Vows to the Boss
Kali Anthony
CHAPTER ONE
Leo knew itwasn’twhoyou invited to your wedding that was important. It was those youleftoffthe guest list that made your wedding an occasion to be talked about. He’d left plenty off his guest list for his wedding today. The writers of magazines and style blogs had estimated the number of guests would be in the many hundreds. They were wrong. Instead, those invited had been chosen strategically, with thought and care. Royalty mingled with commoners, select clients with trusted suppliers. Each invitation sending a message about where Leonardo Zanetti was now placed in the world, who had helped him to get there and where he wanted to be in the future. It was one of the things that made his wedding to Ms Simone Taylor the most talked about of the year.
Leo counted on the talk.
A crucial business deal relied on it. Hewouldpurchase the Tessitore textile company and in doing so cut the knees from Vito and Rocco Silvestri. Father and son.Hisfather and his half-brother. Makers of world-renowned, bespoke furniture that was bought by princes, and coveted and poorly copied by paupers. They were the only ones who mattered to Leo and, when he had his way, they’d never use another metre of Tessitore fabric in their coveted designs, ever again.
A perfect means to avenge his mother’s memory, using the father who’d stolen everything from them both. If Vito hadn’t done so, Leo’s mother would have still been alive.
A cold knife of guilt stabbed through him, lethal as the black ice that had stolen his mother’s life all those cruel years earlier. Back then, he was an angry teenager, tired of being impoverished and living hand to mouth on his mother’s meagre cleaning wage.
Instead of staying in Milan with her, he’d run to Rome to try and seek his fortune. There, he’d learned painful lessons about what poverty and hunger of the body and spirittrulymeant.
How easy it was, when you were cold and famished in squalor on the streets and too full of pride to scuttle home with your tail between your legs, to fall in with people who made you feel you were someone else entirely. Powerful and important, when the ugly truth was, you were nothing but fodder for their illegal enterprises.
It turned out that, for a while, crime did pay. Yet not enough for the lifestyle he’d wanted to live. Leo’s mother had paid the price of his failure to support her. Leaving a job one winter morning she slipped on the icy stairs. A simple fall, a mundane accident. Yet one with catastrophic consequences.
That was when life as he had known it had ended.
Since then he’d risen like a tainted phoenix from the ashes of his rage and grief.
‘Everything okay?’ Simone, his executive assistant and now wife, asked.
They’d been at a table mingling with guests who he considered to be some of his few allies in a world of old-money rivals. Amongst people who wanted to tear him down for the temerity of coming from nothing and making something of himself. This wedding was as much for work and shoring up alliances as it was for showing the world he’d put aside his playboy single days and ‘settled down’. Still, Leo regretted that in his introspection he’d been ignoring Simone.
Whilst they both well knew the purpose of this marriage was business and not pleasure, now wasn’t the time to be thinking all about himself. This was her day as much as his. More to the point, failing to focus on her wasn’t a good look when they were supposed to be blissfully in love.
The mere thought churned acid in his gut. To Leo, love equalled being used, betrayed and abandoned. He’d learned that lesson well, taught by his father’s neglect. Nothing he’d witnessed as an adult had convinced him differently.
‘Everything’s perfect,’ he said. Aside from his dark thoughts that was, but Leo was sure he’d hidden them well enough. He was a master of disguise, after all. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
For good measure Leo threw out his trademark smile. The one that had earned him his first million-dollar pay check at the age of nineteen, after he’d been plucked from the Milan streets by a talent scout in the days after his mother’s funeral.
He’d rocketed to the heights as a top model in a viral and now-famed aftershave commercial, which had earned him dizzying amounts of money. Then he walked away from it all and opened his style and design company, Circolo.
A role where he was feted by the rich and famous for his impeccable taste and advice on how they could achieve it for themselves. One which had made him his first billion dollars before he’d turned thirty.
The story told was an old and well-worn one. Seen as the ultimate fairytale every time the press dredged it up. But all Leo could think at the time was that his face and body were finally good for something more than picking up women or inflicting fear on Rome’s small business owners.
Simone raised an arched brow and cocked her head. Her silvery gaze should have been cool and assessing. Yet the soft smokiness of her eyes and plush pout of her generous pink lips, so different from the barely-there makeup she usually wore, painted another picture entirely. Her intensity in this moment wouldn’t have been out of place in their two-bedroom suite, alone, with both of them contemplating their approaching wedding night.
To hell with the separate bedrooms they’d agreed on…
A shocking heat ignited, settled in his gut, then scorched much lower. Leo schooled his face into neutrality. He was used to hiding his feelings. A skill learned in his modelling days pretending he was basking on a warm summery beach after a cooling swim, when in truth he was wet and freezing in a bitter winter’s breeze.
‘You have that look. Like something’s on your mind,’ she murmured.
There was a prickle of recognition. An uncomfortable sensation, like he was being exposed. Simone had an uncanny way of seeing right through him. It’s what made her the finest executive assistant he’d ever worked with, being able to anticipate his needs before he even realised what he’d wanted himself. It was enough to give him pause. She didn’t need to witness the errant and misplaced desire that suddenly seemed to have overtaken him. It was simply an adjustment period, that was all. Moving from the life of an avowed bachelor with any number of women similarly invested in fun-times-not-a-long-time, to one of a dutifully engaged and then married man, focused on one woman.
It didn’t mean anything more. It never could.
‘Business is on my mind.’
It wasn’t exactly a lie. People believed his life had been charmed but recently, nothing had gone as planned. His efforts to atone for his youthful sins in Rome, finding the families he and the gang he’d run with had harmed, had run into some snags. Unnecessary questions were being asked when all he sought was to keep that part of his life his own, dark secret and repay what was owed to them through an impenetrable trust and charity. Then there was Tessitore, which he was intent on purchasing with single-minded focus. Especially after he’d discovered his father and half-brother were sniffing around, looking to purchase it too.
