Julia James – Heiress's Pregnancy Scandal (страница 1)
Their passion is blazing...
And leads to scandalous consequences!
While on a business trip, dutiful heiress Francesca Ristori is stunned to be swept away with her desire for Italian tycoon Nic Falcone! Nic is unlike any man she’s ever met before and his searing touch thrills and excites her beyond words. But Francesca believes it can only be temporary—she must return to her aristocratic life. Until she learns she’s pregnant with the billionaire’s baby!
JULIA JAMES lives in England and adores the peaceful verdant countryside and the wild shores of Cornwall. She also loves the Mediterranean—so rich in myth and history, with its sunbaked landscapes and olive groves, ancient ruins and azure seas. ‘The perfect setting for romance!’ she says. ‘Rivalled only by the lush tropical heat of the Caribbean—palms swaying by a silver sand beach lapped by turquoise water…What more could lovers want?’
The Dark Side of Desire
Painted the Other Woman
Securing the Greek’s Legacy
The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo
Captivated by the Greek
A Tycoon to Be Reckoned With
A Cinderella for the Greek
The Greek’s Secret Son
Tycoon’s Ring of Convenience
Mistress to Wife miniseries
Claiming His Scandalous Love-Child
Carrying His Scandalous Heir
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Heiress’s Pregnancy Scandal
Julia James
ISBN: 978-1-474-08748-3
HEIRESS’S PREGNANCY SCANDAL
© 2019 Julia James
Published in Great Britain 2019
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
Contents
NIC FALCONE STEPPED through the service door into the casino, glancing around with a deeply satisfied sweep. Yes, this had been a good idea, acquiring and restoring this fading
The fatherless slum kid who’d started his first job at barely sixteen in the basement—literally—of the fabled Viscari Roma hotel had, by his own gruelling efforts, climbed as high as that dilettante playboy Vito Viscari, who’d had a legendary hotel chain handed to him on a plate by his family.
Nic’s expression shadowed as he remembered. Through dogged hard work he’d worked his way up through the ranks at the Viscari Roma, every promotion striven for, until he had finally been in line for the big move into management that he had
But Vito’s uncle, the chairman of the company, had instead preferred that his inexperienced nephew—fresh out of university, with none of the hard-earned, hands-on track record that Nic had under his belt—should get a taste of his future inheritance.
Nic had been passed over—and from that moment he’d known that from now on he would work only for himself. The seeds of the Falcone hotel chain had been sown. Falcone
And through a level of hard work that had absorbed his whole life Nic had succeeded—fantastically. So much so that last year he had been able to swoop, like his namesake the predatory falcon, to take ruthless advantage of an internal power struggle within the divided Viscari family and snap up an entire half of the Viscari portfolio of hotels in a blatantly hostile acquisition.
It had proved, though, to be a triumph that had turned to ashes. Yet again Nic had felt the pampering hand of nepotism thwarting him. This time it had been, of all things, Vito’s mother-in-law, persuading Nic’s own investors, who’d funded his acquisition, to sell the hotels back to her so she could hand them over to her son-in-law, Vito.
Yet again Vito had prospered without lifting a finger for himself—thanks to help from his family.