school with absolutely no frills and left at sixteen.’
Belle was frowning. ‘Fake bills?’
‘Salaries for nannies, tuition fees for exclusive boarding schools, riding lessons, ballet lessons, private medical treatment, holidays. Everything your mother could think up she billed me for with false documents and yet you received none of those benefits. But I was the idiot who paid and paid and paid even in the early days when I was less affluent and it was a struggle to pay,’ Alastair revealed. ‘I learned to hate Tracy while she bled me for every penny she could and that was the background to my first meeting with you. I took my bitterness out on you and it was wrong and cruel and unjust. You were only a kid hoping to meet your father.’
‘I got over it.’ Belle sighed, lifting her hand to squeeze his arm in consolation because she was seeing a complete picture now and it changed everything she had thought she knew about her birth father. Tracy had blackmailed him and lied to him, all to scam money out of him for her own selfish use. ‘Tracy is a bit of a money monster.’
‘A bit? She left you high and dry after your grandfather died and took off with her ill-gotten gains! Not a surprise,’ her father pronounced cynically. ‘But let’s see if we can leave all that and her behind us where it belongs. I very much regret the way I treated you when I first met you. Can we move on from that? I would like to get to know you, and Emily feels the same way. All these years on, am I too late? Or is a relationship still a possibility?’
A wash of stinging tears burned the backs of Belle’s eyes as her father reached uncertainly for her hand and squeezed it with a hopeful look on his face.
‘I think we could try it, see how it goes,’ Belle muttered chokily, tears shining in her eyes even as she gave him a huge smile of forgiveness. ‘I know I would like that very much.’
* * *
‘You chose to bring home a slut,’ Princess Sofia whispered in a gloating tone in her son’s ear as she brushed past him out to the terrace, where Belle could be seen, apparently so rapt by Alastair Stevenson’s attention and their entwined hands that she was blind to Dante’s presence only ten feet away.
Dante wanted to launch himself at the older man and beat him to a pulp with his fists. Steve was at his elbow, urging him to stay calm, seek an explanation rather than dealing out hasty words of anger and retribution. Steve was the voice of reason, but Dante was firing on pure animal instinct. Alastair Stevenson was touching Belle, and Dante was realising that he could not tolerate that. Being forced to witness that act of desecration was like having someone claw the flesh from his bones. And even worse, Belle was smiling at Stevenson, all soft and bright and trusting as she had never once smiled at Dante!
Breaking free of Steve’s restraining hold, Dante strode forward, sufficient enraged heat in his condemnatory dark golden eyes to stoke a bonfire. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’
Alastair frowned and then abruptly rammed back his chair to stand up. ‘Sorry, I’ve been rude keeping Belle all to myself, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak to my daughter again. Alastair Stevenson,’ he said, stretching out a polite hand.
Anxiously having risen, her hand releasing her father’s, Belle had clashed in consternation with Dante’s flashing furious gaze and her entire skin surface had broken out in goosebumps.
‘Belle just...disappeared.’ Dante formed the words through clenched teeth while that entirely baffling word daughter, bounced back and forth through his brain, cutting through the violence coursing through his bloodstream to unleash a wave of angry, confused disbelief. ‘I was concerned. Dante Lucarelli.’ After a perceptible hesitation he shook her father’s hand.
‘I was hoping that I could call and spend some time with Belle tomorrow morning before I head back to the airport,’ Alastair continued pleasantly.
‘Of course. You would be most welcome,’ Dante responded, smoothly concealing the tempestuous emotions still rattling around inside him, the uppermost being a fierce annoyance with Belle for knowing everything about him while carefully squirrelling away her own secrets.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Alastair told Belle with a warm smile.
Dante closed his hand round Belle’s free one as she finally moved away from the older man. When her fingers flexed in his taut grip, he held on fast. Steve had melted tactfully away but his mother, to whom such diplomacy was unknown, still hovered.
‘Well, aren’t you a surprising little thing?’ Princess Sofia commented with a cold gleam of what might have been approval in her sharp appraisal, because Belle had been upgraded in her estimation with the unveiling of her hedge-fund father.
‘Sì...very surprising,’ Dante growled in Belle’s ear, his breath fanning the sensitive skin of her neck and making her flush.
‘I wasn’t expecting him to be here. I was shocked to see him,’ Belle framed.
‘Not half as shocked as I was to see you holding hands with him,’ Dante bit out in a harsh undertone. ‘You’ve been keeping secrets from me.’
‘Why would you have been interested?’ Belle said defensively.
‘Because knowing about a father is a little more important than knowing your favourite colour or your star sign,’ Dante retorted, a whip edge to that tone of dulcet derision.
Annoyance was beginning to spark inside Belle. It had been a tough evening and her emotions were all over the place. She wasn’t prepared to be censured for spending twenty minutes with her father in a public place. ‘But it’s none of your business,’ she heard herself say.
And it really wasn’t his business, she reasoned resentfully, for Dante was merely the man who had hired her to play a masquerade for a weekend, not her husband, not her boyfriend, not anything really. She needed to keep that truth in mind and stop endowing him with an importance he neither deserved nor wanted.
Dante breathed in deep and slow to master his temper. He could never recall being forced to work through so many different emotions in so short a space of time. There had been the concern and then the rage, the amazement and incredulity at her behaviour, followed by the anger that she could have omitted to tell him something so crucial about herself, and then a sick kind of relief he had yet to get his head around.
Some guests were already beginning to leave, and Dante seized on that excuse with alacrity, returning to their table only to say goodnight to Steve and Sancha. Stony silence fell in the limousine and Belle bridled. ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry.’
‘Don’t you indeed?’ Dante scoffed.
‘It makes me want to thump you!’ Belle told him truthfully.
‘It made me want to thump your father. You’re lucky that he identified himself before I got the chance,’ Dante countered between gritted teeth.
Belle studied him in astonishment. ‘And why on earth would you have wanted to do that?’
Dante sent her a look of raw disbelief. ‘You were holding his hand.’
‘So?’ Belle prodded with a toss of her head and raised brows of enquiry. ‘What’s that to you?’
And that was when Dante lost control for the first time ever
