Their passion is forbidden...

Her pregnancy? Shocking!

The only thing standing between CEO Matteo Combe and his company is Dr. Sarina Fellows’s character assessment. She’s dealt with arrogant men like Matteo before and won’t be intimidated. But untouched Sarina isn’t prepared for the intense fire Matteo ignites in her! Succumbing to indescribable pleasure changes everything between them. Especially when she discovers she’s pregnant—with the powerful Italian’s twins!

Meet the billionaire and his two baby bombshells!

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

Also by Caitlin Crews

Bride by Royal Decree

Undone by the Billionaire Duke

A Baby to Bind His Bride

Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring

My Bought Virgin Wife

Bound to the Desert King collection

Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child

Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries

The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

Stolen Brides collection

The Bride’s Baby of Shame

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

The Italian’s Twin Consequences

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08771-1

THE ITALIAN’S TWIN CONSEQUENCES

© 2019 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Maisey,

who likes to sit in coffee houses

and ask me what if…?

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

“I’M AWARE THE terms of these sessions were set out in writing and forwarded to you by your board of directors, Mr. Combe, but I think it’s useful to go over them again in person. While you and I will be doing the talking, I must stress that you are not my client. I will be presenting my findings to the board rather than exploring therapeutic solutions with you. Do you understand what that means?”

Matteo Combe stared at the woman seated across from him in the ancient library of the Venetian villa that had been in his mother’s family since the dawn of time, or thereabouts. The San Giacomos were aristocratic and noble, with blood so blue it sang its own aria. They could even claim a smattering of Italian princes, Matteo’s great-grandfather among them. That he had not passed along his title had been, as far as Matteo was aware, the greatest disappointment of his grandfather’s life.

It would be a spot of luck indeed if Matteo could concern himself with such disappointments. Instead, he had to handle more pressing concerns at the moment, such as the preservation of the family business that his father’s decidedly working-class forebears had built from nothing in the north of England during the Industrial Revolution. That he was choosing to handle that situation here in this self-congratulatory aristocratic villa was for his own private satisfaction.

And perhaps he’d thought he might cow the woman—the psychiatrist—sitting with him while he was at it.

Dr. Sarina Fellows was, by his reckoning, the first American to set foot on the premises. Ever. Matteo was vaguely surprised the whole of the villa hadn’t sunk into the Grand Canal in genteel protest the moment she’d set foot on the premises.

But then, villas in Venice were as renowned for their remarkable tenacity in the face of adverse conditions as he was.

Sarina looked as brisk and efficient as her words had been, which boded ill. She was dressed entirely in funereal black, but was saved from dourness by the quiet excellence of the pieces she wore. Matteo knew artisanal Italian design when he saw it. Her hair was a dark black silk, bound up in a crisp chignon at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were a complicated brown shot through with amber, the irises ringed in black. And her lips were pure perfection, begging for a man to taste them, for all that, she had left them bare of any color.

She looked like what she was, he supposed. The agent of his destruction, if his enemies had their way.

Matteo had no intention of allowing anything to destroy him. Not this woman. Not his parents’ unexpected deaths within weeks of each other, leaving nothing in their wake but the fallout of the secrets they’d kept—and Matteo as the unwilling executor of the things they’d hidden while they lived. Not even his younger sister’s unfortunate life choices, which had led Matteo straight here, where the chairman of Combe Industries’ board—his late father’s best friend—now wished to take control.

Nothing would destroy him. Matteo wouldn’t allow it.

But he had to tolerate this farcical exercise first.

Sarina aimed what he suspected was meant to be a sympathetic smile his way. It struck him as rather more challenging instead. And Matteo had never been one to back down from a challenge—especially when he really should have, to keep the peace.

Lord, but he detested this process already. And it had only just begun.

He recalled that she’d asked him a question. And he’d agreed, hadn’t he? He’d given his word. He would sit here and subject himself to this intrusion and he would, yes, answer her questions. Each and every one.

Through gritted teeth, if necessary.

“I’m perfectly aware of why you are here, Miss Fellows,” he managed to reply. What he did not manage to do was strip his voice of impatience. Frustration. And what his erstwhile personal assistant often dared to categorize, to his face, as sheer orneriness.

“Doctor.”

He didn’t follow. “Excuse me?”

Her smile was all sharp edges. “It’s Dr. Fellows, Mr. Combe. Not Miss Fellows. I hope that critical distinction assures you that these conversations, while perhaps difficult, are wholly professional.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” he said, wondering if he’d done that deliberately. He’d always prided himself on being far less of a blunt instrument than his father, renowned far and wide for his bluster and the sucker punch to back it up. But then, he’d never been in a situation like this before. “I have not spent much time—or any time, if I am honest—in mandated therapy, but the professional nature of this experience was, of course, my foremost concern.”

The late spring storm beat against the windows outside, rushing in from the lagoon and threatening to flood the Piazza San Marco the way it did more commonly in fall and winter. The threat of high water reflected Matteo’s mood perfectly. But the woman across from him only aimed that same smile at him as the rain slapped against the glass, wholly undeterred.

“I understand that there is resistance to this kind of therapy. Or indeed, any kind of therapy. Perhaps it will be helpful to dive in straightaway.” She settled there in the high-backed, antique chair that he knew for a fact was excruciatingly uncomfortable as if it had been crafted to her precise ergonomic specifications. She made a show of checking her notes in the sleek leather folder she brandished before her like a weapon. “You are the president and CEO of Combe Industries, correct?”

Matteo had dressed casually for this interview. Or session, as the woman had insisted upon calling it. Now he wished he hadn’t. He would have greatly preferred the comfort of one of his bespoke suits, the better to remind himself that he wasn’t simply any old ruffian in off the street. He was Matteo Combe, raised to be the eldest son and reluctant heir to the San Giacomo fortune and the sprawling, multinational corporation that his father’s gritty, determined Combe ancestors had built from nothing long ago in the stark mill towns of northern England.

You need to humanize yourself, his assistant had insisted.

That was the trouble, of course. Matteo had never been very good at being human. With his family—his careless, scandalous mother and his bullish, jealous father and all their theatrics—he’d never had much practice.

He forced a smile now. Something else he didn’t have much practice with. “I was president of the corporation before my father’s death. He had been grooming me to take his place for some time.” Since birth, in fact, though he kept that to himself. “I became CEO after he passed.”

“And you chose to mark the occasion of his passing by descending into a physical altercation with one of the funeral guests. A prince, no less.”

The smile on his mouth felt strained. “I wasn’t concerned with what he was at the time. All I knew was that he was the one who impregnated and abandoned my sister.”

Sarina checked her notes again, rustling through her papers in an officious manner that put Matteo’s teeth on edge. Or more on edge.

“You’re referring to your sister, Pia, who is some years younger than you, but is, in point of fact, an adult woman. Capable of choosing to bear a child if she so wishes, presumably.”

Matteo eyed the woman sitting across from him in that draconian chair his grandfather had made him sit in when the old man felt Matteo needed to learn humility. He’d had a dossier prepared on her, of course. Sarina Fellows had been born and raised in San Francisco and had distinguished herself in one of the city’s foremost private academies. She’d gone on to Berkeley, then Stanford, and instead of going into private practice as a psychiatrist, had opened up her own consulting firm instead. Now she traveled the globe, working most closely with corporations on various projects where psychological profiles on executives were needed.

Matteo was simply her latest victim.

Because he hadn’t simply punched out the jackass prince who’d left Pia pregnant and alone, which he still wasn’t the least bit sorry about. His little sister was the only family member Matteo had ever had that he could say he adored unreservedly, if often from afar, as the heiress to two grand fortunes was something of a target. For unscrupulous fortune hunters as well as princes, apparently. He’d happily do it again, and worse. But he’d done it in full view of the paparazzi, who’d had a field day.

Chip off the old block, they’d called him in a frenzy of malicious glee. They’d dragged his late father’s many scandals and altercations back into the light of day, in case anyone had been tempted to forget who Eddie Combe had been, mere days after his death. It had taken a single snide news cycle for the vicious tabloids to start speculating about whether or not Matteo was the right person to run his own damned company.

He’d had no choice but to submit to the demands of his prissy, pearl-clutching board of directors, all of whom had fluttered about claiming they’d never seen such behavior in all their days. A bald-faced lie, since they’d all gotten their positions in the first place from Eddie, who’d been a brawler by nature and inclination.

But Eddie was dead, which Matteo still found difficult to believe. All that force and power and fury, gone. And Matteo had to get high marks from the good doctor after the way he’d channeled his father at the funeral, or risk a vote of no confidence.

Matteo could have quashed the motion outright. But he knew that the company was in a time of transition. If he wanted to lead—instead of what his father had done all this time, which was bully, threaten, lie and occasionally cheat—he had to start off on the right foot.

Especially when he knew exactly what other revelations awaited in his parents’ wills.

“My sister is naive and trusting,” Matteo said shortly. “She was raised to know very little of the world, much less the nature of men. I’m afraid I don’t take kindly to those who would take advantage of her better nature.”

Sarina shifted slightly in the seat opposite, staring at him as if he was some kind of science experiment.

It was not the way women normally looked at him and Matteo couldn’t say he liked it much. Especially when he couldn’t help but notice the doctor was not exactly hard on the eyes. Her legs were slim and toned, and it was entirely too tempting to picture them draped over his shoulders as he drove into her—

Focus, he ordered himself.

He knew too much about her to imagine she would take kindly to his line of thought. He knew that she had built her consulting business out of nothing and was ruthless, driven—qualities he possessed himself and usually appreciated in others. Though not, perhaps, in this particular scenario, when all of that knife-edged ferocity was directed at him.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, almost idly. He knew better than to imagine anything about her was the least bit idle. “Have you?”

“There are ghosts everywhere in a house like this,” Matteo replied, unsettled despite himself. Not at the notion of ghosts. But at the strange sensation that had washed over him at the suggestion of them—the idea that he’d met this woman before when he knew he hadn’t. He shoved the odd sense of recognition aside. “The halls are cluttered with my ancestors. I’m sure some of them enjoy a good haunting, but I can’t say they’ve ever bothered me. Feel free to sleep here tonight and see if you receive a ghostly visitation.”

“That would be something indeed, as I don’t believe in ghosts.” Her head tilted to one side. “Do you?”

“If I did, I’d be unlikely to mention it. I wouldn’t wish to fail your test.”

“This isn’t a test, Mr. Combe. These are conversations, nothing more. And surely you understand why your shareholders and directors take a dim view of the sort of violent, antisocial behavior you displayed at the funeral.”

He lifted a shoulder and then dropped it, affecting a carelessness he had never actually felt. “I was protecting my sister.”

“Walk me through your thought process, if you will.” Sarina propped one elbow on the arm of the chair, then tapped one of her long, elegant fingers against her jaw. He shouldn’t have been mesmerized by the motion. “Your sister is six months pregnant. And not, by all reports, incapacitated in any way. My research into Pia indicates she’s a well-educated, well-traveled, perfectly independent woman. Yet you felt some archaic need to leap to her defense. In a markedly brutal fashion.”

“I am distressingly archaic.” Matteo wasn’t sure why that word ignited like a flame in him. Or maybe that was just her fingers on her own jaw, making him wish it was his hand instead. “It’s a natural consequence of having been raised in a historic family, I suspect.”

“All families are historic, Mr. Combe. By definition. It’s called generations. It’s just so rarely your history, complete with Venetian villas and claims of nobility.” He thought he saw something flash in her gaze then, but she repressed it in the next moment. “But back to your sister. Did you imagine you were defending her honor? How...patriarchal.”

He didn’t like the way she said that word, biting off the syllables as if they were weapons. “I apologize for loving my sister.”

Matteo loved Pia, certainly, though he couldn’t say he understood her. Or her choices when she must have known the whole of the world would be watching her—but then, perhaps she hadn’t had that pounded into her head from a young age the way he had.

“Love is a very interesting word to use in these circumstances, I think,” Sarina said. “I’m not certain how I would feel if my brother chose to express his so-called love for me by planting his fist into the face of the father of my unborn child.”

“Do you have a brother?”

He knew she didn’t. Sarina Fellows was the only child of a British linguistics professor and his Japanese biochemist wife, who had met in graduate school in London and ended up in California together, teaching at the same university.

“I don’t have a brother,” she replied, seemingly unfazed that he’d caught her out. “But I was raised by people who prize nonviolence. Unlike you, if I’m understanding your family’s rather checkered past correctly.”

He could have asked her which checkered past she meant. The San Giacomos had dueled and schemed throughout the ages. The Combes had been more direct, and significantly more likely to throw a punch. But it was checkered all around, anyway he looked at it.

“If I’m guilty of anything, it’s being an overzealous older brother,” Matteo said. And then remembered—the way he kept doing, with the same mix of shock and something a great deal like regret—that he too had an older brother. An older brother his mother had given up when she was a teenager, yet had dropped into her will like a bomb. An older brother Matteo had yet to meet and still couldn’t quite believe was real.

Maybe that was why he’d done nothing about it. Yet.

He tried to flash another smile.

Not that it was any use. The doctor didn’t change expression at all. Instead, she sat there in silence, until his smile faded away.

He understood it was a tactic. A strategy, nothing more. It was one he had employed a thousand times himself. But he certainly didn’t like it being aimed his way.

He felt the urge, as everyone always did, to fill the silence. He refrained.

Instead, he settled there in the ancient armchair where he remembered his own grandfather sitting decades ago, shrouded in bitterness because he was noble, yet not royal. Matteo lounged there the way he remembered the old man had, endeavoring to look as unbothered as he ought to have been. Because this was a minor inconvenience, surely. An impertinence, nothing more.

He was submitting to this because he chose to. Because it was an olive branch he could wave at his board to prove that he was both conscientious and different from his father. Not because he had to.

It didn’t matter if the doctor didn’t realize that.

Besides, the longer she stared at him, letting the silence stretch and thicken between them, the more he found it impossible to think about anything but how distractingly attractive she was. He’d expected someone far more like a battle-ax. Fussy and of advanced years, for example.

He suspected her beauty was another tactic.

Because Sarina Fellows didn’t look at all like the kind of woman who could hold such supposed power over his life. She looked a great deal more like the sort of woman he liked to take to his bed. Sleek and elegant. Poised. Matteo preferred them intelligent and pedigreed, because he liked clever conversation as well as greedier, more sensual pastimes.

If she hadn’t been sent here to judge him, he might have amused himself by finding ways to get his hands up beneath the hem of the elegant pencil skirt she wore and—

“Toxic masculinity,” she pronounced, with something like satisfaction in her tone.

Matteo blinked. “Is that a diagnosis?”

“The good news, Mr. Combe, is that you are hardly unique.” It was definitely satisfaction. Her dark eyes gleamed. “You seem unrepentant, and think about what we’re discussing here. A funeral is generally held to be a gathering where the bereaved can say their final goodbyes to a lost loved one. You chose to make it a boxing ring. And you also took it upon yourself to draw blood, terrify those around you, and humiliate the sister you claim to love, all to assuage your sense of fractured honor.”

He didn’t sigh at that, though it took an act of will. “You obviously never met my father. There were no bereaved at his funeral and furthermore, he would have been the first to cheer on a spot of boxing.”

“I find that difficult to believe. And, frankly, more evidence of the kind of cowboy inappropriateness that seems to be part and parcel of the Matteo Combe package.”

“I am Italian on one side and British on the other, Dr. Fellows. There is no part of me that is a cowboy. In any respect.”

“I’m using the term to illustrate a strain of toxic male vigilantism that, as far as I’m aware, you haven’t bothered to apologize for. Then or now.”

“If I felt the need to apologize for defending my sister’s honor, which I do not, that would be a discussion I had with Pia,” Matteo said quietly. “Not with you. Certainly not with my board. Nor, for that matter, with the clamoring public.”

Her pen was poised over her paper. “So you do feel remorse for your brutality? Or you don’t?”

What Matteo felt like doing would, he suspected, inspire her to call him names far worse than cowboy. He spread his hands out in front of him, as if in some kind of surrender. When he didn’t have the slightest idea how to surrender. To anything or anyone.

“Remorse is a lot like guilt. Or shame. Both useless emotions that have more to do with others than with the self.” He dropped his hands. “I cannot change the past. Even if I wanted to.”

“How convenient. And since you can’t change it, why bother discussing it. Is that your policy?”

“I cannot say that I have a policy. As I have never subjected myself to these, quote-unquote, ‘conversations’ before.”

“Somehow I am unshocked.”

“But I am here now, am I not? I have promised to answer any question you might have. We can talk at length on any topic you desire. I am nothing if not compliant.” He made himself smile again, though it felt like a blade. “And toxic, apparently.”

“Compliant is an interesting word choice,” Sarina said, and he was sure there was laughter in her voice, though he could see no sign of it anywhere on her face. “Do you think it’s an adequate word to describe you or your behavior?”

“I have opened my home. I have invited you into it and lo, you came. I have agreed to have as many of these conversations as you deem necessary. And for this, I am called toxic instead of accommodating.”

“That word bothers you.”

“I would not say that it bothers me.” What bothered him was the pointlessness of this. The waste of his time and energy. And yes, the fact that she was distractingly beautiful—which, he had to remind himself, was nothing but another weapon. “But it is not as if one wishes to be called toxic, is it? It is certainly not a compliment.”

“And you are a man who is accustomed to compliments, is that it?”

He knew better, but still, he felt his mouth curve. “It will perhaps shock you to learn that most women who make my acquaintance do not find me the least bit toxic.”

“Are you attempting to make this session sexual, Mr. Combe?” He saw her eyes flash at that and he could have sworn what he saw in them then was triumph. It told him he was in deeper trouble than he’d thought even before she smirked. “Oh dear. This is much worse than I thought.”

CHAPTER TWO

MATTEO COMBE WAS precisely the kind of wealthy, pompous, arrogant man of too much undeserved power Sarina Fellows hated most.

He was remarkably handsome, which to her mind was a very serious strike against him, right from the start. His was the kind of attractiveness that made people silly when they encountered it. It was the walk into walls, trip over your own two feet, start giggling like a twelve-year-old sort of silliness, and it appalled her deeply that she could feel the swell of that reaction inside of her when she’d long considered herself immune to his type.

But he was different, somehow. He was...more. It was something about the glossiness of his dark hair, the assertive line of his jaw. It was his aristocratic nose and those gray eyes like a storm. It was something about the seething confidence he wore like a kind of cloak, draped about his athletic, rangy body and making it very clear that he was succumbing to her—to this evaluation his own board had demanded—because he chose to do so. That no force on earth could compel him to do a single thing he didn’t wish to do.

He reminded her of a mighty river, roaring over a great ledge. Powerful. Kinetic and dynamic.

Dangerous, something in her whispered.

Sarina dismissed that almost as soon as the word formed inside her. He was beautiful, yes. Somehow austere and lush at once, with that face of his. And he was rich. Filthily, vomitously wealthy. One branch of his family tree was stuck deep into the Yorkshire mills, hardy and tough, inside and out. The other stretched back into the golden age of the Italian Renaissance, which was right about the time this particular villa had been built.

Sarina understood exactly why he had insisted their first meeting be here, in the living fairy tale that was Venice. He wanted her to come all the way into this city of sighs and ancient palazzos and history like a bright tapestry in which his family was a shining, golden thread, the better to gasp and flutter over all his wealth and consequence.

Except Sarina wasn’t the fluttering kind.

And Matteo Combe had no idea what he was in for.

It wasn’t only that Sarina hated men like him, though she did. It was that she knew them. She knew what they were capable of, certainly, and she’d developed an acute allergy to their form of arrogance. The best friend she’d had since childhood, who she’d considered her sister, had succumbed to an addiction to a man just like Matteo. Rashly confident, propped up on all that history and the money acquired for him across centuries, and catered to by everyone he had ever met, every single day for the whole of his life.

Oh yes. Sarina knew all about men like him.

Sarina didn’t need to destroy him, necessarily. But she thought of men like Matteo as big, blown-up balloons, and as it happened, she’d set herself up to be the perfect, pointed pin. She’d been popping overweening male egos professionally now long enough to have quite the reputation for taking masters of the universe down a few pegs, to the mortal men of questionable moral character they usually were beneath all the bluster.

Some of the men she was called in to consult with were decent. In the absence of a record of misdeeds and bad behavior, she was more than happy to issue a glowing report on the man in question. She didn’t hate men, as many had accused her. She hated bad men who abused their power and those vulnerable to it.

She felt sure that Jeanette, wherever she was now, was looking down on her in support.

And the fact that the particular rich, arrogant man in front of her had already managed to worm his way beneath her skin in a way the others never had? With all that dark and brooding certainty he exuded like a rich scent?

Well. That was between her and the private conversations she had in her own head. She had no intention of letting him see it.

“You want me to have remorse,” Matteo was saying. He was sitting in an armchair Sarina didn’t have to know anything about antiques to know was exquisite and priceless, looking entirely too much like a king for her peace of mind. “If I cannot produce any on cue, does that mean I fail this examination?”

“This isn’t a pass or fail experience.” She jotted down a few words on the pad in front of her, more to make him uncomfortable than to record anything. “Do you find that unnerving?”

“That my future is in the hands of someone who cannot answer a direct question?” His gray eyes gleamed. “Not in the least.”

She hadn’t expected him to be dry. And all the pictures in the world—Sarina was fairly certain she’d viewed every last one of them, purely for research purposes—didn’t do justice to the particular wild darkness that was Matteo Combe. It was that thick, near-black hair of his, edging toward the border of unruly. It was the slate gray of his gaze that made her think not only of rain, but more worryingly, of dancing in it.

Even when she knew full well that way lay madness. And things much worse that a little madness.

He usually dressed in expensive business suits and sleek formal wear, the better to lord it over everyone else. But today he’d chosen to greet her in what she assumed passed for casual wear to a man like him. A pair of jeans that looked expensively frayed, because he’d obviously bought them that way. Men like Matteo didn’t do anything that might lead to whitened knees or artful tears in denim, designer or not. His boots were very clearly handcrafted right here in Italy. And he sported the kind of T-shirt that had about as much in common with a run-of-the-mill cotton T-shirt from the stores regular people frequented as stealth fighter jets did with paper airplanes. Worse, the T-shirt clung to his torso, telling her things she didn’t want to know about the extraordinary physical shape Matteo kept himself in.

She knew it already. She knew he liked to run miles upon miles. She knew he enjoyed epic swims and then, with his leftover energy and time, a great deal of flinging weights around. She’d read all of that, but it was one thing to read in a far-off hotel room. It was something else again to sit in the presence of a man who clearly preferred to use every iota of power he could, including the physical.

But she was here to assess his mental state, not gaze adoringly at the place where his bicep strained the hem of his T-shirt, so she frowned a little as she focused on him again.

“This will only be an adversarial relationship if you make it that way.”

“It’s an inherently adversarial relationship,” he corrected her, mildly enough, though there was nothing mild in the way he gazed at her. “I suspect you know that.”

“But you enjoy adversity in your relationships, don’t you?”

He let out a laugh, as if she’d surprised him.

“I would not say that I like adversarial relationships. But in my family, there is almost no other kind.”

“Yet you sat right there and told me how much you love your sister. Or do you consider love another form of adversity?”

“Your family is obviously different from mine or you would know the answer to that question.”

Sarina knew entirely too much about his family, as did everyone else in the known world, because both branches of it had spent so much time dominating tabloid headlines. Even if she’d never looked one of them up deliberately, there would have been no avoiding them. Matteo’s father had regularly appeared in the headlines, for this or that supposed marital or corporate indiscretion. His mother, meanwhile, had been widely held to be the most beautiful woman on the planet while she’d lived. Which had come with its own share of scandals and speculation, and all the attendant tabloid attention.

He and his sister were close, or so it was believed—or as close as they could be with a ten-year age gap between them, leaving Matteo as something more like a secondary parent than a brother.

In contrast, Sarina had been raised by chilly academics. They were far more concerned with their own research, their endless pursuit of publication, and the petty intellectual squabbles of their peers than the daughter she thought they’d had as an experiment in humanity more than any desire to parent. And they had less than no interest in any scandals she might have kicked up along the way.

Sarina couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like this villa, no matter how lovely Venice was. She and Jeannette had grown up in side-by-side old houses in the Berkeley Hills, racing in and out of rooms notable for their towering piles of books and comfortable, threadbare rugs, muddy porches and overgrown yards. This villa was a dramatic clutter of perfectly preserved tapestries and heavy stone statues, slung about this chamber and that, lest anyone be tempted to forget that this was the very heart of old-world wealth.

She knew why he’d brought her here, but it was backfiring in ways she doubted he’d imagined. Because now she knew how seriously he took himself and his pedigree. And that could only work to her advantage.

“Why did you think that it was better to meet here?” she asked, keeping her voice cool. “In a place that is very clearly a home, and not part of your business empire? Is this another attempt on your part to steer our interactions toward something sexual?”

“You are the one who keeps mentioning sex, Dr. Fellows,” Matteo said silkily. “Not me.”

Somehow she kept any reaction to that off her face. “Yet you insisted we start here, not in one of your many offices. Can you explain that choice?”

“This is where I happen to be at the moment,” he replied, and there was a certain smokiness in that voice of his with its unique accent, not quite British and not yet Italian. Something dark, and more compelling than she wanted to admit. To her horror, she felt a certain...thrill work its way through her, settling between her legs and worse, pulsing. She was so horrified she froze. “Both you and the chairman of my board impressed upon me that these meetings had to begin as soon as possible. Obedient in all things, I immediately made myself available.”

There wasn’t a single obedient thing about this man. Sarina ordered herself to concentrate on her reasons for being here and not that pulsing thing. Or the wildness she could sense in him, simmering there beneath his aristocratic surface.

“What I think, Mr. Combe, is that you wanted me to see this villa You wanted to impress me.”

“I cannot imagine anything less on my mind than a desire to impress you.”

“I’m assessing you for corporate reasons, yet you appear in a T-shirt. Here in this very personal space. At the very least, you aren’t taking this seriously. Do you think that’s wise?”

Something changed in his gaze then. Some flash of awareness, or temper. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and she was suddenly aware of the fact that though he’d called it a library, this was really nothing more than a small living room. It just happened to contain a number of books. A fireplace. What had seemed like a reasonable amount of space without it feeling like a closet.

But when he shifted like that, he seemed to take up the whole of it.

“I would ordinarily spare a visitor a dreary history lesson, but there is very little personal about this villa. It appears as it always has. It is my job to be its steward, not a resident in any real sense. I must hand the villa on to the next generation intact. As it has been handed down, eldest son to eldest son, since the day it was built. For me, Doctor, there is no distinction between what is corporate and what is personal. My mother was a San Giacomo. Surely you must know what that means.”

“Is this your way of reminding me that you’re famous, Mr. Combe?”

“My family is not famous,” he said gently. “Fame is the stuff of a moment, here and gone. My family—both of my families—are prominent and of significant means. And have been for some centuries.”

“Do you think—”

“Let us cut to the chase, please.” He interrupted her smoothly, but she was sure that was impatience she could see in his face. And his please wasn’t any sort of supplication. “What is it you are looking for from me? Is it a certain set of words, arranged in a specific way, so as to assuage whatever offended dignity my board is currently pretending they feel? Tell me what it is you need, I shall provide it, and then we can all move on with our lives.”

That felt like a slap, and the fact that it did made her wonder why she hadn’t noticed that he was getting to her the way he was. Not just that thing she could still feel like a new pulse, low in her belly. He was nice to look at, yes—magnetic, even—but it was more than that. She was leaning forward in the uncomfortable chair she’d chosen and now felt she had to pretend she found pleasant.

But Sarina wasn’t assessing Matteo Combe the way she should have been. Instead, she was hanging on his every word. She was enjoying sparring with him a little bit too much.

She was...enjoying this. Him.

A wave of self-hatred crashed over her, and on some level she was shocked it didn’t sweep her away. That he couldn’t see it.

I’m sorry, Jeanette. And as she thought of her lost friend, her sister in her soul, another wave hit her—this time, of the grief that never quite left her. And never would, she thought, until she did her part to give a little back to the kind of men who preyed on pretty girls like Jeanette had been. And did nothing when they fell apart, because they’d already moved on to another victim.

Sarina had vowed that she would honor her best friend’s memory right there where she’d found Jeanette’s body, there in the bathroom of the apartment they’d shared while Sarina finished up her graduate work. She would do what she could to bring supposedly untouchable men to justice, if they deserved it. She would identify predators, look hard at arrogance, and where appropriate, help dismantle systems that kept abusive men in power.

That vow hadn’t simply been words. She’d made it the cornerstone of her life.

One beautiful, brooding much-too-rich man with eyes like smoke wasn’t going to change that.

“I’m afraid that’s not how it works.” Her voice was much chillier than it had been before. Overcompensation, maybe. But there was something about Matteo that encouraged her to...lean in too much. Be a little bit too much engaged. Try to match wits with him when she should have been quietly and competently undermining his confidence. “I understand that you’re a man who’s used to being in charge of things, but you’re not in charge of this. I am. I will tell you when and where the next meeting is. You already agreed to show up. In the same fashion, I will let you know when we’re finished.”

“Surely you cannot have convinced my board to allow this to drag on forever. They prefer instant gratification, I must tell you.”

“What I did or did not offer your board isn’t something I can discuss with you. They are my client. The nature of our relationship must remain private.”

“How convenient.”

“Here’s what I want you to think about,” she said, and smiled at him, encouragingly. With too much teeth, perhaps. “Control is obviously very important to you. You control your company, now more than ever. You apparently think that you ought to be able to control the reproductive choices of your own sister. You’re a very powerful man, and powerful men, as a rule, tend to be under the impression that they should be able to control anything and everything. But you don’t control this. You don’t control me.”

“As it happens, I have thought of little else.”

Again, he was far more dry than she’d been prepared for. It unnerved her—but Sarina hid that. Or hoped she did.

“Good. And as you continue to think about it, as I’m sure you will, I’d like you to find your way to viewing this as an opportunity.”

His mouth curved into something sardonic. “An opportunity for what, exactly?”

He was still leaning forward, and despite herself, so was she. And the room suddenly felt breathless. Fraught and tight around them, like a fist.

But Sarina didn’t sit back. She didn’t break that connection—because she refused to show him that she noticed it in the first place.

“Why, for you, Mr. Combe.” She made her voice light. Very nearly airy. “It’s your opportunity to be a better person. Once you learn how to give up control, you might find that you don’t have to struggle with concepts like toxic masculinity.”

His expression suggested that he was not overconcerned with said concepts, or indeed any kind of struggle. But he only gazed back at her, his gray eyes steady in a way that made her breath feel shallow.

“And I will be free of this struggle because my corporation will crumble into dust, as it requires my control and attention at all times? Or perhaps it will be my family that suffers, once I release my grip—as I am the only thing currently holding us together? I think you misunderstand the fundamental nature of my character, Dr. Fellows. I am not trying to control the universe. Between you and me, I do not much care about the universe. But I do like to control what I am, in fact, in control of.”

“Says the man who descended into an all-out brawl at his own father’s funeral.”

She saw it then. That blaze of pure, stark temper in his gaze that made his whole face change. Into something taut and dark. Powerful in an entirely different way.

Thrilling, something in her supplied, as she pulsed anew. But she ignored all of that.

Or she tried.

But Matteo’s eyes were smoke and ruin, and she had the oddest sense he knew it.

“Oh, Doctor.” He sounded almost pitying. Almost. “Do you think that I was goaded into punching that man? On the contrary, I very much meant to do that. And am glad I did.”

CHAPTER THREE

MATTEO SHOULD NOT have said that.

It was the truth, but the truth was needlessly provocative and he’d known it even as he’d formed the words.

Sarina had stood, a curious expression on her face. Triumphant, he’d thought in the moment, though he couldn’t think why. She’d smoothed her hands over her skirt as if to free it from wrinkles, though it showed none, and when she’d gazed at him her expression had been nothing short of pitying.

“I think we’ll stop here,” she had said in that way of hers, as if her word was law in Matteo’s house. In his presence. When everyone else who’d ever dared speak to him like that had been related to him by blood—and was now dead. “Before we stray too far from our objectives. And I’d advise you to take a bit of time to reflect on the opportunity you have before you for growth, Mr. Combe. But that growth will be stagnant, I fear, if you remain completely unrepentant for the unprovoked physical attack you made on another man.”

At least that time he’d had the sense to bite his tongue.

And he’d reflected, all right, but not in the way the doctor had ordered. She had refused his offer of accommodation, which was likely wise when he couldn’t seem to keep himself from looking at her in ways he knew he shouldn’t. She’d let herself out of the library and marched off, down from his preferred wing of the villa into the great hall, where she’d stood, prim and disapproving, in the midst of all his San Giacomo ancestors in their fussy portraits.

He’d reflected on the height of her heels, sharp stilettos that made her legs look longer than they were and gave rise to all manner of inappropriate images in his head. One more delicious than the next. He’d reflected on the cool intelligence in her gaze and how much he liked that, even when she clearly wished to use it against him. Maybe especially then, because he couldn’t seem to help but like a challenge. He’d reflected that, really, it was unfortunate that he found his board-appointed therapist—consultant—so mouthwatering. Intellectually as well as physically.

He spared no thought at all to Prince Ares, whose eye he’d happily blackened. And would again, with a song in his heart.

Matteo had waited quietly with Sarina until the boat was brought around to ferry her back to her hotel, and he’d murmured all the appropriate, polite things as she’d gone back out into the rain.

But he knew his first meeting with this woman had not gone as well as it might have.

And if he hadn’t, a board member who was still his ally rang up the following morning to quote Matteo’s words back to him.

“You meant to punch that prince. You said so straight out.” Lord Christopher Radcliffe sounded despairing. “Do you want them to vote you out of power, Matteo? Is that what this is about? Suicide by board meeting?”

“Of course not,” Matteo had replied,

But that wasn’t entirely true. There was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to light it all on fire and walk away.

Sometimes that part of him made a lot of noise.

It was shouting up a storm as he flew back to London two days later.

By then he’d had every member of his board on the phone to him, demanding he explain the report they’d received from the consultant Matteo had known was in their pocket—but perhaps not so deep. He’d learned a valuable lesson.

His instincts about Sarina Fellows had been correct: she wanted to take him down.

He was pleased to have that clarified, he thought darkly as his plane soared over continental Europe. He should have thought of that while he was letting her provoke him into shooting off his mouth. He should have been prepared for the woman to be a weapon, and he hadn’t been—because he’d been far more intrigued by the gut punch of his attraction to her.

And as entertaining as it was to imagine the fun he might have had with a woman like Sarina if he’d met her under different circumstances, Matteo couldn’t actually let her take him down. He had felt compelled to allow his board to subject him to this consultation, and thought submitting to it as his own father wouldn’t have made him look far more reasonable and biddable than Eddie had been, but he couldn’t let her plant her seeds of doubt and dissension. It would never be a good time for such things, but this was particularly bad timing all around. He needed to prove to a set of disapproving old men that he could take the helm of the company he’d already been running for years. He needed to cater to his family’s legacy and make sure Combe Industries didn’t die on his watch. And while he was at it, he needed to handle all the unpleasant revelations of his parents’ wills.

No matter how much the consultant his board had selected got to him.

He might have the odd daydream of walking away from it all, but he never would. That wasn’t who he was.

Matteo was the eldest son—or he’d spent his life thinking he was, anyway—and he had been raised to clean up any and all messes that arose on both sides of his family. He was the heir to the San Giacomo legacy. He was president and CEO of Combe Industries. And more than that, he was the family janitor.

What Matteo did was clean up the mess, whatever it was.

Whether he wanted to or not.

At least this particular mess was of his own making. He was the one who had taken that swing at Prince Ares—and to the other man’s credit, little as Matteo wanted to give him any when he’d already helped himself to Pia, he’d taken the hit. And had then done the right thing by Pia by instantly proposing marriage. It was the paparazzi who’d carried on as if Matteo had sucker punched him and left him for dead.

Everything else on Matteo’s plate was there courtesy of someone else’s inability to handle their lives the way he did. His sister’s love life and its consequences no matter his or anyone’s feelings on the matter, like the princely proposal she’d had no choice but to accept—as she was carrying the heir to the throne of the island kingdom of Atilia. Or his parents’ indiscretions and old scandals made new now that they’d died, in the form of at least one sibling Matteo hadn’t known he had—and wasn’t sure how to deal with now he did.

It was one hit after the next, and really, what was a slanted psychological evaluation complete with a not-so-hidden agenda next to family members he’d never met?

To say nothing about the company that he still had to run whether his board of directors thought he was fit for it or not.

By the time he landed in London, Matteo had been putting out fires for hours. Those of his own making and all the others that cropped up every day of the week. And he had little to look forward to but another long day—and week, and month—with more of the same. Fires everywhere, and once again, it was his job to extinguish them. And despite what his board pretended to think, or the papers brayed daily, the one thing Matteo had always been very, very good at was his job.

The thing about putting out fires for the whole of a man’s adult life was that, sooner or later, he developed a taste for the flames. An appreciation and something akin to admiration.

His father had set out to crush those flames any way he could. Matteo preferred to exult in them, then use the resulting heat to his advantage.

And that was what he chose to reflect upon, just as the doctor had ordered. It appeared Sarina wanted to play games instead of plod through the expected set of sessions in good faith. Matteo was perfectly happy to play along now that he’d sussed out her intentions—because the truth was, when it came to games of high stakes where winning meant surviving, he always won.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” his personal assistant, Lauren, said one morning a few days after that first session in Venice, standing at his desk in London in her usual no-nonsense manner, which was one of the reasons he paid her so well. “But she’s here, I’m afraid. And insists upon seeing you.”

Matteo was neck deep in contract negotiations with foreign distributors—all of whom had spent the past month reading the tabloids, apparently—and couldn’t think of a single person with a claim to his time. Or anyone who would dare send his assistant in here to demand it.

He scowled. “And who is she, may I ask? The bloody Queen?”

Lauren Clarke had been working for him for far too long to react to that tone of his. Or the ferocious glare he leveled at her.

“Not the Queen, sir. I doubt very much she’d appear without an appointment and the royal guard. It’s that psychiatrist.”

And this was part of what he’d agreed to, purely to placate the board. They’d all been foaming at the mouth, waving tabloid magazines and their fists in the air, and caterwauling as if they’d expected the building to fall down around their ears. He’d have agreed to anything to calm them down, and he had.

So now he had a psychiatrist standing in his office, demanding to be seen. In the middle of a complicated workday—which was to say, any old Tuesday at Combe Industries.

But he was no longer operating in good faith. She wanted to play with matches? Matteo would respond with a bonfire.

Something inside him rolled over, shook itself off, and bared its teeth.

He finished his call and gazed back at his PA, though he didn’t see her. He saw Sarina instead, and that sheen of triumph all over her face in Venice.

“Give me five minutes,” he instructed Lauren. “Then show her in.”

He set his trap, then moved to the windows that looked out over the city. Night had already set in, gloomy and wet though it was supposedly spring out there. He could see the suggestion of light and movement, blurred with moisture.

But however cold and miserable it was outside, it was no match for the blast of heat he felt when he heard his office door open, then shut.

Temper. Fury. Anticipation.

“You have been busy, Doctor,” he said, his voice so mild he almost fooled himself into imagining it was real. “In less than a week you have managed to sow dissent throughout the whole of Combe Industries. Uncertainty and speculation.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Combe,” came the reply in her smooth voice, and maybe he was imagining the undercurrent of satisfaction in it. Though he doubted it. “I told you that you weren’t my client. You should have assumed that anything you said to me was in no way confidential.”

Matteo didn’t turn around to face her. He kept his gaze on the window before him, but he stopped looking at blurry, giddy London, and focused instead on the figure he could see in the reflection.

She was dressed in black again, sleek and sharp. Like a blade, he thought.

And he was certain he could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He told himself it was his temper channeling into the ferocious intent he was known for, nothing more. This woman had no idea what he was capable of—but he had every intention of showing her.

“I did not expect confidentiality,” Matteo replied. “But I did imagine you would pretend, at the very least, to get at the truth. Instead, you have made it clear that your mission is to destroy me.”

He waited for her to deny that, but she didn’t.

She didn’t laugh, either, but he was sure he could hear the hint of it in her voice when she answered him. “I don’t need to destroy you. You appear to being doing that job all by yourself.”

“I was under the impression that you were here to perform an impartial assessment, not an assassination.”

She moved farther into his vast, sprawling office. He watched her reflection move across the room, a liquid, rolling walk, all hips and glory, and he stopped pretending that the way she affected him had only to do with his temper. She was wearing another pair of those impossible heels, and Matteo was forced to face the somewhat confronting notion that this woman was not only doing her best to make a fool out of him in front of his business associates—she was single-handedly turning him into a foot fetishist.

He would make her pay for that, too.

“I’m not following you,” came her cool reply. He watched her walk to the front of his desk, then shift to lean against it. She folded her arms over her chest, she cocked out one hip, and he knew she understood every square inch of the power games she was playing. At another time he might have applauded it. “I assume you feel that your character is being assassinated, is that it?”

“With a hatchet, Dr. Fellows.”

He didn’t have to see that smirk of hers to feel it, like one more knife shoved deep into his back. “Your character is your business, Mr. Combe. You explained to me that you felt justified in all of your choices. How, then, could I take a hatchet to your good name? Surely that would only be possible if you felt some sense of shame.”

“Because you are determined, one way or another, that you will make me feel this shame. No matter what it takes.”

“That you’re even discussing the possibility of feeling shame feels a great deal like a breakthrough. I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”

He turned then, holding on to his control by the barest of threads. He could feel temper, yes, but something far darker—and much thicker—pounding in his veins. Making his skin feel too tight. Making his self-possession feel threadbare at best.

But then, this was where he had always operated at his fullest capacity. When he was the most challenged, he shone the brightest.

He hoped he blinded her.

“You will have to tell me what you think it will take,” he growled at her. “Do you require me on my knees? Shall I rend my garments at your whim? You will obviously only be satisfied by a very specific performance. Why don’t you tell me my lines?”

Her smile was placid, but her dark eyes gleamed. “If it is not genuine, Mr. Combe, how can it be counted as real?”

“Tell me, Doctor. How would you know the first thing about genuine sentiment for one’s family?”

He took satisfaction in the way she stiffened, as if she hadn’t expected the hit. Her gaze flashed into something darker and he liked that, too.

“I would strongly caution you against making this personal,” she said, and this time her voice was stern. As if she thought he might back down simply because she sounded like she was in charge.

But Matteo wasn’t her client. As she had amply illustrated.

“Why ever not, Dr. Fellows?” he asked, his voice quiet. But he could tell by the way her chin lifted that she wasn’t fooled by his tone. “My board of directors feels that they can excavate my personal life at will. Why shouldn’t I do the same with the blunt instrument they have sent to do their bidding?”

“Am I...a tool in this scenario?”

“What you are is a woman who has no experience whatsoever in the sorts of relationships that led me to the choices I made at my father’s funeral.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of assessing human relationships. Is that what you just said?”

Matteo felt everything in him focus on his target, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers before he reached out with them and ruined this little trail of breadcrumbs he was leaving for her.

“Your parents are lofty intellectuals,” he told her, as if she might have missed that. “Academics who have spent their lives locked away in elite institutions, catering to children of the rich and famous.”

“I’m going to stand back and wait for the irony to hit. If I were you, I would duck.”

“They had you when they were quite old, relatively speaking. You have no siblings. As your parents were each only children themselves, you have no extended family of any kind. Which made it doubly challenging, I imagine, that they ignored you so thoroughly as you grew up, if their lack of attendance at what might reasonably be considered your milestones is any guide. What I’m suggesting to you is that when it comes to the kinds of familial bonds and debts that govern the lives of most people, your view is necessarily limited by your experience.”

“I live in the world,” she shot back at him, with heat, and he wondered if she knew that she’d betrayed herself. That he could see he’d landed a hit. “Last I checked, the world was filled with human beings and human relationships. In fact, I made those things the focus of my life’s work. Rest assured that even if I never experienced the delight of a house filled with siblings—or even numerous houses shared with one much younger sibling and a whole lot of staff, like you—I have made a deep and comprehensive study of every possible permutation of human emotion.”

“Furthermore,” he said, the way he would if he was in a business meeting and didn’t wish to acknowledge that someone else had spoken, “you appear to lack any actual personal relationships yourself.”

She flushed at that, which told him a great many things he doubted very much she wanted him to know. Then she stood straighter, and he was sure he could see her vibrating with her own temper.

But unless he missed his guess, with decidedly less focus.

“You have absolutely no right to go digging around in my life,” she hurled at him.

“It seems only fair. Since you’ve taken a backhoe to mine.”

“You do realize, of course, that this is more evidence of the kind of antisocial behavior that got you into this position in the first place?”

“I am a man who does my research. I leave nothing to chance. No one who knows me—particularly my board—could possibly imagine that I would allow someone access to me, my thoughts, my entire life, and not perform my due diligence.”

“You must be very proud of yourself,” Sarina said, after a moment, that flush still betraying her emotions. He wanted to touch the heat of it. Taste it, even. “Does it make you feel more in control of this downward spiral of yours to think you’ve unearthed the truth about me?”

“You have no relationships,” he repeated, as if he was delivering judgment from above. “You’re a driven, ambitious, professional woman. You live and breathe your work, and you usually do both from hotels. Your parents are fully preoccupied with their research. As far as I can tell, you are entirely solitary.”

They were standing, facing off, as if a brawl was about to break out. And Matteo knew that he was his father’s son, because his blood sang at the thought. But he was also heir to the San Giacomos and all the scheming and plotting that had made them one of Italy’s most prominent families—for centuries.

Sarina should have done her homework.

“You must be under the impression that if you taunt me with my own life, this will somehow... Break me? Put me off my game? Unfortunately for you, Mr. Combe, all it does is give me further insight into your character. I wouldn’t be concerned about anyone else performing an assassination when you seem so willing and able to do it yourself.”

She’d wrestled that flush on her cheeks into submission. Now she gazed back at him pityingly, which he assumed was meant to make him feel small. Off balance.

But Matteo could see the way her pulse racketed around in her neck, and he knew better.

That response—the response he’d thought he’d seen in Venice, but hadn’t pushed—was what he’d been banking on. Somehow, he contained his own roar of victory.

“It turns out I have a fascination for psychology,” he said instead. “For example, I cannot help but wonder why a woman who lives such a lonely, empty life imagines that she should set herself up as a world-renowned expert on the very emotions and relationships she lacks? I should as soon declare myself an authority on literature. I’ve read a book, after all.”

“Keep digging that hole, Mr. Combe.”

Matteo moved then, prowling closer to her and keeping his eyes on that telltale pulse. It was possible it was her own temper, of course. But when he moved closer, he saw the way her eyes widened. The slight flare of her nostrils. And, sure enough, that pulse in her neck sped up.

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