Challenging Dante (A Bride for a Billionaire 4)

‘I’m sorry about the fight,’ Dante said drily. ‘One of your men took a swing at me when I became insistent on entering and one of mine took offence.’

‘You can’t see Topsy,’ Mikhail retorted harshly.

‘I won’t let you tell me no,’ Dante countered without hesitation, striding forward like man with a death wish.

Topsy leapt into the space between the two men. Mikhail was as tall as he was wide and much more heavily built than Dante. She registered that she could not bear to see Dante physically hurt. She knew she should want to see him smashed through the nearest wall and slung from the house, but for some peculiar reason she didn’t.

‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on him!’ she warned Mikhail instead.

‘Topsy!’ Kat interposed in shaken reproach.

‘I do not require your protection, Topsy,’ Dante growled from behind her as he carefully set her to one side of him.

‘Actually, you do,’ Mikhail informed him grimly. ‘Anyone who hurts or harms Topsy is liable to get damaged here.’

Zahir’s handsome and charming kid brother, Prince Akram, walked over and grabbed Topsy’s hand without ceremony. ‘Let your family handle this,’ he advised. ‘Let’s go and have some supper.’

‘And who the hell are you?’ Dante suddenly roared at poor Akram like a lion watching someone stroll in to try and steal his prey.

‘Exactly what have you got to be all jealous and possessive about?’ Topsy roared back at him, losing her own temper with an abruptness that startled her and everyone around her. ‘You’re the one with the girlfriend you didn’t mention!’

‘Kick him out, Mikhail!’ Kat snapped suddenly.

‘I do not have a girlfriend. I am not involved with Cosima,’ Dante spelled out between clenched teeth. ‘Now will you listen to me?’

‘I was kind of looking forward to kicking you,’ Mikhail told him cheerfully.

‘Is your family always like this?’ Dante groaned, his emerald-green eyes almost radiant with raw-edged tension in his handsome face. ‘Is nothing private?’

‘Very little, I’m afraid,’ Zahir dropped in gently. ‘And cross one and you cross them all.’

‘I do want to hear what you have to say,’ Topsy admitted tightly, her eyes suddenly stinging with tears because she had thought she would never ever see Dante again and seeing him in Kat’s home so unexpectedly was extremely disconcerting and had knocked her right off balance. Had he followed her to London? Or had he been coming to London anyway on banking business? And what did it matter either way? Couldn’t she even control her own brain any more?

‘We’ll go back to my hotel.’

Saffy dug a set of keys from her clutch bag and dropped them into Topsy’s hand. ‘Use our place. It’s more private.’

‘You can’t just walk out of here with that man,’ Kat argued worriedly. ‘He’s got a bad temper. He looked at Akram as if he was going to hit him. Suppose he loses that temper with Topsy?’

A pained light entered Dante’s eyes. ‘I am not going to lose my temper or hit anyone.’

‘You lost your temper when I smashed your car!’ Topsy reminded him resentfully.

Mikhail closed a comforting arm gently round his wife’s taut shoulders. ‘Topsy’s all grown up, Kat. It’s time to cut her loose.’

‘You’ve got the family from hell,’ Dante told her darkly outside the front door. ‘I’ve never met a more interfering bunch of people.’

‘But they love me a lot,’ Topsy replied ruefully. ‘I’m lucky to have them.’

‘Not your mother though. I saw an article about her in a tabloid newspaper,’ he admitted curtly, a hand at her elbow as he guided her out to the limo parked outside. ‘It was only thanks to that article that I was able to track you down. The sole address my mother had for you was your mother’s apartment, which is, of course, empty. I assume that was another attempt to cover up your connections with your family.’

‘You read about Mum?’ Topsy felt totally humiliated by that admission. She had deliberately not read any of the newspaper reports about their mother’s arrest. She knew that studying highly coloured revelations about Odette’s turbulent life would only upset her because Kat was doing exactly that and had already been in tears over the stories several times. Mikhail had begged his wife not to read the newspapers, pointing out that the inaccurate articles were written to shock, rather than inform, and that Odette’s plight would only attract tabloid interest for a few days at most. Fortunately nothing more was likely to appear in the media until the older woman was tried in court.

‘Yes,’ Dante confirmed with a forbidding jerk of his stubborn jaw. ‘I thought I did badly in the parental lottery but clearly you didn’t do very much better.’

‘Your mother’s lovely. How can you say that?’ she demanded in bewilderment, sliding into the limousine and leaning forward to give his driver the address of Zahir and Saffy’s house.

As he buzzed the partition shut between the front and the back of the car Dante’s jaw line clenched hard, his eyes glinting like crushed green ice below the fringe of his black lashes. ‘I wasn’t referring to her. My father was a violent man, who used my mother like a punch bag,’ he confessed, every word seemingly wrenched from him against his will. ‘Worst of all, he got away with it because she was too scared of him to report him to the police and when he developed a brain tumour she nursed him right to the end.’

‘Couldn’t you have done something to help her?’

‘I tried. She was terrified of anyone finding out about what went on in our home. She was deeply ashamed of it and blamed herself for everything that was happening.’

‘How could she do that?’

‘She said she never loved him and he always knew it and hated her for it.’

‘I think she was in love with Vittore when she married your father. It wasn’t as though she wanted to marry him, so I suppose he got what he deserved when he used his power and influence to get the girl he wanted.’

Dante frowned at her in bemusement. ‘Vittore? How could she have been in love with Vittore when my father married her when she was only seventeen?’

And at that point Topsy realised she had spoken out of turn, revealing facts Dante had not been told. At the same time, she felt he should know that story to understand the strength of the ties between his mother and his stepfather. That conviction in mind, she shared what she had learned.

Dante was very much disconcerted. ‘I didn’t know she knew him when she was young. Why didn’t she tell me? They got married so fast. I wouldn’t have been as concerned had I known.’

‘Well, you know now,’ Topsy responded, thinking that in some ways Sofia and Vittore had contributed unfairly to Dante’s reserved response to their marriage. Greater candour could well have changed his attitude.

‘It’s not important now,’ Dante breathed in sudden dismissal. ‘But the reason my mother almost died during that last pregnancy with my father was because his violence had caused internal bleeding...’

Topsy grimaced in silence.

‘Soon after that I tried to protect her from him and I hit him but, unluckily for me, I was a weedy teenager, who didn’t grow big and strong until I was much older,’ he volunteered tight-mouthed.

She wondered if that was the time he had been found badly beaten up by the side of the road and her heart squeezed, the awareness that he had grown up in a profoundly disturbed and unhappy home somehow punching a small hole in the wall of her angry resistance to him. She couldn’t forgive him for Cosima and still couldn’t comprehend why he had come to London, for what could he possibly hope to achieve by seeing her again?

Yet she felt better for understanding him a little more and could only wonder if his childhood experience of violence and his parents’ unhappy marriage had damaged his ability to deeply care f

or someone else. And then she remembered, with a sense of utter foolishness and sheepish self-loathing, that he had married a woman at the age of twenty-one. After that recollection she could only question why on earth her brain should be set on trying to find excuses for his inexcusable behaviour!

She unlocked the door of the town house and stepped inside. Lamps were already lit and the temperature made it clear that the heating was on: Saffy must have contacted their caretaker/housekeeper to forewarn her of their arrival.