Free The Ice Prince by Sandra Marton Page B

dangerous couple of seconds Draco came close to demanding the answer.
    He would go after her, swing her toward him, look down into those blue eyes and say,
Hell, woman, how dare you threaten me! Are you fool enough to think I can be brought to heel by you and your hoodlum father?
    Or he’d say nothing at all.
    He’d pull her into his arms, lower his head to hers and kiss her hard and deep until she forgot about being her father’s mouthpiece and became the woman he’d known on the plane, the one who’d come within a heartbeat of giving herself up to him.
    Instead, he stood his ground. He didn’t even breathe until she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle.
    He had to move carefully. No rash decisions. No letting the emotions within him overtake logic.
    Draco went to his desk and sat in the massive chair behind it.
    No question, he had a problem. Anna’s threat had teeth.
    Teeth?
    Hell, it had fangs, fangs that could sink into his throat and destroy him. There were some businesses that sought publicity, that thrived on it.
    Not Valenti Investments.
    Even being mentioned in the same breath as a crook like Cesare Orsini could mean the end of everything he had worked for. Not just money, although the amount he might lose, for himself and for his clients, was staggering.
    But there was more at stake than money. If Anna forced a public confrontation, Draco would lose that which mattered most to him.
    The honor of his name. The respect it once again carried.
    A muscle jumped in his cheek.
    To think he’d almost had sex with her. With Cesare Orsini’s
consigliere.
    Cristo,
he wanted to laugh!
    Not that this was a laughing matter, Draco thought grimly as he took the gangster’s letters from his briefcase and stacked them on the desk in front of him. Nothing about the situation was even remotely amusing.
    If only he’d known who she was last night, he’d never have let things go so far.
    Actually, the more he thought about it, the less he understood why he had become involved with her at all.
    Her name could be Jane Doe, and he wouldn’t want her.
    She wasn’t his type. She was too tall, too blonde, too slender. His tastes ran to petite women. Brunettes, with voluptuous bodies.
    And that attitude of hers, that feminist chip she carried on her shoulder …
    What man in his right mind would be attracted to a woman who argued over everything?
    Calmer now, he could see that it had been the situation, not the woman, that had turned him on. The hushed darkness. The isolation that came of being five miles above the earth. The added rush of knowing you were in a public setting.
    Draco sat back in his chair.
    Given all that, what man would not want to take things to their natural conclusion when he awoke with a woman draped over him like a blanket?
    In a way, he owed Anna Orsini his thanks. Men thought with parts of their anatomy that had nothing to do with their brains. She had saved them both from making an embarrassing mistake.
    Imagine if he’d actually had sex with the Orsini
consigliere …
    Draco did laugh this time.
    There was a solution to the problem. There always was. And he would find it—something he could do to get the Orsinis, father and daughter, out of his life.
    He was, above all else, a logical man. A pragmatist. And pragmatism, not emotion, would save the day. Control over your emotions was everything.
    His father and those before him had never understood that.
    They drank to excess. Gambled with money they didn’t have. They went from woman to woman, losing themselves in the kind of passion and intensity that could only lead to trouble.
    The Valenti family history was a minefield of greed, infidelity, abandonment and divorce.
    Absolutely, a man had to learn to curb his emotions. And Draco had learned early how to curb his.
    His boyhood had been filled with scenes that still made him grimace. His mother had taken a string of lovers who helped themselves to what little remained of the family’s