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DIEGO NAVARRO HAD a bad habit of breaking his toys.
It had started with a little wooden truck when he was a boy. He hadn’t intended to break it, but he’d been testing the limits, running behind it while he pushed it down on the ground.
He’d ended up falling on top of it and splitting his lip open, as well as popping the wheels off his favorite possession.
His mother had picked him up and spoken softly to him, brushing the tears from his face and taking the pieces of the truck into her hand, telling him it was okay.
His father had laughed.
He’d pushed Diego’s mother aside and taken the toy from her hand.
Then he’d thrown it into the fire.
“When something is broken,” he’d said darkly, “you must learn to let it go.”
Those words had echoed in Diego’s head later. When his mother was dead and his father stood emotionless over her body, laid out for burial before the funeral.
Diego hated his father.
He was also much closer to being his father than he would ever be to resembling his sweet, angelic mother, who had been destroyed by the hands of the man who had promised to love her.
Her hands had been gentle. Diego’s were weapons of destruction.
All throughout his life he had demonstrated that to be the truth.
In a fit of frustrated rage after his mother’s death, he had burned down his father’s shop at the family rancho. His father had known he’d done it, and Diego had wondered if the old man would finally kill him too. Send him to the devil, as he had sent Diego’s mother to the angels.
It had been worse. His father had simply looked at him, his dark eyes regarding him with recognition.
To be recognized by a monster as being one of his own had been a fate near death. At least then.
Diego had spent the next few years accepting it. And daring the darkness inside of him.
His father gave him a sports car for his eighteenth birthday. Diego crashed it into a rock wall on a winding road. If he had spun another direction before the accident he would have simply plummeted into the sea, and both he and the car would have sunk down to the ocean floor.
It would have been a mercy. For him to die young like that. Before he could create the kind of damage he had been seemingly destined for.
But no. He had been spared.
His mother, sweet and worthy, had not been. Reinforcing his faith in nothing other than the cruelty of life.
While he seemed to create a swath of destruction around him, Diego had thus far been indestructible himself.
It was the things he touched that burned. That broke.
Like Karina.
His one and only attempt at human connection.
His brother, Matías, was a good man. He always had been. Just as Diego had been born with a darkness in him, Matías seemed to have an innate morality that Diego could never hope to understand, much less possess.
Once he had realized that, he had isolated himself from his brother as well.
But he had met Karina. Pretty, vivacious and exciting.
She had lived life harder and faster than he had. Embracing all manner of mood-altering substances and wild sex. For a hedonist such as himself, she had been a magical, sensual embodiment of everything he hoped to lose himself in.
He had married her. Because what better way to tie his favorite new toy to him forever than through legal means?
Sadly, he had broken her too.
She had been beautiful. And he regretted it.
More than that, he regretted the life lost along with hers. The only innocent party in their entire damaged marriage.
But he was not heartbroken. He did not possess the ability to suffer such a thing.
His heart had already been broken. Shattered neatly, like his mother’s bones when she had fallen off her horse after his father had shot her.
The only good thing about that was, now that it was done, it could not be done again.
Now there was only the destruction he caused the world to concern himself with.
And truly, he did not concern himself with it overmuch.
He carried those losses on his shoulders. Felt the weight of them. Like a dark and heavy cloak.
It was his nature. And he had grown to accept it.
He took a long drink of the whiskey in his hand and looked around the room. He was back at Michael Hart’s impossibly stuffy New England mansion, playing the game that the older man demanded he play before they entered into any kind of business deal.
While Diego had a reputation as more of a gambler than a businessman, the truth of the matter was, he had not made his billions in Monte Carlo. He was a brilliant investor, but he made sure to keep his actions on the down low. He preferred his outrageousness in the headlines, not his achievements.
He wanted a piece of Michael Hart’s company. But more than that...
He was fascinated by the man’s daughter.
The beautiful heiress Liliana Hart had fascinated him from the moment he had first seen her, over two years ago. Delicate and pale, with long, white blond hair that seemed to glow around her head like a halo.
She was lovely, and nothing at all like the stereotype of an American heiress. No sky-high heels and dresses that made the wearer look most suited to dancing on poles.
She was demure. Lovely. Like a rose. He wanted to reach out and touch her, though he knew that if he did, he was just as likely to bruise her petals as anything else.
But he was not a good man. He was selfish and vain. He was also competitive. And at the moment he and his brother were being pitted against each other by their grandfather for the inheritance of the family rancho.
They had to marry to get their share or forfeit entirely.
Matías was too good to rush out and pluck a wife out of thin air simply for financial gain.
Diego wasn’t too good for anything. He would happily marry a woman for financial gain. And if on top of it, Liliana made his blood pound in a way no other woman ever had.
The money was an aside. The real attraction was besting his brother, and debauching Liliana.
And if Michael Hart was willing to give her up in trade for his investment in the company and solve the issue of his inheritance along with it?
Diego would chance bruising her.
He would be more annoyed with his abuelo if the old man’s edict hadn’t given him the excuse he’d needed to pursue the beautiful jewel of a woman who had captured his eye from the first.
He saw a flash of pink by the library door, and he realized it was Liliana, peeking inside, and then running away.
A smile curved his lips. He knocked the rest of the whiskey back, and then excused himself from the gathering, striding out with confidence, enough that no one asked where he was going.
No one dared question him.
He saw her disappear around the corner, and he followed, his footfall soft on the Oriental rug that ran the length of the hall.
There was a door slightly ajar, and he