turn him against his son, Severo had comforted himself with thoughts of the revenge he would one day be in a position to exact.
Now he was in that position, but Severo’s priorities had changed. His father was in a place where his gold-digging wife could no longer hurt him, and the only power the woman who had once made his life hell wielded was to embarrass him. Actually not him—more the family.
When it came to embarrassment Severo was pretty much bomb-proof these days. As for pride in an old name, he took the view that less pride, less romanticising on past triumphs, and less being worried about getting their aristocratic hands dirty and the fortunes of the Constanza family would not have been so sadly depleted when he had been passed the mantle of power by his father.
The truth was Severo had simply lost his appetite for revenge. Not because he’d forgiven his stepmother or even that he had grown to pity her—and Livia Larsen, one-time IT girl and society hostess, had become an object of some people’s pity.
Why waste time and energy when Livia was doing a pretty good job of messing up her own life without any help from him? All Severo wanted these days was for her to stay long enough in one of the expensive clinics she frequently booked herself into to actually clean up her act.
‘Livia.’
He held the phone a little way from his ear, wincing at the sound of his stepmother’s shrill voice berating him for his lack of feeling.
‘How am I expected to live on the pittance you give me?’ she demanded. ‘You have more money than you need!’ she complained. ‘Everyone knows you’re disgustingly rich. Everything you touch turns to gold.’
Severo rubbed his hand across his eyes—they felt gritty with exhaustion—and continued to listen with half an ear. It was a familiar tirade and one that did not alter no matter how much money he gave Livia, but what was the alternative?
Livia’s voice became a coaxing whine. ‘Just a loan?’
Severo sighed. There had been many loans and he had no doubt there would be many more.
‘I’ll pay you back—with interest. I know it’s what your father would have wanted. Your father would have—’ Her voice was drowned out by loud static before the line went dead.
He slid the phone back into his pocket, not feeling unhappy that the signal had been lost.
He was approaching the entrance to the inn when a small figure exploded from the double doors, barrelling straight into him. Coatless and hatless and seemingly oblivious to the arctic blast of air howling down from the surrounding hills, the slim jean-clad female wearing a bright pink sweater covered with yellow daisies righted herself before running past him, then stopped and turned.
‘Did you see her?’
Her eyes were wide, anxious and blue—very blue. So blue, in fact, that for a split second he registered nothing but the colour and then the moment and the opportunity to respond was gone. She was belting on and past him out into the snowy car park.
Her figure stood out, a dark blur in the swirl of white, still managing to emanate high-voltage anxiety across the space that separated them. Through the howl of the wind he heard her dismayed exclamation at the sight of a car pulling out onto the road.
‘Oh, God, no!’
Severo was not a man who felt impelled to ride to the rescue of maidens in distress—such actions were open to misinterpretation and it was his experience that distress could be easily and often artistically feigned. Yet he found himself responding, albeit with reluctance, to some dormant protective instinct.
He was still a few feet from the flame-haired figure when her slumped shoulders straightened and she jumped into one of the parked vehicles and pulled away at a reckless speed. There was a time lag of several seconds before Severo realised that the lights receding into the distance belonged to his own car.
He had not only left the keys in the ignition and a laptop containing extremely sensitive information on the passenger seat, he had stood there and watched while someone stole his car, oblivious to everything except the brilliance of a pair of electric-blue eyes and a desire to offer his assistance.
He closed his eyes, called himself several rude names, not having any cathartic effect, then took a deep breath and strode into the inn.
Chapter Two
THERE was a lull in the buzz of conversation and laughter inside the crowded bar as the door was flung open. The lull lengthened into a silence as people absorbed the details of the new arrival’s appearance.
Tall enough to be obliged to duck his head to avoid collision with the top of the doorjamb, the dark-haired figure who stood framed in the doorway appeared utterly oblivious to the stares directed his way.
Most of his fellow stranded travellers had arrived at this sanctuary feeling to varying degrees stressed and dishevelled. This man did not look stressed, he looked irritated, and, as for dishevelled, he looked like a walking advertisement for what a glossy magazine might suggest a well-heeled, fashion-conscious business executive—always supposing he had a profile like a Greek god and a body like an Olympic rower—should aspire to achieve.
The only clue to the blizzard conditions he had just driven through was the sprinkling of rapidly melting snow on his dark mohair overcoat, open at the neck to reveal the white collar of a pristine shirt and a perfectly knotted silk tie, and the slightly wind-ruffled quality to his well-cut hair that was jet black, had outgrown a crop and was beginning to curl into his neck.
His deep-set dark eyes, fringed by long curling lashes set beneath dark well-defined brows, swept the room before they narrowed as he headed for the bar and the man who stood behind it.
The hum of conversation began once more as people melted away automatically to clear his path.
Severo got straight to the point. ‘My four-wheel drive has been stolen from your car park by a woman—a redhead.’
‘Well, she won’t get far, will she?’
A man who sat nursing a pint piped up with a cheery, ‘As far as the nearest ditch, I would think.’
Severo shook his head to dispel the unbidden slow-motion image complete with sound effects of the redhead hitting his windscreen—had she belted herself in?—and flashed a cold look at the wit sitting at the bar. The man quickly lowered his gaze into his pint glass.
‘Not a lot we can do, I’m afraid,’ the landlord said, still projecting what in the circumstances seemed to Severo a quite inappropriate level of optimistic cheer. ‘Was there anything valuable in the car?’
Severo shook his head in a negative motion even as he listed his possessions still sitting on the passenger seat: passport, credit cards and all that information on the proposed takeover that several rivals would consider, if not priceless, certainly of extreme value.
‘That’s good, then.’
Severo, the strong, sculpted lines of his angular face taut with annoyance, ran a hand across the fresh stubble on his jaw before pressing a finger to the small permanent groove above his aquiline nose. He refused the drink offered by the man behind the bar and rotated his head to alleviate the knots of tension in his neck.
‘You say she’s a redhead?’
Severo nodded, an image of the snow-dappled copper tresses flashing into his head.
‘Someone might know her but, as you can see, we’ve had a lot of people in…’ He banged a tankard on the bar and raised his voice above the loud hum of conversation in the crowded room. ‘Did anyone notice a redhead?’
It was no surprise to Severo that a number of men indicated they had—the car thief had not been the sort of woman to pass unnoticed by men—but no one, it seemed, knew who she was.
The landlord continued to be sympathetic but philosophical. ‘We can’t offer you a bed, but there’s a fire and blankets