As I learned today with regard to the ownership of this house, your father was a good teacher.’
‘I will not allow you to take this sordid mess into a public courtroom,’ Cristo spelt out harshly. ‘If you do that I will fight you every step of the way and I warn you—you don’t want me as an enemy.’
‘Fight me all you like...it’s still going to court,’ Belle replied thinly. ‘We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.’
‘What would it take for you to drop this idea?’ Cristo growled, almost shuddering at the threat of how much damage a media smear campaign could do to his brother. Zarif’s standing in Vashir was delicate, his having only recently ascended the throne. The last thing Zarif needed right now was a great big horrible scandal that would give all too many people the impression that he was from a sleazy family background and was far from being the right ruler for a very conservative country. Zarif, Cristo reminded himself grimly, had already taken the fall for revealing Nik’s biggest secret to Nik’s estranged wife, Betsy, when the first careless spilling of that secret was entirely Cristo’s fault.
‘I’d probably be asking for the impossible,’ Belle admitted ruefully, ‘but I want my siblings to have the lifestyle they would have enjoyed had Gaetano married my mother. It’s very unfair that they should have to pay the price for the fact that he didn’t marry her.’
‘You’re being irrational,’ Cristo condemned, impatiently, moving out of the room. ‘You can’t change the past.’
‘I don’t want to change the past. I simply want to right the wrongs that have been done to my siblings.’
‘Leave the past behind you and move on.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Belle quipped. ‘Not so easy in practice. And I’m not irrational—’
In the hall, Cristo swung round, surprisingly light on his feet for so large and powerfully built a man. ‘You’re the most irrational woman I’ve ever met.’
Belle collided with his stunning dark eyes and for a timeless moment the world stopped turning and she stopped breathing.
‘And for some reason I find it incredibly sexy,’ Cristo purred the admission, his accent roughening his dark deep drawl as he flicked her tee shirt back up over her exposed shoulder with a long careless forefinger.
‘You can’t get round me. I’m not as naïve as my mother was,’ Belle told him tartly.
‘Wake up and smell the roses, cara. You’re a child trying to play with the grown-ups,’ Cristo told her thickly, his intimate intonation vibrating down her taut spinal cord.
Suddenly, Belle was short of breath and she stared up at him, her eyes very wide and scornful. ‘A child? Is that the best you can do on the insult front?’
‘I wasn’t trying to insult you.’ Up that close his dark eyes had tiny gold flecks like stars. His hand curved to her shoulder and the scent of clean, warm male overlaid with a faint hint of cologne ignited a burst of heat low in Belle’s tummy. Just as suddenly she was locked into his eyes and it was as though her feet were encased in concrete and she literally couldn’t move. He lowered his handsome dark head and took her parted lips with a scorching urgency that sent something frighteningly wild and alive flying through her like an explosive charge. It was a fiery kiss and like no other she had experienced. The minute his tongue plunged into the tender interior of her mouth, it sent a wave of violent response crashing through her, and she was lost. Her hands roamed from his broad shoulders up into his luxuriant dark hair while she rejoiced in the taste of him, the unique sexual flavour of a dominant and surprisingly passionate male. His arms tightened round her, long fingers smoothing down her spine to pin her into uncompromising awareness of his erection. She gasped beneath the thrust of his tongue, mind flying free to picture a much more sexual joining and craving that completion with a strength that started an ache between her thighs.
The sheer intensity of what she was feeling totally spooked Belle. With a startled sound of rejection, she pushed him back from her. ‘No, we’re not doing this!’ she told him furiously.
Dark eyes veiled, Cristo stepped back and drew in a long, deep, steadying breath. Maledizione! He was too aroused to be comfortable with the sensation or the woman who had got him into that condition. ‘I seem to recall that I was trying to persuade you not to take private family business into a court of law,’ he murmured flatly.
Belle shot him a disconcerted glance, unable to credit that he could act as frozen as ever in the wake of that passionate kiss. Passion, it seemed, didn’t control Cristo Ravelli. All in the space of a moment she resented his assurance, was insulted by his cool indifference and furious that she hadn’t fought him off. But, my goodness, he could kiss. That mortifying thought crept through her mind no matter how hard she tried to kill it dead.
Belle had done a lot of kissing and not much else as a student, very much hoping to experience a volcanic reaction that would signal that all-important spark of true, overwhelming physical attraction. Now fate was having the last laugh by finally serving up that long-awaited, miraculously special kiss and it was happening with the wrong man. She had no doubt that Cristo Ravelli was wrong in every way for her. He was stuffy and cold and unfeeling and she was a warm, emotional and impulsive individual.
‘I’m sorry. I’m going to do what’s best for my siblings and take this matter to court to get it sorted out,’ Belle told him curtly.
‘You can’t,’ Cristo countered with chilling bite. ‘It will damage other people. You and your siblings are not the only individuals likely to be affected by this.’
‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ Belle admitted truthfully. ‘I want my brothers and sisters to be able to hold their heads high and know who they are without shame.’
‘You want the impossible,’ Cristo derided, turning on his heel.
‘No, I want justice.’
Justice! Cristo reflected contemptuously, a deep sense of frustration ruling him, for Cristo never backed down and never failed to find solutions to problems. Damage limitation was his speciality. How could it be justice that Zarif’s throne would be rocked by the extent of Gaetano’s infidelity and the revelation of his secret family in Ireland? Like father, like son, Zarif’s critics would sneer. Mary Brophy had made her choices when she chose to get involved with a married man and have his children. Her daughter, Belle, had too much pride and her resentment of the Ravelli family, or, more specifically, his father, had persuaded her that she could somehow rewrite history. But washing the family dirty linen in public was not going to make those children feel that they could raise their heads high. No, it was much more likely to shame them by depicting their parents in ways they would never forget. No child of Gaetano’s had ever been proud of him or his name. Gaetano had been a cruelly selfish and uninterested parent.
Ironically, Cristo had always believed growing up that he would be a better man than his father and now he wondered what had happened to that dream and at what point cynicism had killed that honourable goal stone dead. He knew that he had not once considered the plight of Mary Brophy’s children from any viewpoint other than his own. He was a pragmatic man and he knew he was selfish. But even he recognised that Belle Brophy was too young and her grandmother too old to take on full responsibility for Gaetano’s children. Cristo was suddenly very conscious that those kids, right down to the little one with his father’s eyes, were his flesh and blood too, even though he didn’t want to recognise that unwelcome fact.
And then the answer to the problem came to him in a sudden shocking moment of truth. He recoiled from the prospect at first, but as he filtered through the list of challenges he currently faced and that solution ticked every box he began to mull it over as a genuine possibility. It was not as though he were ever likely to fall in love again. Indeed it was a wonder it had happened even once to a male as detached from emotion as he was, he reasoned grimly. Gaetano and Mary’s affair could be decently buried and the children’s antecedents concealed from the media. As for Belle, in the role he envisaged, which was frankly Belle reclining wearing only a winsome smile