He just wished to god he hadn’t been so right.
Maria emerged from the bathroom behind him, not even a hair out of place. She looked as if she’d just conducted the most boring audit in the world, and he felt…
Wrecked.
‘Maria—’
‘This changes nothing. I still expect you to be out of here by the time the ink dries on my marriage certificate.’
Micha bit back a string of invectives that would have burned the entire building down, instead simply saying, ‘Of course.’
There was so much he wanted to say, but nothing emerged from the steel band clamped around his heart. She didn’t want to hear it and he didn’t have the ability to say it.
She nodded once, more to herself, and brushed past him with barely a second glance, the ice-cold breeze rolling off her making him shiver. He tucked his shirt in to the waist of his trousers and pulled up the zip, turning to her, half outraged, half furious and beyond unimpressed.
‘You’re going to leave? Just like that?’ he said, shocked enough to finally speak.
‘Why not? You did,’ she accused, and for the barest of moments, he thought he saw it. The sheer incandescent hurt that he sometimes thought she might be hiding. But then she blinked and it was gone, part of his imagination, a hangover from the young girl he’d once known.
‘You know it wasn’t that simple,’ he replied.
‘Seemed pretty cut and dry to me,’ she said, reaching for the purse that had ended up by the door to the office. ‘Which suited me just fine,’ she said, adjusting the strap of her purse over her shoulder, near eviscerating him with her carelessness.
‘What was this?’ he asked. ‘Really? Was it you just getting what you wanted?’ he forced himself to ask, hating that weakness in him that needed to know.
‘I got the only thing you were ever good for, Micha,’ she bit out and stalked from his life leaving burn marks across his skin and soul.
Maria held it together, all the way down the corridor, in the lift she knew was covered by CCTV, and out onto the streets of Paris. She held it together while the chauffeur-driven car took her back to the private airfield where the Gallo Group’s jet was ready for take-off. She waited until they were forty-one thousand feet in the air before going to the bathroom where no one could see or hear her, and shattering into a million pieces, knowing that she would never, not ever, be the same again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three months later…
To say thatMicha Rufina was pissed off was an understatement of near epic proportions. The last place and person he ever thought he’d be, orwantedto be, on his way to see was Maria Gallo. And if he’d had a say in the matter, he’d have never laid eyes on her again as long as he lived. But no one could have predicted what had happened after Maria had left Paris that last, fateful night.
Not even Gio Gallo.
Antonio Gallo, despite his promise to his cousin Maria, hadnotdivorced the wife he’d married six years ago for convenience and instead chosen to remain with Ivy for love. Meaning that he and Maria failed to meet the terms of Gio Gallo’s will and less than two weeks after she had left Paris, the entirety of Gallo Group had passed into Micha’s hands, setting off what the world’s press had termed the biggest Italian bloodbath since the second Mafia wars of the 1980s.
Family had turned on family, threats both physical and legal had been made, retracted and made again. Stocks had plummeted and recovered, risen and tumbled in various different ways until everyone realised that the worldhadn’tin fact collapsed under Micha’s ruthless and—surprising to some—expertcontrol.
Which was why Micha was absolutely furious that he was now on his way to see Maria because one single client, one out of thousands spread out across the world, refused to continue to do business with Gallo Group unlessshehandled the renewed contract negotiations.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell the client that he could go and get incredibly creative with notions of self-pleasure, were it not for the fact that they were GG’s biggest international client and if they lost that client, it could very well start a mass exodus that Gallo Group literallywouldn’tsurvive. This one client would be the proverbial straw.
He checked his watch as his driver took the turn towards Sant’Arcangelo, and frowned. He lowered the screen between them and said, ‘Why are we heading south?’
‘We are going to Signora Gallo,si?’
‘Si.Is she no longer in Arezzo with her mother?’
‘Signora Gallo moved recently. It is the same distance timewise,’ the driver said, misunderstanding the motivation behind his query.
‘Va bene,’ Micha replied, raising the screen again.
Why had she moved? And when?
Things had been so crazy in the last four months, but this was an alarming reminder that he could not afford to let things slip through his fingers. Like Maria, moving out of her parents’ estate and to the middle of nowhere. He had known that she’d have been furious at losing the company, but he hadn’t expected her to quit.
