The Moretti Seduction

When she was at home, she imagined him there with her. When she slept, he haunted her dreams, making love to her and speaking to her in that beautiful Italian voice of his. When she worked out in the gym, she heard his footfalls on the treadmill next to hers.

He was haunting her. Damn him.

As if she conjured him, he called her. “Nathalie, why haven’t you returned my calls?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ve been busy.” Excuses. She knew better than that. “I guess I wanted a chance to get you out of my head.”

“Did it work?”

No,
she had to admit.
Not at all.

Dear Reader,

The idea for this book came from an article I read in
Newsweek
about the most expensive luxury car in the world: the Bugatti Veyron. This car is not only superfast and overpriced, it is also very hard to obtain. They make only a limited number, so having one is for an exclusive few.

When I started researching the reason the car was called the Veyron, I found that it was named after an F1 driver, and the story for Antonio, Marco and Dominic fell out of that. Once I started thinking about a car company whose focus was driven by drivers, I knew what I wanted to write.

In
The Moretti Seduction,
Antonio has to try to get the rights back to one of the famous Moretti F1 drivers, Pierre-Henri Vallerio, a man who was once Lorenzo Moretti’s best friend. But when Lorenzo married and then divorced Pierre-Henri’s daughter, Anna, the two men became enemies. And Pierre-Henri took back the rights to his name being used on the Morettis’ number one production car, the Vallerio Roadster.

Antonio is the second Moretti brother to choose between love and the curse that he’s grown up under. For Antonio, a playboy and a man used to winning, falling in love doesn’t sound threatening. But once he meets and starts to fall for Nathalie Vallerio, all bets are off.

Happy reading!

Katherine

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The Moretti Seduction
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The rights to the name were in question, something that Dominic, Antonio and Marco—the current generation of Morettis—hadn’t realized until they had sent out a press release announcing their new car and gotten a cease-and-desist order from Vallerio Inc.

Pierre-Henri Vallerio had started the company after leaving Moretti Motors. Pierre-Henri had been a genius with engine design, and Vallerio Inc. was still at the forefront of that industry today. So it seemed to Antonio that they should be excited to have their name on the tongues of car aficionados everywhere.

The only problem was, as with everything that Antonio’s grandfather Lorenzo touched, he’d somehow managed to piss off the Vallerio family.

“Do you ever wonder if
Nono
just had no mojo when it came to women?” Antonio asked his older brother, Dominic.

Dominic was the head of Moretti Motors operations. His title was CEO but he’d always been bossy even when they had been kids.

“The thought has crossed my mind a time or two. Regardless of what his problem was, he left us a mess to inherit, didn’t he?”

“You like the challenge of unraveling his messes,” Antonio said. Dom was one of those men who lived for work. Bringing Moretti Motors back to the forefront of the auto world wasn’t an easy thing to do. But a challenge like this latest wrinkle with the Vallerio family wouldn’t ruffle his older brother. Nor him.

“We need the Vallerio family on board—yesterday.”

“I know. It would have been much easier to handle it if we had realized that the rights to the name reverted to them. I mean, who would have signed a contract that said after twenty years of no production car we lost those rights?” Antonio asked.

“Papa,” Dominic said.

Their father was a wonderful man and the best father in the world, but when it came to business, Giovanni Moretti just didn’t care. Which was why he and his brothers had grown up the poorer relations of the Moretti family.

“Well, I have a meeting scheduled with the attorney.” Antonio closed the file folder. The family’s attorney was the older daughter, Nathalie Vallerio. From her corporate photo he’d sensed a keen intelligence, as well as an innate beauty that reflected her family’s French heritage.

“Good,” Dom said. “With Marco falling for Virginia, I’m afraid that our luck may be changing. I don’t want to let anything compromise the new production car.”

Antonio didn’t know if his brother’s falling in love with the granddaughter of the woman who’d originally cursed the family was going to change their luck or not. Antonio had never put much stock in luck.

The curse had been put on their grandfather by his onetime lover Cassia Festa. Lorenzo had spurned her love and Cassia, being a Strega—an Italian witch—had gone home and spent days getting angrier and angrier at Lorenzo. When Lorenzo decided to marry Pierre-Henri Vallerio’s sister, Cassia had come back to Milan and put a curse on Lorenzo. The words of the curse had been written in her diary, and Virginia, Cassia’s granddaughter, had figured out a way to break the curse. Antonio recalled the curse. No Moretti male would ever be lucky in business
and
lucky in love.

Antonio’s father had no head for business—hence this mess with Vallerio Inc. But Gio had fallen in love with Philomena and those two had found a deep love and happiness in their life.

He and his brothers had grown up realizing they could be either wealthy or happy in love. Being practical boys, they had taken an oath long ago not to mess things up the way their grandfather had. That meant that they would be lucky in business and not risk falling in love and losing everything they worked to build.

Antonio had found that determination and drive covered what luck didn’t. That and his refusal to accept defeat. His entire life he’d never lost at anything once he put his mind to it. And he certainly wasn’t about to let Nathalie Vallerio win this battle.

“No problem. The Vallerio family will sign our agreement and I’ll bring you back the contract.”

Dom rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t need to tell you this, but I won’t feel right unless I say it.”

Dom rarely worried about the effect of his words, so Antonio raised one eyebrow at him in question. Whatever was on his brother’s mind must be something outside the bounds of morality or business ethics. Though at times they’d considered doing things that were in that shadowy gray area, they never had.

Antonio believed that with his determination, Marco’s racing talent and Dom’s drive, the Moretti brothers didn’t need to do anything shady.

“Are you still worried about the corporate espionage?” he asked his brother. They had first realized there was a leak of proprietary information last year at the start of the Grand Prix season. Somehow their main rivals, ESP Motors, had announced an engine intake that was exactly the same as the one that Moretti Motors had been working on for the previous six months.

“I think we can find our leak without doing anything illegal,” Antonio said.

“Tony! I’m not going to ask you to do anything illegal. I have got a lead on our corporate spy.”

“Then what were you going to ask me?”

Dom leaned over his desk, both arms resting on the dark walnut finish. “Use any means necessary, Tony. If you have to seduce her, then do it. Women like romance.”

“Comments like that are the reason why you are single.”

Dom made a rude hand gesture, but Tony just laughed. His brother was a great businessman and a natural leader, but when it came to women, Dom didn’t trust them and he treated them like disposable commodities. Tony knew that was because of Liza, the woman whom Dom had loved and lost.

There was a knock on the door and Dom bade the person to enter. It was his secretary, Angelina de Luca.

“Sorry to interrupt, Signore Moretti, but the Vallerio family is here for Signore Antonio.”

“
Grazie,
Angelina. Please direct them to the conference room and get them some refreshments.”

Angelina nodded and left the room. Dom watched his secretary leave and Tony wondered to himself if his big brother wasn’t as immune to women as he appeared to be.

“You know, with Marco’s engagement to Virginia, it might not be a change in our business luck, only our love luck.”

Dom shook his head. “For you maybe but not me. I think I have
Nono
’s bad woman mojo.”

Tony laughed and stood, clapping his brother on the back.

“I don’t have that mojo. And Ms. Nathalie Vallerio,” Tony said, looking back down at her photo in the folder, “isn’t going to know what hit her.”

“Buon!”