or ignored by the sisters until one day, almost a year later, when Draco had decided he could not take any more.

It was lunchtime, and everyone had been on the playground. Draco saw one of his tormenters closing in.

All the hurt, the fear, the emotions he’d kept bottled inside him burst free.

He’d sprung at the other boy. The fight had turned ugly, but when it was over, the other kid was on the ground, sobbing. Draco, bloodied and bruised but victorious, had stood over him.

His reputation was made. And if keeping it meant stepping up to the challenge of other boys from time to time, beating them and, occasionally, being beaten in return, so be it.

The Mother Superior had said she’d always known he would come to no good.

The day he turned seventeen, one of the senior boys decided to give him a very special gift. He’d come to Draco during the night while he slept, slapped a hand over his mouth and yanked down his pajama bottoms.

Draco was no longer small or skinny. He had grown into manhood; he was six foot three inches of fight-hardened muscle.

With a roar, he’d shot up in bed, grabbed his attacker by the throat and if the other boys hadn’t pulled him off, he might have killed him.

The Mother Superior asked no questions.

“You are,” she told Draco, “a monster. You will never amount to anything. And you are unwanted here.”

He hadn’t argued. As far as he knew, she was right on all counts.

She’d expelled him, told him to be gone the next morning, and he’d thought, So be it.

That night he’d jimmied the lock on the door to her office and taken four hundred euros from her desk. Going home was not an option. He had no home, not really. The castle was in a state of near disaster and his father, who had visited him once the first year and then never again, meant nothing to him.

The next day he’d flown to New York with the clothes on his back, a determination to make something of himself, and a philosophy by which to live.

Never show weakness.

Never show emotion.

Trust no one but yourself.

New York was big, brash and unforgiving. It was also a place where anything was possible. For Draco, that “anything” meant finding a way to make sure he’d seen the last of hunger, poverty and humiliation.

He’d found jobs. In construction. As a waiter. A cab driver. He’d worked his royal ass off—not that anybody knew he was a royal. And in the dark of night, in a roach-infested room in a part of Brooklyn that was beyond any hope of gentrification, he’d lie awake and admit to himself that he was going nowhere.

A man needed a goal. A purpose. He’d had neither.

Until, purely by accident, he’d learned that his father had died.

Prince Mario Valenti, a one-inch item buried in the New York Post said, died yesterday in a shooting accident involving former movie star …

The details didn’t matter. His father had died a shameful death, broke and in debt. And in that moment Draco had known what he would do with his life.

He would redeem the Valenti name.

That meant paying off his father’s debts. Restoring the castle. Making the family name, even the accursedly ridiculous title, stand for something again.

He’d wanted a new start. To get it, he’d worked his way across the vast expanse of the United States. He liked Los Angeles, but San Francisco struck him as not just beautiful but the kind of place that rewarded individuality. He’d talked himself into San Francisco State University, chosen classes in mathematics and finance because he found them interesting. Writing a term paper, he’d stumbled upon an idea. An investment plan. It worked in theory but would it in real life?

Only one way to find out.

Draco took everything he’d set aside for the next year’s tuition and sank it in the stock market.

His money doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled. He quit school, devoted himself to investing.

And parlayed what he had into a not-so-small fortune.

“Draco Valenti,” the Wall Street Journal said the first time it mentioned him, “a new investor on the scene, who plays the market with icy skill.”

Was there any other way to play the market or, in fact, to play the game of life?

Eventually he founded his own company. Valenti Investments. He made mistakes, but mostly he made choices that led to dazzling successes.

He knew the dot com ride would not last forever, and acted accordingly. He thought packaged mortgages sold by banks made no sense and he bet his money, instead, on their eventual failure. He found small tech firms with big ideas and invested in them.

He made more money than seemed humanly possible, enough to buy the San Francisco condo, the Roman villa. Enough to restore the Valenti castle.

And enough to fund a school for poor kids in Rome and others in Sicily, New York and San Francisco, though he kept those endeavors strictly private.

He was tough, he was hard, he was not sentimental. The schools were simply a practical way of using up some of his money, and he’d be damned if he’d let anybody try to put a different spin on it.

Draco shoved aside the Orsini documents and swung his chair toward the window behind him.

There had to be a way around the Orsini problem.

Valenti Investments could not, must not, go under. He could live through the financial loss—hell, life was, at best, an uphill battle—but to tarnish the Valenti name …

He could not bear the thought of that happening again.

He turned from the window.

There was a solution, and he would find it, but not by concentrating on it. He would, instead, do what he always did at moments of stress. He would think about anything but the problem at hand. He would think logically. Rid his thoughts of emotion.

Draco rang the intercom. His PA answered.

“I have some letters to dictate,” he said.

But, damnit, Anna Orsini would not stay in the mental file drawer in which he’d placed her. She kept appearing in his mind, front and center.

Ridiculous, because she was not really the problem. Her father was.

Then why did he keep seeing her face, that sleepy, sexy look in her eyes when she’d lain in his arms last night?

Why did he keep remembering the way she dressed, the conservative suit, the do-me stilettos?

What did she have on under that suit? Was it the equivalent of banker’s gray? Or was it silk and lace, as sexy as the shoes?

“Sir?” his PA said.

Draco blinked.

“Sorry,” he said briskly. “Uh, where was I?”

“The Tolland merger,” his PA said, and Draco nodded and picked up where he’d left off in his dictation.

Five minutes later, he gave up.

“That’s all for now, Sylvana,” he said.

His PA left the room. Draco rose to his feet, grabbed his suit coat and went to lunch. He followed that with a long, hard workout at his gym.

He still had not come up with a way to handle the Orsini situation.

Worse, Anna Orsini was still in his head.

At five, he called for his car.

“Where to, sir?” his driver said.

Draco thought of the various answers he could give.

He could go out to dinner. He had no reservations anywhere, but that would not matter. There was not a ristorante in Rome that would not give him its best table if he showed up at the door.

He could take out his BlackBerry, phone one of a dozen beautiful women. There wasn’t one in Rome who would deny him anything he might ask of her, even at the last minute.

That made him think of his mistress, waiting for him in Hawaii.

Cristo, he had not thought of her once the entire day.

“Take me home,” he told his driver, and while the big car made its way through the crushing end-of-day traffic, Draco put through a call to her.

“Hello?” she said in a sleepy voice.

What time was it in Hawaii, anyway? No way was he going to ask.

“It’s me,” he said. “How are you?”

“Draco,” she said. He could picture the look on her face. Sultry, sexy, pouty. “I thought you’d forgotten me.”

Draco rubbed his temple with his free hand.

“How did you spend your day?” he said, because he knew he had to say something.

She laughed.

“I spent it shopping, darling. Well, window-shopping. I have a whole bunch of gorgeous things picked out for you to buy me when you get back.”

Draco closed his eyes and imagined the hours she’d expect him to spend in a dozen different boutiques.

“When will you be back, Draco?” Her voice turned husky. “I miss you.”

The truth was she missed the status that came of being seen with him. The knowledge that he would buy her whatever she’d shopped for today. She missed his title, his status, his money.

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