Defying Her Billionaire Protector

He slipped the card into a plastic folder along with the others. Aside from an insight into their composer’s mind, the notes offered nothing of real value and no means by which they could track the original sender. The flowers were always ordered online, the cards printed by the florist, the words simply copied from the order’s electronic message field.

Bruno had been confident at first. Online orders meant a traceable digital trail to IP addresses and credit cards. But whoever Marietta’s stalker was he was careful—and clever. Their tech guys had chased their tails through a series of redirected addresses and discovered the account with the florist had been opened using bogus details. The invoices were sent to a rented mailbox and payments were received in cash via mail.

It all indicated a level of premeditation and intent neither Nico nor Bruno had anticipated. And Nico didn’t like it. Didn’t like it that he’d underestimated the threat—assuming, at first, that they’d be dealing with nothing more troublesome than a jilted boyfriend. It galled him now to accept that he’d been wrong because he knew better than to assume.

But he was here now, in Rome, with the meetings he’d had scheduled for today in New York cancelled after Bruno’s call twenty-four hours earlier.

And they would find this guy. They’d break some rules, sidestep some local bureaucracy, and they would find him.

He strode around the desk and dropped to his haunches in front of Marietta’s chair, bringing his eyes level with hers. She jerked back a little, as if she wasn’t used to such an action, and he wondered briefly if it were not the accepted thing to do. But he’d have done the same with any woman he sought to reassure, conscious that his height, his sheer size, might intimidate.

‘We will stop him, Marietta.’

Her eyes remained huge in her face, her olive complexion stripped of colour. ‘He’s been in my home...’

Nico ground his jaw. ‘Perhaps.’

‘But the note—’

‘Could be nothing more than a scare tactic,’ he cut in. Yet the tension in his gut, the premonitory prickle at his nape, told him the truth was something far less palatable. More sinister.

I have left you a gift, tesoro. On your bed. Think of me when you unwrap it. Sleep well, amore mio. S.

On impulse he took her hand—small compared to his, and yet strong rather than dainty or delicate. Her fingers were slender and long, her nails short and neat, manicured at home, he guessed, rather than by a professional.

Incredibly, Nico could still remember clasping her hand on their very first introduction—four, maybe five years ago at her brother’s office. Their handshake had been brief but he’d noted that her skin felt cool, pleasant to the touch, her palm soft and smooth in places, callused in others. He remembered, too, seeing her at Leo’s wedding a couple of years later. Remembered watching her, intrigued an

d impressed with the way she handled her wheelchair—as if it were a natural extension of her body.

In the church she’d glided down the aisle before the bride, composed and confident, unselfconscious—or at least that was the impression she’d given. Her sister-in-law, a beautiful English woman, had looked stunning in a simple white gown, but it was Marietta to whom Nico’s attention had been repeatedly drawn throughout the ceremony.

In his thirty-six years he’d attended two other weddings—his own, which he preferred not to dwell upon, and an equally lavish affair in the Bahamas to which he had, regrettably, allowed a former lover to drag him—but he could not recall a bridesmaid at either who might have outshone Marietta in looks or elegance.

With her thick mahogany hair piled high on her head, the golden skin of her shoulders and décolletage bare above the turquoise silk of her long bridesmaid’s sheath, the fact she was in a wheelchair had not diminished the impact of her beauty.

And then there were the shoes.

Nico could not forget the shoes.

Stilettos.

Sexy, feminine, four-inch stilettos in a bright turquoise to match the gown.

That Marietta could not walk in those shoes had made him admire her all the more for wearing them. It was a statement—a bold one—as though she were flipping the bird to her disability...or rather to anyone who thought a woman who couldn’t walk was wasting her time wearing sexy shoes, and it had made him want to smile.

Hell, it had made him want to grin.

And that was an urge he rarely experienced.

‘Nico?’

Marietta’s hand twitched in his, jerking his thoughts back to the present. He refocused, realised his thumb was stroking small circles over her skin. Abruptly he broke contact and stood. ‘Stay here. Keep Lina with you.’

She wheeled back and looked up at him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Your apartment.’

She frowned, a smudge of colour returning to her face. ‘Not without me, you’re not.’