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THE SABBATINI BROTHERS
Three powerful playboys from the richest dynasty in Europe! Ruthless, irresistible…impossible to tame?
Luca, Giorgio and Nicoló have Italian fire and passion coursing through their blood. And now they are looking for the one thing that money can’t buy…the love of a good woman!
This month Maya learns you don’t say no to Giorgio Sabbatini!
Hearing her say she didn’t need him any more triggered something deep and primal in his blood. He would not let her leave him without a fight—baby or no baby. ‘You have said this is my child, Maya,’ he said. ‘I am not going to walk away from my own flesh and blood. I have changed my mind—our marriage will continue indefinitely.’
Look out for notorious Nicoló Sabbatini, coming soon in Modern™ Romance
Shock: One-Night Heir
By
Melanie Milburne
About the Author
MELANIE MILBURNE says: ‘I am married to a surgeon, Steve, and have two gorgeous sons, Paul and Phil. I live in Hobart, Tasmania, where I enjoy an active life as a long-distance runner and a nationally ranked top ten Master’s swimmer. I also have a Master’s Degree in Education, but my children totally turned me off the idea of teaching! When not running or swimming I write, and when I’m not doing all of the above I’m reading. And if someone could invent a way for me to read during a four-kilometre swim I’d be even happier!’
Recent titles by the same author:
SCANDAL: UNCLAIMED LOVE-CHILD* THE MÉLENDEZ FORGOTTEN MARRIAGE CASTELLANO’S MISTRESS OF REVENGE BOUND BY THE MARCOLINI DIAMONDS
Did you know that Melanie also writes for Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance?
Chapter One
MAYA looked at the dipstick in shock. Her throat closed over as if a hand had locked around her neck as the two blue lines appeared.
Positive.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub, her legs shaking so much she had to clamp her knees together. Hope flickered brightly and then just as quickly waned.
It couldn’t be true.
She took a deep breath and looked at the stick again. She blinked once, twice, three times but the lines were the same as before.
The doorbell suddenly rang with an incessant peal and she sprang to her feet, her heart knocking against her chest wall like a pendulum pushed by a madman. She quickly stashed the test kit in the nearest drawer beneath the twin basins and took a long slow breath to steady herself.
Gonzo was already at the door, barking joyfully in greeting, but Maya didn’t need the dog’s behaviour to signal to her who was at the door. No one rang the doorbell quite the same way as her soon-to-be ex-husband Giorgio Sabbatini did. He always pressed it too hard and for too long. He was summoning her and he clearly would not be taking no for an answer.
Maya fixed a deliberately cool expression on her face as she opened the door. ‘G…Giorgio,’ she said, hoping the catch in her voice wouldn’t betray her. ‘I thought you were sending one of your staff to pick up Gonzo. Isn’t that the arrangement we agreed on?’
‘I decided to come in person this time.’ He bent down to ruffle the ecstatic dog’s ears before he rose back to his full height, his tall frame towering over her. His dark brown eyes glittered with a sardonic light as they met hers. ‘I am quite surprised to find you at home,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be out with your new Englishman lover. What was his name again? Hugh? Herbert?’
Maya bit the inside of her mouth, wishing, not for the first time, she hadn’t gone on that stupid blind date set up by a friend from her yoga class. ‘Howard,’ she said tightly. ‘And it wasn’t anything like the press reported it.’
One of Giorgio’s brows lifted in a cynical arc. ‘So he didn’t rip your clothes off in the hallway of his apartment and have his wicked way with you?’
Maya threw him a venomous look as she closed the door behind him with a snap. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That is more your style, is it not?’
He gave her an indolent smile which made every hair on the back of her neck lift up in reaction. ‘You were with me all the way, cara,’ he said in a tone that was gravelly and rough and so deep she felt a guilty shiver of remembered pleasure cascade down her spine and bury itself in that hot secret place between her thighs.
Maya turned on her heel rather than face him with her colour so high. She still cringed in shame at how she had behaved the night of his brother’s wedding. She still wasn’t exactly sure what had precipitated it. Had it been the champagne or the pain of finally letting go? Break up sex, that was what it was called. It didn’t mean anything, certainly not to him. He had probably bedded several women since they had separated. According to the latest press report, he was currently seeing a lingerie model based in London. Reading that had been like a dart to Maya’s heart but she would rather die than reveal that to him.
She felt him come up behind her, her skin prickling all over and her nostrils flaring as she breathed in his citrus-based aftershave overlaid with his particular male smell. All her senses—the ones she had sworn would always be switched to neutral when he was around—turned to full throttle. She felt her heart give a stutter when his hands came to rest on the top of her shoulders, her breathing stopping altogether when his tall body brushed against hers from behind.
‘You smell nice,’ he said, bending his head so his mouth almost touched the side of her neck. ‘Is that a new perfume you are wearing?’
Somehow she got her voice to work. ‘Get your hands off me, Giorgio,’ she said. Before I turn around and fall into your arms and make a complete and utter fool of myself all over again.
His hands tightened for a fraction of a second, long enough for her heart rate to go up another notch. ‘Our divorce isn’t final until the last of the paperwork is sorted,’ he said, his breath lifting the hairs that had come loose from her makeshift ponytail. ‘Maybe we can make the most of the time before the ink dries, hmm?’
Maya knew what this was about and it hurt much more than the lingerie model. It wasn’t their broken marriage he was fighting for, it was his fortune. The Sabbatini family was as good as Italian royalty. When she had married Giorgio five years ago there had been no prenuptial agreement prepared. It was an unwritten, unspoken law: their marriage was meant to last, as every other Sabbatini marriage had in the past. But Maya wondered if any other Sabbatini marriage had endured the heartache theirs had and survived.
She very much doubted it.
She turned to face him, her heart tightening all over again as she looked into his inscrutable dark-as-night eyes. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.
His thumbs started to knead her knotted shoulders until she was sure she was going to melt into a pool at his feet. She fought the response, clamping her teeth together as she put her hands against his chest to push him away. ‘Will you stop touching me, for God’s sake?’ she railed at him.
He captured her hands effortlessly, holding them in one of his as if they were a child’s. ‘It was good that night, si?’ he said. ‘I can’t remember a time when it was better, can you?’
Maya swallowed unevenly. She had tried so hard not to think of that night, how wonderful it had been to make love with such abandon. No temperature or ovulation charts, no hormone injections—just good old-fashioned bed-wrecking sex, except they hadn’t quite made it to the bed. But this visit: was it about a rerun of that passionate night or a truce to secure his assets?
‘Giorgio…that night was a crazy, stupid mistake,’ she said, not trusting herself to hold his gaze.
She pulled her hands out of his and moved away, crossing her arms over her middle. It was too soon to tell him, of course it was. It would jinx things just like before. How many times had she held up the dipstick in joy, only to have her hopes and dreams smashed like priceless porcelain on a pavement a week or two later? There were no guarantees this time would be any different. If it wasn’t meant to be, at least Giorgio would be free to move on with someone else who could give him what he wanted most. They would both be free to move on. She had wasted five years of his life, not to mention her own. He was thirty-six years old. Most of his friends and colleagues had two or three children by now.
She had given him none.
Giorgio followed her into the tiny salone. Maya felt his gaze on her, the heat of it, the slow burn of it peeling every layer of her skin until she felt raw and exposed. She had to hold herself together. She couldn’t come unstuck and get all emotional and needy in front of him. She was supposed to be over all of that now. She had worked hard at it, working out new priorities, new directions, none of which included Giorgio. Cool and in control was the only way to go with him. She had to prove to him that he no longer had any emotional or sensual power over her. She was her own person now, determined to move on with her life.
She was stronger now, much stronger.
The six-month separation had done that for her. She no longer lived in the shadow of Giorgio’s money and prestige. She was making a way for herself, providing for her future by restarting her career, which she had naively cast aside in order to fit in with what Giorgio and his family had expected of her. She was quite proud of what she had achieved in the time they had been apart. She had been looking forward to starting afresh until this latest hiccup had thrown her off course. Could he see the secret she was trying to hide from him? Was there some clue on her face or in her body, even at this early stage? He seemed to be looking at her so intently, his dark gaze so piercing she felt exposed and raw, as if he could see into her soul.
‘What is this I hear about you moving to London?’ he asked.
She faced him with a set mouth, her shoulders pulled back in determination. ‘I have an interview for a teaching position at a fee paying school. I am on the shortlist.’
A frown brought his brows together. ‘Are you going to take it if it is offered to you?’
She let her arms drop by her sides in an effort to look composed. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said, sending him a pointed look. ‘I have nothing to keep me in Italy.’
A muscle moved up and down in his jaw, as if he were chewing on something hard and distasteful. ‘What about Gonzo?’ he asked.
Maya felt her heart squeeze at the thought of saying goodbye to the dog she had brought up from puppyhood. But no pets were allowed in her apartment block in London, and she knew the big ragamuffin hound would miss Giorgio too much in any case. As it was, the dog had been like a naughty child ever since she and Giorgio had separated. ‘I have decided he is better off with you,’ she said.
His top lip curled. ‘That’s quite a turnaround. You were arguing the point for weeks over who should have him. I was about to get my lawyer to file a pet custody suit.’
Maya lifted one of her shoulders in a shrug of feigned indifference. ‘I am sure he will forget all about me once he moves into your newly renovated villa,’ she said. ‘When do you move back in, by the way?’
Giorgio raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that tugged on something deep inside Maya’s chest. There were so many of his mannerisms she had found herself thinking about lately: how he rationed his smiles as if he found life not all that amusing, how his brow furrowed when he was deep in concentration, and how his eyes glinted and darkened meaningfully when he was in the mood for sex. She skirted away from that errant thought. It brought back too many erotic memories of that forbidden night.
‘I’m not sure. A week or two, I think,’ he said. ‘The painters haven’t quite finished. There was a delay with some of the fabrics for the curtains or some such thing.’
Maya didn’t want to think of how she had chosen the colours and fabrics for all of those rooms in the past. She had done it with such enthusiasm and hope for the future. When she had heard he was renovating the villa, adding rooms and knocking down walls and redeveloping the garden, she had been crushed to think he obviously wanted to rid the place of every trace of her presence. It tore her apart to think of how those rooms might one day be filled with his children by some other woman. She thought of the nursery she had so lovingly decorated the first time she had fallen pregnant. After five years of dashed hopes, in the end she had not been able to even open the door.
‘When do you leave?’ Giorgio asked into the pulsing silence.
With an effort she met his gaze. ‘Next Monday.’
‘This is all rather sudden, is it not?’ he asked, frowning darkly. ‘I thought you had decided long ago you weren’t going to go back to teaching. Or are you trying to imply to outsiders that I’m not paying you enough in our divorce settlement?’
Maya refused to rise to the bait. ‘I don’t care what people think, Giorgio. I want to go back to teaching because I have a brain that longs to be used. I was never cut out for the ladies-who-do-lunch set. I should never have given up my career in the first place. I don’t know what on earth I was thinking.’
He continued to study her with his dark unreadable gaze. ‘You seemed pretty happy with the arrangement to begin with,’ he said. ‘You said your career was not as important as mine. You jumped at the chance to become a full time wife.’
Maya mentally cringed at how romantically deluded she had been back then. Although she hadn’t for a moment thought he was marrying her for love, she had longed for it to happen all the same. His marrying her had more to do with tradition and expectation from his family. He had reached the age of thirty and, in the tradition of the Sabbatini blood line, he’d needed a wife and heir. Giorgio had showered her with diamonds and she had been fooled into believing in the whole fairy tale that one day they would get their happy ever after. How young and naive she had been! Just twenty-two years old, fresh out of university, she had fallen in love on her first trip abroad. It had taken her five heartbreaking years to finally grow up and realise not all fairy tales had a happy ending.
‘I had stars in my eyes,’ she said, knowing it would feed his opinion of her as a gold-digger but doing it anyway. ‘All that money, all that fame, all those luxury hotels and villas and exotic holidays. What girl could possibly resist?’
His brows snapped together and that leaping knot of tension appeared again at the corner of his mouth. ‘If you think for even a moment that you are getting half of all I own, then think again,’ he bit out. ‘I don’t care if it takes my legal team a decade to thrash this out in court, I will not roll over for you.’
Maya raised her chin at him. It was always about money with Giorgio. She had been yet another business transaction and the thing that rankled with him was it had failed. The truth was they had both failed. She hadn’t made him any happier than he had made her. Money had cushioned things for a while but she had come to see the only way to move forward was to part.
‘You will only delay the divorce even further,’ she said. ‘I am not after much, in any case.’
Giorgio gave a snort. ‘Not much? Come on, Maya. You want the villa at Bellagio. That has been in my family for seven generations. It is priceless to my family. I suppose that’s why you want to take it away from us.’
Maya steeled her resolve. ‘The place should have been sold years ago and you know it. We’ve only been there the once and you acted like a caged lion the whole time. Both of your brothers haven’t been there for months and in the whole time we’ve been married your mother has never once gone there. For most of the year it lies empty, apart from the staff. It’s such an obscene waste.’
His eyes moved away from hers, as she knew they would. He absolutely refused to discuss the tragic event that had occurred during his childhood, and every time she had tried to draw him out over his baby sister’s death he put up a wall of resistance that was impenetrable. She hated the way he always locked her out. She hated the way it made her feel as if she was not entitled to know how he felt about even the simplest things. But then all he had wanted from her was a cardboard cut-out wife, a showpiece to hang off his arm and do all the things a corporate wife was supposed to do—all the things except unlock the secret pain of his heart.
He turned his back and paced back and forth, his hands clenching and unclenching by his sides. ‘My mother might one day feel the need to go back to the villa,’ he said. ‘But, until she does, the place is not to be sold.’
Maya shifted her tongue inside her cheek, still intent on needling him. ‘Are you planning to go there any time soon?’ she asked. ‘How long’s it been, Giorgio? Two or three years, or is it four?’
He turned and faced her, his eyes blazing with something hot and hard and dangerous. ‘Don’t push it, Maya,’ he said. ‘You are not getting the villa. Anyway, Luca and Bronte will most probably use it now they are married. It’s a perfect place for Ella to spend her childhood holidays.’
Maya felt her insides clench as she thought of the dark-haired, blue-eyed toddler Luca had introduced to his family a few weeks ago. His new wife, Bronte, a fellow Australian, had met Luca two years ago in London, but Luca had broken off the relationship before he had realised Bronte was carrying his child. Their reunion and marriage had been one of the most romantic and poignant events Maya had ever witnessed.
Being around gorgeous little Ella on the day of the wedding had been a torturous reminder of how Maya had failed to produce an heir. She wondered if that was why she had acted so stupidly and recklessly once the reception had ended. She had been so emotionally overwrought, so desperately lonely and sad at the breakdown of her own marriage that she had weakened when Giorgio had suggested a nightcap.
Going back to his room at the Sabbatini hotel in Milan where the reception was held had been her first mistake. Her second had been to let him kiss her. And her third…well, she was deeply ashamed of falling into his arms like that. She had acted like a slut and he had walked away from her when it was over as if he had paid for her services like a street worker.
‘I want the villa, Giorgio,’ she said, holding his diamond-hard gaze. ‘I surely deserve some compensation. I could ask for a whole lot more and you know it.’
His jaw moved forward in an uncompromising manner, his eyes now darker than ink. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Maya. I want this divorce just as much as you do. But the villa is not negotiable. I am not going to budge on this.’
His intransigence fuelled Maya’s defiance, so too did his all too ready acceptance of the divorce. Surely, if he had ever felt anything for her, wouldn’t he have fought to keep her by his side no matter what? The only reason he was dragging the chain a bit was over the settlement.
Her bitterness was like a hot flood inside her, scorching its way through her veins. ‘You bastard,’ she threw at him. ‘You’re rich beyond belief and you won’t give me the only thing I want.’
‘Why do you want it?’ he asked. ‘You’re moving to London within days. What use would you have for a thirty-room villa?’
‘I want to develop it,’ she said with a combative toss of her head. ‘It would make a fabulous hotel and health spa. It would provide a supplementary income to my teaching. It would be an investment, a great investment in fact.’
His eyes flashed like lightning. ‘Are you deliberately goading me?’ he asked. ‘Dio, Maya, I’ve already warned you not to push me too far.’
‘Why?’ she tossed back at him. ‘Are you worried you might show some human feelings for once? Some anger, some passion, or maybe even some vulnerability for a change?’
The air pulsed with a current of energy that made the skin on the back of Maya’s neck start to tingle. His eyes were so black she could not tell where his pupils ended and his irises began. He had stopped clenching his hands as soon as he saw her eyes flick to them but she could sense the tension in him all the same. His face was carved from stone, his lips flat and tight. She wondered if he was going to close the distance between their bodies and take her in his arms the way he had done the night of his brother’s wedding. They had argued just like this and then suddenly, instead of shouting at each other, they were locked in a passionate embrace. Her body quivered at the memory and when she met Giorgio’s eyes she could almost swear he was recalling exactly the same shamelessly erotic moment when his mouth had crashed down on hers.
‘Is that what you want, Maya?’ he asked in a low and deep and silky tone as his hand snaked out and captured one of hers. ‘You want me to lose control and take you just like the last time?’
Maya’s body flared with heat, her wrist burning like a ring of fire where his fingers curled around it like a handcuff. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ she bit out.
He pulled her up against him, his body hot and hard and unmistakably male against her soft femininity. ‘I dared before,’ he reminded her. ‘And you enjoyed every second of it.’
Shame flooded her cheeks but she put up her chin haughtily all the same. ‘I’d had too much champagne to drink.’
His mouth turned up derisively. ‘Is that the only way you can absolve yourself for sleeping with me again?’ he asked. ‘Come on, Maya, you were begging for it even before you had your first sip of champagne. I saw it in your eyes the moment you stepped into the church and looked at me.’
Maya remembered the moment all too well. That first glimpse of him standing there beside his brother after not seeing him for months had knocked her sideways. She had pointedly avoided him as much as possible prior to the wedding. The arrangement over Gonzo being picked up and dropped off by a neutral party had been at her insistence because she didn’t trust herself in his company. Going into the church that day and seeing Giorgio, she had felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. All the bitterness and ill feeling had somehow vaporised, all she could see was a tall, commanding and handsome man with impossibly dark brown eyes which at that moment had been centred right on her. The message in his eyes had been as scorching as his touch was right now. ‘Your imagination is getting as big as your ego,’ she said. ‘You think any woman who looks at you wants you.’
She pulled out of his hold and stepped away from him, tossing over her shoulder, ‘You should probably take Gonzo with you now. His lead is hanging on the hall stand.’
‘I am not going anywhere, Maya,’ Giorgio said through gritted teeth.
Maya turned, trying to ignore the flutter of unease that passed through her belly at the dark glittering heat of his gaze as it meshed with hers. ‘Giorgio…’ She ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden dryness. ‘We’ve said all that needs to be said. The rest is in the hands of our lawyers.’
There was another beat or two of heavily charged silence.
‘I didn’t come here to discuss the divorce,’ Giorgio said.
Maya ran her tongue over her parched lips, her stomach freefalling. ‘You…you didn’t?’
His eyes were unwavering on hers. ‘I came here to issue you an invitation.’
She blinked at him in alarm. ‘An…an invitation? What sort of invitation? I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean because I will not for a moment agree to such an outrageous, insulting and indecent proposal.’
His sensually full lips went into a flat line again. ‘Not that sort of invitation, not that it isn’t a tempting thought, given what happened the last time.’
‘It’s over, Giorgio,’ she said, reminding herself as well as him. ‘We are over.’
He held her look for two beats before he spoke. ‘I know it’s over, Maya. It’s what we both want. It’s what we both need to move on with our lives.’
Maya nodded because she didn’t trust her voice to work right then. Of course it was over. It was what she wanted. She was the one who had done the legwork to get the divorce process going. What sort of hypocrite was she to have second thoughts now? Even though those two blue lines on that dipstick were lying in that drawer upstairs didn’t mean they would appear on a subsequent test. It could all be a mistake. She might have imagined the whole thing. She would need to do another test and another, just to make sure.
Giorgio pushed his hand back through his hair again, taking it off his forehead where it had tipped forward as he moved to the other side of the room. Maya noticed then how tired he looked about the eyes. Too much partying, she supposed. She could just imagine him enjoying the night life after years of being tied down in a going nowhere marriage. He had been like that before they had married and that, no doubt, would be his fallback position.
‘My grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party is next weekend,’ Giorgio said, facing her again. ‘He wants you to be there.’
Maya tightened her mouth. ‘Why then didn’t he call and invite me, instead of sending you? Or why not send an invitation through the post? What’s going on?’
‘You know what he’s like,’ he said. ‘He’s a stubborn old fool who thinks we are throwing away a perfectly good marriage. He wanted me to ask you in person. He apparently thinks I still hold some sort of sway with you.’ He gave her a wry look. ‘I told you he was an old fool.’
Maya spun on her heel to pace the floor. ‘I am not attending any more Sabbatini family functions,’ she stated firmly. ‘No way. Not after the last time.’
Giorgio held up his hands. ‘I promise not to touch, OK?’
She stopped mid-pace to glower at him. ‘I don’t hold much faith in your promises. You were barely in the door a moment ago when you put your hands on me as if you owned me.’
He gave her a crooked half smile that never failed to twist her insides. ‘Put it down to force of habit or muscle memory or whatever.’
She screwed up her face in scorn. ‘Muscle memory? What sort of ridiculous excuse is that? We’re about to be divorced, remember? You have no right to touch me now.’
His fleeting smile disappeared and a frown pulled at his brow. ‘Look, Maya, you will make an old man very happy if you agree to come. Divorce or not, he still considers you a member of the family. He will be devastated if you don’t turn up.’
Maya chewed at her lip, torn between wanting to pay her respects to the only grandfather/father figure she had ever known and her reluctance to spend any further time with the one man she suspected she was not going to be able to resist if she was in too close contact with him. ‘If I go it will be because he asked me, not you,’ she said.
He jangled his keys in his pocket as if impatient to leave. Mission accomplished, Maya thought. He’d got what he wanted and now he was off to enjoy his freedom. She watched as he moved to the front door of her small rented villa, the words to call him back stuck like a handful of thumbtacks in her throat.
It’s over.
It’s what we both want.
It’s over.
The words went over and over in her head like a music system stuck on replay.
‘I’ll pick up Gonzo the day before you leave for London,’ he said as he opened the door.
‘Right. Fine. OK,’ Maya said, cupping her elbows to stop herself from fidgeting.
He gave her one last look, his eyes dark and unfathomable as they ran over her. ‘Champagne or not, it was a great night, cara, wasn’t it? Good note to end our relationship on.’
Maya swiftly turned her back on him, her eyes burning with unshed tears. ‘Please leave…’ she said, surprised her voice had come out at all, much less without cracking.
After what seemed an age, the door finally closed with a click that felt as if it had snapped her heart in two.
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