Excerpt

ARISTIDE ANGELICO, BILLIONAIRE FOUNDER of Angelico Technologies and a once legendary playboy, rested back in his limousine as he was ferried to Luke Walker’s memorial service. Six feet four inches, he was built like an athlete, lean and muscular in every long line with unruly black curls, bright green eyes and a startlingly handsome face.

He questioned what he was doing.

‘Why are you going to this?’ his PA had asked him casually that morning. ‘You hardly knew the man.’

The answer?

Aristide was attending out of pure, unvarnished curiosity. The death of an innocent cyclist in busy traffic on his very first day of permanent work had ironically made the news. Aristide had been stunned when he recognised the photo.

He had not, however, been keen to see his ex, weeping over the coffin of her late husband. It would all have been a fake show, a demonstration of the reality that she had about as much emotional depth as a puddle. So, he had ducked the funeral, choosing to attend the memorial service instead.

Aristide had Scarlett Pearson, the dewy-eyed primary schoolteacher, in his bed for almost a year and he had believed he knew her inside out. But, surprise, surprise, he reflected cynically, he had proved to be just as foolishly trusting as many men when it came to a tiny, beautiful redhead. Certainly, Aristide had been stunned when, within weeks of becoming inexplicably unavailable, Scarlett had announced—by cowardly text—that she was getting married to Luke Walker. Luke, her best friend from childhood, and a relationship that she had repeatedly assured Aristide was pure and platonic.

More fool him for trusting her! In spite of all the precautions Aristide had taken to keep himself invulnerable, he had ended up almost being a fool for a woman, just as his grandfather and father had been, just as his late twin brother, Daniele, had been. The Angelico men had a poor track record with the opposite sex. As a teenager, Aristide had sworn to remain a playboy and for years that resolve had held fast. The golden years of youth, ignorance and irresponsibility, he labelled that period now. He was only twenty-nine, but he had been a stud at eighteen, determined never to tie his future to either a cold-hearted shrew like his mother or to a cheating gold-digger as his unfortunate younger brother had.

And now the world was threatening to turn full circle, he acknowledged grimly. His mother was putting pressure on him to marry years before he was ready to embrace the institution. Why was he even listening to her? Unfortunately, Daniele’s last heartbreaking request of his brother had been that Aristide strive to be kinder and more understanding of their mother’s unpleasant nature. It was a tall order, but Aristide was still attempting to be tolerant out of respect for his late twin’s memory and to make allowances for his mother’s tragic past.

‘For the sake of the family,’ Daniele had urged, because family had meant everything to his twin…sadly, a great deal less to Aristide.

Suitable marital prospects were served up to Aristide at every family event he attended, and it had become seriously annoying. After all, his plan had always been to stay single until he was middle-aged. Only then would he marry to provide the next generation. He had no perfect candidate in mind, but then he didn’t believe a perfect woman existed. He had, however, already considered the desirable attributes his wife should possess. She would have to be beautiful, wealthy in her own right and of a maternal nature. That last trait was non-negotiable. Nobody knew better than Aristide what it had been like to grow up with a cold, cruel mother.

‘You’re exhausted,’ Edith, Scarlett’s mother-in-law, sighed in a sympathetic undertone in the church foyer, scanning the younger woman’s shadowed eyes.

‘You are as well,’ Scarlett pointed out ruefully as she acknowledged that the sudden unexpected death of her husband a year earlier had ripped the heart out of the whole family circle.

Luke had essentially died in a cycling accident on the way to work, only the shell of him had lingered in a hospital bed for two long months afterwards. There had, however, been no real hope that he would emerge from his coma during those dreadful weeks and eventually she and her in-laws had agreed for the machines keeping him alive to be switched off. He had been twenty-four years old, newly qualified as an accountant and a much-loved only child with everything to live for still ahead of him. And in the blink of an eye he was now gone and nothing could change that reality.

Scarlett dragged in a ragged breath.

She was empty of tears now. The weeks during which Luke had lain unresponsive in his hospital bed had drained her of the first sobbing desperation of grief. In addition, she was no stranger to family loss. Her adoptive parents had died soon after her marriage, one from a long-standing illness, the other from a massive stroke, brought on, she suspected, by the shock of bereavement. Becoming an adult orphan had made Scarlett even more grateful to have Luke and his parents in her corner. He had helped her build their family with two parents. Now, without Luke around to steady her, she felt as though the foundation of her world had collapsed and she knew that she had to get over feeling that way because she still had two young children to raise.

Just about the very last thing Scarlett was prepared to handle was the shocking vision of her ex, Aristide, striding up the path to the church door where she and Luke’s parents were greeting their friends. Impossibly elegant in a dark suit, so beautifully tailored it could only have hailed from an Italian designer, Aristide Angelico looked utterly untouched by the passage of time. Not that that surprised her, because she had learned the hard way that nothing much touched Aristide deep and it had only been two years since she had last seen him. That two years for her, however, had been packed tight with her pregnancy, her marriage, the birth of her twins and a new life darkened by the loss of Luke, but an utterly different life from what she had once had while she was with Aristide.

Gleaming black curls that caught the sunlight and were a little too long for tidiness tumbled above a lean, stunningly handsome face. Aristide was a male whom few women failed to notice. Scarlett could feel her knees weakening as though some insidious spell had entered her bloodstream the instant she saw him. It brought back bad memories of how lost she had once got in Aristide, of how vulnerable she had become in the grip of her fear of losing him. And that And that disturbing surge of recollection hit her at the exact right moment and put her back in control as he grasped Edith’s hand, bowed his gorgeous dark head in polite acknowledgment of the sad occasion and murmured conventional words of regret. And then it was Scarlett’s turn…

She collided reluctantly with glittering emerald-green eyes as cutting as diamond blades and she didn’t hear what he said, didn’t even register his hand gripping hers briefly because she felt the burning animosity and scorn powering his gaze down into her very bones. Her pale heart-shaped face flamed as though a blowtorch had been turned on her. Involuntarily, she took a tiny step back from him as he turned to address Luke’s father, Tom.

Still in shock at being exposed to the passionate aura of charisma that Aristide emanated like a forcefield, Scarlett had to be prompted by Edith’s hand on her arm to swivel back and greet the next person approaching. Her brain, her very consciousness and control, still, however, seemed lost to her.

She was remembering what she didn’t want to remember: Aristide, smiling, concerned and effortlessly captivating the very first time she had met him when she had turned an ankle out jogging. She had not believed that love at first sight existed until that day. The attraction had been that instant and overpowering. By the time she truly understood who he was, what that wealth and status meant in the world and how it would colour his every expectation of her, she had already been in too deep to pull back. Loving Aristide had made her too forgiving in that she had kept on making excuses for him when he’d disappointed her. No, no, she told herself angrily, not going there now, not today, which was her best friend Luke’s day…

Aristide sank fluidly down in a pew, his attention locked on the grieving widow’s profile. That porcelain-clear skin of hers showed everything. Even though months had passed since her husband’s death, she still looked pale, dark shadows bruising her remarkably blue eyes, her skin wildly outclassed in brilliance by the dark auburn fall of hair like molten copper, which she had restrained in an ugly bun. Surprisingly, he wasn’t as pleased to see Scarlett still looking wretched as he had assumed he would be. Did that mean that he was a kinder person than he had ever believed he was? He didn’t think so.

Once again, he thought how fortunate it was that he had made himself let Scarlett go in every way. He hadn’t spied on her from a distance, keeping tabs on her life. Oh, yes, he had been tempted, because curiosity could be a killer, but he had known that ultimately it was better for him simply to turn his back and move on without wondering how her new life with another man might be developing.

Even so, questions were still bubbling up like burning lava in the back of his mind, the sort of questions he had suppressed two years earlier, questions that he considered beneath him. Had she always loved Luke Walker? Had she set up Aristide as a rival to inspire jealousy and finally win her best friend’s sexual interest? Or had she been cheating on Aristide all along? In one of those twisted can’t-commit-can’t-let-you-go relationships?

But she had been a virgin, not that Aristide had ever chosen to openly acknowledge that fact lest he encourage his lover to have expectations. And he never ever made that mistake with women. He was always very clear about what he was and what he wasn’t offering. She had accepted the status quo just as all the women he had ever met did. Even so, Scarlett had continually strained against the boundaries of that acceptance. She had refused expensive gifts and holidays, refused to acknowledge that his needs as the CEO of an international business empire should naturally take precedence over her own humbler calling. Indeed, Scarlett had sometimes been so blasted difficult that he had wondered why he was still with her.

Even so, Aristide was no fool. Scarlett Pearson/Walker still intrigued him because she had ditched him and she was the only female who had ever walked away from him. Of course, that fact still rankled with a guy whom Scarlett had once accused of having an ego as big as the planet. It was natural for him to wonder why she had picked another man, nothing more complex than that.

He attended the community-hall sandwiches-and-tea gathering that followed the memorial service. He had rarely felt so out of his depth anywhere, listening to impromptu speeches being made about Luke Walker, who had apparently been a noted youth and outreach volunteer in the local church and various organisations. A Mr Perfect, Aristide decided, wondering what murky secrets Scarlett’s husband had been hiding below that squeaky-clean surface because Aristide was that much of an innate cynic.

He couldn’t imagine Scarlett with a man like that, but he could imagine her admiring a man like that, which set his teeth on edge. When he had first met her, Scarlett’s every free hour had seemed to be devoted to similar philanthropic interests, he recalled belatedly, only she had slowly fallen away from all that do-gooding once he pointed out that she was never available when he wanted to see her. Without warning though, Aristide was inexplicably feeling as though he had never really known Scarlett at all and it annoyed him that in many ways he had refused to acknowledge the kind of world she had grown up in. A settled, conventional and conservative realm, which he could barely comprehend because it was the very opposite of the hyper-sophistication, the cold silences and the bitter secrets and dramas that had soiled his own far more dysfunctional background.

Aristide didn’t know what family warmth and support was. From what he had witnessed over the years, his parents had always detested each other. His father, who had proved to be a most reluctant father and husband in reality, was indifferent to him. His mother, however, idolised him, her sole surviving child, while Aristide quietly despised and avoided her. Regardless of those unpleasant facts, maintaining the Angelico family line entailed presenting an appearance of unity, dignity and doing one’s duty. Aristide, however, had only ever truly cared about one other person and that person had been his beloved twin, who had taken his own life six years earlier. A world shorn of Daniele’s bright optimistic spirit still seemed like a very bleak place, but it had somehow felt a little less bleak while Scarlett was by his side.