Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
But there was no pain. No dizziness. No tunnel vision, no ringing ears, no tingling in her fingers, none of the warning signs she'd memorized on laminated cards during those long, long months in rehab.
Just...this.
Just him, looking at her with those dark eyes that had an entire ocean's worth of depth, and her heart doing something it had never, ever done before, and the smartwatch confirming with its calm little numbers that she was, medically speaking, fine.
Which meant this wasn't a cardiac event.
But instead...
Gulp.
The truth was far more shameless, and it was that she was crushing on a total stranger—-no, wait, it was worse, actually. She was crushing on a man whom she had mistaken for a total stranger, only to realize that he was the man she was legally married to...by means of a proxy wedding that had been arranged without her knowing.
Chelsea cast one last look at her smartwatch. Heart still beating faster than normal, but because there were no other red flags—-
Oh gosh.
This really was nothing but a full-fledged crush, and the thought had her swallowing hard.
Play it cool, Chels.
She mustered the courage to slowly lift her head, and the first thing she saw was him.
Watching her.
But she had no time to think about this, with Edgar coming up to them, and her godfather being his usual blunt self, he simply went straight to the point.
"Are introductions still needed...or should we continue somewhere private?"
Chapter Two
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AGO, life was exactly as Olivio Cannizzaro knew it to be.
He'd arrived back in Toronto yesterday evening, having spent two weeks in Sicily for Selena's birthday. The annual gathering had quietly become the thing his father looked forward to most, which was something Olivio found both unexpected and, if he was honest with himself, something close to relieving.
Miguel had mellowed. Not softened—-a Cannizzaro man didn't soften, it simply wasn't in the bloodline—-but mellowed was more than enough, the way good stone mellowed, becoming more itself with time rather than less. The years of friction between him and Aivan, Olivio's older brother, had finally found their resolution, and Sienah had done what Selena had always believed she would do, which was to simply love his brother steadily until Aivan remembered that he, too, possessed the capability to love.
Those two weeks were good. But Olivio still chose to take the red-eye back because even for such occasions, he had a schedule he strictly observed, and he was not, by nature, a man who lingered.
Now moreso than ever actually, with how both Miguel and Selena had been attempting to matchmake him with a rotating cast of daughters belonging to this friend and that. A senator's daughter in Palermo one afternoon, then a hotel heiress summoned to dinner under transparent pretenses, and with every instance, Selena's eyes would find his across the table that he knew she earnestly believed was subtle but was actually not.
Isn't she lovely? How about settling down like your older brother? Do you see yourself spending the rest of your life with her?
Olivio had deflected each one with the ease of long practice and the courtesy of a man who understood that his family's affection, however misguided its expression, was genuine.
His own life, meanwhile, had operated with the discipline he'd spent twelve years building into it. The North American arm of the Cannizzaro empire—-his, built from a graduation gift and a particular talent for seeing what a piece of land wanted to become before anyone else did—-ran like something engineered rather than merely managed. Every quarter projecting forward.
Every variable accounted for.
Or at least it had been that way...until this morning.
Russell Marquez had been twenty-three years old and the kind of young man who moved through the world as though consequences were something that happened to other people. Olivio had spent eight months positioning himself to acquire the waterfront property in Vancouver that Russell had inherited from a grandfather who'd had better sense than his grandson. The deal had been three weeks from signing.
Then Russell had gone snowboarding without a helmet.
Olivio had spent the first hour of his morning restructuring an acquisition timeline that no longer existed and trying not to think about how a helmet cost less than the hospital bill that hadn't saved him anyway.
The property had reverted to Russell's grandparents, the Marquez family, rather infamous in certain circles for doing business exclusively with family men. Not businessmen. Not billionaires. Men with rings, with wives, with the kind of life that photographed well at charity galas and could be verified with a phone call to someone who'd attended the wedding.
Olivio had been composing his alternative strategy—-methodically, without particular feeling, the way he did most things—-when his assistant put Edgar Coolidge's call through.
He'd taken it.
He always took Edgar's calls. Whatever had happened this morning, whatever Edgar had done, that would not change. There were certain men whose absence from one's life left a particular kind of silence, and Edgar was one of them. Olivio had known that since he was eighteen years old and had first understood what it meant to have someone in your corner who asked nothing in return.