The Billionaires Collection. Оливия Гейтс

everyone who crossed his line of sight in his current mood, and more than that, he’d probably enjoy it a lot more than was good for anyone involved. He kept walking. Slowly, surely, the more blocks he covered the more New York worked its usual urban magic on him, the rhythm of the city getting into his blood the way it always did. One block, then another, and he felt the cloud of it all shift, then begin to lift. He was almost feeling back to his normal self when he stopped at a newsstand outside his office building for the paper.

      For the first time since he’d turned his back on a stunning tropical view to find his past standing in front of him in a long black dress, Dario felt pretty good.

      Until, that was, he saw his own name splashed across the tabloids. Bold and unmistakable.

      For a moment he didn’t move. He couldn’t, no matter how the man behind the counter glared at him and the people behind him muttered. He stared at the obnoxious headlines in sheer disbelief, as if that might make sense of them.

      It didn’t.

      Di Sione in Bitter Custody Battle with Secret Wife—“He Wanted Nothing to Do with Me or My Baby Until Now!”

      “He Left Me Years Ago to Make His Fortune, but Now He’s Stolen My Baby,” Cries Abandoned Anais!

      Is ICE’S Front Man Cold Enough to Kidnap His Own Child?

      And there was Anais’s face, treacherous and tearstained, as if she’d camped out in front of the paparazzi giving interviews. It occurred to him that she must have done exactly that. She was front and center on the three largest tabloid papers, her supposedly heartbroken photos side by side with the harshest-looking pictures Dario had ever seen of himself. He couldn’t imagine where they’d even found such photographs. He looked like a serial killer.

      His stockholders were unlikely to find any of this particularly delightful.

      Gritting his teeth, Dario pulled out his still-buzzing phone. Marnie, repeatedly, with a series of 911/SOS texts besides. His lawyers, every fifteen minutes to the second. Numbers he assumed were the usual carrion crows of the so-called press, looking for his response or his reaction, as ever. Some of his usually hands-off siblings, no doubt almost as astonished to discover they had a previously unknown nephew as he’d been to find out he had a son. And his grandfather, who surely deserved better at his advanced age than to see another one of his descendants splashed all over the papers in yet another scandal.

      He didn’t return any of the calls.

      He stalked into the cavernous entry hall of his building and stood stonily in the elevator as everyone else in it pretended not to stare at him, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find Marnie waiting for him when he arrived at his floor.

      “I’m so sorry,” she began the moment he stepped out of the elevator car, which was never good. “I assume you know about the tabloid situation?” He only glared at her. “Of course you do.”

      “I’ll want a copy of each paper that ran this story and the direct number of its managing editor within the hour,” he bit out.

      “Of course, but—”

      Dario didn’t wait to hear but what. He started moving toward his office in the far corner of the otherwise open, wood-and-steel space, Marnie scurrying along beside him.

      “Get Legal on it. I’m not afraid to take every last one of them to court for publishing this crap.”

      “Yes,” Marnie said, “I will, but really—”

      He raked a hand through his hair and unclenched his teeth. Or tried, anyway. “Do we know if the stock has taken a hit? Has it gone that far?”

      “Mr. Di Sione, I’m sorry, but she’s here.” Marnie took a deep breath when he scowled at her, but then pushed on, confirming that this unpleasant day really had gone from frying pan to fire, just like that. “Your—Mrs.—Anais is here. In the conference room, waiting for you. Right now.”

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      DARIO STOPPED WALKING. Abruptly.

      He was aware of too many eyes on him, from people who should have been concentrating on their work instead of on this explosion of his personal life into the public domain. God, but he hated this. He’d hated it when he’d been a kid and his parents’ tempestuous lives and tragic deaths had brought the Di Sione family entirely too much unwanted attention. It was worse now.

      And even so, he was aware that what leaped in him at the sound of her name was not quite temper or fury or any of the things it should have been. It was that traitor inside his chest, and worse, entirely too much of that same old hunger he’d dared to imagine he’d slaked the other night.

      What a laugh. There was no slaking his desire for Anais. There was only indulging it or recovering from that indulgence, and nothing in between.

      Dario tried to focus on his secretary. “I was unaware that I’d lifted the standing security alert on her. She should be in a jail cell, not polluting my conference room.”

      “Yes, well.” Marnie shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but held his gaze with such directness it made her sleek, steel-gray bob shake slightly where the razor edge of it scraped her chin. “She told the security officers downstairs that if they didn’t let her come up she’d hold a press conference on the front steps. I thought this was better.”

      Dario made a low noise that was far too close to a growl, but he knew it wasn’t Marnie’s fault. And there were a thousand things he could have done then. He could have turned and left the building. He could have had Anais wait for him all day while he dealt with the piles of actual work he needed to do. He could have had her thrown out, anyway, and damn her threats.

      He didn’t do any of those things.

      And later, he couldn’t remember leaving the elevator bank at all, but there he was, pushing through the glass doors of the conference room, every atom of his being focused on the slender woman who stood at the windows with a studied insouciance that made his blood boil.

      And other parts of him stand up and pay far too close attention.

      “The tabloids?” he demanded as he strode inside, and he made no attempt to keep the fury from his voice. “Is there nothing you won’t do? No depth too low for you to sink?”

      Anais shrugged, but she didn’t turn from the stretch of windows across the back of the room, with skyscrapers and the distant Manhattan streets spread out before her. As if the great, sprawling city was sunning itself at her feet, the glare of the late-summer sun almost too bright to bear.

      “Apparently the tabloids are the only thing that gets your attention. And you have some nerve talking about sinking to new depths, having recently transitioned from corporate shill to kidnapper.”

      He ignored that, along with the uncomfortable twinge inside of him that suggested a few headlines wasn’t quite the same thing as flying off with a child, and no matter that he was supposedly the child’s father. “Lying to me in private wasn’t enough for you, so you took your lurid fantasies to the gutter press? I’d almost admire the escalation if it weren’t so calculated.”

      “Says the man who seduced me for the sole purpose of abducting my child.” She sniffed, still with her gaze fixed on the city outside the windows, her voice irritatingly smooth and cool, like everything else about her. “You could teach the art of calculation to one of your computers, couldn’t you?”

      “Is this a competition?” His voice was not nearly as smooth as it should have been. Dario found that far more irritating than was at all wise.

      “You’ve been calling me a liar for years when I told you the truth. I thought I’d live down to your expectations.” She turned then, and she looked even more perfect and untouchable than she usually did, and God help him, but all he could think about was that wide bed in Hawaii and the way she’d sobbed