Challenging Dante (A Bride for a Billionaire 4)

‘Or I have to say it,’ Mikhail breathed very quietly from the doorway.

‘Come on now, children,’ the resident nanny spoke from the top of the stairs.

Within the space of a minute all Topsy’s little nephews and nieces had vanished and silence had fallen. In the interim her cell phone rang and she pulled it out, her heart thudding at an insane rate when she realised it was Dante. Part of her wanted to disconnect the call as she had been doing every time he tried to speak to her throughout the day she had spent travelling. He must have rung her a dozen times already and her nerves were worn down and this time it seemed easier just to answer it.

‘Yes?’

‘Why the hell have you gone back to London?’ Dante thundered angrily down the line. ‘Without even speaking to me? Without even giving me a chance? That has to be the craziest, most irrational thing you’ve ever done!’

‘Dante? Why would I give you a chance after what you’ve done to me? I’ll give you crazy, I’ll give you irrational!’ Topsy slammed back furiously, forgetting that she had an audience. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again. So, leave me alone and don’t phone again!’

The awful silence around her finally pierced the shell of her utter misery. For the first time she wanted to cry and sob with the sheer frustration of the many emotions attacking her all at once but the combined power of her siblings’ questioning stares stifled that desire.

‘Petyr’s getting very cheeky,’ Mikhail complained with unexpected tact to his wife.

‘He’s a real chip off the old block, then,’ Kat told her husband without sympathy.

‘Karim started it,’ Zahir’s wife, Saffy, pointed out wryly.

‘But we both know that my daughter loves getting your son worked up,’ Saffy’s twin, Emmie, countered uncomfortably. ‘She deliberately teases him.’

‘No matter. Royalty has to learn self-discipline,’ Zahir spelled out wryly. ‘And Karim is too inclined to get bossy with little girls.’

Topsy gave her twin sisters an awkward hug, avoiding the looks that told her they now had lots of questions to ask, and said, ‘Does anyone care to tell me why I had to come home so suddenly?’

Every pair of eyes in the room seemed to meet in mute discomfiture and a heavy silence fell in response to her question.

‘It’s Odette,’ Saffy advanced reluctantly.

‘She’s been arrested,’ Emmie chimed in behind her twin.

‘Arrested?’ Topsy exclaimed in horror.

‘Accused of living off immoral earnings from her escort agency,’ her brother-in-law Zahir supplied grimly.

Topsy sank down shakily into a seat, appalled by the news, well aware of how much embarrassment such a case being taken to court could cause her relatives. As the ruling King and Queen of a conservative Gulf state, possibly Zahir and his family had the most to fear from being publicly linked to Saffy’s mother.

‘I couldn’t care less what happens to her,’ Emmie’s husband, Bastian Christou, admitted with unnerving cool. ‘After what she did to my wife, it’s past time she got her comeuppance and if it takes the law to do it, so be it.’

‘But in the meantime we don’t want our families or our reputations smeared by her dodgy lifestyle,’ Mikhail pronounced in direct disagreement.

Topsy said nothing while the three men in the room began to argue about how best to deal with Odette’s arrest. Her sisters clumped together exchanging grimaces until finally the broad terms of a reluctant agreement were thrashed out between the men. They would hire a good legal team to represent Odette in court but in no other way would any of them get more closely involved.

Topsy tried to imagine how Dante would have reacted to the news that her mother was going to be hauled up in court to answer a charge of living off the proceeds of prostitution and she shuddered sickly, grateful he would never know. Her sisters weren’t saying anything and neither was she and, sadly, she understood why: they were one and all ashamed to death of Odette and the dubious way in which she made her living. Several attempts had already been made to persuade her mother to sell her business but Odette had demanded so much money in compensation that even her wealthy sons-in-law had baulked, believing that she would continue trying to blackmail them.

‘Dante?’ Mikhail queried softly to one side of Topsy, his approach having gone unnoticed by her in the state she was in. ‘Was that Dante Leonetti phoning you?’

Topsy wrapped her arms round herself, suddenly cold, suddenly exhausted by the mental and physical stress of the past forty-eight hours. In silence she nodded.

‘But I warned you about him,’ her Russian brother-in-law reminded her.

‘It was too late by then,’ she muttered, wondering at what exact hour her fate had been cast. The first time she rested her eyes on that lean, devastatingly good-looking face of Dante’s? The first kiss? The first time he held her hand?

‘But by the sound of it, it’s over now,’ Kat commented, crossing the room to close a supportive arm round her youngest sister. ‘What did he do to you?’

Saffy was the next to move closer. ‘Spill,’ she urged.

But Topsy couldn’t spill, couldn’t bring herself to admit that Dante had had another woman all along. Blanking out her sisters’ frustration over her refusal to talk about Dante, she confessed to suspecting that Vittore was her father instead and told her sisters about the DNA testing to take place. That provided a comfortable alternative to discussing Dante, and after dinner when Odette was the main topic of conversation, Topsy took refuge in her bedroom. She needed her own place, she really did need a corner of her own, she conceded ruefully, and she texted Saffy to ask if the

couple’s town house was free or if they were staying there on this visit. Generally when there was a family conclave, everyone stayed with Mikhail and Kat because they lived in an enormous house. Saffy confirmed that their house would be free but urged her to stay on with the family for company for a few more days.

* * *

Three days later, when Topsy was convinced that she was dying from the inside out in the slowest and most painful of ways, Dante showed up at Kat and Mikhail’s on an evening when they were entertaining. She had tried so hard not to think about Dante, not to keep on going over the same old pointless ground inside her head. It was done and dusted, finished with no need of a post-mortem to drag her spirits down further. That constant mantra kept her together until above the sound of the jazz pianist playing she heard the sound of raised voices from the hall and then the noisy crash of breaking china. Taken aback, she followed Kat and Mikhail to the doorway.

Four men were engaged in a physical fight in the hall, two of them Mikhail’s security guards and the other two she recognised from Italy as working for Dante.

‘Dante...’ she whispered in astonishment, seeing his tall, powerful figure poised by the front door, which still stood wide open on the night air. And every feeling and sensation she had tried to deny and suppress came flooding back to her in a violent shameful wave. In his charcoal-grey suit, he looked amazing: cool, sophisticated, wonderfully handsome, all the gifts that she had told herself all her adult life were superficial and unimportant. But that awareness did not prevent her from responding to Dante’s pure physical charisma.

In a thunderous burst of Russian, Mikhail intervened in the free-for-all of angry men and told his bodyguards to take the fight outside before saying in English to Dante, ‘Topsy doesn’t want to see you.’

But Topsy did want to see Dante; she wanted to see him and speak to him so badly that the prospect of him leaving again hurt and that sudden burst of lowering self-knowledge slashed her pride to ribbons.