steeled her spine. ‘Our lawyers will rip whatever evidence you think you have to shreds, I’m sure. If you’re here to seek some sort of closure, you picked the wrong time to do it. Perhaps we can arrange to meet you at some other time?’
Zaccheo didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Hands once again tucked behind his back, he simply watched her father, his body a coiled predator waiting to strike a fatal blow.
Silence stretched, throbbed with unbearable menace. Eva looked from her father to Sophie and back again, her dread escalating. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
Her father gripped the mantel until his knuckles shone white. ‘You chose the wrong enemy. You’re sorely mistaken if you think I’ll let you blackmail me in my own home.’
Sophie stepped forward. ‘Father, don’t—’
‘Good, you haven’t lost your hubris.’ Zaccheo’s voice slashed across her sister’s. ‘I was counting on that. Here’s what I’m going to do. In ten minutes I’m going to leave here with Eva, right in front of all your guests. You won’t lift a finger to stop me. You’ll tell them exactly who I am. Then you’ll make a formal announcement that I’m the man your daughter will marry two weeks from today and that I have your blessing. I don’t want to trust something so important to phone cameras and social media, although your guests will probably do a pretty good job. I noticed a few members of the press out there, so that part of your task should be easy. If the articles are written to my satisfaction, I’ll be in touch on Monday to lay out how you can begin to make reparations to me. However, if by the time Eva and I wake up tomorrow morning the news of our engagement isn’t in the press, then all bets are off.’
Oscar Pennington’s breathing altered alarmingly. His mouth opened but no words emerged. In the arctic silence that greeted Zaccheo’s deadly words, Eva gaped at him.
‘You’re clearly not in touch with all of your faculties if you think those ridiculous demands are going to be met.’ When silence greeted her response, she turned sharply to her father. ‘Father? Why aren’t you saying something?’ she demanded, although the trepidation beating in her chest spelled its own doom.
‘Because he can’t, Eva. Because he’s about to do exactly as I say.’
She rounded on him, and was once again rocked to the core by Zaccheo’s visually powerful, utterly captivating transformation. So much so, she couldn’t speak for several seconds. ‘You’re out of your mind!’ she finally blurted.
Zaccheo’s gaze didn’t stray from its laser focus on her father. ‘Believe me, cara mia, I haven’t been saner than I am in this moment.’
ZACCHEO WATCHED EVA’S head swivel to her father, confusion warring with anger.
‘Go on, Oscar. She’s waiting for you to tell me to go to hell. Why don’t you?’
Pennington staggered towards his desk, his face ashen and his breathing growing increasingly laboured.
‘Father!’ Eva rushed to his side—ignoring the poisonous look her sister sent her—as he collapsed into his leather armchair.
Zaccheo wanted to rip her away, let her watch her father suffer as his sins came home to roost. Instead he allowed the drama to play out. The outcome would be inevitable and would only go one way.
His way.
He wanted to look into Pennington’s eyes and see the defeat and helplessness the other man had expected to see in his eyes the day Zaccheo had been sentenced.
Both sisters now fussed over their father and a swell of satisfaction rose at the fear in their eyes. Eva glanced his way and he experienced a different punch altogether. One he’d thought himself immune to, but had realised otherwise the moment he’d stepped off his helicopter and singled her out in the crowd.
That unsettling feeling, as if he were suffering from vertigo despite standing on terra firma, had intrigued and annoyed him in equal measures from the very first time he’d seen her, her voice silkily hypnotic as she crooned into a mic on a golden-lit stage, her fingers caressing the black microphone stand as if she were touching a lover.
Even knowing exactly who she was, what she represented, he hadn’t been able to walk away. In the weeks after their first meeting, he’d fooled himself into believing she was different, that she wasn’t tainted with the same greed to further her pedigree by whatever means necessary; that she wasn’t willing to do whatever it took to secure her family’s standing, even while secretly scorning his upbringing.
Her very public denouncement of any association between them on the day of his sentencing had been the final blow. Not that Zaccheo hadn’t had the scales viciously ripped from his eyes by then.
No, by that fateful day fourteen months ago, he’d known just how thoroughly he’d been suckered.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she muttered fiercely, her moss-green eyes firing lasers at him.
Zaccheo forced himself not to smile. The time for gloating would come later. ‘Exacting the wages of sin, dolcezza. What else?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t think my father is in a position to have a discussion with you right now, Mr Giordano.’
Her prim and proper tones bit savagely into Zaccheo, wiping away any trace of twisted mirth. That tone said he ought to know his place, that he ought to stand there like a good little servant and wait to be addressed instead of upsetting the lord of the manor with his petty concerns.
Rage bubbled beneath his skin, threatening to erupt. Blunt nails bit into his wrist, but the pain wasn’t enough to calm his fury. He clenched his jaw for a long moment before he trusted himself to speak.
‘I gave you ten minutes, Pennington. You now have five. I suggest you practise whatever sly words you’ll be using to address your guests.’ Zaccheo shrugged. ‘Or not. Either way, things will go my way.’
Eva rushed at him, her striking face and flawless skin flushed with a burst of angry colour as she stopped a few feet away.
Out on the terrace, he’d compelled himself not to stare too long at her in case he betrayed his feelings. In case his gaze devoured her as he’d wanted to do since her presence snaked like a live wire inside him.
Now, he took in that wild gypsy-like caramel-blonde hair so out of place in this polished stratosphere her family chose to inhabit. The striking contrast between her bright hair, black eyebrows and dark-rimmed eyes had always fascinated him. But no more than her cupid-bow lips, soft, dark red and sinfully sensual. Or the rest of her body.
‘You assume I have no say in whatever despicable spectacle you’re planning. That I intend to meekly stand by while you humiliate my family? Well, think again!’
‘Eva...’ her father started.
‘No! I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but I intend to play no part in it.’
‘You’ll play your part, and you’ll play it well,’ Zaccheo interjected, finally driving his gaze
