‘Which was rather unfortunate, wasn’t it, carissima…’ Despite the endearment, as he fell into step beside her again condemnation oozed out of every superb inch of him ‘…as it turned out?’
‘Why?’ She stopped dead on the path. ‘Because I was on the dance floor with a man who happened to be the husband of a neighbour I really liked and respected?’ Her bright head came up as she faced him with pulsing indignation. ‘Who also happened to be there with us that night!’
She could tell that beneath that hard, implacable exterior he was quietly but very thoroughly shaken.
‘Santo cielo!’ he breathed after a few moments. ‘You cannot blame me for leaping to the obvious conclusion. The way you were dancing that night there wasn’t a man at that club who could keep his eyes off you!’
A lizard ran across the path, a flash of movement, one moment there—the next gone, swallowed up in a thicket of lush undergrowth.
‘Including you, by the sound of it!’ Her blood raced from the possibility that she might have affected him in that way, though she had seen only anger glittering in his incredible eyes.
Including him, Romano acknowledged, his breath catching in his lungs.
It had incensed him to watch her dancing with the man he’d believed was her lover. But he couldn’t forget that other emotion he was ready to admit now was irrational jealousy as he’d watched the way she’d moved beneath a not particularly flattering dress, her hair swaying like a sensuous red curtain, her body made voluptuous by pregnancy. Not that anyone would have realised had they not been aware of it already, he thought, because her condition hadn’t shown until it was quite advanced.
‘You were married to my brother!’ he rasped, as though that could negate the unforgivable feelings that had tormented him whenever he was around her. Desire. Wanting. Need. But it went far deeper than that. Her intelligence, her beauty and her gentle manner were in themselves an ensnaring combination. But it was the way she quietly stood up to not just his parents, but him too—deflecting his caustic comments with guarded tolerance one minute, and open challenge the next—that tugged at some crazy reluctant regard for her deep inside of him. And that only intensified his mindless desire for her and his increasing guilt, a vicious circle of feelings he could only handle by staying away from the castle. He was almost glad when she lived up to everything he had believed her to be.
‘Yes, I was married to your brother and I asked him to come and join me! Not leave me there on my own to cope alone with Dad. I kept asking him to come.’ Begging him, she remembered, only she didn’t say that. ‘I wanted him to, but he could just never get away. You and Sophia and Marius made sure of that. He said he’d be made to feel he was shirking his responsibilities. Letting the company and the so-called family down if he tore himself away for just a week or two to be with his wife!’ And then there was his mammoth allowance that he suddenly started caring about losing, but she didn’t say that either. ‘He knew all he’d wind up getting would be recriminations and disapproval from his wonderful family—including you,’ she finished pointedly, ‘if he had!’
A breeze swept up from the coast, ruffling Romano’s hair into a sea of ebony ripples. Those glittering eyes boring into hers seemed to Libby to be stripping her to her bare bones.
She saw a shadow flit across his face, a dark emotion as though he was having some sort of inner battle with himself.
‘Come on,’ he said, catching her hand.
The small plane seemed to glide over the magnificent bay. Below them Naples sprawled like a sweltering red jungle. Intense buildings. Congested roads. And mighty archeological ruins. To the west, cruise ships floated like white palaces in the harbour, presided over by an ancient fortress, a legacy of less peaceful times. Above it all Mount Vesuvius towered like a slumbering cone-shaped monster. Powerful. Destructive. Magnificent.
‘Don’t worry. It’s not going to erupt—at least not today,’ Romano assured her wryly, noticing where her interest lay. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’ Which was the only thing that wasn’t, he thought, if he let his feelings for this girl run riot.
‘I wasn’t,’ she answered, considering the violent act of nature that had devastated this area and its population nearly two thousand years ago. ‘I was thinking it reminded me of you.’
‘Me?’ He laughed. ‘No, don’t tell me!’ he said, putting up his hand. ‘Let me guess. Big, imposing and with a tendency to getting far too overheated where present company is concerned?’
His reminder of the previous night brought shaming colour to her cheeks so that she glanced away, down at the hub of the bustling city way below them. How could he fly this thing? Stay so composed? she wondered, impressed by his capability while discussing something so intimately disturbing as sex!
‘Why not add outlandishly conceited to that?’ she said, but couldn’t help laughing nevertheless. How had he managed to make her feel like this?
With long-acquired skill he manoeuvred the aircraft seaward, leaving the coast curving in a wide golden arc behind them. ‘Because it wouldn’t be true.’
Her snort of scepticism drew an amused masculine glance her way.
‘At least I’ve got you to relax,’ he said on a more serious note. ‘To smile for a change.’
‘Is that why you brought me up here? Just to witness a rare rearrangement of my features?’
‘I don’t have to propel us both skyward to do that,’ he remarked drily, so that she felt her cheeks colouring again, aware exactly what he was hinting at. ‘I thought you could do with some fun.’
‘Fun?’ An elevated eyebrow mockingly challenged that idea. ‘With you?’
‘Is that such an unimaginable concept?’
‘Yes,’ she stressed, but laughed again in spite of herself, envying his proficiency as a pilot. She was not only trusting this man with her life, she realised suddenly, but felt perfectly at ease in doing so too, and was comfortable in the silence that ensued as he navigated the plane across the indigo water.
‘So…Elizabeth Vincenzo…’ he didn’t see her flinch, or realise how his sidelong glance at her made her blood race when those dark-fringed eyes made a swift but assessing survey of her body ‘…how do you like to enjoy yourself? When you aren’t driving men crazy with those big green eyes and that fiery hair?’
What was that supposed to mean? Libby mused, catching her breath. Was he presuming that because of last night and that night in her flat that she was sex-mad? she thought, wondering what he would say if she told him she hadn’t been to bed with a man since his brother had died. He’d probably laugh, or at the very least think she was telling lies.
Choosing to ignore his disconcerting remark, above the drone of the engine she said soberly, ‘I was made to promise never to use that name.’
‘Scusi?’
‘Vincenzo,’ she elaborated. As if he needed reminding! Denied her, she remembered bitingly, because his father could still have carried out his unspeakable threat if she hadn’t done exactly as she’d been ordered to do. ‘I didn’t want to give it up. I was Luca’s widow. I had a right to it. That’s why I took the English form of Vincent. It wasn’t hurting anyone. I still had my married name in a way, although I wasn’t sullying yours by degrading the name of one of the oldest and most respected families in Italy!’ She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice, or the accusation as she tagged on, ‘Anyway, I thought you played a role in all those…conditions.’
He engaged the controls as ahead of them the Isle of Capri beckoned, a sun-baked pleasure island above the glittering sea.
‘What conditions?’ His voice was deceptively soft.
Libby darted a less than amiable glance his way. He had to be joking surely? ‘The ones your father laid down when he forced me into giving up my son!’
‘My father forced you into handing over Giorgio?’ His concentration was split now between his handling of the plane and what she was telling him. Even so, she knew she was perfectly safe. ‘What are you sa
ying?’
Hurting, puzzled, Libby looked at him in disbelief. How could he pretend not to know?
‘I didn’t hand Giorgio over, Romano,’ she decided to remind him anyway. ‘Not in the way you prefer to believe I did. I was ill after I’d had him and couldn’t come back for Luca’s funeral. When I did manage to get here, your parents told me they wanted to adopt Giorgio. They were pleasant about it at first, but when they could see that I wasn’t prepared to give him up they made me do it under duress.’
‘But…you were paid…handsomely…made terms which you agreed to…’
His puzzled reminder had her looking away and gritting her teeth to stem the anger and pain that were suddenly welling up inside her. ‘Oh, I was paid off all right!’
‘How? For what reason does a mother part with her baby if it is entirely against her wishes to do so?’
‘Through a gradual wearing down and a stronger will—bulked up by a much bigger bank balance! Your father owned the cottage we lived in—that your grandfather still allowed us to live in rent-free after he’d been forced to give up work. It had been Dad’s home for most of his life. In the end, when Marius could see I was adamant about keeping Giorgio—stubborn, he called it—he threatened to evict him. The doctors said a move at that time would almost certainly kill Dad, and your father knew that. He also knew that if it didn’t destroy him physically, then it would grieve him so much to leave his home that he would probably have died of a broken heart. I didn’t want the money he was offering, but I thought if I refused it he would have seen it as an act of insurgence on my part—that I wasn’t keeping to my side of the bargain. I was afraid for Dad.’
He didn’t say anything as they approached the island’s airfield, negotiating the runway to land the small aircraft with smooth and effortless skill.
She had never seen him look so darkly forbidding. If he’d looked shaken before, his face appeared bloodless now, making his angular features as hard as the rocky coast over which they had just flown.
‘If you think I helped engineer a plot like that…’ he spoke very quietly, but she could feel the anger in him bubbling just beneath the surface ‘…then you don’t know me very well. Something, mia cara, we are going to have to rectify—as of now!’
CHAPTER SIX
‘I’VE never been to Capri,’ Libby remarked, surprising herself as well as Romano as she gazed with delighted eyes from the rear seat of the chauffeur-driven car that had meet them at the airport, taking it all in. The tiny squares—bustling with day-trippers. The flower-decked white houses and the narrow alleyways of the island’s principal town perched high on the rugged cliffs above the sea. ‘Not even through my work,’ she added, although her job had taken her to many exotic places over the years.
‘Then you have a treat in store,’ he told her, looking decidedly pleased as he caught her hand, linking his fingers with hers as though it were the most natural thing in the world; as though they hadn’t been enemies for the past seven years until reaching some point of amnesty up there in the sky; as though it didn’t produce the same riot of sensations in him that ran chaotically in Libby as the action caused her fingers to brush against the hard strength of his thigh.
But he was right. Being on Capri was a treat, she decided when they were sipping cappuccinos outside a street café in a pedestrian thoroughfare, flanked one side with flowering oleander trees, the other sporting a profusion of matching white bell-shaped canopies above the doorways of designer boutiques.
‘So…is this not every woman’s dream?’ Romano smiled, indicating the shops with their temptingly dressed windows as he tucked into a slice of the mouth-zinging lemon cake that they had both decided to order with their coffee.
‘And every husband’s nightmare, I should imagine!’ she laughed, well aware of the sort of price tag the clothes in those shops carried. She hadn’t come so far, though, that she had forgotten the value of things and how hard it could be to struggle with hardly enough money to live on. She hoped she never would.
‘You said you lost your father recently,’ Romano commented, seeming to pick up on the line her thoughts had taken, ‘and your mother…when you were an infant, I believe.’
She had never told him that, so he must have got it from Luca and remembered it, Libby surmised, guessing that very little would be lost from this man’s clever mind once it was firmly lodged there.
She nodded.
‘That must have been hard,’ he empathised.
She gave a little shrug of acceptance. ‘We coped.’
‘So what did you do when you walked out of our lives? Before taking up your career as one of the planet’s loveliest models?’
You mean before I was pushed out? she wanted to remind him, but stopped herself in time. They had handed each other the metaphorical olive branch earlier. She didn’t want to be the one to allow it to snap.
Her shoulder lifted again in light dismissal of his casually delivered compliment. She had been called beautiful on countless occasions, but coming from him it filled her with heart-warming pleasure.
‘I took business studies,’ she told him, ‘at home, so that I could be around to help Dad. The modelling happened quite by chance. I hadn’t planned to do it, but Dad had found a new partner—one of the nurses when he was in hospital—and he insisted I made the most of the opportunity and he supported—no, pushed me’ she amended fondly, ‘every step of the way.’
‘He must have been proud of his daughter—and of her devotion to him.’
She gave that familiar little shrug he was getting used to whenever he said anything that was remotely flattering, as though complimenting her on her attributes and achievements embarrassed her. She was looking choked up, though, he noticed, and guessed that he was probing wounds that were still too raw.
‘So why did you never try to get Giorgio back?’
His question, across the top of his cappuccino, surprised her.
‘I did,’ she responded, setting her own cup down, her spirit returning as she reiterated fiercely, ‘Believe me, I did!’
‘And?’
‘And access—let alone any chance of custody—was firmly denied. By the time I’d started to earn money so that your father’s threats couldn’t have hurt Dad, they’d already adopted Giorgio legally. I wrote him letters but they were returned. They wouldn’t even let me send him birthday cards without sending them back.’
He remembered that buckled card he’d noticed in the drawer last night and was fuelled by a sudden propulsion of anger towards his parents.
‘I really didn’t know any of this.’ Whatever else she thought about him, it was suddenly absolutely vital to make that clear to her. ‘I was abroad for a period. No one told me what was going on.’
‘So what about you?’
He laughed. ‘What about me?’ He was glad she had changed the subject. It was difficult coming to terms with what his parents had done.
‘Apart from boarding-school and university, playing squash and swimming, what have you done besides save a retail chain, turn the fortunes of an airline around and earn yourself the title of “youngest billionaire” in last year’s Rich List?’ she enquired, eager to learn what it was that really made him tick.
He laughed again before finishing his cappuccino. ‘That’s about it,’ he accepted with a wry attempt at immodesty, his earlier suggestion that she should get to know him better obviously not something she was going to achieve over coffee. ‘Well…’ setting down his cup, he gestured towards the boutiques ‘…are you going to let an opportunity like this bypass you?’
Amusement tugged at Libby’s mouth. ‘In England we say “pass you by”,’ she corrected, her eyes drawn to the balconies above the shops where geranium-filled baskets blazed with a riot of colour. ‘But if you think a spell of retail therapy and wallowing in designer clothes is how I like to spend my time, then you don’t know me very well either,’ she assured him softly.
‘Oh?’
Why did the full
impact of his gaze have the power to make her blood tingle?
She swallowed, trying to control the feeling. ‘My idea of total relaxation is just to go walking in the countryside,’ she said, ‘just to be away from the noise and the traffic and everything about the city, and to be able to hear just the birds and insects and the wind in the trees instead. That’s a pleasure no amount of spending can equal.’ She saw his mouth quirk almost sardonically. ‘What’s wrong?’ she challenged, suddenly defensive. ‘Doesn’t that quite tally with the materialistic person you thought I was?’
Almost imperceptibly his shoulder moved. ‘You just surprise me—every step of the way.’
‘You mean I’m one step ahead of you.’
Resting on the white tablecloth, his long brown hands opened in unconditional acceptance. ‘So I’ve got some catching up to do.’
Was that his way of admitting that he’d been wrong?
‘Prejudiced people are usually surprised—if they allow themselves to be.’
Romano’s jaws clamped tightly together. She had forced him to see that he had been prejudiced all right! And now she was turning the screw. It didn’t help any telling himself that he deserved her soft reprobation. Deeply, however, with the richness of melting chocolate, he murmured, ‘So surprise me some more.’
Blackmailed For Her Baby (Bought For Her Baby Series Book 4) Page 9
