LITMIR.BIZ

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      “My wife announced her engagement this week. To another man.”

      The lawyer pressed a hand to his temple. “Yes... I saw the piece in the paper. That’s why I’ve been trying to track you down. It’s a rather complicated situation.”

      “Complicated?” Lorenzo slung the word across the room with the force of a bullet. “How much do we pay that firm an hour? Hundreds? Thousands? To not make mistakes like this. Ever.”

      “It’s not acceptable,” Cristopher agreed quietly, “but it is the reality.”

      His lawyer squared his shoulders, looking ready to be verbally flogged to within an inch of his life, but Lorenzo had lost the power of speech. That his short-lived marriage to his wife, a disaster by its ignominious end, had, in fact, never been legally terminated was too much to take when heaped upon the other news his father had delivered today.

      He counted to ten in his head, harnessing the red-hot fury that engulfed him. This he did not need as he attempted to close the biggest deal of his life.

      “How do we fix this?” he asked icily.

      Cristopher spread his hands wide. “There are no magical solutions. The best we can do is hope to expedite the process. But it could take months. It will still mean—I mean you’ll still have to—”

      “Tell my wife she can’t marry her boyfriend so she doesn’t commit bigamy?”

      His lawyer rubbed a palm across his forehead. “Yes.”

      And wouldn’t that be fun, given Angelina was set to celebrate that engagement in front of half of New York tomorrow night?

      He turned to face the jaw-dropping view, blood pounding against his temple in a dull roar. He was shocked at how much the idea of Angie marrying another man repulsed him even though he had once convinced himself if he never saw his wife again it would be too soon. Perhaps because her vibrant, sensual, Lauren Bacall-style beauty haunted him every time he thought about taking another woman to bed... Because every time he tried to convince himself he was ambivalent about her, he failed miserably.

      The conversation he’d had with his father before leaving Milan filtered through his head like some sort of cruel joke, had it not been of an entirely serious nature. The chairman of Ricci International had fixed his impenetrable, ice-blue stare on him and dropped a bombshell. “Your brother Franco is unable to produce an heir, which means it’s up to you, Lorenzo, to produce one and produce it soon.”

      His dismay for his younger brother, his bewilderment Franco hadn’t told him this the night before over dinner, had evaporated under the impact of his father’s directive. Him marry again? Never happening. Except, he conceded with bitter irony, he was apparently still married. To the woman who had walked out on him and said he had no capacity to love. The woman who had stolen the last piece of humanity he’d possessed.

      “Sir?”

      He turned around. “Do you have any more bombshells to add to the pile or is that it?”

      “That’s it. The deal is fine for the moment. We’re still negotiating the smaller points and you need to clear those last couple of tricky items with Bavaro, but other than that we’re on track.”

      “Bene.” He waved a hand toward the door. “Go. I’ll take care of Angie.”

      His lawyer nodded. “Do you want me to file the papers? Get the process started?”

      “No.”

      Cristopher gave him a stupefied look. “Sorry?”

      “I said leave it.”

      His lawyer left. A wise decision. He walked to the bar and poured himself a whiskey. Padding back to the windows, he lifted the glass to his mouth and took a sip. Began to feel vaguely human as the spirit warmed his insides and smoothed out the raw edges—raw edges that had been festering ever since one of the clippings in his daily press briefing had buzzed about his former wife...current wife’s betrothal plans to a prominent Manhattan lawyer.

      He had pushed the news of Angie’s engagement aside. Refused to acknowledge how it sank its claws into his skin, dug into his insides—inspired dark, inexplicable thoughts he couldn’t have identified if he’d tried. Angie had ended a marriage that had descended to the very deepest depths of acrimony, a marriage many would have left for dead. So why did it still sting so much?

      Why was he still so angry, still so damn angry it was like a disease inside of him, eating away at his soul? He itched he was so angry.

      Why hadn’t he asked Cris to file those papers? Ended something that should have been ended two years ago?

      He stared out the window for a long time, sipping the whiskey, watching night fall over a light-strewn Manhattan. Considered his duty to the Ricci line. The fifteen-billion-dollar acquisition deal in front of him—a deal that required every bit of his concentration—that would make Ricci the top luxury hotel chain in the world if he landed it.

      The solution to his predicament, when it came, was shockingly, simplistically clear.

      * * *

      Why wasn’t there any air in this room?

      Angie took the glass of champagne the bartender handed her, turned and leaned against the lit glass surface, surveying the cocktail-dress-attired crowd mingling in the elegant, whitewashed art-gallery space. Shimmering light from the antique chandeliers cascaded onto gleaming black marble floors, while directed lighting spotlighted the stunning artwork on the walls. A perfect, sophisticated backdrop for her and Byron’s engagement party, everything they’d envisioned to celebrate their upcoming nuptials. Why then did the room seem to have drained of oxygen as the night wore on? Why this restless pull in her veins she couldn’t explain?

      She should be ecstatic. She had the career of her dreams as one of New York’s most buzzed-about new jewelry designers, the freedom she’d always craved from life as a Carmichael and a wonderful man waiting in the wings. What more could she ask for?

      And yet something still felt...missing.

      It did not, she told herself firmly, have anything to do with the man who haunted the edges of her happiness. Who had shown her what having everything looked like, then taken it away in the next breath. Because she knew now that kind of an adrenaline rush was for fools. What went up must come down, and in her and Lorenzo’s case, had come crashing down.

      A searing pang throbbed in her chest. She took a deep breath of the nonexistent air. Perhaps that’s what she needed—oxygen to clear her head.

      Byron engaged with a business colleague across the room, she seized the moment. Winding her way through the buzzing crowd, around the live jazz band to the elegant staircase that led to the second level, unused tonight, she climbed the stairs and headed for the small terrace that opened off the upper level.

      Hot, thick summer air hit her like a wall of heat as she stepped outside. She walked to the edge of the beautifully landscaped space, rested her elbows on the railing and drank it in. The frenetic activity in the street below as cabs and pedestrians battled for supremacy on a sticky Manhattan night was a familiar refrain that soothed her senses.

      Another sensory impression seeped in. Spicy, masculine, it was imminently familiar. Disturbingly, distantly familiar.

      Cold fingers clamped down on her spine. Her heart a drumbeat in her throat, she turned around. Her brain flatlined as she took in the tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned male dressed in an exquisitely tailored suit standing in front of her. She lifted her gaze to his hard, dark eyes, as treacherous as black ice. Moved them down over Lorenzo’s prominent Roman nose, the day-old stubble lining his jaw, his beautiful, sensual mouth that knew how to wound and pleasure in equal measure.

      For a disturbingly real second or two, she thought she’d conjured him up. That he wasn’t actually here, but was a product of the strange, restless mood she was in. That, in this fantasy of hers, he’d heard about her engagement and come here to stop it. That he still cared

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