of her cabin, exactly where she’d been for the past two hours since she’d walked away from Gabriele, before she’d given into the temptation to punch him in the face.
Never in her entire life had she hated someone. Never in her entire life had she felt so, so, so...much towards another person.
Her early childhood had been spent rallying against the injustice of being the only female in a household of males. She had come to realise the only way to get their respect was to behave like them. She might have been home educated, unlike her brothers who were sent to smart schools, and she might have been sheltered from the outside world, but within the household she had turned her anger to her advantage and become one of the boys. She had forced her brothers’ respect and at the same time gained her father’s.
Now she felt as helpless and angry as she had at the age of ten when she’d finally comprehended that the education she dreamt of, one where she could be with other girls her age, had been denied her. Even now she still struggled with other women. She just couldn’t relate to them. First kisses, first attempts at putting make-up on, everything that went with being a female adolescent had been denied her. She had learned to embrace it.
Well she wouldn’t embrace this situation. Gabriele would pay for this. She didn’t know how or when or...anything, but she would make him pay.
She couldn’t even think about what it would mean to have his child.
A child. A baby. The one thing she’d never thought she would have.
Having intended to spend her life as a Vestal Virgin, Elena had reconciled herself to never having a child of her own. Her brothers had taken too much glee in sharing salacious stories of their conquests. She’d listened to all the sordid details and heard their obvious contempt for the women who were always, without exception, referred to as whores.
By the time she’d turned fifteen Elena had known she would rather stay a virgin than be subjected to that kind of disgusting treatment. She would never allow herself to be treated as a piece of meat. Yes, there were ways to conceive a child that didn’t involve getting physical with a man, but they weren’t ways she could bring herself to consider.
A knock on the cabin door brought her out of her reverie.
She unlocked it and found Gabriele standing there, a thin document file in one hand, the case she’d taken to Nutmeg Island in the other.
‘Where did you get that?’ she asked, amazed.
‘I had it couriered to my assistant. She brought it on the helicopter.’
‘But how?’
‘A friendly police officer retrieved it.’ He smiled a secret smile. ‘Carter’s gang disabled the security monitors before you arrived. All your security team saw on their screens was the feed from the day before. No one knows you were on the island and I would imagine the gang won’t mention it unless they want to add assault and attempted kidnap to their list of charges.’
Immediately her blood pressure rose. ‘So they get away with it?’
‘Not at all.’ A darkness crossed his features. ‘They will pay for it. They were arrested before they could leave the island and can all look forward to a hefty sentence in a prison that will make the one I was incarcerated in look like a holiday camp.’
He threw a thin document file on her bed before she could argue any more about it. ‘Here’s the contract.’
‘You don’t waste time.’
‘Read through it, sign it and we can leave.’
‘Are we at Tampa Bay?’ She hadn’t seen any sign of land from her balcony.
‘No. You’ve already reached your decision so my helicopter will take us inland to my jet. My assistant and lawyer are waiting in the saloon—they’ll act as witnesses for the contract.’
‘You can’t expect me to sign it now?’
‘It’s written clearly and concisely. It won’t take you more than five minutes to read it.’
Giving him a baleful glare, Elena leaned over the bed to grab the file and see for herself.
As she turned back again, pulling the elegantly bound papers out, something about him made her stop.
There was an expression on his face she’d never seen before. A look in his eyes...
Heat pooled in her stomach and spread through her, climbing up to crawl through the veins in her face.
She’d taken his oversized shorts off the second she’d arrived back in her cabin.
She’d leaned over to grab the file totally forgetting she had no underwear on.
He’d seen her.
Gabriele’s breathing had become heavy, his eyes containing a blackness that was quite unlike the angry circles of ice he usually looked at her with.
Please, something, anything, swallow her up right now.
He’d seen her.
His throat moved and then he coughed and took a step back before pulling a small tube from his pocket. ‘This is some lotion for you to put on your wrists—it should help with the bruising.
‘I will leave you to dress and read through the contract.’ He no longer looked at her, his voice even deeper than normal. ‘I will send someone for you in thirty minutes.’
He didn’t wait for a response, throwing the tube on the bed and leaving the cabin in three long strides.
* * *
Gabriele concentrated hard on the conversation with his lawyer, discussing the finer details of the contract Milo had drafted for him.
Milo knew better than to try and talk Gabriele from the route he was taking. He had been his family’s lawyer for over two decades, and there was little about Gabriele that Milo didn’t know. It was this familiarity that made him sense the lawyer didn’t approve of this particular route.
Whether his lawyer approved was irrelevant. As for Anna Maria, his assistant, she was too well paid to have an opinion on anything.
His lawyer and assistant were the only people to know the truth and he intended to keep it that way. To the rest of the world, especially to Ignazio, his and Elena’s marriage would be the real deal.
It was only when Milo and Anna Maria both rose that he knew Elena had arrived.
Straight away his mind flashed to the image he’d been fighting not to see for thirty minutes.
The base of her bottom.
The base of her white, peachy, perfect bottom. The way it darkened at the base of the curve to show the promise of her hidden femininity.
One look and his pulse had paused for a heartbeat then surged into life, heat throbbing through his bloodstream.
He hadn’t had such a visceral reaction to a woman since his teenage years. Arranging his features into neutrality,
