able to grapple with.
Her skin paled, her heart lurched. ‘You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?’
He angled his head away from her and in profile his face was powerful, as if carved from stone, and a muscle jerked in his jaw, throbbing hard as he reined in his temper.
‘You have no interest in the shares I want.’
‘How do you know that?’ she demanded, crossing her arms over her chest.
He turned to face her, his eyes pinning her to the wall. Oh, God, just like the wall he’d held her against when he’d thrust inside her. Her heart gave a strange little double-beat as memories threatened to swallow her whole.
‘Since you inherited your stock portfolio, you have attended precisely zero board or shareholder meetings. You do not appear at corporate events...you do not have a bio on the website. You are absent in every way.’
‘So?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Ever heard of a silent partner?’
‘It is not the same thing. You have holed yourself up here, as far as you can get from the seat of power in diSalvo Industries. You do not want to use your shares to control the company—’
‘And is that any wonder? When getting involved in my family’s business would mean running up against vultures like you?’
His nostrils flared as he expelled a rapid breath. ‘You think I am a vulture for wanting to take back what was stolen from me? Prim’Aqua is my birthright...’
‘As much as it is mine and Carlo’s,’ she interrupted firmly, her cheeks flushing pink. ‘You have as large a stake in the company as I do. And larger than my brother’s too. So what’s your problem?’
‘I do not want your family having any part of it,’ he said with icy simplicity. ‘Your grandfather stole it and I intend to take it back.’ He softened his voice slightly. ‘Only I am not stealing it. This is a business transaction, plain and simple. You have something I want and I’m prepared to pay you for it.’
‘You’re unbelievable. Do you realise that if you’d told me this when you first arrived I might have heard you out? But how can you think, after what just happened between us, you can lay all this at my feet and I won’t be angry?’
‘Because you’re a sensible, mature woman,’ he said. ‘And I believe you capable of seeing that business is separate to the personal.’
‘There is no business here!’ she roared. ‘We just had sex! Not even an hour ago! You took my virginity and it was...just a way to soften me up towards you, so that I’d agree to anything you wanted.’
He swore in Spanish and shook his head. His face was deathly serious, his face harsh with intent. When he spoke, the words were slow and grated from him, indignation heavy in each accented syllable. ‘If you think I would ever stoop to something so low, then you have no idea who you’re dealing with.’
‘No, clearly I don’t,’ she agreed scathingly. ‘Now, please go.’
‘You do not want me to leave without those contracts,’ he said, the words softly menacing.
It took a moment for the penny to drop, to make sense of the words he’d just issued. ‘Are you threatening me?’
Something like sympathy crossed his face. ‘No. I am threatening your brother.’
Now Amelia was frozen still, her breath coming in fits and spurts, her eyes holding his as she tried to make sense of what he meant.
‘Carlo foolishly picked up our families’ rivalry some years ago.’ Antonio spoke calmly, emotions carefully blanked from his voice. ‘In truth, I’m surprised he never spoke to you of it.’
‘He knew I had no interest in that side of things.’ She wrapped her arms around her chest.
Antonio’s expression tightened. ‘He wanted to ruin my father once and for all, to destroy my family’s legacy as the final step in this feud. By the time I took over the company it was a shambles; my father was destroyed, his life’s work ruined.’ His eyes glinted with the harsh recollection, and there was something else there too. A grief that threatened to shake her sympathetic heart to the core. ‘It has taken me a long time to rebuild Herrera Incorporated, but I have done it, querida, and then some.’
And then some.
The words sat between them and a frisson of tension ran down her spine because there was a threat in that word, surely. A threat and a promise.
‘What does that mean?’
He seemed to be waging a war within himself, as though there was a part of him that wanted to spit the salient facts at her feet and a part of him that wanted to protect what they’d just shared. The former won, apparently.
‘I have invested wisely these last few years, steadily amassing shares in diSalvo business interests so that I now find I own more than half of your brother’s various companies.’
She sucked in a breath. Surely it was a lie, an exaggeration?
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said after a beat had passed, her mind working fast to keep up. ‘Carlo would never have allowed that to happen.’
‘It is easy to acquire anything if you are prepared to bide your time.’
Her stomach twisted into dozens of knots. ‘To what end, though?’ The depth of his hatred made no sense to Amelia. ‘Surely you don’t want diSalvo investments?’
‘Want them? No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I want to destroy them. I want to take your brother’s legacy and crush it into the ground, as he did my father’s. Only I will destroy him beyond any hope of redemption. I will only rest when he is destitute and starving, so that the memory of having a wallet full of money is all he has to warm him in his old age.’
She stared at this passionate man who had only a short time earlier taught her body what it was capable of feeling, the pleasures he’d lavished her with! And now she saw the beast of hatred that moved within him and shivered, for there was such coldness there, such determination, that she didn’t doubt him capable of carrying out what he’d threatened.
‘You honestly think that’s going to fix what happened to your father?’
He stayed quiet for a moment and then shrugged his broad, powerful shoulders. Her traitorous body gave a little jerk of awareness and she wanted to slap herself for feeling anything for this man except disgust. ‘Carlo played with fire. I am simply making him feel the heat of those flames.’
She gaped. ‘That’s preposterous!’
But he was, apparently, beyond arguing. He spoke with a calm insistence. ‘There are two options here, querida. Sell me your shares in Prim’Aqua and it is over. Done. I will release the grip I have on his empire and he will be safe. Or, if you keep your shares and deny me ownership of a company that is rightfully mine, I will destroy the rest of your family’s businesses. I have the power to tank them, and I will do it. And, what’s more, I will damned well enjoy it.’
Her
