The Orsini Brides: The Ice Prince / The Real Rio D'Aquila
International bestseller Sandra Marton’s THE ORSINI BRIDES novels – together at last!Two Sicilian sisters, two powerful men!Prince Draco Valenti wears an icy exterior like armour that no opponent can penetrate… Except Anna Orsini. She’s a high-flying lawyer in a suit and killer stilettos. While they are at odds in business, in the bedroom Draco’s desire for Annamelts his defences.Two passionate, tempestuous marriages!Years ago a poor Italian urchin escaped to Brazil, took a new name and pulled himself up from the streets. Now Rio D’Aquila is wealthy, uncompromising in business…and incomparable in bed! But with vulnerable Isabella Orsini he feels something deep within him stir…
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International bestseller
Sandra
MARTON
presents
The ORSINI BRIDES
Two Sicilian sisters, two powerful princes—two passionate, tempestuous marriages!
THE ICE PRINCE
THE REAL RIO D'AQUILA
SANDRA MARTON wrote her first novel while she was still in primary school. Her doting parents told her she'd be a writer some day and Sandra believed them. In secondary school and college she wrote dark poetry nobody but her boyfriend understood—though, looking back, she suspects he was just being kind. As a wife and mother she wrote murky short stories in what little spare time she could manage, but not even her boyfriend-turned-husband could pretend to understand those. Sandra tried her hand at other things, among them teaching and serving on the Board of Education in her home town, but the dream of becoming a writer was always in her heart.
At last Sandra realised she wanted to write books about what all women hope to find: love with that one special man, love that's rich with fire and passion, love that lasts forever. She wrote a novel, her very first, and sold it to Mills & Boon. Since then, she's written more than seventy books, all of them featuring sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life heroes. A four-time RITA>® Award finalist, she has also received eight RT Book Reviews awards and has been honoured with an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Series Romance.
Sandra lives with her very own sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life hero in a sun-filled house on a quiet country lane in the northeastern United States.
Sandra loves to hear from her readers. You can contact her through her website, www.sandramarton.com, or at PO Box 295, Storrs, CT 06268, USA.
Table of Contents
The Ice Prince
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Real Rio D’Aquila
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
Sandra Marton
THE first time he noticed her was in the Air Italy VIP lounge.
Noticed? Later, that would strike him as a bad joke. How could he not have noticed her?
The fact was, she burst into his life with all the subtlety of a lit string of firecrackers. The only difference? Firecrackers would have been less dangerous.
Draco was sitting in a leather chair near the windows, doing his best imitation of a man reading through a file on his laptop when the truth was he was too sleep-deprived, too jet-lagged, too wound up to do more than try to focus his eyes on the screen.
As if all that weren’t enough, he had one hell of a headache.
Six hours from Maui to Los Angeles. A two-hour layover there, followed by six hours more to New York and now another two-hour layover that was stretching toward three.
He couldn’t imagine anyone who would be happy at such an endless trip, but for a man accustomed to flying in his own luxurious 737, the journey was rapidly becoming intolerable.
Circumstances had given him no choice.
His plane was down for scheduled maintenance, and with the short notice he’d had of the urgent need to return to Rome, there’d been no time to make other arrangements.
Not even Draco Valenti—Prince Draco Marcellus Valenti, because he was certain his ever-efficient PA had resorted to the use of his full, if foolish, title in her attempts to make more suitable arrangements—could come up with a rented aircraft fit for intercontinental flight at the last minute.
He had flown coach from Maui to L.A., packed in a center seat between a man who oozed over the armrest that barely separated them and an obscenely cheerful middle-aged woman who had talked nonstop as they flew over the Pacific. Draco had gone from polite mmms and uh-huhs to silence, but that had not stopped her from telling him her life story.
He had done better on the cross-country flight to Kennedy Airport, managing to snag a suddenly available first-class seat, but again the person next to him had wanted to talk, and not even Draco’s stony silence had shut him up.
For this last leg of his journey, the almost four thousand miles that would finally take him home, he had at the last minute gone to the gate and, miracle of miracles, snagged two first-class seats—one for himself, the other to ensure he would make the trip alone.
Then he’d headed here, to the lounge, comforted by the hope that he might be able to nap, to calm down, if nothing else, before the confrontation that lay ahead.
It would not be easy, but nothing would be gained by losing control. If life had taught him one great lesson, that was it. And just as he was silently repeating that mantra, trying to focus on ways to contain the anger inside him, the door to the all but empty first-class lounge swung open so hard it banged against the wall.
