Billionaire's Secret by Chantelle Shaw

Author:Chantelle Shaw [Shaw, Chantelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, General, Contemporary Romance, Fiction
ISBN: 9780373132638
Google: U5UdAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00J2ZVEDG
Barnesnoble: B00J2ZVEDG
Goodreads: 21471414
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘I DON’T PITY you,’ Sophie insisted as she leapt to her feet. Nicolo towered over her and she tilted her head to meet his furious gaze. ‘But I don’t understand you. Why do you hide away here? Why have you cut yourself off from your family, and in particular your father and the business he built up?

‘Being trapped in that fire must have been terrifying, and your injuries must have been agony,’ she said huskily. ‘But you survived. Surely you must realise better than most people how precious life is?’ Having faced death herself, she appreciated every day of her second chance at life.

‘You did a wonderful thing,’ Sophie continued when he made no response. ‘You rescued a member of the hotel staff from the fire. You were a hero and you should be proud of what you did.’

‘Proud?’ Nicolo gave a bitter laugh. Sophie’s words mocked him. The fire had happened so many years ago but his memories would never fade. Tonight, especially, he was filled with the self-loathing that had haunted him for almost two decades.

‘I’ve said it before, Sophie,’ he said curtly. ‘You ask too many questions.’ He stared at her lovely face and something cracked inside him. He did not want her here. He did not want her to look at him with gentle compassion in her eyes that made his gut ache.

‘Do you want to know the truth? I was no bloody hero. It was me who started the fire. It was my fault that the maid was trapped in the blaze and my fault that we both nearly burned to death.’

Sophie suddenly recalled a conversation she’d had with the cleaning lady, Betty.

‘Mr Nicolo had a wild streak when he was younger … there’s more to the story of the fire than the newspapers ever knew…. ’

She glanced at Nicolo and her heart turned over when she saw his tortured expression. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said shakily. ‘How could you have started the fire?’

He raked his hand through his dark hair that fell past his collar, and despite the tension, Sophie’s stomach muscles tightened with fierce sexual awareness. With his chiselled features and a hard gleam in his eyes he was the dangerous highwayman of her imagination, but she had glimpsed a softer side to him, a vulnerability that made her yearn to put her arms around his waist and lay her cheek against his chest.

‘I was drunk,’ he said abruptly.

‘Drunk? You were thirteen.’

‘I’d been drinking my father’s whisky.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘I’d let myself into his penthouse apartment with the intention of tipping his scotch down the sink. Childish, I know, but I was still a child. I was feeling very angry with my father about—’ his mouth tightened as he recalled how a few days earlier he had discovered his father in bed with a naked woman who Nicolo had recognised as one of the hotel chambermaids ‘—about something he had done,’ he muttered. ‘I wanted to annoy him.

‘Gene owned a collection of rare and expensive malt whiskies.

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