'Of course not—and do stop holding my hand! Someone might see us a-and you know how people talk.'
'Yes, what a meaty little bone for the scandal cats to get their teeth into.' His smile was the essence of mockery and careless disregard for what anyone thought of him. 'But tell me, do you really care what that kind of person thinks?'
'No—at least, I care that my behaviour doesn't damage Bay's good name in any way.'
'And being seen with me is likely to damage it?'
'You'd revel in it,' she rejoined. 'You tried to wipe the tennis court with him and found it wasn't so easy.'
'My dear Dina, the game lost its zing when you chose to run away—do you always turn tail and run
when the game hots up? Are you going to try it on right now?'
'You aren't going to let me, are you?' Her fingers moved helplessly within his. 'Oh, do let's walk along! We're attracting attention!'
'You sound nervy, very much on edge,' he said, as side by side they proceeded along the pavement to the shoemaker's, an overcrowded, leathery shop where some of the most affluent and famous feet in Hollywood were skilfully measured for hand-tooled shoes, boots and sandals made from the finest hides. That Raf should be a client of the shop didn't surprise Dina in the slightest, but it had come as a shock to run into him on the same errand as herself. She felt his tallness beside her, that power he had of making everything seem more significant, as if like some alchemist he threw a spell over the day. She felt the vitality and the challenge ... the sense of threat as Raf Ventura crossed her path once more.
She hoped that after they had concluded their business in the shop he would allow her to go home ... as she examined her satin slippers she was intensely aware of his scrutiny, and her nerves jumped when he took one of the slippers into his lean dark hand and quirked a look at her face.
Dina didn't dare to meet his eyes and was glad when the slippers were wrapped in their tissue paper and carefully placed in a white box so she could take them home with her.
'You have to see about your boots, so I'll be off-'
'Have tea with me—please?'
Never before in their association had he used that word and it caught at Dina, and this time she
did meet his eyes and they had a deep stillness to them, a waiting quality, as if he expected a refusal and would accept it if she chose to make it.
'I promised to go straight home,' she said, but as the cynicism stole back into his grey eyes she was sharply struck by the awareness that this might be their final chance to be together, for once she was married there could be no more meetings with him.
'All right,' she added. 'I—I am rather thirsty.'
'Grazie.' That was all he said, with not a hint of a smile on his face. He turned his attention to his riding-boots, long and supple, with an ox-blood gleam to the leather from which they were cut. He ran his lean hand over the leather, and Dina felt the tightening of tiny nerves in the region of her ribs. It was a tingling sensation, tipped by tiny barbs of fire, and she wasn't so naive that she didn't know what caused the feeling as she gazed at that tapering hand like a swordsman's, with the speck-less trimmed fingernails and none of that showy liking for rings on his fingers. What had he been in a previous existence? A sorcerer, or the son on the bar sinister side of a noble escutcheon?
As he stood there running a critical eye over those handmade boots he had more than a hint of the ruthless patrician in his profile; more of an air than those young men who formed part of the upper-crust of Californian society.
'What do you think?' He turned to her with a quick smile. 'A bit on the dashing side, eh, for a hotel-keeper?'
'They're like the boots of a condottiere,' she said.
'A soldier of fortune, eh? I suppose you could say I'm a modern version of one.'
They left the shop with their packages and outside on the pavement, in the sane light of the somewhat misty day, Dina was nervously tempted to sav she had changed her mind about having tea with him. She cast a quick look at him and the breath caught in her throat,, for he seemed to be reading her mind as his eyes raked over her face and ran down her slim body, clad in a suede hip-jacket, tapering check trousers, and a soft shirt almost the exact colour of her eyes. In the lobes of her ears were a tiny pair of cloudy ambers, and the opaque sunlight played over her silvery cap of hair.
'How devilishly pretty you are,' he almost growled. 'You are a rare creature, Dina Caslyn.'
'Oh—why?' A warmth swept upwards over her cheekbones, and a pulse beat quickly at the base of her throat. Nothing could be more dangerous than to be thought attractive by this man ... nothing could be more foolish than to stay and be aware that she wanted the bittersweetness of this meeting to be prolonged. Wanted it like an addict needing the wine that left a guilty hangover.
'You,' he shrugged, 'have a pair of perfect ears. Haven't you noticed, not many people have?'
'Raf-'
'You dare say it, what I see wTitten in your eyes.' His eyes became a glittering grey and his jaw had set like iron. 'You can leave your car where you have parked it and we'll drive in mine to the place I have in mind for our tea. Is it so much to ask. when Bay Bigelow will be having you for breakfast, dinner and supper?'
'Is it wise?' she murmured.
'That, Dina, whether you realise it or not in your infinite innocence, is a provocative remark.'
'
His lips quirked. 'If you need to question the wisdom of being alone with me—my dear, the last time it was I who got the knee.'
'You don't forget, or forgive too easily, do you, Raf?'
'That?' A sudden brilliant amusement filled the depths of his eyes. 'I still have a very Italian soul, Dina, and I have no time for women of loose morals. It hurt like hell, but I deserved it. Good for you, but dio mio, how slim legs have sharp knees!'
'Raf, you could have killed me!'
'At that precise moment. Come, my car is just around this corner and I'll lug you there underneath my arm if you won't walk.'
Her fingers clenched the ribbon of her slipper box. An ordeal of uncertainty was hers—to go or not to go. Raf took a threatening step towards her, so tall as she looked up at him, dark-avised, lean and sinister, and supremely capable of carrying out his threat.
Dina walked with him to his car, feeling there was a minor earth tremor going on under her legs. He ran a large Hispano-Suiza from other days, bold coloured, outlandish, and remarkably well sprung. They drove along the Sunset Boulevard into the cool canyons of Beverly Hills, and came out upon the wide smooth road that led into Las Palmas.
Behind the wheel of the big car Raf was a clean and sweeping driver who cornered superbly. Dina knew in what direction they were heading, but at this stage there seemed no point in resisting him. They were on their way to his Sun Tower.
'You are as nervous as a kitten on the wrong side of the fence,' he said. 'Relax and you'll enjoy the ride—I'm not kidnapping you, as tempting as the
idea might seem. Did you know that in certain parts of Italy if there is parental objection to a love match, then the young man snatches the girl and rides off with her. After they have spent a night together there can be no more objection to the match and so they are married in order to restore the girl's good name. Do you think such a system would work in America?'
Dina shot a glance at his profile and wondered if he were being cynical or serious. 'I wouldn't advise you to try it on,' she replied. 'American girls aren't quite so—so romantic, if that is the word for what happens in your wild Italian hills.'
'Doesn't such an elopement seem romantic to you?' He shot her a quizzing look. 'Are you so fearfully keen on all the rigmarole and ritual of so-called civilised marriage? There's a lot of reserve to you, Dina, and somehow I can't imagine that you like the idea of being the satin-clad star of a big production wedding to which many people have been invited, with buckets of champagne, dozens of presents, avid eyes on you from the moment you take your place beside the groom, looking like a lovel
y ghost. I believe you'd like to dash off to some quiet border town and get it all over as soon as possible. Come, am I right?'
'I'm sure you think you are,' she said, trying to speak distandy, in fear that he might read deeper into her mind ... and her heart.
'I was watching your face when you were shown your wedding slippers. Was that the smile of Cinderella that I saw, that tortured little twist of the lips?'
'You have a vivid imagination, Raf, and the Latin gift for making mystery where there is none
'I see. You have no confidante but your own heart, eh?'
'I'd hardly make a confidante of you,' she rejoined.
'I wonder why not when I also possess the Latin love of secrecy. Are there things in your heart, Dina, that I mustn't be told?'
'My heart, signore, is my affair, and if you're going to act the inquisitor then I'm going to insist that you turn the car and take me back to where I can pick up my coupe.'
'Ah, was it an unspoken covenant that you and I took tea together if I made polite conversation and kept my toes off your green-green grass? How boring, Dina. How tiresome to be barred from the naughtiness of saying forbidden things—after all, who is to know?'
'I shall know.'
'Isn't that carrying virtue a little too far? I'm sure your worthy young man can pot a shot with no touble at all, but I doubt his ability to read a woman's mind—least of all your mind, Dina.'
'I haven't a devious mind, thank you, nor one that is black as the inside of a tinker's kettle.'
'Ouch,' he laughed softly. 'Does Bay Bigelow know that you have a touch of temper and a shrewish little tongue at times? No, of course he doesn't! He barely knows a thing about the real you. He'd be shocked to his upstanding backbone if he even suspected that his snow-maiden could blaze into fury and know exactly where to disarm a man. Ah, what a waste of potential 1 As a man of business I hate to see anything at half capacity.'
'Thanks,' she said. 'If my voltage is that low, then I daresay you'll be glad to get back to the type
of women who smoulder more than I do ... once you've satisfied your curiosity about me. Did you hope that I'd have one mad fling before my marriage—with you?'
'Heaven forbid that I'd be that fortunate.' As he spoke he swung the car on to the forecourt of his hotel, a grand sweep of a piazza fronting the towering facade of what he had visualised and had built to his exact requirements. His silver castle, thought Dina, as she climbed from the car and stood there gazing up at the glittering structure whose upper towers were lost in the mist. The last time she had been here she had been companioned by Bella and she hadn't known that the place was owned and run by Raf Ventura. She hadn't dreamed that he had watched her and wondered if she might be the type to have an affair with him.
She turned to face him ... her heart seemed to check as she met his eyes, almost crystalline in his lean dark face.
'What you're thinking isn't true at all,' he said harshly. 'I envied the all-American guy who might have you for his own. but I never thought for one minute that you went in for flings—last-minute or otherwise. You know, it might take the hook out of my throat if I could believe you were like so many other women, careless about cheating, corruptible, grabbing at today and not caring about tomorrow. But it looks as if I'm going to have to swallow that hook, or choke on it.'
'Don't talk like that.' She gave a little shiver and stared at his strong brown throat in the opening of his brown silk shirt. 'Are we going to the restaurant?' She made as if to cross to where a marble staircase led to the lobby, with its Persian blue
chairs and carpet, its walls hung with an Italian harlequinade which she remembered studying. Had he watched her then? And what was it he had really hoped for?
His fingers caught her by the wrist. 'My penthouse—don't refuse, donna mia. You'll be as safe as Beatrice with Dante. I take my oath!'
His touch was warm against her skin, more surely intimate than anything had ever been. Fair Beatrice and dark Dante, meeting on a bridge that symbolised the separate lives that they would lead, chained hearts in bodies that walked apart.
'All right,' Dina murmured, and he escorted her to the scenic elevator of the hotel, a curving structure of glass and steel, winging them to his penthouse apartment at the very crown of the building. The mist closed around them, and she felt as if an eagle had hold of her and was carrying her into the sky.
They crossed a small lobby of golden polished wood and he unlocked a door into a spacious lounge whose parquet floor was covered here and there by rough wool rugs; the kind that he might have brought back from an Italian holiday. She saw a pair of enormous couches in off-white hide, hand-chiselled cabinets of dark glossy mahogany, and there on the wall a striking death-mask in bronze, with the satiny finish of perfect casting.
She didn't need to ask to whom the Italianate features had. belonged; those lips that took the same mordant twist as Raf's when he was being cynical.
She felt him at the back of her, just close enough to be felt with every nerve in her body. 'Yes, Don Cicero,' he murmured. 'You see my facial likeness
to my notorious grandparent, don't you? Are you wondering again if that resemblance is more than skin deep? If I am a member of the rackets and from them have made my money? This is what the godmother has planted in your head, eh, about me? Do you believe her?'
'No.' Dina made the decision suddenly and finally. 'I think you have a tough and ruthless brain, and you prefer the challenge of making your money rather than stealing it. Also your mother and father were hurt by the notoriety of—him.' She gestured at the bronze mask. "Why was it made, and why do you have it on your wall?'
'My father had it done at the request of Don Cicero, to always remind me, his grandson, that crime leads nowhere in the end, only to death. It was a pity he ever left Italy. Does he seem to you to have the face of an infidel?'
'No, but faces can be deceptive, can't they?'
'You find my face that of a deceiver?' He placed his hands upon her shoulders and swung her to face him. She gazed up at him and he seemed to her to have the face of a conqueror, with the hair that slashed downwards on his forehead in an explicit black peak, with the bold Roman nose, and the jaw which had a keen, ruthless strength about it. He had no illusions about his own dynamic powers; he had never needed to be a member of a mob. He stood alone, and his Sun Tower was his symbol of himself.
'You are solitary, aren't you?' she said. 'Like the eagle, and this is your eyrie.'
'Benvenuto! Welcome to my eyrie.' He led her across the room and opened the glass doors of his private terrazza, where on a clear day a panorama
of Las Palmas would be visible, and in the evening there would be a fantasy of lights and shadows, like being trapped in a beautiful glass bottle.
'You are still very nervous,' he said, quirking an eyebrow. 'Don't you like it on my side of the fence?'
'We both know that I'm playing truant, don't we, Raf?' She gazed out at the swirls of mist and felt on the edge of a precipice, let alone a fence.
'We met by chance,' he reminded her. 'We didn't plan to meet like guilty conspirators.'
'Isn't chance the fool's name for fate?' she asked. 'There is something fateful in the way we meet a-and it frightens me. I shouldn't have come here—I should have resisted when you asked.'
'Fate doesn't always permit us to resist. Let me take your coat.'
He had made up his determined mind that she would stay, so with tremulous fingers she unbuttoned her jacket and handed it to him. As his terrazza was completely enclosed by glass there was no sense of chill up here, even though the graceful building seemed to soar into the clouds.
'Won't you miss this when you move into your haunted mansion?' she asked.
"It will not look haunted when the builders and decorators are finally finished with it. In any case. I shall probably only use it for my rural base and will still spend most of my time here at the penthouse—did you think I had made plans to become a family man?'
'W
ould that be so surprising?' She made herself meet his eyes. 'Even an eagle must one day share his feathered nest—isn't it the law of nature?'
"Very much so, if he finds the mate to suit him.
Eagles can be obstinate when it comes to sharing their eyrie and if they can't find their chosen mate they prefer to fly alone.'
'Does that apply to Italian eagles? I thought it part of their natural heritage to want a son to follow them.'
'It is probably the heritage of most natural men. but I may have chained my desires to a very special kind of woman. Had you thought of that?' His scrutiny of her was quite unsparing as he spoke, and like an arrow it winged to her, that shattering sense of harmony that was totally unfelt with anyone else. With Raf she could say whatever came into her head, and it was a forbidden wine, an intoxicant she should run away from ... but -where could she go? He had her trapped high above that other world where satin, silver and shining stones were being bonded together to make chains that would bind her to a socially desirable young man, whose heart was kind but whose eyes had never made her feel weak when he looked at her.
Grey and glittering eyes cutting away the silk shirt from her slim and virtuous body.
'Don't, Raf!' She gave him a faintly tortured look and his smile pursued her across the terrazza, where the high glass walls held her captive, like a moth in a bottle. 'You promised to be good.'
'I'm being a saint—for me.' His lean hand stole down the soft suede folds of her jacket, which he held over his arm. 'Take a seat while I phone down for tea—tell me, are you very hungry? I had to attend a board meeting and missed lunch and quite frankly I feel like having rather more than the traditional plate of cakes. What do you say?'
Dina had lunched sketchily herself, having been
too concerned for Bella to do more than pick at her food. There was rather an empty feeling at her midriff, and it also occured to her that if Raf were occupied with a good menu he might stop looking at her with those devouring eyes.
'I am rather peckish,' she admitted. 'What do you have in mind—in the way of food, I mean!'
The Sun Tower Page 13
