was big and round and had to walk in a kind of waddle to get down the makeshift aisle, she married him at last in a tiny ceremony on Violet’s terrace. Violet presided. The bride and the officiant wept.
Giancarlo smiled with the greatest satisfaction he’d known in his life. And kissed his bride. His wife.
“Don’t ever torture me like that again,” he growled against her lips when they were in the car and headed home, finally married, the way they should have been more than ten years before.
“Surely you knew I’d marry you,” Paige said, laughing. “I’ve been pretty open about how much I love you.”
“I’m not at all certain I deserve you,” he said, and was startled when that made great tears well up in her lovely changeable eyes, then roll down her cheeks. “But I’ve taken that on as a lifelong project.”
She smiled at him, the whole world in that smile, the way it had been that long ago day on that set when they’d locked eyes for the first time. And Giancarlo knew without the slightest shred of doubt that this was merely a particularly good day on the long road toward forever. And that they’d walk the whole of it together, just like this.
And then her expression altered, and she grabbed his arm.
“We’re going to have a lot of lifelong projects,” Paige said, sounding fierce and awed at once. His beautiful wife. “I think my water just broke.”
* * *
They named their daughter Violetta Grace, after her famous grandmother, who’d insisted, and the less famous one, who’d died before Paige was born and Arleen had gone completely off the rails, and she was perfect.
Extraordinary.
Theirs.
And they spent the rest of their lives teaching her, in a thousand little ways and few great big ones, what it meant to be as happy as they were the moment they met her.
* * * * *
Ruthless Revenge: Passionate Possession
A Virgin for Vasquez
Cathy Williams
A Marriage Fit for a Sinner
Maya Blake
Mistress of His Revenge
Chantelle Shaw
Cathy Williams
JAVIER VASQUEZ LOOKED around his office with unconcealed satisfaction.
Back in London after seven years spent in New York and didn’t fate move in mysterious ways...?
From his enviable vantage point behind the floor-to-ceiling panes of reinforced rock-solid glass, he gazed down to the busy city streets in miniature. Little taxis and little cars ferrying toy-sized people to whatever important or irrelevant destinations were calling them.
And for him...?
A slow, curling smile, utterly devoid of humour, curved his beautiful mouth.
For him, the past had come calling and that, he knew, accounted for the soaring sense of satisfaction now filling him because, as far as offices went, this one, spectacular though it was, was no more or less spectacular than the offices he had left behind in Manhattan. There, too, he had looked down on busy streets, barely noticing the tide of people that daily flowed through those streets like a pulsing, breathing river.
Increasingly, he had become cocooned in an ivory tower, the undisputed master of all he surveyed. He was thirty-three years old. You didn’t get to rule the concrete jungle by taking your eye off the ball. No; you kept focused, you eliminated obstacles and in that steady, onward and upward march, time passed by until now...
He glanced at his watch.
Twelve storeys down, in the vast, plush reception area, Oliver Griffin-Watt would already have been waiting for half an hour.
Did Javier feel a twinge of guilt about that?
Not a bit of it.
He wanted to savour this moment because he felt as though it had been a long time coming.
And yet, had he thought about events that had happened all those years ago? He’d left England for America and his life had become consumed in the business of making money, of putting to good use the education his parents had scrimped and saved to put him through, and in the process burying a fleeting past with a woman he needed to consign to the history books.
The only child of devoted parents who had lived in a poor barrio in the outskirts of Madrid, Javier had spent his childhood with the driving motto drummed into him that to get out, he had to succeed and to succeed, he had to have an education. And he’d had to get out.
His parents had worked hard, his father as a taxi driver, his mother as a cleaner, and the glass ceiling had always been low for them. They’d managed, but only just. No fancy holidays, no flat-screen tellies for the house, no chichi restaurants with fawning waiters. They’d made do with cheap and cheerful and every single penny had been put into savings for the time when they would send their precociously bright son to university in England. They had known all too well the temptations waiting for anyone stupid enough to go off the rails. They had friends whose sons had taken up with gangs, who had died from drug overdoses, who had lost the plot and ended up as dropouts kicked around on street corners.
That was not going to be the fate of their son.
If, as a teenager, Javier had ever resented the tight controls placed on him, he had said nothing.
He had been able to see for himself, from a very young age, just what financial hardship entailed and how limiting it could be. He had seen how some of his wilder friends, who had made a career out of playing truant, had ended up in the gutter. By the time he had hit eighteen, he had made his plans and nothing was going to derail them: a year or two out, working to add to the money his parents had saved, then university, where he would succeed because he was bright—brighter than anyone he knew. Then a high-paying job. No starting at the ground level and making his way up slowly, but a job with a knockout financial package. Why not? He knew his assets and he had had no intention of selling himself short.
He wasn’t just clever.
Lots of people were clever. He was also sharp. Sharp in a streetwise sort of way. He possessed the astuteness of
