Page 1 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

CHAPTER ONE

LYSSIAANDERSONHADa plan. Pink boots, and extremely racy underwear. The boots were useful in the current climate—the ski fields at her father’s Alpine resort were freezing. The underwear was not, but that was fine. It wasn’t related to the weather. It was related to her plan.

To Carter Westfield, and the growing connection between them.

Her father’s new assistant was just...the best. Endlessly caring, so in touch with his feelings, so...sweet. And he was so cute.

Just so cute.

She had never lost her head over a guy before. Not once. And Carter was...

Well, her father sending them on this mission to audit the goings-on at the ski resort was just perfect.

She was thrilled her dad was involving her with the company to begin with. She was at a weird crossroads—one where she was trying to decide what to do with her own company, and what she would do if she did let it go, and she’d finally told her father that it would be nice if there was a space for her at Anderson Luxury Brand Group because she had interned there after all.

He’d listened. He’d told her he would value her input on the condition of the Swiss ski property and that was almost as exciting as the prospect of hooking up with Carter.

They both felt linked, in some ways. She was starting to feel stagnant and there was an underlying discomfort in that stagnation. A feeling that she was treading water when she didn’t believe people had that kind of time.

Her mother had died in her twenties. Life wasn’t infinite, time wasn’t guaranteed.

Onward!

She tightened her parka more firmly around her body—the underwear was beneath layers of warmth, obviously—and pushed open the doors of the lobby. The wind bit into her skin and she fought to keep from reacting to it. She didn’t need to go shrieking about the cold in front of the locals.

People already thought of her as a soft heiress, she knew that. A nepo baby. She frequently made online lists ofTwenty-Five Nepo Babies Who Got It All from Their Daddy, or whatever.

Some nepo baby she was. Her father’s luxury vacation empire wasn’t even ever going to her. Which was why she’d started her own business three years ago. Which landed her on other, even meaner online lists:The Least Successful Nepo Babies Squandering Daddy’s Money.

Lyssia Anderson, of the Anderson Luxury Brand Group, runs a tiny boutique interiors business, making furniture and tchotchkes no one asked for.

One has to wonder what a little rich girl who grew up with a pony and an indoor pool knows about what the poor want in their houses. One of her pink couches, which professes to have “custom premium fabrics,” retails for over ten thousand dollars.

No wonder she hasn’t taken the world by storm.

Not that Lyssia had articles like that memorized.

She was damned if she did and if she didn’t. She’d started her own business and it was a source of mockery and disappointment, but if she did nothing she’d be a leech, and if she worked for her father she would just be folded into his dynasty and on and on and on.

She was twenty-three. It wasn’t like she was lagging hideously behind. Her company was solvent. It was just that people thought she should besuccessful, so that they could tell her she didn’t deserve the success. And until she was, they were going to sneer about how she was losing at life on the easiest setting.

Blah-blah-blah. So many people tore down the achievements of others, but what did they build? Nothing. She’d built something at least.

And she had options.

The problem was, maybe it was true. The business hadn’t grown very much in the last few years, and at a certain point she had to wonder if there was truth to what was being said. If she had the backing of her father’s name, why was she so mid?

But then her dad seemed to think she was mid too, since she had never been the potential heir to his empire, despite being his only child.

Not when there was Dario.

Something hot churned in her stomach when she thought of him. Dario Rivelli, the antithesis of a nepo baby. He’d clawed his way up from nothing, had been taken under her father’s wing when he was twenty and making waves in the business world.

He’d gone out on his own, had taken the green housing industry by storm, with groundbreaking build techniques that had quite literally changed the world. Then he’d pivoted into eco-tourism, which had brought him back into her father’s life. And her father had...promised him everything.

“Dario Rivelli is the future.”

Her father said it like Dario was a god.

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