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

‘But...’ She was overwhelmed, stunned actually, that this private man would share their love with the world.

‘I’ve been planning it for months,’ Gian said. ‘Even the letterhead has all changed. The last time I saw your father, like you, he told me I could do better with the hotel names and, like me, he thought your name should be in lights. I think he knew the way the wind was blowing, perhaps even before we did.’

She liked that thought so very much, and then, better than any insignia, came the sweetest sight of all: their daughter stretching her little arms out of the swaddle of linen. They both smiled at the little squeaking noise she made.

Gian clearly wasn’t going to wait for her to cry.

‘Hey, Violetta,’ he said, and gently lifted her from the crib.

They had named her after her great-great-grandmother, the forgotten Duchess, somehow lost in all the tales of Fiordelise.

Well, she was forgotten no more.

Violetta’s restored picture was mounted on the gallery wall of their home in Rome, and soon it would be joined by her namesake’s first photo.

Ariana buried her face in her daughter’s and breathed in that sweet baby scent, and then lifted her head and gazed down at her.

‘I cannot believe how much I know her already,’ Ariana said, playing with her tiny fingers, ‘and at the very same time I cannot wait to get to know her more...’

That was, Gian thought as he looked at his wife, a rather perfect description of his love.

The Secret That Can’t Be Hidden

Caitlin Crews

CHAPTER ONE

IF SHE CONCENTRATED on how outrageous the situation was, how humiliating and impossible, Kendra Connolly knew she would never do what needed to be done.

Yet there was no way around it. She had to do this.

Her family was depending on her—for the first time. Ever.

She’d been sitting in her car for far too long already in the parking structure deep beneath Skalas Tower in the hectic bustle of Midtown Manhattan. She’d been given a certain amount of time to appear on the cameras in the elevators before the security officials who’d checked her in would investigate her whereabouts, here beneath the North American power center of one of the world’s wealthiest men. The clock was ticking, yet here she was, gripping the steering wheel while staring at her knuckles as they turned white. Psyching herself up for the unpleasant task ahead.

And failing.

“There must be some other solution,” she had said to her father.

So many times, in fact, that it had really been a lot more like begging.

Kendra was desperate to avoid...this. But Thomas Pierpont Connolly had been unmoved, as ever.

“For God’s sakes, Kendra,” he had boomed at her earlier today, when she’d tried one last time to change his mind. He’d been leaning back in his monstrously oversized leather chair, his hands laced over his straining golf shirt because nothing kept him from a few holes at Wee Burn when he was in the family home on the Connecticut island his Gilded Age forebears had claimed long ago. “Think about someone other than yourself, for a change. Your brother needs your help. That should be the beginning and the end of it, girl.”

Kendra hadn’t dared say that she disagreed with that assessment of the situation. Not directly.

Tommy Junior had always been a problem, but their father refused to see it. To him, Tommy had always been made of spun gold. When he’d been expelled from every boarding school on the East Coast, Thomas had called him high-spirited. When he’d been kicked out of college—despite the library Thomas had built to get him in—it had been excused as that Connolly bullheadedness. His failed gestures toward entrepreneurial independence that cost his father several fortunes were seen as admirable attempts to follow in the family footsteps. His lackadaisical carrying-on as vice president of the family business—all expense account and very little actual work—was lauded by Thomas as playing the game.

Tommy Junior could literally do no wrong, though he’d certainly tried his best.

Kendra, meanwhile, had been an afterthought in her parents’ polite, yet frosty marriage. Born when Tommy was fourteen and already on his fifth boarding school, her well-to-do parents had never known what to do with her. She’d been shunted off to nannies, which had suited her fine. The old Connolly fortune that consumed her father’s and brother’s lives had been meaningful to her only in that it provided the sprawling house on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, where she could curl up in a forgotten corner and escape into her books.

Her mother was the more approachable of her parents, but only if Kendra conformed to her precise specifications of what a debutante should be in the time-honored fashion of most of her family, who proudly traced their lineage to the Mayflower. To please her, Kendra had attended Mount Holyoke like every other woman in her family since the college was founded, but as she grew older she’d come to understand that the only way to gain her father’s attention was to try to take part in the only thing that mattered to him, his business.

She wished she hadn’t now.

The clock kept ticking, and Kendra had no desire to explain why she was dragging her feet to the Skalas security team, who had already thoroughly searched her car and her person and had sent her photograph up to the executive floor. Where, she had been told coldly, she was expected. Within ten minutes or she would be deemed a security risk.

Kendra forced herself to get out of the car and shivered, though it wasn’t cold. She didn’t like New York City, that was all. It was too loud, too chaotic, too much. Even here, several stories beneath ground with the famous Skalas Tower slicing into the sky above her, an architectural marvel of steel and glass, she was certain she could feel the weight of so many lives streaming about on the streets. On top of her.

Or, possibly, that was her trepidation talking.

Because