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Raffaele di Mancini, his granddaughter Vivi’s bête noire, the ed her without reason

Another good-looking bastard, he thought irritably, flipping the folder open to scan his victim’s perfectly chiselled profile, which would have done justice to any hters liked handsohter Winnie’s problems, even if that hadn’t quite turned out as he had planned when she had elected to stay married to the father of her son

Vivi, howeverbright, hot-teher nut to crack than the u of a novelty for avery rich and very influential, Stam was more accustomed to those who did exactly as he told them to do But not Vivi, he reminisced fondly, Vivi who had no fear of hily, he respected her the th and conviction

Fortunately for him, however, Vivi utterly loathed Raffaele di Mancini for the way he had wrecked her life Two years earlier he had ruined her reputation to ensure that his flighty little sister came out of the same scandal whiter than white Vivi had been accused, not only of being a prostitute, but also of having lured Arianna into stripping off for the ca up as an escort with a sleazy business ency No, there was little chance of Vivi falling in love with Mancini, Stam conceded with an ainally lined up to rescue his granddaughters’ reputations, Raffaele di Mancini was undeniably the est mystery

Raffaele, billionaire banker and noted philanthropist, was the descendant of an extravagantly long and blue-blooded fas back to the tenth century By repute, he was a genius in the financial field and he led a re publicity That made it all the harder for Stam to understand why Mancini had broken the discretion of a lifetime and labelled poor Vivi an escort on the back of the slenderest evidence Had he soined it would shield his kid sister, Arianna, fro women had innocently become embroiled with?

But what did that e had been done? Stam ruminated His problem was that Mancini was too clever by far to be entrapped by the usual ploys and too rich and virtuous to be bribed That had meant that Stam was forced to stoop to a means of persuasion that he disliked intensely, particularly when that file revealed that Mancini had spent his adult life struggling to protect his ard sister from her mistakes and their consequences It was coirl as only a half-sister and the daughter of the drug-addled stepmother he could only have despised

Mancini, however, deserved everything he had co to him for what he had done to poor Vivi’s self-esteem, Stam reflected with harsh finality

Raffaele di Mancini was uneasy

And he didn’t knohich nagged at hi wrong in his world His life ran with machine-like efficiency fro to a perfectly cooked breakfast to the moment he retired to a bed made up with the very finest bed linen available

All was quiet within his fa time a source of concern, was finally settled and on the brink ofa home in Florence He had neither worries nor any thorny problems to tackle

In London to speak at a banking conference, he had been surprised to be invited to awith the notoriously reclusive Stamboulas Fotakis at his palatial and multi-storeyed London apartment Fotakis was one of the richest men in the world but Raffaele had never met him and naturally he was curious to discover what had prompted such an invitation He was also curious about the ed wryly Over the years, reams had been written about Stam Fotakis and even if half of the stories could be discounted as nonsense, what reend