‘What I had to do,’ she shot back just as hard and just as low, and damn it if it didn’t turn him on.
As a girl, she’d been all soft curves and sighs, giggles and curiosity. As a woman? She would be something else altogether. For a moment, the apocryphal sight of her entwined in Antonio’s embrace rose in his mind, making him nearly want to retch.
‘Antonio and I will be married by the end of the month,’ she declared.
He barked out a laugh. ‘That’s ridiculous. He doesn’t love you like that.’
‘Who said anything about love?’
‘Dio mio, are you so desperate for this company that marriage means nothing to you?’ he accused. ‘Vows before god, your family, yourmother?’
Maria felt her cheeks heat with anger and her pulse pick up beneath her skin.
‘My mother?’ Maria scoffed. How dare he talk about her mother? About marriage. Aboutvows. ‘I’m surprised you managed to say all that with a straight face, Micha. Or is this just another little ploy to shame me, to manipulate me,distract me? “Look over here, Maria,” all the while, you’re over there…playing another game entirely.’
Bitterness dripped like poison between them.
‘Well, I won’t fall for it. Not this time,’ she said, ignoring the way dark red slashes appeared on cheekbones she’d known both womenandmen to swoon over. ‘My marriage to Antoniowillhappen,’ she insisted. ‘The companywillbe mine. And youwillbe gone.’
Micha’s only response was the slight narrowing of his eyes.
Oh, damn this man! She was trying to have an epic, victorious moment and he wasn’t doing what she’d spent years, a near decade, imagining. He was supposed to be on his knees, begging for mercy.
She turned away from him, wanting to hide her reaction to his words. He knew. Heknewwhat her parents’ marriage had been like. How distant and cold, and unbearable it had been for her. The endless sniping and degrading, demeaning and belittling from her father—the near horrific silence of her mother. She’d once begged and pleaded with them to get a divorce, hoping that perhaps then she might be able to find space to breathe from the suffocation she had grown up with. And ironically, it had been the one single thing in their entire marriage that they agreed on.
There would be no divorce.
Throughout her childhood she had sought sanctuary with Antonio and, yes, even at one point, Micha. At many points even—but she refused to dwell on those times. Together the three of them had run amok throughout Tuscany and it had felt as if the entire world was at their feet. They had been the only family her age or near enough—distant cousins removed more than once were either older or not yet born. As for siblings, for her father, her mother’s inability to bear a second child only furthered the distance between the wife who had failed him and the daughter who would always be a disappointment instead of the heir apparent he’d always wanted.
Antonio and Micha had been her salvation. They had protected her, distracted her. Antonio’s mother had called them the Three Musketeers, and they had imagined playing with swords, attacking their enemies and cutting down their foes.
Well, she was still doing that. Only now, her weapon of choice was marriage. Marriage to Antonio. Not marriage to the boy she had once given her sovery-precious heart to. She braced herself before turning back to where Micha was riffling through some pages on his desk, still standing.
And oddly, she knew that he would stand for as long as she did. Something gentlemanly that he had inherited from her grandfather. He might not have been related to her by blood, but Micha carried some things from Gio Gallo that were instinctive. The way he held himself. His manners. It was perhaps a goddamn relief that he hadn’t inherited the man’s morals. Micha was ruthless enough by himself. He didn’t need that in his blood too.
‘It will, perhaps, be a little harder than you think to get rid of me,’ he said, without bothering to look at her. It made her feel small. It made her feel dismissed. But she was done allowing Micha Rufina to make her feel those things. She’d had enough of that when she was sixteen.
‘On the contrary. I think you’ll find it quite expeditiously done with two little words. You’re fired.’
‘You underestimate how much I do for this company, Maria.’
‘And you overestimate how much I care,’ she shot back, recklessly. Because no matter what had passed between them, no matter where in the world they were, he hadalwaysmade her reckless.
‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you? You’d fire me, and damn the consequences?’ he asked, a strange light in his eye.
‘Absolutely.’
‘No questions?’
‘None.’
‘I have one,’ he said, surprising her a little.
‘Shoot.’
‘Do you really believe that you hate me?’
She stilled, sensing the danger in his question.
