Chapter Forty One

She was breathtaking.That was the only word that arrived first, and it arrived without permission — simple, unadorned, and entirely inadequate for what Alessandro was actually looking at. He had seen beautiful women. He was, after all, in a room full of them this very evening. He knew what beauty looked like when it was assembled deliberately, when it was the product of intention and expertise and the right dress on the right figure in the right light.This was something else.This was the kind of thing that stopped a room.Maya.He said nothing. He moved nothing. He simply stood where he was, in the middle of his father's ballroom, with three hundred people around him and the orchestra still playing and the chandeliers still throwing their extravagant light across everything, and looked at her — and felt, with a completeness that he found genuinely alarming, that the rest of the room had become largely theoretical.Her dark brunette hair had been swept into an updo of the kind that

Chapter Forty Two

The evening moved forward, as evenings at Giovanni Guidotti's events always did — with precision, with momentum, with the sense that each element had been sequenced by someone who understood that luxury is also a form of choreography.Alessandro found himself at the podium earlier than he was ready for, which was, he supposed, the condition under which he performed most things these days.His speech was well-received. It was the kind of speech that sounded warm and came from somewhere colder — professional gratitude, measured tribute, the language of a man who had learned to translate everything private into something presentable before it left his mouth.The applause was genuine. He returned to his position near the family table without looking at the corner where Maya Cruz was seated, which required more conscious effort than it should have.Giovanni's speech followed.It was Giovanni's speech. Alessandro did not need to hear it to know its shape — the authority, the vision, the car

Chapter Forty Three

Just when Alessandro decided that the evening couldn't get any worse, Viviana broke their unspoken truce.He should have seen it coming. He should have planted himself somewhere unreachable — a corner, a terrace, the bottom of the Atlantic ocean— anywhere that wasn't here, in this gilded room that smelled of old money and older grudges. But he hadn't, and now she was sidling up to him with that Cheshire smile carved into her face and a glass of champagne held between her fingers like a prop in a play she'd been rehearsing all evening.Of course. He took a slow breath. Of course it's her."Anything I should know?" Viviana asked, her tone vague in that deliberate way of hers — the kind of vague that meant she already knew everything and simply wanted to watch him squirm.Alessandro cast her a dirty look. He knew she was up to no good. He knew, the way a man knows when a storm is rolling in off the water — not because he can see it yet, but because the air changes. Everything about Viv

All Chapters of Entwined With You : Chapter 41 - Chapter 43

Chapter Forty One

Chapter Forty Two

Chapter Forty Three