Defying Her Billionaire Protector. Angela Bissell

Marietta might have been and wasn’t, thanks to one fateful split-second decision. One irreversible moment of teenage stupidity. A moment that had altered the course of her life and shattered what little had remained of her childhood innocence.

      Still—as a few well-intentioned if slightly insensitive people had pointed out during the long, excruciating months of her rehabilitation—she’d been lucky.

      She had survived.

      The three teens in the car with her—including the alcohol-impaired driver—had not. Two had died on impact with the concrete median barrier, the third on a gurney surrounded by the trauma team trying desperately to save her.

      For Marietta, the sole survivor of that tragic car crash, a long string of dark, torturous days had followed. Days when she’d lain unable or sometimes unwilling to move, staring at the ceiling of the hated rehab unit. Reliving those final moments with her friends and wishing, in her darkest moments, that she had died alongside them.

      But she had not died.

      She had fought her way back.

      For the brother whom she knew had taken the burden of responsibility—and blame—upon himself. For the second chance at life she’d been given that her friends had not. For her mother—God rest her soul—who would have wanted Marietta to fight with the same courage and determination with which she’d battled the cancer that had, in the end, cruelly won. And—even though she’d stayed angry with him for a long time after he’d died—for her father, who’d fought his own grief-fuelled demons after his wife’s death and tragically lost.

      Her chin went up a notch.

      She had faced down every brutal obstacle the universe had thrown at her and she was still here. She would not let some stranger, some clearly unhinged individual, disrupt the life she’d worked so long and hard to rebuild. And she certainly wasn’t afraid of some pathetic words on a little white card.

      She held out her hand for the envelope. Nico hesitated, then handed it over. Willing her hands not to shake, she tore open the flap and pulled out the card. She sucked in a deep breath and started to read—and felt the cold pasta salad she’d had for lunch threaten to vacate her stomach.

      * * *

      Marietta’s hands had started to shake.

      She glanced up, her espresso-coloured eyes so dark Nico couldn’t differentiate between iris and pupil. They were glassy, enormous—larger than usual—and, he noted, unblinking. Combined with her sudden pallor, the tremor in her slim hands, they conveyed an emotion Nico had more than once in his life been intimately acquainted with.

      Fear.

      He cursed under his breath, reached over the glass-topped desk and whipped the card out of her hands.

      His Italian wasn’t impeccable, like his native French or his English, but he had no trouble reading the typewritten words. His fingers tightened on the card but he took care to keep his face expressionless. Marietta was a strong woman—something he’d intuited the first time they’d met in passing at her brother’s office, and again at Leo’s wedding—but right now she was shaken and he needed her to be calm. Reassured. Safe.

      Anything less would be a disservice to her brother, and Leo was a good friend—had been ever since their paths had crossed via a mutual client eight years ago. Nico had recognised in the Italian the qualities of a man he could like and respect. Leo’s company specialised in cyber security, and his people occasionally lent their technical expertise to Nico’s own. Outside of business the two men had become firm friends—and Nico did not intend to let his friend down.

      He slipped the card into a plastic folder along with the others. Aside from an insight into their composer’s mind, the notes offered nothing of real value and no means by which they could track the original sender. The flowers were always ordered online, the cards printed by the florist, the words simply copied from the order’s electronic message field.

      Bruno had been confident at first. Online orders meant a traceable digital trail to IP addresses and credit cards. But whoever Marietta’s stalker was he was careful—and clever. Their tech guys had chased their tails through a series of redirected addresses and discovered the account with the florist had been opened using bogus details. The invoices were sent to a rented mailbox and payments were received in cash via mail.

      It all indicated a level of premeditation and intent neither Nico nor Bruno had anticipated. And Nico didn’t like it. Didn’t like it that he’d underestimated the threat—assuming, at first, that they’d be dealing with nothing more troublesome than a jilted boyfriend. It galled him now to accept that he’d been wrong because he knew better than to assume.

      But he was here now, in Rome, with the meetings he’d had scheduled for today in New York cancelled after Bruno’s call twenty-four hours earlier.

      And they would find this guy. They’d break some rules, sidestep some local bureaucracy, and they would find him.

      He strode around the desk and dropped to his haunches in front of Marietta’s chair, bringing his eyes level with hers. She jerked back a little, as if she wasn’t used to such an action, and he wondered briefly if it were not the accepted thing to do. But he’d have done the same with any woman he sought to reassure, conscious that his height, his sheer size, might intimidate.

      ‘We will stop him, Marietta.’

      Her eyes remained huge in her face, her olive complexion stripped of colour. ‘He’s been in my home...’

      Nico ground his jaw. ‘Perhaps.’

      ‘But the note—’

      ‘Could be nothing more than a scare tactic,’ he cut in. Yet the tension in his gut, the premonitory prickle at his nape, told him the truth was something far less palatable. More sinister.

      I have left you a gift, tesoro. On your bed. Think of me when you unwrap it. Sleep well, amore mio. S.

      On impulse he took her hand—small compared to his, and yet strong rather than dainty or delicate. Her fingers were slender and long, her nails short and neat, manicured at home, he guessed, rather than by a professional.

      Incredibly, Nico could still remember clasping her hand on their very first introduction—four, maybe five years ago at her brother’s office. Their handshake had been brief but he’d noted that her skin felt cool, pleasant to the touch, her palm soft and smooth in places, callused in others. He remembered, too, seeing her at Leo’s wedding a couple of years later. Remembered watching her, intrigued and impressed with the way she handled her wheelchair—as if it were a natural extension of her body.

      In the church she’d glided down the aisle before the bride, composed and confident, unselfconscious—or at least that was the impression she’d given. Her sister-in-law, a beautiful English woman, had looked stunning in a simple white gown, but it was Marietta to whom Nico’s attention had been repeatedly drawn throughout the ceremony.

      In his thirty-six years he’d attended two other weddings—his own, which he preferred not to dwell upon, and an equally lavish affair in the Bahamas to which he had, regrettably, allowed a former lover to drag him—but he could not recall a bridesmaid at either who might have outshone Marietta in looks or elegance.

      With her thick mahogany hair piled high on her head, the golden skin of her shoulders and décolletage bare above the turquoise silk of her long bridesmaid’s sheath, the fact she was in a wheelchair had not diminished the impact of her beauty.

      And then there were the shoes.

      Nico could not forget the shoes.

      Stilettos.

      Sexy, feminine, four-inch stilettos in a bright turquoise to match the gown.

      That Marietta could not walk in those shoes had made him admire her all the more for wearing them. It was a statement—a bold one—as though she were flipping the bird to her disability...or rather to anyone who thought a woman who couldn’t