Elizabeth Power - Italian Mavericks - A Deal With The Italian - The Italian's Deal for I Do / A Pawn in the Playboy's Game / A Clash with Cannavaro

The heat, the potent attraction that had been smoldering, building, between them all night wrapped itself around her like a shroud, seizing her lungs. Despite what he thought of her, despite what he’d done to her that night in Navigli, her body wanted him to finish what he’d started. Badly.

She raised her gaze to his. Dark color stained his high cheekbones, everything about him hard, masculine challenge. He would be spectacular in bed. All that intensity caged in an outrageously good body. She could almost taste how good he would be.

She nearly did it, too. Because numbing her brain as to what lay ahead just a little bit longer was high on her agenda. Then her rational brain kicked in. Short-term avoidance wasn’t going to help her in reality. She stepped back, removed herself from all that heat and called it a brush with insanity.

“No, thank you, Rocco. I’m finally starting to learn the rules of your game, and I decline. This year is going to be hard enough without introducing sex into the mix.”

She watched him process her response. The emotion that flickered through his volatile gaze. Watched him firmly slam a lid on it. “I tend to wholeheartedly agree. But push me again like that, Olivia, and I won’t be responsible for my actions, deal or not. Count on that.”

A shiver rocked through her. She turned and walked into the bedroom before the madness escalated. She should be focusing on the day ahead, figuring out how she was going to get through it rather than allowing herself to become hopelessly distracted with Rocco.

Not that anything could prepare her for returning to the life she’d left behind. Nothing ever could.

CHAPTER NINE

NEW YORK DURING Fashion Week was a frenetic exercise in seeing and being seen. Anyone who was anyone in the fashion world descended on the city like a swarm of locusts ready to make their mark. Press coverage was massive, celebrity sightings in an already star-encrusted city even more frequent and thousand-dollar bottles of Cristal ran like water in the dozens of warm-up parties held across the metropolis.

There was, however, no partying going on at the Mondelli suite at Fifteen Central Park West on the afternoon of the Italian fashion house’s show, Olivia’s first appearance on a runway in over twelve months. The show, combined with the details of planning the society wedding of the year, had Olivia hurtling close to the edge. She was wearing the face of Medusa. Rocco was afraid if he touched her, she would snap in half.

She stood, hands on jean-clad hips, in the salon, blue eyes shooting fire at him. “I told you I don’t care,” she muttered in response to his question about the wedding color scheme. “Maybe we should make it a black-and-white theme—the light and the darkness.”

“Perfetto,” he murmured. “You would be the darkness and I would be the light.”

“As if.” She shoved the guest list back at him. “I told you. Violetta, Sophia, my mother and my father. That’s it. And my father is not walking me down the aisle.”

“Why?”

“Because he has his own family now, and who knows if he’ll be able to take the time off work. He works long hours for the transit company.”

Rocco frowned. “So I’ll send him some money to cover the week. Maybe he and his family can even make a vacation out of it.”

“You will not.” Heat flared in her eyes. “He hasn’t wanted anything to do with my mother and me for years. Leave him alone.”

“Let’s talk about your mother, then. If you’ve forgiven Giovanni and her for the affair, why the animosity?”

“Forgiving her for the affair has nothing to do with my general feelings for my mother.”

“Which are?” He lifted a brow. “I’m going to be meeting her tonight. Maybe you should give me a heads-up as to what I’m walking into.”

“Like you did with Stefan?” She shook her still-damp hair back over her shoulders. “All she cares about is status. Keeping up with the Joneses.”

He frowned. “It must have been hard for her when her career fell apart. When she lost Giovanni and your father.”

“She brought it on herself. And then she made everyone pay.” Olivia got down on her hands and knees and peered under the coffee table. “Have you seen my sneakers? We have to be out of here in five minutes.”

He shook his head and shrugged on his jacket. “What do you mean ‘made everyone pay’?”

“Dammit, I need those sneakers.” She crawled over and looked under the sofa. “They’re my lucky ones. Are you sure you haven’t seen them?”

Rocco walked to the door, found her sneakers jammed under a pair of his dress shoes and fished them out. He carried them over to her but held them out of reach.

“Tell me.”

She got to her feet and grabbed the running shoes out of his hands. “When I began to have success with modeling, my mother latched on to me as if I was her saving grace. Her career was done, and she had a hard time holding a normal job. So she spent my money like it was cheap wine. Went on living her life like she had in the good old days. The more she spent, the more I had to work to pay the bills. I was exhausted, in a different city every week. But it never stopped. It was an endless vicious cycle of wanting to cut back and not being able to.”

His brows came together. “Are you saying she spent all your money?”

She sat down and tugged a shoe on. “I’m saying that when I returned home from a trip to Europe where my credit card was declined, the bank manager told me I was broke. As in zero dollars in the bank. She had spent it all.”

His stomach lurched. “On what? What could she have spent that much money on?”

She yanked the other shoe on. “An apartment, a car, trips to visit her friends in the south of France. I was so busy working I had no idea.”

“And you trusted her,” he concluded grimly.

“Who would you trust more with your life than your mother?”

Or your father. The uneasy feeling in his stomach intensified. The way he had read this woman wrong from the very beginning on every point shamed him to his core. She hadn’t been out partying away her money. She had been attempting to support her family, just as he had had to.

“Mi dispiace,” he said quietly as she stood there, a vulnerability emanating from her he now knew to be utterly authentic. “I have judged you completely wrong from the beginning, Olivia. I owe you an apology.”

She stared back at him for a long moment, surprise etching its way across her face. Self-disgust kicked in his gut. He had really been a first-class ass this entire time.

Her gaze fell away from his. “We should go. I need to be backstage in half an hour.”

* * *

Olivia tried to ignore the seismic shift that seemed to have occurred in her and Rocco’s relationship as they walked the short distance to the Lincoln Center. It had been there ever since that kiss during the photo shoot. Ever since he’d told her he believed her about her and Giovanni’s relationship. He may have been avoiding her even more the past couple of weeks, but he was different with her. His respect for her showed. He’d stopped treating her like a high-priced show horse he’d purchased, his to bend to his will.

Rocco came backstage with her to greet the designers and models. Frederic, who was producing the show, gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Put that face away,” he scolded. “You are going to shine tonight. They can’t wait to see you.”

That made her stomach squeeze into an even tighter ball.

“By the way,” Frederic said quietly as models and crew members flowed past them, “Guillermo is shooting backstage tonight.”

“Oh.” She caught her lip between her teeth and considered that. She hadn’t seen Guillermo since the night she had walked out on him, her own heart broken in two. “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said huskily. “How is he?”