Katherine Garbera - The Moretti Heir / Billionaire Extraordinaire - The Moretti Heir / Billionaire Extraordinaire

The race in Barcelona, Spain, wasn’t any different from the two previous races for Marco. He did press conferences, attended Moretti Motors functions and as far as his brothers and his teammate Keke were concerned, he was the same ambitious winning driver he’d always been.

But inside Marco seethed. At first, when he’d discovered he was alone in Melbourne, he’d been concerned about Virginia, worried that their night of passion had overwhelmed her. But as time had gone on he’d realized that she’d been after just that one night with him.

He also realized that she didn’t want to be found. And that shouldn’t have been a big deal. He was aware that if she’d stayed, he would have hustled her out of the penthouse and then gone on with his life. He wasn’t looking to settle down. He had made a promise to his brothers that he wouldn’t break, and he had no time in his life for romantic complications.

So why, then, was he still so angry when he thought about the way she’d left him?

“Marco?”

“Sì?”

“We have to meet with the officials in a few minutes…are you okay?” Keke asked.

“Fine. Just going through the race in my head.”

“Are you free for dinner tonight? Elena’s family is in town and we’re going out with them.”

Keke and Elena were getting more serious with each month that passed, and he appreciated his friend always including him, but Marco was starting to feel like a third wheel with them.

“My parents are coming to the race, so I’m going to spend the evening with them.”

“You can invite them, as well.”

“What’s up? Don’t you want to be alone with Elena’s parents?”

Keke flushed. “It’s not that. I’m going to ask her to marry me and I would like to have you there. I don’t have any real family, you know?”

Marco understood. “I’d be honored to join you. In fact, Dom has reserved a restaurant for our evening so that we would have privacy…would you like to use that location?”

“I made reservations at Stella Luna,” Keke said.

“Then we will join you there. What time?”

“Nine.”

Marco looked at the German, wondering what this would mean for their friendship. He knew no matter how much a man wanted his relationships to remain intact, once a man got married, his life changed. “Congratulations, amico mio. ”

“Thanks. I…if she says yes, will you be my best man?”

“She will say yes, and I will be your best man.”

Keke left a few minutes later and Marco called his parents and brothers to invite them to join Keke’s dinner celebration.

Marco had a moment’s pause, as he always did when he thought of marriage. The plan that he and Dom and Tony had concocted when they were young boys meant that they’d probably never marry for love. And he envied his friend that relationship.

He left the garage and found a group of fans waiting for autographs. He stopped, smiled for photos and signed hats and shirts, all the while scanning the crowd for Virginia’s face. He was a sap and an idiot to keep looking for her. She was gone. And he needed to move past that one night in Melbourne.

But he couldn’t. She was the one who left. A part of him acknowledged that it was wounded pride that made him want to see her again. Another part, the baser part, wanted to see her again for purely sexual reasons. He wanted to take her and enslave her with the passion that ran between them. Bind her to him and then when she was well and truly his…leave her so that she could experience what he’d been going through.

He was lucky his racing hadn’t suffered, but at this point in his career he knew how to shut out everything except the race when he got behind the wheel.

“Marco, wait up,” Dom called as he walked across the field toward him.

“What is it?”

“I got your message about tonight and I’ll try to be there. But I may not be available.”

“Is something going on?”

“I think we have a spy in our company. I might have to return to Milan to take care of the matter.”

Marco’s eyes narrowed. The ruffled papers on my desk …“Why do you think that?”

“I ran into Dirk Buchard today in the owner’s lounge, and he mentioned rumors of a new car design from ESP,” Dom said.

ESP Motors had been formed by Nonno’s archrival on the Grand Prix track. Moretti Motors had outshone ESP at the time. One thing that had been in Lorenzo’s favor was the fact that he had the Midas touch when it came to business. “What about the design?”

“I might be paranoid—”

Marco snorted. His brother wrote the book on paranoid when it came to guarding business secrets. “Might be?”

“Whatever. But he mentioned something that is on the new Vallerio model. And no one outside of you, me, Antonio and our R & D team has seen that.”

“You don’t have to stay for the race if you want to go back to Milan and do some more research,” Marco said.

“I want to. I think you race better when Tony and I are here.”

“I agree. I like to remind you both that I’m faster than either of you can ever hope to be.”

Dom punched him in the arm. “Speed isn’t the only thing that matters.”

“In our world it is.”

“True enough. Speaking of speed, did you get the e-mail I sent about the new marketing campaign?”

“Yes. I like it. I think it’ll be just what we need to launch the new Vallerio.”

“I agree.”

Marco thought for a moment. “Is it possible that someone could have figured out what we were doing by studying the cars? I’m using similar technology in my race car this season.”

“I’ll know more after I go back to the Milan office.”

Marco looked at his brother and thought of how hard they’d all worked to distance themselves from the fiasco that had been Moretti Motors under his father’s management. At times like this, Marco felt like no matter what they did, they were always going to be struggling.

The only times he didn’t feel that way were when he was on the track…and when he’d slept with Virginia. That night, he’d realized he could find peace in a woman’s arms.

Virginia landed in Barcelona on Saturday morning. Last week, when her period had started, she’d had a genuine excuse to return to Marco. Clearly their one night of passion hadn’t born fruit. She had been happy, because she’d missed Marco. And she knew that was a problem. What if her actions just perpetuated the curse on both families?

The truth was, she didn’t care. Every night she’d been away from Marco, she’d dreamed of him, rich and vivid images of the two of them together.

And not just making love.

She’d had strong visions of her and Marco with children dancing around them.

She collected her luggage and found the car she’d hired to take her to the hotel. She wished her grandmother was still alive so she could ask her about the curse she’d put on Lorenzo.

But she had no one. There had been a bit of sadness laced in the knowledge that she wasn’t pregnant. For the first time, she understood why her mother had been so happy to have her. A child meant the end to the loneliness that seemed to haunt each generation of Festa women.

She meant to end that loneliness.

“Welcome to Barcelona,” the liveried doorman at the Duquesa de Cardona Hotel said.

She’d chosen a luxury boutique hotel in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic district. She smiled at the doorman as she exited the cab and walked into the hotel. It was odd to be traveling so much, yet at the same time, she felt like she was finally alive.

All those solitary years of staying at home on Long Island, going to school as a child and young woman and then teaching—it had been a life of nothing but routines; and now she had a mission. Something to fill her days. She felt alive for the very first time.