“You’re right,” Leo added. Still no rancor in his voice. Only a mild curiosity. “We’d have happily joined in. You went after the one person who had nothing to do with all this. But you’re forgetting that Alex has connections in high places, all over the world.
“There’s no shortage of people that will happily help her out, to save her from an untenable situation.
“She’s the most loyal person I know, even if the person getting it is questionable.
“Knowing how much you despise even our name, she’ll twist herself around to not give you any more ammunition against us. She knew you’d demand to know where she is. Keeping it a secret is her way of protecting us.”
“She fought with me like a lioness because she thinks she needs to protect you from me. And you didn’t come to her aid?”
“You’re not listening, Cavalli. Alex’s long gone. No one here knows when she’ll return or even if she will.”
For the first time in a week, Vincenzo felt the sure ground under his feet shift. There was no gratification in Massimo’s voice or Leonardo’s gaze crowing over the fact that Alex had trumped him. Only worry for her. “She can’t escape from her life. She has obligations, a global career,” he protested.
“A career she’s been slowly decoupling herself from. If you knew her at all, you’d have known she’s been finishing up all her contracted work and not signing up to anything new,” Massimo said. “Cristo, you really did a number on her at an already rough time, when she’s been questioning everything about herself, her career, her life.”
“What are you talking about?” Leo asked his brother the question that Vincenzo wanted to.
“She broke it off with that photographer boyfriend of hers—Javier Diaz—a few months ago. She plans to quit modeling altogether. I’ve been wondering why she’d marry a practical stranger after—”
“Alessandra and I have known each other for a few weeks,” Vincenzo put in. But he was slowly losing ground. Losing his belief in her.
Had her vows to him meant nothing at all? Damn it, why hadn’t she fought with him? Demanded an explanation? Given him the chance to convince her his motives were sound?
“It still makes you a stranger. But now I think I see it.” Massimo’s gaze bored into him. “You were a rebound from Javier. An escape. A temporary madness.”
Vincenzo was more than tempted to knock the smirk off the tech genius’s face but it went against everything he believed in. “Watch your words, Massimo.”
“Walk away, Cavalli.” The younger man stood up. “It hasn’t dawned on you yet, has it? Alex has gone. It’s what she does when the pain gets too much for her.”
Vincenzo had no retort. No words, even.
This wasn’t the Alessandra he knew. The sophisticated and yet vulnerable minx that had demolished his self-control with one genuine smile. This was not the woman who’d seduced him by giving away pieces of herself. The woman that had distracted him from twenty years’ worth of strategizing in a mere few weeks.
But then how much did he truly know Alessandra beyond the report a PI had provided him with, beyond the picture the media painted of her?
“I’m supposed to believe that this complicated woman…is the woman I married?”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe us or not. We’ve known Alex for a long time,” Massimo pointed out, satisfaction pouring out of every word. “You betrayed her trust. Learning about how Greta treated you was a double betrayal for her to have to deal with. And if I know your convoluted, labyrinthine mind—and I’m beginning to—you had every intention of using her against us,” he said with a shrewd gleam in his eyes that for Vincenzo was far too much like looking in the mirror. “And I’m guessing she knew that. But then Alessandra has always known her own weaknesses,” he finished cryptically.
Vincenzo had had enough. “If this is her way of telling me to pick between her and my original intentions, then she—”
“If she’d thought she could convince you to abandon this crazy revenge you’re bent upon—” Leonardo’s dark gaze held the first stirrings of anger in it “—she wouldn’t have left her own home in the middle of the night without telling even us, would she? Which means you did nothing to reassure her. Nothing to prove to her that she wasn’t just another pawn in your game.”
“My plans for the Brunettis have nothing to do with her.”
“Then you truly do not understand what family means to Alex. What family means at all.” Vincenzo looked away, despising even the hint of sympathy in Leo Brunetti’s eyes. “Accept she’s gone, Cavalli. And that she’s not returning anytime soon.”
Vincenzo tensed, reeling under the other man’s words, fury and frustration building inside him. A future he hadn’t wanted but had gotten used to looking forward to for the last few weeks was slipping through his fingers.
Was this the depth of Alessandra’s commitment? To run away at the first sign of difficulty? To abandon their marriage because things had got tougher than she’d like?
Massimo gave him a pitying look. “I bet you anything she’s gone running back into Javier’s arms. Can’t really blame her, can we, when her prince actually turned out to be a frog. And for all your scheming steel trap of a mind, I bet she won’t be found until she wants to be.”
CHAPTER THREE
Nine weeks later
THERE WAS GOING to be the devil to pay.
The very devil.
Alessandra stood near the bank of elevators, her feet rooted to the ground, staring across the vast white marbled lobby to the dark oak door that should bear the warning “Beware all you who enter here” or some such.
Everything in her wanted to run away from this. From him. But she was done running.
Her reflections in the metallic shine of the elevators—all six of them—had her second-guessing her direct arrival here at BFI’s towers in Milan’s financial district straight from the airport after her long flight from San Francisco.
She
