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As if she could read his thoughts, she blinked away the emotion he’d sensed sweeping through her, straightened her back slightly, and said, “So how long did you own the apartment before your parents found out?”

He dead-eyed her, not knowing if the resumption of her provocation was better than his chest tightening to imagine the devastation she must have lived through at the loss of her mother.

Children, girls especially, needed their mothers.

“I’m willing to bet your father learned about it before the ink was dry.” Her lips pulled back into that taunting smile. “Let’s face it, your father knew everything. Maybe that’s why he didn’t anoint you as his successor? He didn’t trust your secrecy.”

“He didn’t anoint me because he died before he could,” he refuted tightly.

She laughed. “Bullshit. If he’d wanted you as his successor, he would have made it clear a long time ago instead of having it hang over everyone. He had four children, and the only one capable of stepping into his shoes was his daughter, but she’s a girl, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he had to choose between his three sons. Two of those sons were volatile playboys who thought with their dicks, the other was you, and he didn’t trust you, did he?”

Mattia tried hard to swallow his fury, but damn this woman, she knew the buttons to press to enrage him and she was pressing them with abandon. One moment he was feeling an unexpected and unwanted tenderness for the child she’d been, and now he was back to dealing with the dangerous, unwanted fury only she was capable of setting off in him. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

She shook her head and tutted. “Swearing again, Esposito? Am I hitting more nerves?”

“I doubt there’s a nerve you couldn’t hit without even trying.”

The loud ping of his phone stopped any clever retort Elvira might have thrown back at him.

Might have? Who was he kidding?

When he got the gun off her, he wouldn’t just cuff her to the chair and make her use a bucket; he’d gag her too.

Chapter Seven

A storm was closing in on them. The sun was up, but dark clouds kept them in shadows. Time passed with excruciating slowness.

A steady trickle of messages had been pinging into Mattia’s phone: his men sailing the bay in their inconspicuous boat checking in; his rat on the inside updating whenever it was safe for him to do so.

Every ping of his phone came with Elvira demanding to know who’d made contact and why.

Another impasse had been reached between them. Instinct told him it couldn’t last. The tension shrouding them was just too tight. Something had to give, and if he maintained the indifference he’d been projecting these last few hours, it would be Elvira who would snap and make a move.

Mattia’s outward dispassion had been helped by his rat on the inside confirming Elio was taking his demands seriously and had ordered Vincent Angeli, the Espositos’ lawyer who’d done more than anyone to wrench the Espositos’ empire from them and gift it to Elio, to return from his holiday in Morocco. He would be back on Italian soil within the hour.

If Mattia survived the coming days, the first thing he would do was hunt Vincent down and personally put a bullet in his head. Resisting the temptation to hunt him down sooner had been unbearable at times, but priorities were priorities. Get his mother and the Esposito Group back first, and if he survived that, retribution against Vincent second. The other rats would have their fates decided at a later date. One thing at a time.

First, the ultimate first, was getting through these excruciating hours with Elvira.

Eight hours they’d been stuck together. It felt like eight years. Only another twenty-six hours to go.

When she made her move, he needed to be prepared. He’d found an external passivity to deal with all her frequent twists of the verbal knife, but she couldn’t know the control it was taking to maintain it and stop himself from rising to it. Or maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she kept moving her position on the sofa. An arm here, a leg there, a flick of her hair. Her pert breasts moved with every motion. Those watchful silver eyes never left his face.

Her movements were deliberate. Provocative, but in a different way to her verbal provocations. It was taking as much concentration not to react to her movements as it was to ignore her knife-twisting comments.

Even the weather was playing its part. Every nearing roar of thunder or crackle of lightning seemed to enclose them more tightly together and feed the tension.

“Who was that from?” the beautiful, dangerous thorn in his side asked after he’d read the latest message to ping into his phone.

“My man on the inside.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did he say?”

“That everything’s in hand,” he answered shortly. “Still. Just as it was when you last asked.”