Demanding His Billion-Dollar Heir

She was just about to cross the room when she heard a knock on the door. Turning, she called for Matthieu to enter. She knew it was him, felt it on her skin, in the air, as if somehow she had become so attuned to his presence, she just

...knew.

‘Hi,’ he said as he stepped into the room, taking it all in with one expansive gaze, before finally settling back on her. It gave her the time to assess for any physical damage.

‘So it didn’t descend into fisticuffs, then?’ she asked, half afraid of the answer.

‘Why would it have? I can be charming, you know.’

‘It wasn’t you I was worried about.’

‘They are both perfectly intact, I assure you.’

Maria couldn’t help but smile, only to follow the return of his gaze to the boxes lining the far wall. She turned back to look at them too. The sum total of her life in London.

‘What are in those boxes?’

‘Mostly equipment and materials.’

‘You sent them here?’

Rather than bring them with you?

The implied question rang in the air like the vibrations of a bell tolled.

She walked over to one of the boxes and peeked into the depths where the tape had come away. She couldn’t help but smile as she peeled back the tape a little more and slipped her hand inside to retrieve the spool of silver threading. She ran her hand over it, caressing it like a long-lost friend. Only now did she realise how much she had missed her time in the studio space she had rented in Bermondsey. The busy hum of others as they worked around her, each person lost in their own imagination, bent on creating reality from dreams.

‘I didn’t want to look as if I was moving in and taking over,’ she replied, the lie falling heavily even to her own ears.

She felt Matthieu move across the room behind her, the heat from his body warming the cool that had descended over her. Using that heat, feeding off it, she went to the small lock box of finished pieces that she had packed shortly after returning to London after their first meeting in Switzerland when she had told him about their baby.

Opening it, she removed one of the pieces from the clear plastic bag and unwrapped the soft tissue paper carefully protecting it. It was a ring—the last piece she had made before discovering she was pregnant. This was the first piece she had made since the exhibition that wasn’t a commission. That wasn’t for someone else. This one had been for her.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Matthieu said quietly and with some reverence.

‘Thank you.’ Pride gently shimmered through her words. A small pearl sat within a swirl of beaten gold, sweeping up around the orb like a wave, as if on the brink of concealing the beautiful natural formation. She had always been fascinated by the concentric layering of pearls... How something so stunning was formed through layers and layers of calcium carbonate surrounding what was once an irritant to the small mollusc that created it. This pearl hadn’t been considered perfect enough to be classed as a gemstone, but it was no less precious to her.

‘Do you miss it?’

‘Yes and no,’ she replied honestly. ‘Coming home from Iondorra, after... Theo and Sofia, after you... I was determined to forge a “new me”,’ she said slightly ironically. ‘To put aside the childish fantasies I had hidden behind for years. That night...it was so much for me,’ she said, turning back to Matthieu. ‘I realised so many things. Like how I’d been hiding behind an infatuation with an idea of someone, when in truth the reality of you was so...overwhelming. And how much I had allowed my brother to protect me from the harsh realities of life. And while that was fine, it felt as if I’d also been protected from other experiences.

‘Before I discovered I was pregnant, I threw myself into a lot of commissioned work—many of which had come from my first exhibition. I was almost feverish in the determination to make this “work” pay, to provide security for myself, to become independent from Sebastian, from anyone really.’

She paused, now thinking of the way her imagination had unfurled in the last few months. The way that her self-imposed hiatus from jewellery had, in a way, fed her starved creativity, which had diminished since she’d accepted more commissions after her show.

‘Thinking of it now, I was running before I could walk. I was overwhelmed by how wonderful it was that people wanted my work, but somehow sacrificed some of my self in the process. I think I lost a little of that—was certainly at risk of morphing into the extreme of what I had always wanted.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I just wanted enough. Enough to get by and allow me the time and finances to pursue the pieces that I really wanted to make. And if people, customers, wanted those pieces, all the better. But I never wanted to lose the love of it—I never wanted to destroy the one thing that had given me so much pleasure and so much...company during my childhood.’

‘Company?’

‘Sorry, that sounds strange. But even as a child, I would spend hours lost in my imagination, designing pieces in my mind, trying to work out how it could be done, what materials would be best...’

‘You were lonely?’

‘A little perhaps. Seb was forced to work all hours to ensure that the family didn’t lose everything. My father and Valeria were rarely there, either locked away in a different part of Italy, or still desperately trying to cling to a lifestyle they no longer had. Meanwhile I had been thrust into a new school with a new language, which didn’t exactly form the best basis for deep and lasting friendships.’