LITMIR.BIZ

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fell from his mouth as Gio detailed all the backstabbing Raphael had done.

      However pale he might look, Raphael didn’t intend to go on the defensive. “Have you no explanation for why you are trying to push me out of my own company?”

      “I’m cleaning house. I should’ve done it years ago.”

      “You’re the bloody CEO, Raphael. What more could you want?”

      “You and I are both aware that a quarter of the board members are always looking for ways to go behind my back. I’ll not tolerate any dissent. This is my company now, Gio.”

      “No one would dare question your command. They know it’s you who drives the stock prices higher. Your reputation is fierce. And if they crawl back to me, it’s because they know you loathe them.”

      “I loathe them because they’re not worthy of anything.” Half of them had turned his father away during the hour of his need. “I’ll not allow any vipers on the board.”

      He was deceived by the very people he trusted.

      Pia’s words wouldn’t leave Raphael alone. In eighteen years, he’d not once looked at it that way. He’d only seen his father’s actions from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old boy. But never as a man who’d been betrayed, as a man who’d been honorable until his last breath.

      “Your work consumes you.” He sighed. “I think at the cost of everything else. This compulsion you have to reach even higher goals...”

      “It is what keeps my family in the style they’re used to.”

      “Si, exactly. This wealth, retrieving your family’s social standing, it’s an obsession. Marco wouldn’t have wanted you to sacrifice your personal happiness.”

      Hands clenching into fists, Raphael turned away. “I’m nothing like my father.”

      Gio’s head jerked toward him as if Raphael had committed blasphemy. “Businesses fail, Raphael. Men make unwise investments, bad choices.”

      His throat raw, Raphael gave voice to the pain he had bottled for years, the complaint he hadn’t let himself make even in the darkest of his nights. “He took the coward’s way out. He should have been a stronger man.” For me. Shame choked those two words.

      “He adored your mother—did you know that? He spent years building his little business, trying to win her hand. But at the first sign of calamity, Portia fell apart. She blamed him. Your mother’s inability to cope with the loss, the weight of your sisters’ disappointments, the large unit of leeches that constitute your various uncles and aunts and cousins, and their taunts—that was what sent him to that early grave. No one believed in him anymore, Raphael, not even the woman he loved.”

      Raphael felt winded as if he’d been dealt a hard blow. He’d thought of his father as a coward. Instead, had his heart simply been broken? Had he given up on them because they had given up on him? Because he couldn’t bear to be diminished in the eyes of the woman he loved?

      His father had been a man who’d cared deeply, a man who’d loved his wife, his family from the bottom of his heart.

      His vulnerability had only brought him ruin and a broken heart. “You backed me into a corner. And I fought back.”

      A shrewd light entered his grandfather’s eyes. “How?”

      “You’d hear it from my own mouth? About Pia?”

      He shrugged and examined his nails. “What does my granddaughter have to do with you buying up stock?”

      “Basta! Stefano Castillaghi, Gio? You think I’d let that bastard touch VA? Did you think I’d ever give you the chance to pull something like this again?”

      “So you claimed Pia.” A cat wouldn’t have looked as satisfied as Gio did. That his hunch had been right made Raphael’s blood boil.

      “I didn’t claim Pia as much as I agreed to her scheme about pretending that I did. You terrified her with your demands and your ill health. She came to me as a last resort.”

      Silence thundered in the air instead of the outrage he’d expected. Damn it, had Gio known that it was a pretense too?

      “No one will come near her again. At least no one that cares about her and not her wealth. In the last month, all of Milan has seen how possessive you are of her. Do not think I have not seen you look at her like a starved dog stares at meat.”

      “Christo, Giovanni. Do not be crude. That is your granddaughter you speak of.”

      “See how protective you get of her? You might as well see the pretense through and marry her, Raphael. You want the company? It’s yours. You want my share of stock that would rightfully be hers? It’s yours. All I ask is that you take care of her. You watch over her when I’m gone. Marry her, Raphael.”

      All his bluster had been leading to this. Every move he’d made since the night of the ball had been toward this. “You know I’ll never marry again.”

      “Pia is different from Allegra, from any other woman you’ve known.”

      “She’s not my type,” he said, even as the idea took root, digging into him and settling down. He forced a harshness into his voice. “She’s neither beautiful nor sophisticated. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She sees too much where there’s nothing.”

      He hadn’t thought of her as anything less than intoxicating for so long. He was always on edge because his only satisfaction came from his imagination and his hand, while seeing Pia every day. While touching Pia. While her subtle perfume and body heat sneaked into his bloodstream.

      Worse was the bruised look in her eyes after what he’d done at his mother’s house. She barely even met his eyes anymore.

      Gone was the laughter, the teasing wit, the endless questions about his past, his mother and sisters, and even Alyssa.

      With one ruthless move, he’d shattered her rose-tinted glasses but he hadn’t realized how much it would disturb him that he’d become less in her eyes too. He’d thought it was better to alienate her but it had backfired. And he hated himself for what he’d done to her.

      “A girl with more substance than glitter is not your type, si.” Giovanni snorted with that proud wisdom that the old thought they had over the young.

      Raphael could not say it was not justified. This one time.

      He had gone for the glitter once before, had come away burned. Allegra was all polished veneer with no strength beneath. His mother had once been called the beauty of Milan. She was not cruel or fickle like his Allegra had been. She even loved him and his sisters, in her own way. But Gio was right, she possessed nothing of substance. She had had nothing to offer his father when he’d needed her the most.

      And Pia was as different from his mother or Allegra as he himself was from his father. He would never trust anyone like his father had done. He would never need a woman’s strength like Marco had done. He just didn’t have that kind of vulnerability.

      Would it be so bad though?

      Giovanni, sensing victory, went in for the kill shot. “You’re a fool if you don’t see that I offer everything you want, Raphael.” He stood up, and again, Raphael was hit with how old and frail—no, how ill Gio looked. “But I’ll not have you chasing her away.”

      Shock hounded away concern. Damn it, his priorities were all skewed. “What are you talking about?”

      “She’s talking of returning to the States for a short trip. That she...whatever it is, it’s because of you. You owe me this, Raphael. You owe me the peace I would get knowing that Pia is safe in your hands. Before—”

      Raphael never got a chance to reply, for Giovanni collapsed midway through the sentence. Heart jumping into his throat, Raphael barely caught him before Gio hit the ground.

      And while

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