Defying Her Billionaire Protector

CHAPTER ONE

‘MAMMA MIA! HERE they come.’

Marietta’s hands stilled over the keys of her computer, her assistant’s warning—low-voiced yet laced with an unmistakable thread of anticipation—shattering her train of thought like crystal under a hammer. She looked up in time to see the courier pushing open the glass doors of the gallery she managed in the heart of Rome’s affluent Parioli district. In his arms he cradled a huge, hand-tied bouquet of roses.

‘Bellissimo.’ Lina moved from the storeroom doorway and stood by Marietta’s desk at the rear of the gallery. ‘They are the best yet!’

Marietta would have liked to disagree with that assessment, but Lina was right. The long-stemmed roses were beautiful, each head—at least two dozen of them—exquisite, the velvety petals a vivid red that in the whiteness of the gallery made Marietta think, perversely, of blood.

Her thoughts snapped to the elegant spray of white orchids that had been delivered earlier in the week—surprisingly, because until then the flowers had always arrived on a Friday. Pretty and delicate, the orchids, like the roses, had been lovely to look at, but their sweet, cloying scent had lingered in her nostrils and left her feeling faintly ill long after she had disposed of them.

Even the note that had come with them had been heavily perfumed, and she’d wanted to destroy that too. Had wanted to rip the card and its intimate typewritten message into tiny, indecipherable pieces and flush them down the toilet.

But she’d been told to keep the notes in case they held any clues, so she’d shoved the card into a drawer, along with all the others, and vowed that when this was over—when her secret-admirer-turned-stalker was caught or simply grew tired of his antics—she would set a match to those cards and enjoy watching them burn.

The courier strode over the polished concrete towards them, and Marietta felt her stomach doing a little surge and roll. She didn’t want to touch the roses. She definitely didn’t want them near enough for her to smell.

‘Ciao.’

The young courier’s broad smile did nothing to quell her dread. His gaze shifted sideways—drawn, unsurprisingly, to Lina’s tall, willowy form—and Marietta saw the predictable flare of male appreciation on his face give way to surprise—or maybe shock was a better word—the moment the man sitting behind her stood.

He strode around her desk, straight into the courier’s path, and she imagined she heard the young man’s jaw crack, his mouth dropped open so fast. His face lost its colour, paling several shades as he took in the large, imposing man before him. She felt a twinge of sympathy for the guy; Nicolas César, ex-legionnaire, head of the widely revered global conglomerate César Security and her brother’s good friend, could scare the wits out of most people—and that was on the days he didn’t look hell-bent on throttling someone.

He stared down at the courier from his massive height and extended a large, capable-looking hand. A hand that appeared elegant and bone-crushingly strong all at the same time. ‘Give them to me.’

Nico’s deep voice rumbled with the kind of natural authorit

y only a fool with no thought for self-preservation would dare to challenge. Wisely, the younger man didn’t hesitate. He handed over the roses with a haste that might have amused Marietta had anything about this situation been remotely funny. His eyes darted back to Lina, but her attention was firmly fixed on the other man, and, as if understanding he couldn’t possibly compete with all that eye-popping masculinity, the courier shot Marietta a bemused look and hurried out of the gallery.

She gripped the titanium hand rims on the wheels of her custom-made chair and reversed a few feet from her desk. Although Nico stood on the other side, with a great slab of horizontal glass between them, she needed the comfort of the extra distance before she looked at him.

Not, she told herself, because she wasn’t used to looking up at people. Thirteen years in a wheelchair had accustomed her to seeing the world from a diminished height, and she’d long ago reconciled herself to that aspect of her disability. And although able-bodied people often thought of her as being confined to a wheelchair—as though the chair and not her paralysed legs were the prison—for Marietta the use of her modern, ultralight chair for mobility was a choice. One that gave her the freedom to work and travel. To live her life with a level of independence any single, career-focused woman of thirty would wish to enjoy.

But Nicolas César wasn’t anything like the people Marietta encountered on an ordinary day, and it wasn’t only his unique physicality that set him apart—wasn’t only the impressive breadth of his shoulders, the fact that he stood taller than most. On par with her six-foot-four brother—or the fact that his dark trousers and close-fitting black shirt moulded the kind of lean, hard-muscled physique that spoke of discipline and sweat and the good fortune of strong, resilient genes. Rather, it was the raw power he exuded from every inch of that undeniably masculine frame—the overriding impression that here was a man few others dared trifle with—that made Marietta’s hormones sit up and take notice.

Which irritated her enormously.

Sexual attraction was a complication she didn’t need in her life right now—or ever, for that matter. Especially to a man so far out of her physical league her pride smarted just to look at him.

‘Are you not going to interrogate him?’ she asked, and her annoyance with herself—with that hot, inescapable lick of feminine awareness—lent her words a much pithier edge than she’d intended.

Dark blue eyes thinned and settled on her, making her aware that her sarcasm wasn’t lost on Nico, and guilt instantly pricked her. He was here to help because her brother had asked him to. That Leo had done so without consulting her first was no fault of Nico’s. Unleashing her frustration on him was childish. Unfair.

He held her gaze, his silent, prolonged eye contact causing her skin to flush and her insides to squirm with something far more unsettling than guilt. She didn’t look away and wasn’t sure she could even if she wanted to. His eyes were such a dark, mesmerising blue. Staring into them made her feel as if she’d been dragged beneath the surface of a vast, bottomless sea and could no longer breathe.

She opened her mouth to offer an apology—and drag some much-needed air into her lungs—but Nico spoke first.

‘Bruno has cleared the staff at the florist’s shop and vetted the couriers they use. There is no need for me to...’ he paused for a fraction of a beat ‘...interrogate him.’

That slight yet deliberate emphasis on the word interrogate elevated Marietta’s discomfort. Looking at him, it wasn’t at all difficult for her to visualise Nicolas César in the role of interrogator—nor did she have any trouble imagining that anyone on the wrong side of that arrangement would quickly find themselves either pleading for mercy or spilling their deepest, darkest secrets to him. Or both.

At the same time, she imagined any man who possessed that degree of dark, potent magnetism would rarely, if ever, want for female companionship. Women flocked to him wherever he went, no doubt, drawn like hummingbirds to nectar by his hard-edged looks and his big, powerful body.

And that would be before he opened his mouth.

Before that deep-timbre voice, with its French accent and slight North American inflection, poured over them like heated syrup and turned their insides all gooey.