Italian Prince, Wedlocked Wife

CHAPTER ONE

HE’Dfound her!

Prince Maximo d’Aquilla parked his Mercedes beneath a broken streetlight, staring at the brightly lit gas station. The shining light from the shop’s windows illuminated the snowy night like a flame in the darkness, silhouetting the girl working alone inside.

Lucia Ferrazzi.

The granddaughter of his enemy. The ex-lover of his business rival.

Fate, he thought, gripping the steering wheel. Il destino. After all these years of looking, how else to explain it?

His phone rang. Ermanno, one of the bodyguards waiting in the car parked behind him, said a single word: “Signore?”

“Wait for my signal,” Maximo replied in Italian, and snapped his phone shut.

He watched her for another five minutes. It was ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and the store should have been busy selling wine and beer; but the run-down South Chicago neighborhood was eerily dark and deserted beneath the heavily falling snow.

The girl assisted her only customer at the cash register with a shy smile. Her scrubbed, clean face made her seem younger than twenty-one, he thought. Cat’seye glasses framed her wide-set brown eyes, giving her plain features a dowdy, bookish look.

She would fall to him easily, he thought.

The solitary customer left, and a gray sedan skidded to a stop near the gas pumps. A thin man stepped out of the car. He stared at the girl, spraying breath freshener into his mouth, then started toward the store.

Maximo saw the alarm in the girl’s eyes, the way she bit her tender pink lip as she watched the slender man come toward the door. She was afraid of him.

Maximo allowed himself a single, grim smile. She didn’t realize how much her world had changed.

As of now, she was under Maximo’s protection.

Before the clock struck midnight, she would be his bride.

His revenge would be complete. And as for that other matter…

He pushed the thought firmly from his mind. It would all be over. He would take her, and in three months, he’d be free. Free—of everything.

“Oh, no,” Lucy Abbott whispered aloud. The sound of her voice echoed in the empty store.

She leaned her head against the glass, watching as her smarmy manager came toward the door. She’d prayed she wouldn’t see him tonight. That he would have a date, a party, anything to keep him from stopping by to “check on the store.”

Just one more week, she reminded herself with a deep breath. One more week to put up with Darryl’s crude jokes, the way he stared at her breasts beneath her cashier’s smock, the way he would “accidentally” brush his groin against her hip amid the narrow aisles of chips and candy.

She’d applied to be an assistant manager at a nearby store, and she needed his good reference until her position was finalized next week. Then Lucy could say goodbye to him forever. And even better, she would get a raise. For the first time since her baby had been born, she would be able to have just one job instead of three—she could work just forty hours a week instead of sixty. She’d be able to spend a few precious hours with her baby every single day.

Baby? Chloe wouldn’t be a baby much longer. Tomorrow was her first birthday. She could hardly believe it. In Lucy’s constant struggle to pay rent and medical bills and child care, she’d missed much of her daughter’s first year. She’d missed the first time her baby had rolled over, the first time she’d sat up by herself, the first time she’d crawled. She’d missed countless smiles and crying and happy jabbering…

Stop it, she ordered herself, angry

at how close she was to tears. Stop it right now.

Darryl burst through the door with a hard ring of the bell, bringing a blast of wind and snow behind him.

“Hey, Luce,” Darryl said with a leer on his pink, rubbery lips. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” she mumbled, hating that he called her Luce. It reminded her of the last man who’d called her that.

“Busy tonight?”

“Yes, very,” she lied over the lump in her throat.

“Let me see.” She tried to flinch away, but he still managed to brush against her backside as he went behind the counter. He punched a few buttons on the cash register, then seeing the few dollars inside the tray, looked up at her accusingly. “Why, you little tease.”

Pretending to laugh, she backed from him. “It’s been busy, really! See the floors wet with tracked snow? I’d better get a mop…”

“Always such a busy little bee.” He sneered, stopping her with one bony, sinewy hand. “You really think you’re better than me, don’t you?”

“No, of course not, I—”

Darryl grabbed her blue smock, looking down at her, breathing hard. “I’m tired of being nice to you for nothing.”

She heard the bell jingle above the door. But before she could look, he grabbed the back of her head, coming at her with his pink, rubbery lips.

“What are you doing—let me go!”

“You act so prim,” he panted, “but you sleep around. You had that kid, didn’t you? I know you want me—”

“No,” she whimpered, struggling to turn her face away.

Darryl yelped as a large hand grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around, yanking him backward like a dog on a leash.

Lucy gave a little cry as she saw a dark, towering figure pick up her manager by the lapels of his jacket. Darryl struggled futilely while the man, far taller and stronger than him, lifted him off the floor.

The stranger’s eyes were hard and black. In a voice as cold and implacable as death, he growled into his face, “Get. Out.”

“Yes,” Darryl gasped.

The giant tossed him to the floor. Her manager scrabbled back like a crab, tripping over his own feet in his eagerness to get away. He paused at the door.

“You’re fired!” he bleated at Lucy, then rushed out into the snowy night, revving the engine of his old gray sedan down the dark street.

Fired? She was fired? Her heart pounding, Lucy looked at her rescuer beneath the fluorescent overhead light.

The dark stranger looked down at her. His expressive eyes seared hers. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to. Just the heat of his glance made her tremble from deep within, as if he’d just woken something deep inside her…