by Lynne Graham
Then she started reading. A piece entitled ‘Billion Kill on Wall Street’. It was three months old. Luca was described as a finance magnate, brilliant at playing the world currency markets, born rich and getting even richer. His personal fortune was estimated in a string of noughts that needed counting and incredulous re-counting before she could suspend scepticism. And this is the guy who took a cheque from me when I was stony. broke and he knew it... ? Darcy thought in numbed disbelief.
He was a louse—lower than a louse, even. He was microscopic bacteria! He had no honour, no decency, no shame, no scruples. She read on. Reference was made to Luca’s reputation as a commitment-shy womaniser, his ruthless business practices, his implacable nature, his complete lack of sentiment. Darcy was chilled by the perusal of such accolades, and soon decided that it was better not to read any more because it was in all likelihood ninety per cent rubbish and gossip.
No Fielding had ever been guilty of running away from a fight, she reminded herself fiercely. But her problems with the estate were all financial, and Luca had probably been the sort of child who’d started investing his pocket money and playing the stock market at the age of six. She was outmatched, and she felt quite sick at the memory of having confided in him about her overdraft.
Even allowing for exaggeration, Luca was evidently a strikingly effective financial strategist. He was rich, feared and envied, doubtless used to wielding enormous power and influence. A control freak? She glanced down at the grainy picture. So forbidding, so severe, so utterly and completely unlike the male she had fallen madly in love with in Venice. But so dauntingly, chillingly like the male she had married today...
Nothing she had read suggested that he was secretly insane, or given to peculiar starts and fancies, but she was not one bit closer to solving the mystery of his motivation in seeking to punish her. What did he want to punish her for? What had she done? She had spent only one night with him, yet for some inexplicable reason he had gone to huge lengths to track her down and hog-tie her by deception into a marriage that had never been intended to be anything but a sham. In achieving that feat, Luca now had the ability to influence and ultimately control her every move over the next six months. The price of defiance would be the loss of everything she held dear.
And although she didn’t want to do it, she made herself remember that night in Venice, when her explosive response to his first kiss had shocked her inside out. Within seconds, Darcy was plunging back into the past—indeed, suddenly stung into eagerly seeking out those memories, almost as if some part of her believed they might be a comfort...
‘I said just one dance before I leave,’ she reminded Luca stiffly, thoroughly unnerved by her own behaviour and pulling hurriedly back from him.
For Richard had never once made her feel like that. Only now did she understand why her relationship with the younger man had failed. Neither of them had made an effort to share a bed before their wedding. Richard had said he didn’t mind waiting. Theirs had been a love without a spark of passion, an unsentimental fondness which they had both mistaken for something deeper.
‘Why should you leave?’ Luca demanded.
‘I don’t belong here—’
He vented a soft, amused laugh. ‘Running scared all of a sudden?’
‘I’m not scared. I—’
‘Are you committed to someone else?’
Recalling Richard’s betrayal, fiery pride made her eyes flash. ‘I don’t believe in commitment!’
‘If only that was the truth,’ Luca drawled, supremely unimpressed by that declaration. ‘In my experience all women ultimately want and expect commitment, no matter what they say in the beginning.’
Darcy flashed him a look of supreme scorn. Having come within inches of the deepest commitment a man could make to a woman and lost out, she no longer had any faith in the worth and security of promises. ‘But I don’t follow the common herd...haven’t you realised that yet?’
As she stepped back. from him, he shot out a hand and linked his fingers firmly with hers to keep her close. ‘Either you’re bitter...or extremely clever.’
‘No, frank...and easily bored.’
‘Not when I kiss you—’
‘You stopped!’ she condemned.
An appreciative smile of intense amusement slashed his dark features. ‘We were attracting attention. I’m not a fan of public displays.’
In the mood to fight with her own shadow, Darcy shrugged. ‘Then you’re too sedate, too cautious, too conventional for me...’
And, like Neanderthal man reacting with reckless spontaneity to a challenge, Luca hauled her back into his arms and crushed her mouth with fierce, hungry passion under his again. When she had emerged, her lips tingling, every sense leaping with vibrant excitement and delighted pride at this proof of her feminine powers to provoke, she had giggled. ‘I liked that... I liked that very much. But I’m still going to leave.’
‘You can’t—’
‘Watch me...’ Sashaying her slim but curvaceous hips, she had spun in her low-heeled pumps and moved towards the doors that stood open on the ballroom, willing him to follow her with every fibre of her being.
‘If you walk out of here, you will never see me again...’
‘Cuts both ways,’ she murmured playfully over one slight shoulder, and then she recalled that he was a waiter...or was he? Somehow that didn’t seem quite as likely as it had earlier.
‘Are you a waiter?’ she paused to ask uncertainly. ‘Because if you are, I’m not playing fair.’
‘What would you like me to be?’
‘Don’t be facetious—’
‘So that treatment doesn’t cut both ways! Of course I am not a waiter,’ he countered in impatient dismissal.
She smiled then. So he had lifted a tray and brought her a drink specifically to approach her. She was impressed, incredibly flattered as well. ‘Then you’re a guest, a legitimate one, yet you’re not masked.’
‘I’m—’
‘You really are dying to introduce yourself, aren’t you? I don’t want to know... After tonight, I’ll never see you again. What would be the point?’
‘You might be surprised—’
‘I don’t think so...are you going to follow me out of here?’
‘No,’ he delivered with level cool.
‘OK...fine. I felt like company, but I’m sure I can find that elsewhere...but then I sort of like you—the way you kiss anyway,’ she admitted baldly.
‘One moment you behave like a grown woman, the next you talk like a schoolgirl.’
Darcy’s face burned with chagrin. As she attempted to stalk off he tugged her back to him and spoke in a lazy tone of indulgence. ‘Tell me, what would you like to do tonight that you cannot do here?’
She put her head to one side and answered on impulse. ‘Sail in a gondola in the moonlight...’
Luca flinched with almost comical immediacy. ‘Not my style. Tourist territory.’
Darcy pulled her fingers free of his. ‘I am a tourist. I dare you.’
‘I’ll arrange a trip for you tomorrow—’
‘Too late.’
‘Then sadly, we are at an impasse.’
‘It’s your loss.’ With a careless jerk of one shapely shoulder, Darcy strolled back into the ballroom. She took her time strolling, but he didn’t catch up with her as she had hoped. She wondered why she was playing such dangerous games. She wondered if, her whole life through, she would ever again meet a man who could turn her bones to water and her brain to mush with a single kiss...
On that thought, her stroll slowed to a complete crawl. She glanced back in the direction she had come and froze, suddenly horrified by the discovery that she couldn’t pick him out from all the other guests milling about on the edge of the dance floor. Already he was lost.
‘Blackmail leaves me cold,’ a familiar and undeniably welcome drawl husked in her ear from behind, making her jump a split second before a huge surge of relief washed over her, leaving her wea
k. ‘But that look of pure panic soothes my ego!’
Whirling round, she laughed a little uneasily. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘It is rather frightening to feel like this, isn’t it, cara?’
‘I don’t know what you mean—’
‘Oh, yes, you do...stay frank, I prefer it.’
‘How do you feel about one-night stands?’ she asked daringly.
He stilled. A silence thick as fog sprang up.
‘I don’t do them,’ he said drily. ‘I was rather hoping you didn’t either.’
‘How do you feel about virgins?’
‘Deeply unexcited.’
‘OK, you don’t ask me any questions, I won’t tell you any lies...how’s that for a ground rule?’
‘You’ll soon get bored with those limitations,’ he stated with supreme confidence.
But she knew she would not. Honest answers would expose the reality she longed to escape. The young woman who had disappointed from birth by being a girl, who had been denied the opportunity even to continue her education, and who had finally crowned her inadequacies by being jilted at the altar, subjecting her family, to whom appearances were everything, to severe embarrassment and herself to bitter recriminations. She had no desire to pose as an object of pity.
Within minutes he led her down that grand staircase. Realising only then that she had won and that they were leaving the ball together, she stretched up on her toes to kiss him in the crowded hall, generous in victory. Hearing what sounded like a startled buzz of comment erupt around them, she drew back, stunned by her own audacity. She blushed, but he just laughed.
‘You’re so natural with me,’ he breathed appreciatively. ‘As if you’ve known me all your life...’
A magnificent beribboned gondola was moored outside, awaiting their command. A gondola with a cabin swathed in richly embroidered fabric and soft velvet cushions within. And what followed was magical. Luca didn’t just point out the sights, he entertained her with stories that entranced her. The Palazzo Mocenigo, where Lord Byron had stayed and where one of his many distraught mistresses threw herself from a balcony. The debtor’s prison cell from which Casanova contrived a daring escape. The Rialto where Shakespeare’s Shylock walked.
His beautiful voice slowly turned husky with hoarseness, and captured in that haze of romantic imagery she smiled dreamily, sensing his deep love and pride in the city of his birth, reaching up to him to kiss him and meet those dark deep-set eyes with a bubbling assurance she had never experienced in male company before. At one point they glided to a halt in a quiet side canal to be served champagne and strawberries by a sleepy-eyed but smiling waiter.
‘You’re a fake, cara mia,’ Luca breathed mockingly then. ‘You say you don’t want romance, but you revel in every slushy embellishment I can provide.’
‘I’m not a fake. Why can’t we have one perfect night? No strings, no ties, no regrets?’
‘I’ll make you a bet—a a sure-fire certainty,’ Luca murmured with silken assurance. ‘Whatever happens tonight, I’ll meet you tomorrow at three on the Ponte delta Guerra. You will be there.’
‘Tomorrow doesn’t exist for us,’ she returned dismissively, not even grasping at that point that he might understand her better than she understood herself, that almost the minute she was away from him she would want to be back with him, no matter what the risk. ‘Take me home,’ she told him then, impatient of the deeply inhibiting need to keep her hands off him in public.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Your home...’
‘We’ll have breakfast together—’
‘I’m not hungry.’
He had stared steadily down at her. ‘You know nothing about me.’
‘I know I want to be with you... I know you want to be with me...what more do I need to know?’
A spasm of stark pain infiltrated Darcy as she recalled that foolish question. It shot her right back to the present, where fearful uncertainty and frustration ruled. At that moment she could not bear to relive the final hours she had spent with Luca in Venice. And she was tormented by the awareness that her own behaviour that night had been far more reckless, provocative and capricious than she had ever been prepared to admit in the years since.
The door opened without warning. Taken by surprise, Darcy scrambled awkwardly off the bed. Thrusting the door closed again, Luca surveyed her, sensual mouth curling as he scanned the shabby shrunken jeans. ‘I always used to believe that a woman without vanity would be an incredible find. Then fate served me with you,’ he imparted grimly. ‘Now I know better.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Darcy snapped defensively.
‘You’ll find out. Sloth in the vanity department won’t be a profitable proposition.’
His frowning attention falling on the large framed photo, Luca strode across the room to lift it from the cabinet. There was a stark little silence. He was very still, his chiselled profile clenched taut. ‘You sleep with a picture of Richard Carlton by your bed?’ he breathed a tinge unevenly, a slightly forced edge to the enquiry that thickened his accent.
‘Why not...? We’re still very close.’ Darcy saw nothing strange in that admission, particularly when her mind was preoccupied with more pressing problems. She drew in a sharp breath. ‘Luca...I don’t know what’s going on here. This whole situation is so crazy, I feel...I feel like Alice in Wonderland after she went through the looking glass!’
‘You astonish me. In every depiction I have ever seen Alice sported fabulous long curly hair and a pretty dress. The resemblance is in your mind alone.’
Darcy groaned. ‘Now you’re being flippant. From my point of view you are acting like a man who has escaped from an asylum—’
‘That is because you have an extremely prosaic outlook,’ Luca delivered softly. ‘You cannot grasp the concept of revenge because you yourself would consider revenge a waste of time and effort. I too am practical, but I warn you, I also have great imagination and a constitutional inability to live with being bested by anyone. Setting the police on your trail wouldn’t have given me the slightest satisfaction—’
‘The...the police?’ Darcy stressed with a look of bank astonishment.
Luca flicked her a shrewd, narrow-eyed glance, eyes black and cold as a wintry night. ‘You play the innocent so well. I can ever understand why. You were far from home. You felt secure in the belief that you would never be identified, never be traced, never be punished for your dishonesty—’
‘I don’t know what the blazes you’re talking about!’ Darcy spluttered. ‘My...dishonesty?’
‘But you miscalculated...the role of victim is not for me,’ Luca declared. ‘And now it’s your turn to savour the same experience. A flare for the prosaic will be of no benefit whatsoever in the weeks to come.’
‘I’ve got a lot more staying power than you think!’ Darcy fired back, determined to stand up to him. ‘So why don’t you tell me why you’re making crazy references to the police and my supposed dishonesty?’
Luca sent her a winging glance of derision. ‘Why waste my breath? I prefer to wait until you get tired of pretending and decide to make a pathetic little confession about how temptation got the better of you!’
‘I can hardly confess to something I haven’t done!’ Darcy objected in vehement frustration.
Ignoring that fierce protest, Luca lifted up a sheet of the fax paper, directing his attention to the business address of the stud farm at the top. ‘Carlton’s place,’ he registered grimly. ‘So it was Carlton you got in touch with.’
‘I didn’t tell Richard anything...I just wanted to know who you really were—not an unreasonable wish when I find myself married to a man who hasn’t told me one single word of truth!’ Darcy shot at him in ringing condemnation.
‘But you couldn’t wait to get married to me,’ Luca reminded her with gentle irony. ‘And, I, who have never felt the tiniest urge to give up my freedom, was equally eager in this instance to see the legal bond put in
place.’
‘Because now you think you’ve got me where you want me.’
Luca regarded her with hard intensity. His arrogant dark head tipped back. Eyes hard as diamonds raked her defiant face. ‘Carlton’s still your lover, isn’t he?’
‘That’s none of your business...in fact if I had a lover for every different day of the week, it would be none of your business!’ Darcy slung back.
‘No?’ Luca said softly.
‘No!’ As her temper rode higher, Darcy was indifferent to the menace of that velvet-soft intonation.
Luca shifted a lean dark hand with fluid grace and eloquence. ‘Even the suspicion that you could be contemplating infidelity will be grounds for separation. You see, although I have laid it all before you in very simple terms, you still fail to appreciate that I hold every card. You cannot afford to antagonise a husband you need to retain.’
Darcy shivered with anger, outraged by that, ‘very simple terms’, which suggested she was of less than average intelligence. ‘The price could well be too high—’
‘But it has to be high, and more than you want to pay...how could I enjoy this otherwise?’ Luca countered, the dark planes of his strikingly handsome features bearing a look of calm enquiry.
As her green eyes flashed with sheer fury, Luca shot her a provocative smile.
In that instant, Darcy lost her head. Temper blazing, she stalked forward and lifted a hand with which to slap that hateful smile into eternity. With a throaty sound of infuriating amusement, Luca sidestepped her. Closing two strong hands round her narrow ribcage, he lifted her clean off her feet and tumbled her down onto the bed behind her.
CHAPTER SIX
BREATHLESS and stunned as Luca captured her furiously flailing hands in one of his, Darcy whispered in outrage, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m not thinking right now,’ Luca confided, luxuriant lashes low on liquid golden eyes of sensual appraisal as he scanned the riot of bright curls on her small head. ‘I’m wondering how long your hair will get in six months... You’ll grow it for me, just as you will do so many other things just for me—’
