“How exactly can you help me, Isabella?” he asked, damning Logan for putting that idea out into the universe where Isabella found it.
She shrugged, then tossed her hair over her shoulder.
“Daddy listens to me, he trusts me, which means he will do what I tell him,” she answered. Gideon had no doubt that was true; the woman had gotten away with murder at least twice that he knew of, and Papa Mancini just put more money on her credit cards and told her to stay out of trouble.
Gideon shifted, widening his stance, preparing himself for what he knew was coming.
“And what is it you’d want in return for helping me, Isabella?” he asked, planting his hands on his desk, to brace for impact.
She shrugged again, her gaze going sharp as a blade, her smile turning predatory.
When he’d first thought of a contract marriage, Adrian had suggested Isabella, but Gideon had immediately shut that shit down. He refused to entwine his life any tighter with the New York Mafia. Being Adolfo Mancini’s media fixer was stressful enough; being his son-in-law would have been a fucking nightmare. And while Isabella was definitely arm -trophy material for galas and the paparazzi, she wasn’t wife or mother material. She was so self-centered and selfish there was no way she’d ever have a baby, which would have made the arrangement moot anyway.
And when he’d informed Mancini of his marriage to Kendra, the man had stiffly congratulated him…but Isabella threw a fucking tantrum big enough to involve the police from three different boroughs. Covering that up hand been a pain in the ass, but he’d done it because that was what Mancini expected of him.
Since then, Isabella had made it a habit of popping in to see him uninvited and unwanted, or showing up wherever he was in public—so, of course, the tabloids wrote shit about it. Yes, he could “fix” that, but Mancini hadn’t given that order, choosing to let his daughter have her “harmless” fun. Which meantGideon was stuck in a scandalous “situationship” with the Mafia princess—a harmless one.
He mentally sneered at that.
It wasn’t harmless to him and his marriage, though; he knew Kendra saw that bullshit, that she had to deal with the whispers and looks from people who knew them, but that was all part of being his wife. She had to suck it up and deal with it—it was the least she could do since she was failing at the one thing he’d married her for.
Exhausted, already stressed, already simmering with unspent rage, and with a full day of Mafia bullshit ahead of him, he was not ready to deal with the reminder that he was still without an heir three years later.
As if reading his mind, Isabella purred, “Kendra isn’t the right woman for you, Gideon. She isn’t likeus; she doesn’t have the skills or connections or even the class to stand beside you.”
Each word pummeled him, making his chest burn. He hadn’t cared about any of that when he’d chosen Kendra, and he still didn’t.
“What does that have to do with you helping me, Isabella? Get to the fucking point,” he snapped, well over the conversation, and still peering down the gun barrel of the phone call with Mancini in an hour.
Isabella rose to her feet, five-foot-ten of leggy, blonde Mafia bitch. She glided toward him until she was just across the desk from him, then she leaned down, placing her hands just centimeters from where his were planted.
“Divorce her, marry me, and I’ll help you deal with Daddy—keep things like what happened with the sleazy photog from ever happening again.”
Suddenly, everything fell into place, the glaring truth slammed into him, and he tensed.
Holy fucking shit…it had been a set up from the beginning.
All fucking night, he and Logan had banged their heads against the wall, trying to figure out why Wilkens, a two bit, low-life scumbag would pay someone to create an AI image of two prominent figures, and then sell it to a dime store rag in a mid-sized town more known for Frank Sinatra than political scandal.
Now, he knew.
Isabella had engineered everything—and he would bet his entire Patek Phillipe collection that she’d maneuvered him into this very position to get what she’d always wanted from him.
A ring. A place in his bed. And the prestige and power and bragging rights that came with being the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the US.
“Not a fucking chance,” he spat. “There isn’t a thing you can offer me that would ever make me divorce my wife and marry you.”
A dark, malicious shadow shifted over Isabella’s face, her bottomless, black eyes narrowing on him.
For a moment, he wondered if he’d signed his own death warrant with his rejection.
But, in the next breath, he reeled back, fucking shocked.
Isabella straightened to her full height, and curled her lips at him in a smile that would have made a lesser man shudder.
Finally, she said, “Ican give you a baby.”
Before his synapses could even fire to comprehend what she’d said, his cell rang a familiar ringtone, like the air sirens signaling an incoming tornado.
