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Excerpt - Loving the Enemy
The Montebellos Book Three
Prologue
Six months ago, Villa Fortune.
HE WANTED TO CRUSH something in the palm of his hands. Fury zipped through his body, disbelief a taste of adrenaline in his mouth.
She was getting married.
Alessia – his ex-wife. And she hadn’t even thought to tell him. Was he really surprised by that? It wasn’t as though their marriage had ended on good terms. Her infidelity had made sure of that. It was the one thing he’d never forgive, and she must have known he’d feel that way
They were like strangers now.
Except they weren’t.
He’d known her almost all of her life. He’d watched her grow up. He’d married her.
Something shifted inside of him, like the blade of a knife, and anger exploded through him. He paced across the room, grabbing a scotch bottle from the bar as though it had personally wronged him in some way.
Alessia Amando was his.
The thought assaulted him and he rejected it immediately. One person couldn’t belong to another, it was true, and yet despite that, they had belonged to each other. For one year they’d been man and wife, and he’d married her with every intention of their marriage lasting a lifetime.
He should have known better. She was immature, young and naïve. What had he expected? That she’d had the maturity to realise what she was doing?
He ground his teeth together, moving towards the windows that overlooked the ocean. It was too dark to make out any detail now, but he knew it was there, an enormous chasm, wild and untamed.
He rarely thought of Alessia. He’d trained himself not to. He didn’t like to focus on his mistakes, and she’d been a big one. From thinking that he actually cared about her, to believing he could make her happy, to hoping to control a desire that had threatened to burn him alive.
And now? She was getting married.
He continued to stare at the ocean, those words chasing themselves around and around his head. She was getting married? She was marrying someone else? Alessia would become another man’s wife?
He stared at the ocean and another thought beat its way through the rush of his mind, demanding to be heard.
She was marrying someone else?
Over his dead body.
Chapter 1
The Four Seasons, Prague.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE you doing here?” Surely she was hallucinating? Alessia pressed a hand out behind her, surreptitiously feeling for the wall, needing some kind of hard support in the face of her ex-husband’s appearance here, on what should have been her honeymoon.
She was stupid to have come, but given the fact the hotel wouldn’t refund the booking and she felt like she needed to get away from Italy and yet another failure in her personal life, this had seemed like the best option.
But staring up into Massimo Montebello’s darkly-glittering eyes, she felt awash with a thousand and one emotions. Damn it, he was so handsome, and she hated him for that, just as she had towards the end of their marriage. It was easy to hate him, given how he’d broken her heart.