Never Dare a Tycoon Read Online Free PDF

to family gatherings?” she asked herself and threw the covers back, running to the bathroom to shower and change.
    Fifteen minutes later, she was dressed in a sunny yellow dress with a soft, buttercup-yellow cardigan. She pulled her black, curly hair into a tight chignon, forcing the stray curls to calm down, then pinned it with a matching yellow clip. Antonia quickly put on some mascara and a dab of lipstick. Then she hurried down the street to the bus stop that would take her to the apartment building where all her brothers believed she lived.
She stepped off the bus and had only a moment before Michael’s car pulled up along the curb next to her.
     
“Antonia, you don’t have to wait out here. I can pick you up at your building if you’d just tell me where it is,” Michael called out the open window.
    Michael was the daredevil of the family. He liked mountain climbing, sky diving, hang gliding – anything that would give him a thrill. So it was odd that he had chosen to go into computers, a very non-dangerous profession. But he was a genius when it came to programming. Sal had made him head of IT, computer technology, the section of ATI that developed software programs for various clients, commercial and government. Since taking over, Michael had grown the business to twice its original size. His love of taking risks had followed him and he’d combined his incredible programming prowess with his risk taking nature and it had paid off enormously.
    Antonia smiled at her brother, wondering how much he knew about Sal’s recent discoveries. Probably everything, she guessed. “I don’t mind. It gets my blood going,” she joked, ignoring his reference to her mystery apartment. “You know how hard mornings are for me,” she said. Antonia got into the passenger seat of his blue Mercedes, smiling as cheerfully as possible to her brother. But her usual spark wasn’t there, and Michael noticed immediately.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asked as soon as she closed the door.
     
“Nothing. Why do you ask?” she said, pulling the yellow sweater over her arms.
     
“You look tired. Did you sleep well last night?”
     
Not wanting to reveal that anything was amiss between her and Sal unless he’d already told them, Antonia simply nodded her head in the affirmative. “Why?”
    Michael wasn’t the most diplomatic man on earth. “Because you look awful. You have dark circles under your eyes and you’re wearing that dress.” He said, then concentrated on merging into the traffic that would take them to Sal’s house.
“What’s wrong with this dress?” Antonia asked, looking down at it. It wasn’t her style exactly, but none of the clothes she wore around her brothers were. “It makes you look like you’re about to throw up,” he said, none too gently.
    Antonia couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. Only a brother would be that honest, she told herself. Goodness, she loved them all. Why did they have to be so smothering? “But you gave me this dress for my birthday last year,” she said.
    Michael nodded. “Yeah, I know. The salesperson warned me that not many women could wear that shade of yellow. But I ignored her because I liked it and thought you would look nice in it. You probably would if you didn’t’ have those circles under your eyes.”
Looking out the window, she smiled. “I think it’s a nice color.”
     
Michael didn’t say anything else. They drove in silence the rest of the way.
    The Attracelli home wasn’t just a house. It was a mansion. A huge, gothic mansion with seventeen bedrooms, a kitchen that a catering company would envy, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a maze of hedges among acres of gardens maintained in memory of Antonia’s father who loved a lush variety of flowers.
    Inside, there was a ballroom, mostly used to chase siblings, and now cousins, a library stacked floor to ceiling with books, a sauna, gym, solarium and hot tub. Growing up in this house, Antonia knew