CHAPTER SIX
You need to get down here right now.
Micha looked atthe message Ivy Gallo had sent him less than ten minutes ago and checked the location share on the map. He was less than fifty metres away from the shop they were in, but he forced himself to stop. To breathe. Tothink.
It had been four days since he had left Maria’s rented cottage near Lake Trasimeno and with only two days before the wedding he still hadn’t wrapped his head aroundher. His assistant had kept him updated on her movements, Maria seeming to prefer to communicate with Eduardo rather than him—something he was both thankful and slightly resentful over.
Eduardo had informed him that Maria had checked into the hotel La Tormalina last night but her belongings and personal effects were still at the lake house. It wasn’t that he’d expected her to magically uproot her life and integrate it into his, he told himself. That would be an outrageous assumption for anyone to make, he recognised, even as the twist of dissatisfaction tightened in his gut.
But he couldn’t help but feel that it was symbolic of her holding back. Of her not realising the situation that she was in. They were in. He wouldn’t, couldn’t accept half measures in this. He’d been young when he learned that lesson and he’d learned it hard. But it was a lesson that had dragged him from the streets to the dizzying heights of control of one of the world’s largest conglomerates.
At seven years old, he’d not had the luxury of time to adjust. He’d known that if he hadn’t acted immediately, the next man his mother sold herself to might just kill her. That was the day he’d met Gio Gallo and his life had changed. It wasn’t luck. It was because Micha had made a decision. It was because he had decided to go all in that Micha had picked the richest mark, the person he could steal the most from. And honestly, for a moment there he’d thought he’d got away with it. But Gio had been too clever for him. The Italian businessman had let him escape, but only so far. Micha hadn’t even imagined that the man had followed him all the way back to where he lived.
And while it wasn’t in the way he’d expected, Micha’s lifehadchanged that day. Gio had plucked him and his mother from the slums they’d barely been able to afford, and given them housing, given Micha an education, given first his mother work and then, when he’d been old enough, Micha had worked for Gio too; whatever the older man said, whatever he wanted, Micha made it happen.
And in just two days’ time it would change again.
When Maria became his wife.
Micha followed the location arrow on the map on the screen of his cellphone until he was right on top of it. Looking up at the boutique Ivy had brought him to, he winced. Mentally cursing, he blew out a reluctant breath of air and braced himself.
The bell chimed as he crossed the threshold, but no one rushed to greet him and he soon discovered why as he ventured further into the bridal store.
‘Absolutely not.’
The sounds of a somewhat heated argument came from somewhere in the back, he guessed, because he couldn’t see past the rows and rows of dresses in various shades of white and increasing states of bouffant.
‘But Ms Gallo, the designer assured me—’
‘As the designer isn’t here, I’m having considerable trouble wondering how on earth she could have assured you that I look anything other than absolutely hideous!’ he heard Maria insist.
If the shop assistant knew what was good for her, she should probably give up the argument. Maria had never been one to back down from a fight, ever.
And just like that, a childhood memory flashed into his mind. About two years after Gio had ‘adopted’ him, in an attempt to civilise the hellion that he’d been, Micha had been sent to the same school as Antonio and Maria. They’d been inseparable back then. Not that it had stopped some opportunistic kids trying to bully him. The day he’d been about to prove exactly why it was futile to do so, Maria—half a head smaller than both him and the wannabe bully—pushed her way in between them and threated what amounted to grievous bodily harm if the kid didn’t stop.
He rubbed his jaw, fighting the smile that threated to crack across his features from the memory.
‘The style of dress perhaps—’ the shop assistant pressed on, heedless of Maria’s ire.
‘Is terrible? Awful? Makes me look like my grandmother? Ivy, you can see it, can’t you?’
‘Well…’
‘Oh, you’re soEnglish, Ivy. Too polite to say anything negative,’ Maria dismissed as Micha drew closer to the dressing area. Between peach-coloured draped silk, he caught glimpses of a raised dais, and several mirrors.
The assistant was helping Maria out of something puffy and white as Ivy turned, her eyes widening to see him, both in relief and warning.
Few knew that he and Ivy had met several years ago when Gio Gallo had sent him to try to bribe her into divorcing Antonio, thereby leaving Antonio free to marry Maria as Gio intended. Ivy had earned both his and Gio’s respect when she had turned down a life-changing amount of money, instead choosing to stand beside the husband of a convenient marriage that soon proved to be so much more. And that respect had developed into like, forging a strange unspoken understanding and respect between him and Ivy. In some ways, Micha felt that she had seen him in a light that Antonio and Maria would never, because she wasn’t tarnished by the Gallo family prejudice.
‘Help,’ Ivy mouthed and he couldn’t stop the smile that came to his lips—the moment of humour easing something of the stress and tension that had held him taut for the last four days.
‘It’s not funny!’ she mouthed again and he bit his lip to stop the laughter in his chest.
It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. But there was something painfully familiar about Maria’s frustration over something as simple as a wedding dress.
Behind Ivy, the assistant had manoeuvred Maria into another bright white dress that made him wince. The low-cut neckline created more cleavage than he’d even thought possible for Maria, then puffed out beneath her breasts in a way that reminded him of a Victorian milk maid, creating an uncomfortable discord between the competing images of purity and impropriety. The shocking bright white made Maria look almost sick in the harsh lighting and he wasn’t in the least surprised when Maria fisted her hands at her sides and let out a cry of frustration.
Which was nothing compared to the cry of alarm she made when she caught sight of him standing there.
