Harlequin Presents--July 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Natalie Anderson

  The disbelief had almost been as great as the pain, he recalled, still unable to fully credit what had happened. He’d been BASE jumping for years, thriving on the exhilaration, taking ever-increasing risks in this as with everything he did, because why not?

  The few accidents he’d had had been expected and minor. Until this one, which had seen him airlifted to hospital in Courmayeur, where he’d endured hours of complex surgery, followed by a stint at a clinic back home in Venice and then a gruelling physiotherapy programme that technically he was still supposed to be in the middle of.

  ‘A rookie mistake?’

  ‘I have a thousand skydives and two hundred BASE jumps under my belt,’ he said. ‘It’s simply one of the most dangerous sports you can do and on this occasion I was unlucky.’

  The look she threw him was disconcertingly shrewd. ‘Is the danger the attraction?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re a risk-taker.’

  ‘I am. Are you?’

  She gave her head a shake. ‘Quite the opposite. I like things planned, organised and well thought through. I like control.’

  ‘Yet you work in crisis management and damage limitation, where the unexpected is the norm.’

  ‘True,’ she admitted, ‘but the unexpectedness is expected. Will you go back to doing it?’

  ‘BASE jumping? No,’ he said, realising, once his brain had caught up with his mouth, that it was true. Which was odd. Because why would he want to give it up? Yes, he’d been injured, but he’d been injured before, albeit not quite so severely, and been back in the saddle as soon as he could. What was different about this time? And why was his chest tight and his pulse fast?

  ‘What will you do instead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted uneasily, apparently unable to answer anything right now.

  ‘Doesn’t it get a bit lonely, rattling around here on your own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should get a pet.’

  The thought of it sent a shudder through him. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Because he needed attachments like a hole in the head. Because he preferred to move through life alone and apart, and that precluded animals. ‘I don’t want one.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I’m seeing a theme.’

  ‘What kind of a theme?’ he asked, a strange sense of apprehension beginning to trickle though him.

  ‘No neighbours, no pets, no clutter, no attachments of any kind. You don’t just live on an island, Rico, you are an island. So was that why you left Finn’s study?’ she asked with a tilt of her head. ‘Did the thought of potential attachment spook you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said easily, although how close she was to the truth was making him sweat. ‘I merely remembered I had somewhere else to be.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Precisely. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going for a swim.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AS IF A swim was going to succeed in putting her off, thought Carla, watching Rico stalk out of the gym as if he had wolves snapping at his heels.

  She’d been right in her belief that one could discover a lot from exploring another person’s house. In Rico’s case, she’d indirectly learned that exiting a conversation when it touched a nerve was what he did, and it revealed more than she suspected he was aware of. It gave her points to note and avenues to pursue, such as why he moved through life like a ghost, living in such isolation, even if the isolation was splendid, as indeed it was.

  The walls throughout his house were a soft off-white, the floors made up of great slabs of travertine covered with huge, ancient earth-toned rugs. Fine voile hung at the open windows and fluttered in the breeze. The furniture that was wood gleamed, while the sofas and chairs looked sumptuous and inviting.

  But the stark absence of personal effects intrigued her. Even the kitchen, which was filled with shiny gadgetry and utensils that obviously weren’t simply for show, bordered on the clinical. And as for his study, a room in which presumably he spent much of his time, well, she’d never seen such order. His desk was bare apart from three massive monitors and a telephone, and not a file was out of place on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined one wall.

  Did Rico have a place elsewhere crammed to the rafters with all his things? If he didn’t, and this was him, was there really nothing and no one in his past that he wanted to hang on to, to remember? How sad and lonely his life must be with no family and no friends, she thought, feeling a tug on her heartstrings even though how he lived was no concern of hers.

  But if he needed breathing space, she was more than happy to let him have it. She knew when to push and when to retreat. How to plant the seed of suggestion and wait for it to take root. Not that she had a lot of time to get anything to take root, but it gave her a bit of breathing space too, which she badly needed after what had happened at his front door when he’d gone very still, his mesmerising blue eyes darkening to indigo and his expression unfathomable as he looked at her with heart-thumping intensity.

  She’d had the crazy notion that he’d been contemplating kissing her and even more crazily, for one split second, she’d actually hoped he would, instinctively softening and leaning in and preparing herself for fireworks until he’d suddenly drawn back, leaving her feeling mortified and rattled.

  This feeling of being constantly unsettled and on edge was unacceptable, she told herself for the thousandth time as she made her way to her room to send Georgie an email giving her a temporary number and an update, and to arrange some annual leave for next week. As was the longing to know what Rico’s bedroom looked like, and not just because perhaps that was where he stashed all his things. She did not need to know anything about his bedroom or how exciting it would be to kiss him.

  The only interest she had in his attitude to risk was that it was another thing to investigate and report back to Finn. An analysis of how different it was to hers was not required, any more than was the kick of appreciation she’d felt in the pit of her stomach when she’d realised that he recognised her ability and need to take care of herself.

  She would not be sidling across her room to the balcony that overlooked the terraces to check out the splash she’d just heard that indicated a gorgeous man might now be in the pool, scything slickly through the water while wearing virtually nothing. She would not be contemplating how deliciously tanned his skin might be, how powerfully he might move or whether the well-honed definition of his muscles was limited to his arms.

  Time was marching on and she had a job to do, and she would concentrate one hundred per cent on that.

  * * *

  Rico tended to do much of his strategising while pounding up and down his pool, and the swim he’d just taken was no exception. As the rhythmic strokes cleared his head of the tangle of unanswerable questions Carla had stirred up, and his body of the excruciating tension that had been gripping him, he’d had something of an epiphany. Not about the shift in his attitude towards BASE jumping—that was still clear as mud—but about how to handle Carla and her continued attempts to prise information out of him.

  One excellent way of putting a stop to it, it had occurred him as he’d flip turned and switched from crawl to butterfly, would be to divert the focus of conversation from him to her instead. He had no interest in finding anything out about her, of course, but if she was talking about herself she wouldn’t be able to interrogate him. She’d be too busy picking and choosing her own answers, the way she had at dinner last night and the police station earlier.

  He might be out of practice when it came to conversation, while she was anything but, but how challenging could it be to turn her questions back on her? How hard would it be to drum up some of his own that might just wrong-foot her the way hers did him?

  It
was an approach that would require focus and caution, he thought with a stab of satisfaction and relief at finally having come up with a way of taking back the upper hand, but it would get him through the hours until she left, certainly through the supper he was about to start preparing, and it was a solid one.

  * * *

  Determined to concentrate on the job she’d come to do and not get distracted once again by the subject of her investigations, Carla walked into the kitchen and didn’t even break stride at the unexpectedly sexy sight of a big, handsome man standing at the island and pouring boiling water over a couple of tomatoes in a bowl.

  ‘How was your swim?’ she said, noting when he glanced up at her that there was a gleam to his eye that she’d never seen before, which was both shiveringly unsettling and unnecessarily intriguing.

  ‘Refreshing,’ he said with the easy-going smile that she’d learned concealed so much. ‘Wine?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He poured her a glass of something pale and cold and—she took a sip—utterly delicious. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘You can get the clams from the fridge.’

  Reminding herself to focus, which was hard when she could feel his eyes burning into her back, Carla put down her glass and walked over to the appliance he’d indicated and opened the door.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, staring at the shelves that were crammed with more food than she’d ever seen in one place outside a supermarket. ‘You have one very well-stocked fridge.’

  ‘I like to eat.’

  Yet there wasn’t a spare ounce on him. She’d felt him when she’d fainted into his arms. Nothing but warm, solid muscle... ‘So I’ve noticed,’ she said, hauling her recalcitrant thoughts back on track with more effort than she’d have liked.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Last night,’ she said, locating the box of clams and taking it out. ‘At the restaurant. You ate as though you were afraid that if you put your fork down for even a second someone would whip your plate away.’

  ‘The food there is good and I’d missed lunch.’

  Hmm. ‘It seemed like more than that. And you did it again at brunch today.’

  ‘Do you cook?’

  ‘I never learned.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Work’s always been crazily busy,’ she said, as an image of her fridge, which generally contained milk, ready meals and not a lot else, slid through her mind. ‘I’ve been putting in fourteen-hour days for years. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for haute cuisine.’

  ‘What were you doing in Hong Kong?’

  ‘Dealing with a crisis and a CEO who didn’t believe there was one.’

  ‘I imagine you eventually persuaded him to see things your way.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said with a quick grin that drew his gaze to her mouth and for the briefest of moments stopped time.

  ‘You really enjoy what you do, don’t you?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like solving problems and fixing things. I also love a challenge,’ she said with a pointed look in his direction, which was rather wasted, since he’d switched his attention to peeling a clove of garlic. ‘Do you like what you do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you get into fund management?’

  ‘I have a talent for numbers and a drive to make money,’ he said, then added, ‘You should be careful you don’t burn out.’

  What was it to him? she wondered, as bewildered by his concern as she was by the rogue flood of warmth she felt in response to it. Why did he care whether she burned out or not? And hadn’t they been talking about him in the first place?

  Ah.

  She saw what he was doing, she thought as the warmth fled and strangely cold realisation struck. He was trying to manipulate the conversation. Well, that was fine. At least she’d recognised it. And now she had, she could use it. This whole exercise was supposed to be about her extracting information from him, not vice versa, but perhaps things would move more efficiently if she went along with his plan. She need give away nothing of significance. She hadn’t so far and now she was on her guard, she wouldn’t. There’d be no more warmth stealing through her at anything he might say and there’d be no more grins, quick or otherwise.

  ‘And that’s why I’ve taken next week off,’ she said, taking a sip of her drink and noting a fraction more acidity than she had before.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I have no idea. Sleep probably. I haven’t had a break in months. I suppose I could learn to cook. I might even take up Italian. And, talking of languages, how come your English is so good?’

  ‘It’s the language of business and I have an ear for it.’

  His reply was too quick and too smooth, and undoubtedly only partly the truth. ‘You understand nuance and inference and your accent is almost flawless. That’s quite an ear.’

  ‘Grazie,’ he said, taking a knife to the garlic and slicing it with impressive deftness.

  ‘Where were you raised?’

  ‘Mestre. Across the lagoon, on the mainland. You?’

  ‘On a series of communes in various corners of the UK.’

  ‘Not much opportunity for haute cuisine there, I imagine,’ he said with a smile that bounced off her defences.

  ‘None whatsoever. We mainly survived on lentils and vegetables.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do they still live on a commune?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘You don’t make time for them.’

  Why would he think such a thing? she wondered for a moment before recalling their conversation last night in the restaurant. ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You didn’t need to.’

  ‘All right,’ she admitted, faintly thrown by the fact that he’d remembered such a tiny detail too. ‘I don’t see them all that often. It’s complicated. Are yours still on the mainland?’

  ‘Mine died in a car crash when I was ten.’

  A silence fell at that, and despite her attempts to remain coolly aloof Carla couldn’t help but be affected. God, how awful, she thought, her chest squeezing and her stomach tightening. How tragic. He’d been so young. How did something like that affect the boy and then the man? How had it changed him? She couldn’t imagine being so wholly on her own. After what had happened to her, her parents had felt so guilty and regretful that they’d gone from borderline negligent to smothering, and yes, their relationship was strained because of it but at least they were around.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with woeful inadequacy.

  He gave a shrug. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Finn lost his mother at the age of ten, too.’

  ‘And what were you doing at the age of ten, Carla?’ he countered, neatly avoiding the point.

  Trying to get her parents’ attention, mostly, she thought, remembering how she’d constantly played up at the various schools she’d attended. Figuring out how to persuade them to stay in one place long enough for her to make friends. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shifting on her stool to ease the stab of age-old pain and disappointment. ‘Listening to music and hanging out with the other kids on the communes, I guess.’

  The look he gave her was disconcertingly shrewd. ‘Why do I get the feeling that isn’t all?’

  ‘I truly can’t imagine,’ she said before deciding to engage in a bit of conversational whiplash of her own. ‘Did you know you were adopted?’

  ‘It was never a secret. There was some effort to locate my birth parents after the death of my adoptive ones.’

  ‘But they weren’t found.’

  ‘
No.’

  ‘Weren’t you ever interested in carrying on the search?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I discovered I preferred being on my own.’

  ‘You aren’t any more.’

  He didn’t respond to that, just slid the garlic from the board into the sizzling oil in the pan, and then gave it a toss, which made her think it could be time to shake things up on the conversational front too. She had to at least try and make him see reason about the family he could have now.

  ‘Did you know you were born in Argentina?’ she asked, dismissing the guilty feeling she might nevertheless be crossing a line because for Georgie and Finn there never would be a line.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you can’t know that there are three of you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re one of three. There’s you and Finn and one other. You’re triplets. All boys.’

  The only indication that what she’d said had had any impact at all was a tiny pause in his stirring of the garlic. ‘Who’s the third?’ he asked after a beat of thundering silence.

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘He hasn’t been found?’

  ‘Not yet. You may be able to help.’

  ‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to.’

  ‘Which you don’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  But Rico was lying. He’d resumed his methodical stirring of the garlic but she could tell by the tension gripping his body and the muscle ticking in his jaw. He was interested and it gave her the encouragement to persist. ‘What did you think when you first saw Finn’s photo?’

  ‘I was surprised.’

  ‘That’s it?’ she said. ‘No lightning bolt of recognition? No sense of... I don’t know...everything suddenly falling into place or something?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Well, something drove you to seek him out in his own home,’ she said, beginning to feel a bit riled at the way he was deliberately blocking her at every possible point yet determined not to give up. ‘So I think you’re not only lying to me, but also to yourself.’