Her cheeks coloured. She cleared her throat and took a sip of her juice, then looked around again and said conversationally, ‘You like your glass walls, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your apartment in London has external glass walls. Is there a theme?’
‘I don’t like to be...what’s the word when things are too near to you?’
‘Hemmed in? Cramped?’
He shrugged. ‘Both could be it. I like space and light. I had enough of being cramped when I was a child.’
‘You weren’t put in a cupboard under the stairs, were you?’ she asked teasingly.
‘I spent a year living in a cellar.’
Anna eyed him warily, unsure if he was joking. Everyone knew of Stefano’s torrid childhood—he wore it as a badge of honour: the teenage drug-addicted mother who died when he was a toddler, the teenage drug-addicted father who’d disappeared before he’d been born, the grandfather who’d raised him until his own death when Stefano had been only seven at which point he’d been sent to live with a succession of aunts and uncles. He’d always been fighting and causing trouble and being kicked out to live with the next family member until there had been no family members left willing to take him in. From that point on he’d been alone. At the age of fifteen.
He’d spent years begging and fighting to make a living, finding work wherever he could in the seedy underbelly of Lazio’s streets. At the age of nineteen, to no one’s surprise including his own, he’d been sent to prison but, within a year of his release, the adolescent who had been expected to spend his life as a career criminal had formed the technology company known to the world as Moretti’s and the rest was history.
This was all public information. Stefano was happy to talk about his formative years with the media, proud of being the bad boy who’d made a success of himself.
As a PR strategy it had worked fantastically well, capturing the public’s imagination and adding an edgy aura to the Moretti brand. It had the added advantage of actually being true, or so Anna had always assumed. Stefano’s past crossed the divide from professional to personal so she’d never asked him anything about it other than in the most generic terms. Well, not in her memories in any case.
‘Really? A cellar?’
‘That was when I lived with my Uncle Vicente. My cousins there wouldn’t let me share their rooms.’
‘They made you sleep in a cellar because they didn’t want to share?’
‘They were scared of me—and for good reason. You do not keep kicking a dog and not expect it to bite. I was an angry teenager who liked to fight.’
Fighting was the only answer Stefano had had. A patchy education had left him severely behind at school, which, coupled with always wearing threadbare clothes either too big or too small, had made him a target for bullies. Once he’d realised he could silence the taunts from cousins and school friends alike by using his fists he’d never looked back. A volatile temper and a rapidly growing body had quickly turned him into the boy everyone crossed the road to avoid.
‘Were all your family afraid of you?’
‘They were when I hit puberty and became bigger than all of them. I wasn’t the skinny kid they could bully any more.’
‘Why did they bully you?’
‘My mother was the bad girl of the Moretti family and brought shame on them. I was guilty of being her son. They only took me in because it was my nonno—my grandfather—his dying wish. They hated me and made sure I knew it.’
‘That’s horrible,’ she said with obvious outrage. ‘How can anyone treat a child like that? It’s inhuman.’
‘It makes you angry?’ he asked with interest.
‘Of course it makes me angry! If Melissa had a child and anything should happen...’ Her voice faltered and she blanched at the weight of her own dark thoughts. ‘I would love that child as if it were my own.’
Yes, she probably would. If his wife was capable of loving anyone it was her sister.
She shook her dark hair and took a drink of her juice. ‘Do you ever see them now?’
‘You know I don’t...’ But then he remembered she knew nothing of the last year and how all their time not working had been spent in bed. When they’d been only boss and employee she had determinedly made a point of asking him little about his free time. ‘The last time I spoke to any of them was when my Uncle Luigi turned up when I was still living in Italy asking for money. My answer would make a nun blush.’
Her face broke into a grin and she laughed. ‘I can well imagine.’
‘Do you know, I walked out of my Uncle Vicente’s house—was kicked out for breaking my cousin David’s arm in a fight—thinking of only one thing. Revenge. I would make such a success of myself that my family would have to see pictures of my face everywhere they went and read details of my wealth and know they would never get any of it. Whatever they did with their lives, I would do better. I would earn more money, eat better food, live in a better home, drive a better car. My success would be my revenge and it was. Everything I gained only drove me to get more.’
His revenge had fuelled him. The cousins who had begrudged him the clothes they’d outgrown, the aunts who’d begrudged feeding him, the uncles who’d treated their pets with more respect than they had their orphaned nephew... None of them would see any of his hard-earned gains.