Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 by Carol Marinelli (desktop ebook reader txt) 📗

compelling him to click into her bio and fall down an online wormhole of testimonials.

“Clare is one of my best friends from boarding school. London Connection was her idea. She came into some money when her father passed and wanted to open a business. I worked the social media side of things, organizing high-profile events and managing celebrity appearances. Once we were able to expand the services beyond straight promoting into problem-solving and crisis management, we exploded. We’re so busy, we dragged our friend Bea from her law firm to join our team.” Her face softened with affection. “We’re all together again. It’s the best career I could have imagined for myself.”

“Boarding school,” he repeated. That explained how Amy took to private jets like a duck to water. She’d probably been raised on one of these. “I thought I detected a hint of American beneath your accent. Is that where you’re from?”

“Originally.” Her radiance dimmed. “We moved to the UK when I was five. I went to boarding school when my parents divorced. I was just looking up your foundation. Do I have the name right? Fondo Della Regina Vallia?”

“That’s it, yes.”

“I have some ideas around merchandise that would double as an awareness campaign. Let me pull a few more details together.” She dipped her attention back to her tablet, corn-silk hair falling forward to curtain her face.

And that’s how it was done. Replace the thing you don’t want to talk about with something that seems relevant, but actually isn’t.

Amy Miller was very slick and not nearly as artless and open as she wanted to appear.

Rapport goes both ways, he wanted to mock, but he didn’t really want to mock her. He wanted to know her.

Who was he kidding? He wanted to know what she liked. She was twenty-eight, and at least a few of the men photographed with her must have been lovers. Maybe some of the women, too. What did he know? The fact was, she was one of those rare creatures—a woman in his sphere who attracted him.

His sphere was depressingly empty of viable lovers and historically well guarded against them. His mother had surrounded her children with hypervigilant tutors, mentors and bodyguards. It had been the sort of blister pack wrapping within a window box frame that allowed others to look in without touching. He and Sofia had been safely admired, but never allowed out to play.

Mostly their mother had been trying to protect her children from learning the extent of their father’s profligacy, but she’d also been doing what she could for the future of Vallia. There’d been a small civil war within the palace when she died. Luca and Sofia’s advisers had collided with their father’s cabal—men who had had more power, but also more to hide.

In those dark days, while he and Sofia remained oblivious, deals had been struck that had kept everyone in their cold war positions. Their father’s death had finally allowed Luca and his top advisers to carve the rot from the palace once and for all. Luca had installed his own people, and they all wanted to stay in the positions to which they had ascended—which was how he’d wound up in this predicament.

And the reason he was still living a monk’s existence. He had no time and was monitored too closely to burn off sexual calories. At university, potential partners had always been vetted to the point that they’d walked away in exhausted indifference rather than run the gamut required to arrive in his bed.

As an adult moving through the hallowed halls of world politics and visiting allied territories, he occasionally came across a woman who had as much to lose by engaging in a loose-lipped affair as he did. They would enjoy a few private, torrid nights and part ways just as quickly and quietly. The few who had progressed into a longer relationship had been suffocated by his life, by the inability to make the smallest misstep with a hemline or a break with protocol without suffering cautionary lectures from his council and intense scrutiny by the press.

Luca didn’t blame women for walking out of his life the minute they saw how little room there was to move within it.

Amy would die in such a confined space. She was too bright and vivacious. It would be like putting a burning light inside a cupboard. Glints might show through the cracks, but all her heat and power would be hidden and wasted.

Why was he dreaming of crawling in there with her? Imagining it to be like closing himself within the cradle of a suntan bed, surrounded in the sweet scent of coconut oil and a warmth that penetrated to his bones.

He dragged his gaze from where the barest hint of breast swell was peeking from the open buttons of her dress and set his unfinished drink aside. Best to slow down if he was starting to fantasize about a woman he’d hired—to ruin him.

He bet she could ruin him. He just bet.

His assistant came to him with a tablet and a handful of inquiries, and Luca forced his mind back to who he was and the obligations he still had—for now.

Perhaps when this was over, he promised himself, he would be able to pursue the iridescent Amy. Until then, he had to remain the honorable and faultless king of Vallia.

CHAPTER THREE

AMY’S FATHER USED to joke that he had oil in his veins and a rig where his heart ought to be. His great-grandfather had hit a gusher on a dirt farm in Texas, and the family had been filling barrels with black gold ever since. Her father was currently the president of Resource Pillage International or whatever name his shell company was using these days. He had moved back to Texas shortly after the divorce, remarried, and was too busy with his new children to call his eldest more than once or twice a year.

Amy’s mother came from a family of bootleggers, not that she would