But she was no more Cinderella than Raphael Mastrantino was a prince.
Raphael ran a finger along his collar, his body humming with awareness, with unspent energy as if he were a randy youth.
His attraction to Pia—instant and all consuming—defied logic. She was not beautiful, not in the conventional sense, not sophisticated for all her dress and jewelry—and yet there was something irresistibly alluring about her.
Which woman among the society he lived in would so openly admit what she felt for him? And with that artless dismay that she was attracted to him?
No, first there were games, games that every woman played. Even his mother played them when Raphael refused to buy her the latest model of the Vito Viva. Either she cooked his favorite food every night or she shed phony tears over his father’s death—an entire episode meant to guilt him and remind him that he should be a good son who granted each and every one of her expensive wishes.
Even his four sisters played games, with Raphael, and with their boyfriends who had inevitably turned into husbands.
No one admitted in that raw, unsophisticated way what a man made her feel. No one moaned like that—as if she were sinking into a whirlpool of pleasure when a man touched her ankle. No woman that he knew stared at a man with those big, luminous eyes as if he was the answer to her every fantasy.
Coy looks, innuendoes laced with sexual tension, teases, throwing herself at other men to make him jealous—the list of things his ex-wife, Allegra, had tried on him a few years ago were innumerable.
I’m not good at playing games.
There had been a genuine quality to her distress, to her confusion. As if her body was betraying her and she didn’t know what to do.
Either she was truly naive—an anachronism with her faint blushes and her trembling mouth—or she knew just how to appeal to a man as jaded and cynical as he was. Perhaps she had decided that the right way to court his attention would be to cater to that traditional man in him, the Neanderthal that Allegra had called him so many times.
Was that it? Had she thought to counter his distrust by catering
precisely to his tastes?
A chill ran down the length of his spine as he made his usual rounds through the mansion as he usually did when visiting.
He had no doubt about how much Gio would have talked about him over the last month. As his godson and his protégé, he was Giovanni’s pride and joy. Raphael had turned the small spare automobile parts company that Gio had handed him into Vito Automobiles, a leading manufacturing company.
Giovanni had been his lifeline when he’d been sinking as a seventeen-year-old. He’d been a light in a long, dark tunnel that Raphael’s weak father had plunged them all into.
Not that it stopped Giovanni from also being manipulative as hell. Throughout the evening, he had stood on the periphery of the crowd, watching, with a satisfied smile on his face. Like a puppeteer intensely delighted with the results of his string pulling.
Whatever the old man was up to, it would eventually fall to Raphael to clean it up. Just as he kept Giovanni’s hounding relatives at bay. Just as he ensured that the leftovers from Gio’s time on the board—men who would stab Raphael in the back before he could blink—didn’t leach away the gains he had made.
Just as he took care of the various and sundry branches of Mastrantino families without any expectations in return.
And yet, as he questioned one of the staff members about Pia, Raphael was suddenly aware that this was unlike any other responsibility he shouldered.
For no bickering ex-wife of Gio’s or grasping cousin of his mother had ever caused his blood to pound like this.
No woman had ever called to his baser instincts like this supposed innocent granddaughter of his godfather.