name. The respect it once again carried.
A muscle jumped in his cheek.
To think he’d almost had sex with her. With Cesare Orsini’s consigliere.
Cristo, he wanted to laugh!
Not that this was a laughing matter, Draco thought grimly as he took the gangster’s letters from his briefcase and stacked them on the desk in front of him. Nothing about the situation was even remotely amusing.
If only he’d known who she was last night, he’d never have let things go so far.
Actually, the more he thought about it, the less he understood why he had become involved with her at all.
Her name could be Jane Doe, and he wouldn’t want her.
She wasn’t his type. She was too tall, too blonde, too slender. His tastes ran to petite women. Brunettes, with voluptuous bodies.
And that attitude of hers, that feminist chip she carried on her shoulder …
What man in his right mind would be attracted to a woman who argued over everything?
Calmer now, he could see that it had been the situation, not the woman, that had turned him on. The hushed darkness. The isolation that came of being five miles above the earth. The added rush of knowing you were in a public setting.
Draco sat back in his chair.
Given all that, what man would not want to take things to their natural conclusion when he awoke with a woman draped over him like a blanket?
In a way, he owed Anna Orsini his thanks. Men thought with parts of their anatomy that had nothing to do with their brains. She had saved them both from making an embarrassing mistake.
Imagine if he’d actually had sex with the Orsini consigliere …
Draco did laugh this time.
There was a solution to the problem. There always was. And he would find it—something he could do to get the Orsinis, father and daughter, out of his life.
He was, above all else, a logical man. A pragmatist. And pragmatism, not emotion, would save the day. Control over your emotions was everything.
His father and those before him had never understood that.
They drank to excess. Gambled with money they didn’t have. They went from woman to woman, losing themselves in the kind of passion and intensity that could only lead to trouble.
The Valenti family history was a minefield of greed, infidelity, abandonment and divorce.
Absolutely, a man had to learn to curb his emotions. And Draco had learned early how to curb his.
His boyhood had been filled with scenes that still made him grimace. His mother had taken a string of lovers who helped themselves to what little remained of the family’s money. Still, she’d apparently found her life boring and abandoned her husband and Draco when he was a toddler.
His father might as well have done the same. He was too busy whoring and gambling to pay attention to his son. Draco’s early memories were of big, silent rooms, most of them stripped of what had once been elegant furnishings. The few servants who remained, overworked and underpaid, ignored him.
He had been a solitary and lonely child; it had never occurred to him other children might have had different existences from his.
One winter, his father stayed sober long enough to figure out that the last of what he’d still referred to as his staff had abandoned ship, leaving nine-year-old Draco to fend for himself.
The prince had given his young son orders to bathe and dress in his best clothes. Then he’d taken him to a school run by nuns.
The Mother Superior, who was also the principal, had eyed Draco and wrinkled her nose, as if he gave off a bad smell. She’d tested him in math. In science. In French and English.
Draco had known the answers to all her questions. He was a bright boy. An omnivorous reader. From age five he’d sought solace by immersing himself in the few remaining volumes in the once-proud Valenti library.
But he’d been struck speechless.
The nun’s voice had been sharp; he’d been able to see his own reflection in her eyeglasses, and that was somehow disorienting. Her coif had made her round face with its pointed nose look like an owl’s.
She had been, in his eyes, an alien creature, and he’d been terrified.
“Answer the Mother Superior,” his father had hissed.
Draco had opened his mouth, then shut it. The nun glared at his father, then at him.
“The boy is retarded,” she’d said. Her fingers had clamped hard on Draco’s shoulder. “Leave him with us, Prince Valenti. We will, if nothing else, teach him to fear his God.”
That was the theology he’d received at the hands of the sisters.
The other boys had taught him more earthly things to fear.
Beatings, on what was supposed to be the playground. Beatings at night, in the sour-smelling dormitory rooms. Humiliation after humiliation.
It had been the equivalent of tossing a puppy into a cage of hungry wolves.
Draco had been skinny and pale. His clothes were threadbare, but their style had marked him as a member of a despised upper class, as had the way in which he spoke. He was quiet, shy and bookish, with the formal manners of a boy who had never before dealt with other children.
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.
