Sidonie opened it and saw a cheque with her name on it inside. It was for an amount of money that took her breath away. Enough to halve her aunt’s debts at least. The signature at the bottom was bold and arrogant. Reeking of condemnation and disgust.
Fire filled Sidonie’s belly. She stalked straight back into the villa and went to Alexio’s office.
She took the cheque out of the envelope and ripped it up into tiny pieces. Then she put them back in the envelope and wrote on the outside.
It was never about the money.
And then she left.
Four months later...
Alexio looked down at the craggy dark island below him with its distinctive white and blue roofs. The helipad on his own villa loomed into view and tension made his gut hard. Alexio grimaced as his solicitor’s words came back to him. ‘You’re heading for burnout, man. I’ve never seen you like this before.’
Alexio couldn’t remember being like this before either—not even in the days when he’d been struggling and working night and day to make a success of his business. But for the last four months he’d barely stopped to breathe. On automatic pilot.
His fortune had doubled. His acquisitions had extended to North America, making him the first European budget airline to secure such a lucrative contract. Now he was global, having taken half the time people had predicted.
But Alexio felt as if an essential fire inside him had been doused. He rejected the thought immediately. Nothing was different. He was still the same—held the same values and ambitions.
As the small aircraft circled lower and lower he fought her memory. This was precisely why he’d avoided coming back here before now. During daylight hours he had to make a concerted effort not to think of her; that was where work came in. But in the nights she haunted him. Stopped him from sleeping. Made his body ache so badly that he had to ease it like a horny teenager.
He wouldn’t mind if he could alleviate his frustration with another woman, but he could barely look at a woman these days without feeling a measure of disgust. And a disturbingly flatlining libido.
He told himself it was because he’d come so close to being burnt. A vivid memory came into his mind as the glittering sun-kissed sea below the villa came into view—Sidonie launching herself onto his back as they’d walked up the steps from the sea, kissing his neck, joking, laughing. And all the time plotting to feather her nest.
Alexio felt sick, and he almost told the pilot to keep going...but they were landing now and Alexio refused to let a memory override his intellect.
He’d finally agreed to go somewhere for a few days’ R&R after he and his brother had almost come to blows for the first time in years. Alexio had been closing a deal with Rafaele to create a joint company which would invest in research for future technologies in cars and aircraft. They’d been in Rafaele’s palazzo outside Milan, where he was spending the summer with his family.
Alexio had been keen to keep working one day and Rafaele had looked at him incredulously. ‘Are you crazy? We’ve been working all day—Sam is making dinner tonight and Milo’s back from summer school in Milan. I haven’t seen him since this morning. I have a family now, Alexio...things are different.’
Alexio had felt a completely irrational anger erupt at his brother’s very valid reasons not to keep working. Since he’d arrived he’d found the domestic idyll of Rafaele’s family almost too much to bear. The openly loving looks between him and his wife. His precocious and gorgeous nephew, who bathed everyone in his sunny charming nature. The way he was doted on by both Sam and Rafaele. The way Rafaele’s relationship with his own father had clearly undergone a transformation for the better.