Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 23340 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 117(@200wpm)___ 93(@250wpm)___ 78(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 23340 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 117(@200wpm)___ 93(@250wpm)___ 78(@300wpm)
Sicilian billionaire Marcello Bastianelli loved his shy young wife more than anything in the world.
But everything changed when he was given proof that Chisa had betrayed him to his enemies.
He never asked if it was true.
He simply had his pregnant wife driven out of his gates before dawn.
For the past eight years, Chisa has lived in a beautiful home, with more money than she could ever spend, and a seven-year-old daughter who adores her father.
There is only one thing Chisa is forbidden to have.
Her husband.
Every month, she watches from a distance as Marcello comes for their daughter.
He won’t speak to Chisa.
Won’t look at her.
And he has no idea the wife he banished was innocent.
Note: This is a fast-paced, angsty, page-turning billionaire romance. Marriage in crisis, wrongly accused wife, banished while pregnant, forced proximity, no other woman ever. HEA guaranteed
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
Marcello
THE OLD MAN HAD BEEN standing in the doorway of the study for a full minute before he could make himself come in, and that was how Marcello knew it was bad.
“Get to the point, Curzio.”
“Do you want to sit down first?”
“Do I look like I want to sit down?”
Curzio had taught this boy to drive. He’d taught him to shoot, to shave, to keep his face still while other men lost theirs—and now he had to stand on the good carpet in a house he’d known for thirty years and take that face apart with eleven pages.
He wished, not for the first time that night, that he had the power to change the bad to good. But as people in their world knew from an early age, that was impossible. Life often seemed like an endless series of bads, worse, and not-so-bads.
And what he was about to say, well...
“It’s about your wife,” he said heavily.
This was something Curzio would classify as painfully worse, as evinced by how Marcello had whitened at the mention of his wife.
The second-born Bastianelli heir stood at the window with his back to the room while the rain came off the lake, and the desk lamp threw his shadow up the wall until it covered the whole of it. Six foot four, the characteristic broad shoulders that the men in his family were known for, and an air of violence that could never be washed away, even though it had been years since they were involved in any feud.
Curzio had watched grown men—dangerous men, men who’d done unspeakable things for a living—come into this room and start talking faster than they’d meant to, all because a Bastianelli was present.
“What about her?” Marcello asked finally.
“She’s been talking to Sabatino’s people.” Curzio turned his hat over in his hands, over and over. “I don’t want to be the one saying this to you...”
“Then don’t. Show me instead.”
And so the folder went down on the desk between them. Eleven pages and a paper clip, against four years of hauling this family out of the business one contract at a time, and Curzio hated every one of those pages personally.
“The route,” he went on doggedly. “Not the street. The route itself, the way we ran the Burgess paper in November. Four people knew it, and that includes...”
“My wife was asleep in the car. You remember that?”
“Sì,” Curzio agreed wretchedly. “I remember. But is that proof enough?”
The second page was worse, and they both knew it. A phone number that had no business existing in this city, dialled from the landline in the front hall at three and four in the morning—and there was exactly one person in this house awake at three in the morning. The whole staff had heard her on those stairs, five months along but unable to lie down for more than an hour at a stretch.
The last pages were photographs. A restaurant downtown, the good corner table, a man called Nuñez sitting across from Marcello’s wife with his hand out for the check like a gentleman.
In this photo, it was the girl’s face that mattered, and Curzio could see, just by the way Marcello’s jaw had clenched—the boy knew it, too.
This was not how it should be, Curzio thought painfully. Marcello’s wife was dear to him, too. He would have sworn, would have staked his life that she wouldn’t be able to do something like this. Ever!
And yet...
Marcello knew he was staring too long at his wife’s face. But even though this was just a photo of her, Chisa’s features were such that her face...
It was the kind that made men stupid, even men who were supposedly tough and smart like him.
Her features were soft in a way that he had once thought was no longer possible for modern women. Her brown eyes innocent in a way that made her look helpless while making Marcello feel helpless. When they had first met, her eyes had been swimming with unshed tears, and her fingers shaking as she tied a silk ribbon around the box. And her voice, it had been shaking just as bad as she finally handed him the bracelet she had gift-wrapped with care.