LITMIR.BIZ

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Her sister’s jaw dropped. “What do you mean ‘screwed them up’? Who?”

      “Lorenzo’s legal firm. They forgot to file the papers with the state.”

      “Is he fixing it?”

      She closed her eyes. “He won’t.”

      “What do you mean ‘won’t’?”

      “Franco can’t have a baby. Lorenzo needs to produce an heir. He wants me to do my duty and put our marriage back together. Give him a baby.”

      A gasp escaped her sister. “That’s outrageous. You’re engaged.”

      “Am I?” Panic skittered up her spine. “If I’m legally married to Lorenzo, what does that make Byron? My illegitimate fiancé?”

      Her sister looked dumbfounded. “I don’t know... Regardless, we’ll sic our lawyers on him. This has to be negligence.”

      “He’s angry,” she said quietly. “So angry at me for leaving.”

      “You did what you had to do. Lorenzo wasn’t an innocent victim in all this. You both had a role to play in what happened.”

      Angie pushed a hand through her hair. Fixed her gaze on her sister. “Is the Carmichael Company in trouble? Is there something you haven’t been telling me?”

      A guarded look wrote itself across her sister’s face. “What does that have to do with this?”

      “Lorenzo says he’s given Father two loans. That he will bail Carmichael out of its financial problems if I try and make our marriage work. Incentive, he called it.”

      Abby’s eyes turned into hard, bright sapphires. “That bastard.”

      “Is it true? Did he give father those loans?”

      “Yes.” Her sister’s admission made her stomach plunge. “At first it was the need to switch over equipment to compete with other high-tech manufacturers. But Carmichael never really recovered from the new technologies taking over the market.”

      Angie’s breath left her in a sharp exhale. She’d been hoping against hope it wasn’t true.

      Abigail’s lips firmed. “You aren’t doing this. Father’s been burying his head in the sand for years. He didn’t want to see the writing on the wall. It’s his problem to fix, not yours.”

      “Why didn’t you tell me?” She swallowed past the lump swelling her throat. “You promised you wouldn’t carry the load alone.”

      “You needed time. You were shattered when you walked away from Lorenzo. The last thing you needed to know was that your ex-husband was bankrolling the Carmichael Company.”

      Blood pulsed against her temple. “And Mother? How is she handling this?”

      Abby frowned. “Ange—”

      “Tell me.”

      “She’s become more unstable since the financial difficulties began. It—” She waved a hand. “It may be time to check her into a program. She doesn’t want it. She swears she won’t go, but I got a call from Sandra last week while they were on a girls’ night out. I had to pour her into bed.”

      Emotions she’d long held at bay welled up inside of her, causing her throat to constrict and the knots in her stomach to twist tighter. “What was it this time?”

      “Gin.”

      She closed her eyes. She’d distanced herself from her family for her own self-preservation—because picking up her mother again and again had left her in a million pieces. Because she just couldn’t do it anymore while she’d been trying to pull herself back together after the demise of her marriage. But the guilt surrounding the difficult decisions she’d made was always there in the background, impossible to escape.

      It wrapped itself around her now—tight, suffocating. For when Della Carmichael started sliding down her slippery, alcoholic slope, the bottom came fast and furious.

      “Angie.” Her sister’s firm voice brought her head up. “I won’t allow him to do this to you. This is not on you.”

      But Angie knew her sister was wrong. The only solution to this was her. Her convincing Lorenzo this was insane, that it would never work. Because she knew tonight hadn’t been the end of it.

      * * *

      Her dilemma was still raging in her head as she put down the phone the following evening having assured Byron she was fine—that the headache she’d pleaded to extract herself from the party just before midnight was gone. The same headache that had made her slide out of her fiancé’s kiss and leave him on her doorstep, a frown on his face.

      Dammit. She gave up on the idea of work, pushed to her feet and walked across her bright studio space to stand looking out at the street. SoHo at night was still busy with foot traffic, the city thick with tourists at the height of the summer. A good thing for the boutique she ran below the studio that featured her work. The bell announcing visitors had been ringing all day.

      The purple awning bearing her name whipped in the breeze below. Carmichael Creations. It rankled, more than she could say, to know this studio she loved, that she was so proud of, had been contaminated by Lorenzo’s powerful reach. She’d wanted—needed—to prove so badly she could do this by herself. To follow her heart and forge a successful career as a designer after Lorenzo had dismissed it as a hobby, when in fact, self-expression was as necessary to her as breathing.

      She watched a group of young girls walk by, laughing and jabbing each other in the ribs as they pointed at a slick-suited handsome male in front of them. Her heart gave a painful squeeze. She’d been like that when she’d met Lorenzo—desperately innocent, utterly swept away by his powerful aura.

      The memories flooded back, tumbling one over another in painful succession until she was standing by the pool at her parents’ legendary winter party in Nassau clad in the sexiest silver lamé gown she owned, butterflies in her stomach knowing the gorgeous, ruthless corporate raider Lorenzo Ricci would be in attendance. Her father had been doing friendly business with Lorenzo rather than serving as one of her husband’s hostile takeover targets, but Alistair Carmichael’s directive had been clear to his daughter—leave Lorenzo alone, you’re way out of your depth.

      And she had been. But smarting from an argument with her father, needing to escape her miserable, lonely existence for just one night, she couldn’t resist. Every woman had wanted to catch Lorenzo, the most desirable widower in Manhattan, perhaps because none ever had. She’d taken her best friend Becka’s dare to ask him to dance and shockingly he’d said yes. That dance had led to a kiss in the garden and a hot, heated assignation that had shaken her innocent foundations to the core. She’d gotten her one night with Lorenzo Ricci plus way more than she’d ever bargained for.

      She closed her eyes, an ache pulsing low in her chest. She’d thought she could be the one, the one who could make her husband love again because what they’d had had seemed earthshaking to her twenty-two-year-old self. That by offering him her unrequited love, she could help him get over his late wife, Lucia, who popular consensus had said he was still hung up on. Until Angelina had learned love was an emotion her husband reserved exclusively for his late wife, an emotion that would never be on offer to her.

      Blood throbbed at her temples. She couldn’t change the past as much as she wished she could, but she could—would—fight Lorenzo on this.

      She could postpone the wedding until her divorce came through. Move to a cheaper studio space. But that still didn’t address the financial difficulties the Carmichael Company was in. The responsibility that lay on her shoulders.

      A chill crawled through her at the thought of the cold, hard stranger she’d faced on the terrace last night. Lorenzo had always been tough, carved by his experiences, shaped by the cutthroat scion of the Ricci family, Salvatore Ricci, but last night she’d seen a whole new lethal side of him.

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