Read Online Revelations of the Night Before by Lynn Raye Harris - Free Book Online Page B

It was as if each one had been trying to outdo the other.
    Now Nico had to somehow manage to keep the world from knowing how close the Gavretti fortunes teetered to the brink.
    He wanted to laugh at the irony. He’d threatened Tina with ruin for her brother if she did not agree to marry him, and yet he was the one who could be ruined if knowledge of the estate’s financial matters became public at the wrong moment. He did not doubt that Renzo D’Angeli would snap up Gavretti Manufacturing and sell it off for scrap.
    Nico didn’t blame him. In his position, he’d do the same—and without a shred of remorse, either.
    Nico leaned on the balustrade and peered at the lights of the village in the distance. He couldn’t let it happen, and he damn sure couldn’t let Tina refuse to marry him. Without a marriage, he would have no claim to his child, especially if she refused to publicly acknowledge him as the father, no matter what she said about papers and signatures.
    And why did that matter so much?
    It wasn’t as if he knew the first thing about being a father, or even that he had latent fatherly instincts coming to the fore. Nor had he wanted a wife or a child to interfere with the way he ran his life. He was free, unencumbered by entanglements, and uninterested in changing the way he lived.
    Yes, if he were to let her walk away, he could work on saving the Gavretti estate and think about finding a proper wife later.
    Nico snorted. What was a proper wife? His mother had been a proper wife, hand-selected by his father’s family, and look how that had worked out. Two bitter, selfish people who’d produced one child and then used that child in their feud against each other.
    Anger ate at him, burning in his gut the way it always did when he thought of his parents and the empty childhood he’d had. Oh, he’d had everything money could buy, but he’d lacked the one thing it couldn’t: love.
    Maybe that was why he’d been so drawn to the D’Angelis. There had only been the three of them, but they’d had enough love in their home to fill him with its glow simply by association.
    He glanced over at the glass doors that led from Tina’s room. They were shut, the curtains drawn, butthere was a light on inside. The light of the television flickered in the gap where the curtains hadn’t quite come together all the way.
    A wave of longing filled him, stunning him with its potency. He wanted to walk inside there and take her in his arms again, fill her body with his and shut out the world. It was melancholy and stress getting the best of him, he knew that, but it made the feeling no less powerful.
    If he were still in Rome, he’d head out to a club for a few hours, call one of the women on his contact list. He’d engage in a night of wanton sex and wake up refreshed and ready to tackle his problems again.
    Love had nothing to do with it.
    No matter how much he might have longed for his parents’ love, or how much he’d admired the D’Angelis’ wealth of it, he knew that love was ephemeral in his world. He’d grown up in a family who loved themselves more than each other, and he expected that was how his life would continue. He was thirty years old and he’d never felt even a glimmering of love for another person.
    Until the moment Valentina D’Angeli had walked back into his life and told him she was expecting his child. He didn’t kid himself that he’d fallen into instant and overwhelming love with this baby, this collection of cells growing in her body, but something
had
happened.
    He’d felt as if she’d punched him in the gut, and the feeling hadn’t abated over the past few hours. He didn’t know what it was, but he wasn’t letting her walk away. He hadn’t intended to marry her, but in the end he’d realized it was the only way.
    Aside from ensuring him access to his child, marrying Tina would give her brother pause. If Renzo did getwind of Nico’s financial troubles, he would think twice about