A Dangerous Solace

by Lucy Ellis

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said slowly, ‘I was in a hurry the other day. I almost didn’t stop in at Nero’s.’

  ‘Nero’s?’

  ‘The coffee bar in Rome. I would have missed you—this.’ He reached out and stroked the line of her cheek, down around the curve of her jaw.

  Unaccountably Ava’s eyes filled with tears. ‘But you didn’t miss me,’ she said huskily.

  ‘Then why are you crying, tesoro?’

  Ava gave a self-conscious little laugh. ‘I don’t know.’

  But she did. Her heart felt full to overflowing. He wasn’t anything like the way she’d made him in her head—the self-defensive picture she’d created of a spoiled, privileged aristocrat who didn’t care about the women he slept with, only the conquests he made. He wasn’t arrogant either. He just possessed confidence in who he was, what he could do. Travelling with him, she felt incredibly safe and also relaxed.

  All of her life she had been the one to take charge.

  It was nice knowing she didn’t have to.

  He would take care of it.

  The fact he expected to take care of it should have lifted her hackles, but it was difficult to begrudge him a role he assumed so naturally.

  ‘Where will we go now?’ she asked.

  He gave her a supremely masculine smile. ‘My turn to surprise you.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘NO, I COULDN’T—I can’t. It’s too much, Gianluca.’

  ‘On the contrary. It’s perfect.’ He held the necklace, with its tiny tourmalines, green beryls, amethysts, pink sapphires and diamonds delicately wrought through a white gold chain, against her throat.

  The jeweller in the exclusive little shop hovered discreetly in the background.

  Ava was all too conscious of their audience—until Gianluca’s shoulders blocked them out and he bent his head close to hers.

  ‘Let me spoil you, tesoro,’ he said, his eyes intent on hers.

  ‘But I don’t need you to buy things for me,’ she answered. ‘I have my own money.’

  His mouth twitched. ‘It is not the cost, Ava, it is the sentiment.’

  She looked anxiously at the divine glittering string he hung before her and the thought flittered through her mind that it was a very expensive piece of rope she might easily hang herself on.

  ‘Then it is a no?’ he said, with that infinitesimal Latin shrug.

  She wanted it so badly. Not because it was beautiful—although it was—but because he wanted her to have it. And he was being so sweet in letting her have her way although it disappointed him. He wasn’t pushing it on her, and he could have no idea how good that made her feel.

  Gianluca always gave her a choice, and after a lifetime of struggling and fighting to make her own choices, to have her voice heard, it was a true gift well beyond the glitter of an obscenely priced piece of jewellery.

  ‘No.’ She laid her hand on his arm. When he gave her a quizzical look she smiled and blurted out. ‘I mean, yes. Yes, I want you to spoil me. If you want to.’

  She’d officially handed in her Miss Independent, Miss Stand Alone card in at that moment, but Gianluca didn’t seem to see the significance. He merely placed the necklace back in its box and with a barely discernible nod of his head had the jeweller and three members of his staff transferring the tiny purchase to an exquisite box.

  As they emerged into the bright day after the hushed, strategically lit environs of the jeweller’s Ava said, a little haplessly, ‘But we left it behind.’

  ‘No, cara, it will be delivered to the hotel. I didn’t think you would want to carry it around all day in your handbag. Am I right?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she muttered, feeling a little foolish. Why didn’t she know these things? And now Gianluca knew she didn’t have a clue.

  He was the first man who had ever bought her jewellery. Not unexpectedly her mind shot to the little engagement ring she had secreted away in her suitcase. She had bought it in preparation for Bernard’s proposal from an estate jewellers near her office, on her own.

  She’d forgotten it in all the excitement.

  Unease formed a stagnant pool in her stomach. She didn’t want to think about the woman who had made that purchase, the woman who had seen nothing wrong in shelling out for their holiday and the ring, as if by paying for everything she could control what happened.

  ‘You are really very sweet,’ he said, putting his arm around her.

  Ava disliked public displays of affection. She disliked anything that drew attention to her, so someone could say, Look at her—what’s wrong with her? but her judgement seemed out of place at this moment, with this man...and Italy seemed to be full of canoodling couples. In fact love seemed to be a part of the public display along with dressing up and that charming custom passeggiata—walking every evening through the town simply to be seen.

  ‘So are you,’ she said, resting her head against his shoulder.

  ‘I am sweet, tesoro?’ He sounded amused.

  ‘Yes, you always have been. I remember—’ She broke off, aware she had broken her own rule not to speak about seven years ago.

  But it was too late. He bent his head close to hers. ‘You remember...?’

  ‘When you were twenty-three. When we first met.’ She touched his chest with her hand. ‘You were so gentle, kind and sensitive, and yet strong. I felt safe with you.’

  ‘Tesoro,’ he said, capturing her hand in his and bringing it to his lips, ‘you must never tell an Italian man he is sensitive. It just won’t do.’

  ‘I think you were—are.’ She could feel that heavy weight of seven years lifting off her chest.

  ‘If it pleases you to think so, then I’m glad,’ he said neutrally.

  But she sensed his resistance. He was more than simply uncomfortable with the description.

  Cautiously Ava reached up and touched his jaw, running her fingertips lightly over the incipient stubble.

  ‘It is a nuisance,’ he said in a low voice, capturing her hand. ‘I need to shave twice a day. Even then I will probably mark your soft skin.’

  ‘No,’ Ava said with feeling. ‘I like it. I—’ She broke off.

  A wave of embarrassment swept through her and she didn’t know what to say. She was standing in the middle of a busy street, on the other side of the world from where she had always lived, in the arms of this amazing man, saying out loud all sorts of things she would usually only whisper to her pillow, and he was listening to her and looking at her with those eyes as if...as if...

  ‘What else do you like?’ he prompted.

  ‘I like you,’ she said, wondering what on earth had got into her.

  ‘Si, this did occur to me,’ he said as he angled her towards the car, ‘but I didn’t like to push my luck.’

  * * *

  They drove the winding coastal road out of Positano. They drank limoncello and ate clams for lunch on a terraced restaurant looking out over the bay at Amalfi. They walked through the town and in the early evening strolled with half the inhabitants along the waterfront.

  Gianluca had found he wanted to know everything about her.

  Where she’d gone to school. Too many to count.

  What was her first job? Sweeping up hair clippings in a hair salon.

  Her favourite colour? Blue. Her favourite song? Anything with Billie Holliday singing it.

  She’d laughed then and asked some questions of her own.

  Where had he gone to school? A military academy, aged eight.

  Maybe the Twenty Questions wasn’t such a hot idea, he realised now, as the smile was wiped off Ava’s face.

  ‘Eight?’ she repeated.

  ‘It is how it is done in my family, cara. All Benedetti males have attended the same military academy for five generations.’

  ‘Is done?’

  ‘Was done. As I don’t intend to have children the question for me is moot. But my sisters have not followed the custom with their male children.’

  ‘No?
’ Her voice sounded a little hollow.

  Gianluca recognised stony ground when he stood on it. Was she referring to his sisters or his comment about himself?

  ‘You have sisters?’

  Si, definitely about him.

  ‘Two—four nephews, two nieces.’ He tried not to look uncomfortable by tugging on the neck of his shirt.

  ‘You don’t like children?’

  ‘Sure. I love kids.’

  Ava regarded him with those sea-green eyes and he braced himself for the feeling of annoyance and sheer frustration a woman badgering him on this topic always aroused.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  It was all she said. Swishing her hair over her shoulder, she turned to look out over the water.

  Just hmm?

  Inferno, what was that supposed to mean? He didn’t have to explain himself. It was a long, boring story—Dio, he’d told it to himself so many times even he was bored with it! But perhaps Ava should hear it so that she understood, so that she didn’t make any plans involving him...

  ‘This is magical. I can see why people turn out in the evening to promenade,’ she said unexpectedly, turning up eyes made soft by the light. ‘We should go out on the water tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow he had planned on meeting with some investors.

  ‘Unless you’ve planned something else?’

  Could a woman look more guileless? All her anticipation and uncertainty flickered in those few words.

  What could he say?

  ‘Anything you desire, Ava mio.’

  * * *

  The next day he took her out in a motorboat along the coast, around the Galli Islands. The day after they drove into the Lattari Mountains cradling the Amalfi Coast.

  A light rain began to fall and, hand in hand, they ran to shelter in a local church. In the dim incense-scented light he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He didn’t know what it was—perhaps it was the coastal light—but she seemed to shimmer in the gloom. Her dark shoulder-length cloak of hair, her pearly skin, the deep pink of her mouth—all hot colours on a rainy day. She rested against him, looking out at the rain, with his hands hooked around her waist, his head resting against hers.

  The weight of her was perfect.

  She smelled like vanilla and cloves.

  She smelled like Ava.

  ‘Do you see that hill?’ She pointed dead ahead. ‘It looks like a rabbit’s head.’

  He couldn’t see the rabbit.

  ‘Si, innamorata. A fluffy little bunny.’

  She eyed him wryly.

  ‘And over there—the forest. That’s a boot.’

  ‘Si, a boot.’

  ‘I made that one up to see if you were humouring me! And it’s not a forest—it’s a wood.’

  She shoved her shoulder into his chest playfully and then gave a little cry of delight.

  ‘Oh, look—is that a fox?’

  The whisk of red across the pasture was indeed a fox.

  He felt her thrill and realised that although he knew this area like the back of his hand, from boyhood summers with his maternal grandparents, looking at it through her eyes made him feel as if he was seeing this place for the first time.

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her that the fox was probably on its way to gobble up any real rabbits foolish enough to be darting around in the rain. She was a true city girl. She was...

  Making him crazy. Pazzo. Why was he discussing furry animals, in a church in a little village no one had ever heard of, when he had a hotel suite waiting for them? He wasn’t a tour guide, and he sure as hell didn’t think foxes were something to be delighted over rather than thought of as the vermin they were.

  He’d tell her that in a minute. He’d drag her out of here and they’d make a run for the car, rain or no rain, and drive all the way back to Positano at speed. And when they got to the hotel he’d strip her clothes off her and do what a sensible man would be doing with a beautiful woman—not hunkering down in churches on a day custom-made for more adult indoor activity.

  Then he’d get around to organising their transport south, because tomorrow was D-Day and all he’d been doing was dragging his feet round these tourist traps for days.

  She turned in his arms and looked up, her eyes shining. ‘I’ve never seen a fox before—at least not so close.’

  ‘Si, they’re shy little animals,’ he found himself saying. ‘You have to play your hand carefully around them...no sudden moves.’

  Which was when, instead of whisking her off for some debauchery, as he had done a hundred times before with other women, he bent his head and kissed her soft, delicious mouth. He forgot about D-Day and tourist traps and the idiocy of delighting in foxes and accepted he was possibly the luckiest bastardo in the world.

  * * *

  In town, he let her out to run another one of her mysterious errands, idling the car above the waterfront. He caught sight of her coming across the grass, the sun as bright here as it had been banished by cloud cover in the hills, shining on her chocolate hair.

  She looked Italian—there was no other word for it—in her simple button-front sundress. She even wore it sliding slightly over one shoulder, with the top two buttons undone over her cleavage and the bottom three buttons undone to reveal a portion of her long thighs with each step as the skirt opened over her knees. She looked happy and earthy and incredibly sexy, and Gianluca became aware his wasn’t the only pair of eyes on her.

  As he got out of the car a piercing wolf whistle had her looking around, and him looking too, to hunt the perpetrator down.

  He knew he hadn’t stopped thinking about her since she’d walked back into his life. He knew he would never forget her as she had been last night, wearing the string of pretty stones—wearing only the pretty stones—in his bed.

  Even before she’d accepted them, as he’d held them up against her pale throat in the jeweller’s, watched her breasts below her clavicles rise and fall, he’d seen them draped on her naked.

  He’d also seen the tremble in her hand as she took the string from him, and the vexation that had sent her dark brows together as she wrestled with her conscience.

  There could be a hundred and one reasons why a woman would not accept a gift from a man. Ava’s reason had been as transparent as those green eyes of hers. The gift meant something to her.

  As you wanted it to, idiota.

  He shifted uneasily on his feet. It wasn’t a pledge...it wasn’t a ring. It was just a token—no, more than that. It was a gesture—a sign of his esteem...his affection.

  And why shouldn’t he feel affectionate towards her? It was easy to stumble into putting labels on things, on feelings—and, yes, he did have feelings for her. Fairly strong feelings.

  Perhaps he always had.

  It didn’t mean this was anything beyond his experience...although it was.

  She was.

  He watched Ava bending down to pet a small dog. She was speaking to the owner, her face turned up like a sunflower.

  What would she think about his plan?

  If she said no, if she insisted on continuing with this ridiculous excursion to Ragusa...

  She stood up and turned her head.

  Her smile made his heart turn over in his chest.

  It crashed through him as he stood on a pavement in Positano, amidst scooters and tourists eating gelato and a hundred other peripherals that had never touched his everyday life—until this woman stepped into it and brought it into his world.

  The simple happiness of being with this woman.

  The way she made him feel.

  ‘Ava.’

  She turned to him, oblivious to what had just occurred in his world, and said, ‘Luca, this gentleman breeds Lhasa Apsos—’

  He framed her face with his big hands.

  ‘Come back to Rome with me.’

  Her mouth opened. No sound. But her eyes went soft and round and a little soulful.

  ‘No family. No Ragusa. No pretence, Ava. Just you and me. Say ye
s, innamorata.’

  She didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  * * *

  He flew them back to Rome.

  A small jet from Naples, in deference to Ava’s needs.

  They shot down the highway in his beloved Lamborghini Aventador roadster at dusk. He dropped the speed as they hit the drowsy late afternoon streets of the city he loved and everything became larger than life—the crumbling façades of old buildings, the ruins among the new that was Rome.

  It was the old that hung like a millstone around his neck.

  But this was new. This surging feeling—this certainty of purpose about a woman.

  He didn’t want to share her with his family. He didn’t want her to have to deal with her brother.

  To this end he’d arranged for two hundred red roses to land on his mother’s lap tomorrow morning by way of apology, and Ava had phoned her brother.

  ‘He asked me to put in a good word with you,’ she’d said in a bemused fashion when she had emerged from the bedroom with her phone.

  ‘You told him we were together?’

  Even now he couldn’t believe he’d been tactless enough to say it.

  Ava’s expression had neutralised in an instant. ‘I didn’t know it was a secret.’

  No, not a secret—but how to explain that in the past the women in his fishbowl world had appreciated his discretion?

  This wasn’t like that. It wasn’t a liaison. It wasn’t anything either of them should be ashamed of.

  He didn’t intend to hide her away in the palazzo. He hadn’t exactly formulated a plan, but he wanted to show her Rome, and naturally that would include meeting people—people who mattered to him—introducing her as...as...

  He looked over at her now. She was scrolling through her phone, checking the e-mails from her business.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Ava—’

  Ava said a rude word.

  ‘Cara...?’

  ‘Stop the car.’

  When he continued to drive she wailed, ‘Please, Benedetti!’

  It was the please that worked. Braking and pulling over, he barely had the car to a standstill before she sprang out.

  Swearing fairly colourfully himself Gianluca leapt out after her, stalking around to where she stood with one hand on her hip, the other waving her phone at him.