Page 1 of The Virgin’s Dance with the Devil (The Martinelli Wedding #3)

Chapter One

Federico Esposito, better known to all who loved and hated him – not always mutually exclusively – as Rico, was propped against the bar of the vast party room with his brothers watching the guests doing their thing on the dancefloor.

This was their little sister’s engagement party, which meant lots of female pickings.

Even better, there were some fresh faces.

One fresh face in particular had caught Rico’s eye, a dark chestnut-haired beauty whose hot little body was wrapped in a white halter neck dress.

There was something self-conscious and uncertain about the way she danced, clumsy even, as if this were the first time she’d ever let herself sway to music.

Or maybe it was her shoes. He’d spotted her earlier when she’d crossed the room, the flared skirt of her dress swishing behind her.

The stiffness in her gait suggested a woman unused to wearing five-inch black heels.

When she stepped out of them, he doubted she would reach his armpit.

Rico wasn’t particularly fussy when it came to women, but there was something about the shorter ones that did it for him.

He nodded in her direction. “Who’s that in the white dress? ”

Both of his brothers followed his stare, and then Tommaso, the middle brother, grinned. “That’s Marisa Rossellini.”

“Luisa’s sister?”

Luisa Rossellini was married to Gennaro Martinelli, brother of Niccolo Martinelli, the man marrying their sister in four months. Now that he thought about it, Rico could see the sisterly resemblance.

“Yes. She’s one of Niccolo’s guests.”

“She’s hot. How have I never met her before?”

Tommaso smirked. “Because she lives like a nun.”

“Nuns don’t wear dresses like that.” The only thing holy about Marisa Rossellini’s dress was its colour. Backless, its front plunged in a V to her midriff, its design cleverly revealing only a hint of cleavage.

“She’s a good girl who’s never had a boyfriend and attends mass every Sunday. My guess is she’s a virgin, so if she’s your chosen conquest, my suggestion would be to forget it – that one doesn’t put out.”

People thought money made the world go around, but people were wrong. Information was king. Information was power, a fact of life instilled in the three Esposito sons when they were learning to read.

Take Niccolo Martinelli. Niccolo was a member of one of Italy’s oldest, wealthiest and most aristocratic families. That was no secret. However, it was information their father had harvested about him that had enabled him to lure Niccolo into his lair.

Since the engagement had been agreed, Rico had been charged with keeping Niccolo under surveillance.

Through this surveillance, information had come that Rico’s future brother-in-law had spent the last weekend shacked up in a Parisian hotel with a woman who was not Rico’s sister.

No one, not even Siena, expected Niccolo to be faithful.

All he had to be was not stupid. As information was also currency, Rico had pocketed his knowledge of Niccolo’s infidelity on the basis that one never knew when information would need to be cashed in.

It was the Espositos’ thirst for information and self-preservation that meant every guest in attendance that evening had been thoroughly vetted, a task overseen by Tommaso. Again, you never knew when uncovered information could be cashed in. Or weaponised.

“How old is she?” Rico asked, his interest piqued even more.

“Twenty-five.”

“A twenty-five-year-old virgin?” he murmured. “Rarer than a unicorn.” And this one was more beautiful too. “Does she work?”

“In accounts.”

“Of the creative kind?” Creative accounting was the only worthwhile accounting as far as Rico was concerned, a sentiment shared by all Espositos.

“I told you, she’s a good girl. She works in the accounts department for a fashion chain. When she’s not working, she helps with the care of her father. He has Parkinson’s disease. When she’s not at work or caring for him, she goes to mass.”

“No interests at all?”

“She’s in a book club.”

“A what?”

“A book club – it’s where a group of people choose a book to all read and then get together to discuss it.”

“To discuss books ? Why would people do that?”

Tommaso shrugged, his expression mirroring Rico’s bemusement, but Mattia, the eldest brother, said, “Maybe if you’d ever read a book, you would understand the appeal.”

Rico and Tommaso looked at each other and then burst into laughter.

Unimpressed, Mattia raised an eyebrow and drained his bourbon. “You two are philistines.”

“What was the last book you read?” Rico challenged. Mattia’s delusions of intellectualism never ceased to amuse him.

“A book on the foundations of Rome.”

Rico and Tommaso caught each other’s bemused eyes again. “Do you think my virgin unicorn would enjoy it?”

“She’d enjoy it more than anything you have to offer, but why don’t you go and ask her?” Mattia said. “It will be fun to watch you humiliated.”

“You don’t think I can have her?” In all his thirty-two years, Rico had never come across a woman who could resist him.

Those who kept their guard up at his approach quickly lowered it when he told them his name.

Having never suffered false modesty, Rico knew his name, wealth and looks were a killer combination.

“Not that one,” Tommaso said. “That one will never put out without a wedding ring on her finger.”

“How much do you want to bet?”

“Ten grand.”

“Done.” They shook on it, and then Rico downed his neat vodka and rubbed his hands together. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I have ten thousand euros to win.”

Marisa Rossellini was trying very hard not to return Federico Esposito’s stare. It felt like his eyes had been on her the whole evening.

She doubted there was a sentient person in Italy who hadn’t heard of the Espositos or who was unfamiliar with their faces, so to be on the receiving end of such blatant interest from one of them was unsettling .

Led by patriarch Lorenzo, who in four decades had dragged them from being minor drug dealers in Naples – a fact conveniently memory-holed – to being one of the richest families in the country, no money or shiny shoes could disguise what the Espositos were at heart: thugs.

Dangerous thugs. Dangerous, powerful thugs.

Lorenzo owned a hefty chunk of the media, including television stations, much of what was left of the newspaper industry and, more recently, social media platforms. The family had fingers in the pies of many other industries too, arms dealing only included by the very brave in their lists of them.

They also had something equally as powerful in Italian society – charisma.

It was Lorenzo’s special brand of charisma that made the family so dangerous.

The Italian public adored the Espositos.

They saw in Lorenzo a gregarious, working-class hero made good, a stinkingly rich man who’d never forgotten what it was to be poor (as if he’d ever been truly poor!) and loved nothing more than donating his money to worthy causes close to his heart.

Lorenzo had opened numerous care homes for the elderly across the country which were unique in providing top-class care and facilities at prices even the poorest of society could afford, and even had hospital cancer and children’s wards named after him.

That much of the funds that paid for these good deeds were a means of laundering his filthily-gotten gains wasn’t even strenuously denied by the family: the few journalists who dared ask the question, however obliquely, were dismissed offhand, swatted away like pesky flies.

That the journalists who refused to be dismissed and probed beneath the deep veil of secrecy had a habit of disappearing…

well, that was memory-holed as effectively as the Espositos’ origins.

Marisa was quite sure that if she’d grown up in an ordinary household, she’d think the Espositos were the second coming too.

As it was, she’d been raised by a lawyer-father whose main client was Giuseppe Martinelli, a Duke and one of Italian society's foremost men. Giuseppe and his wife were – had been – extremely close family friends of the Rossellinis, and evening suppers had often been spent discussing the Espositos in contemptuous tones. To the Martinellis’ minds, and those of their high society friends, the Espositos were scum and undeserving of a seat at their table.

Having always disliked Giuseppe, Marisa would have loved to have seen his face when he’d learned his youngest son was marrying Lorenzo Esposito’s only daughter.

However, with Giuseppe having terminated his business relationship with Marisa’s father and taken away her parents’ seat at his high society table in light of her father’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, she’d had to take her amusement from afar.

She’d not wanted to come to the party tonight and suffer seeing Giuseppe and Carmella.

The way they’d treated her parents was something she prayed daily to find forgiveness for, but Luisa had begged her to come.

Luisa had married Giuseppe and Carmella’s older son, Gennaro, in a deal to prevent the Rossellinis going bankrupt (Marisa was quite sure both Martinelli sons hated their father as much as she hated him), and it was a marriage most definitely made in cold loathing.

Considering her sister had given up her life, even if the marriage was only temporary, to save their family, the least Marisa could do was support her when Luisa needed her.

And so Marisa had travelled to the party with her sister and brother-in-law, braced for an evening spent with the Espositos, the most powerful and dangerous family in Italy.

What she hadn’t factored in was catching the eye of the youngest Esposito son.