Free Power Games by Victoria Fox Page A

for? I know the guy you’ve really come to see.’
    Another, younger, man stepped into the room.
    ‘Meet Dino, my eldest.’ Carmine clapped him on the back. ‘Dino, you remember Don Silvers … and this, of course, is the gorgeous Angela.’
    There was a long silence.
    Dino was like something out of a catalogue—coffee hair, twinkling eyes, and a stacked body that was suited to perfection. He was an ad for mob fashion, gold rings glinting on his fingers, collar crisp, jacket pressed. Angela guessed he was in his thirties, indisputably handsome but so far from her type that even in a radically different context she could never have considered him a match.
    It didn’t matter who Dino Zenetti was. He wasn’t Noah.
    Her heart sank. How am I going to tell him?
    She played out her defence, each claim more ridiculous than the last.
    We can still see each other; it won’t change a thing. Dino means nothing to me. I’m doing it for the business, a transaction, no emotions, I swear …
    Even Noah Lawson’s boundless patience wouldn’t stretch that far.
    ‘Aren’t you kids gonna say hello?’ Carmine boomed, breaking the tension with a guffaw. ‘I tell ya, Donnie, this is like being back in the sixth grade!’
    ‘Good to meet you,’ said Dino, in a gravelly husk. Heput out his hand. Angela shook it. She said nothing. Every instinct recoiled. It wasn’t too late, she could still back out of this; she could still change her mind.
    ‘I guess you two’re gonna want to get t’know each other, huh?’ Carmine thrust a glass into his son’s hand and supplied a wink. Their conspiracy filled her with horror. She wanted to run, never stop and never look back, until she reached his arms.
    If only that was all there was to it …
    ‘I want you to listen carefully,’ her father had said that night in his office, ‘for if you choose to accept, our empire is yours. Everything. You take over.’
    The words Angela had waited her whole life to hear.
    Her father’s confidence, his respect, his finally recognising what she was capable of, a bond between them of trust and belief, nothing to do with her brothers.
    But she could never have guessed at what cost.
    ‘The business is dying,’ Donald had explained. ‘I’ve been shielding you from it. I haven’t told Orlando, or Luca, or any of the board. I haven’t even told your mother. I’m telling you, Angela, because you’re the one I am counting on to help. We’re in bad shape. Real bad shape.’ He had wiped a hand across his face and she’d heard him swallow, a dry, sickening sound, coarse with regret. ‘Twelve months ago I put money into a sideline I believed was a dead cert. I was wrong.’
    Donald Silvers was never wrong. He had made a fortune on those grounds.
    ‘But—’
    ‘Let me finish. That’s only the start.’
    And then he had confessed the awful truth.
    Her father had been diagnosed weeks ago. The doctors hadgiven him mere months to live. Isabella had been protected from that blow as well.
    ‘No,’ Angela had spoken with someone else’s voice, tinny and strange in an upturned world, ‘you won’t,’ she fumbled for sense, ‘you can’t—’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘They’re wrong. You’ll get through it—’
    ‘The Zenettis can pull us out,’ said Donald, matter-of-fact, no time for weakness. ‘They’re our last hope. They can give us back our future. Your future, Angela, should you decide to commit.’
    Her chest tightened. ‘Commit to what?’
    He had laid it out in basic terms. The proposed marriage to Dino, the combined fortunes bailing them out of debt, the mutual interests to both parties as they embarked on a super-empire merging the last word in leisure and retail.
    The Silvers would take a cut, thirty per cent against the Zenettis’ seventy, but the brand would survive. Given time, it might even grow.
    And she would be there to rebuild it. Her business. Her chance.
    Her chance.
    Carmine Zenetti wanted to make it official, cement the