by Abby Green
‘Come here.’
She obeyed without question. When she stood before him he reached down for the hem of her dress and pulled it up and off. Then he turned her around and undid her flimsy bikini top so that it fell to the floor.
He turned her back and hooked his fingers into the bottoms, and pulled them down until she could step out of them at her feet. In that moment, naked, she’d never felt more womanly or more whole. Or more free of the shadows that had dogged her for as long as she could remember. They weren’t gone completely, but it was enough for now.
He took her hand and led her into the bathroom, which was fogged with steam that curled over their sticky, sandy bodies. Standing under the hot spray, Serena lifted her face and Luca covered her mouth with his, his huge body making the space tiny.
When he took his mouth off hers she opened her eyes to see his hot gaze devouring her. And just like that she was ready, her body ripening and moistening for him, ravenous at the sight of Luca’s gleaming wet and aroused body. He lifted her and instructed her to put her legs around him—then groaned and stopped.
She looked at him, breathless with anticipation. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘No protection, preciosa. We need to move.’
Serena was dazed as he carried her out of the shower, her legs still wrapped around his waist. She could see the pain on his face at the interruption but she was glad... She’d been too far gone to think about protection herself.
He put her down on the bed and reached for a condom from his cabinet, ripping the foil and sheathing himself with big, capable hands. Serena felt completely wanton as she watched this display of masculine virility.
And then he was coming back down over her, pushing her legs apart, settling between them, asking huskily, ‘Okay?’
She nodded, her chest tightening ominously, and then Luca was thrusting in so deep her back arched and her legs went around his waist. It was fast and furious, his gaze holding hers, not letting her look away.
Bliss broke over her after mere minutes. She was so primed—as if now it was the easiest thing in the world and not something that had been torturously elusive when they’d first made love.
Serena bit into Luca’s shoulder as powerful spasms racked her body just as he reached his own climax, his body thrusting rhythmically against hers until he was spent. He collapsed over her and she tightened her arms and legs around him, loving the feel of him pressing her into the bed, his body still big inside hers.
Eventually he withdrew, and Serena winced as her muscles protested. Luca collapsed on his back beside her, his breathing as uneven as hers. She looked at him to find him watching her with a small enigmatic smile playing around his mouth.
He came up on one arm and touched his fingers to her jaw. ‘You make me lose my mind every time...’ he admitted gruffly.
Serena looked at him. Somehow his confession wasn’t as comforting as she’d thought it might be. It left her with a definite sense that Luca did not welcome such a revelation.
And then he was kissing her again, wiping everything from her mind, and she welcomed it weakly. She was far too afraid to face the suspicion that she had fallen in love with this man and there was no going back.
Three days later
‘Miss DePiero? Senhor Fonseca said to let you know that he’s been unavoidably detained and you should eat without him.’
‘Okay, thank you.’ Serena put down the kitchen phone extension and looked at the chicken stew she’d made, bubbling on the state-of-the-art cooker. Unavoidably detained. What was that code for?
Crazy to feel so disappointed, but she did. She’d spent her lunch hour buying ingredients, and as soon as she’d finished work at the charity office she’d rushed back to start cooking.
And now she felt ridiculous—because wasn’t this such a cliché? The little woman at home, cooking dinner for her man and getting all bent out of shape because it was spoiled?
Mortified at the thought of what Luca’s reaction would have been to see this attempt at creating some kind of domestic idyll, and losing any appetite herself, Serena took the chicken stew off the cooker. When it had cooled sufficiently she resisted the urge to throw it away and put it into a bowl to store in the fridge.
Feeling antsy, she headed outside to the terrace. The stunning view soothed her in a way that Athens had never done, even though she now called it home.
‘Maledire,’ she cursed softly in Italian. And then she cursed Luca, for making her fall for him.
The weekend had been...amazing. She remembered Luca kissing the tattoo on her shoulder. He’d murmured to her, ‘You know the swallow represents resurrection?’
Serena had nodded her head, feeling absurdly emotional that he got it.
When they’d woken late on Sunday Luca had told her that he had to visit a local favela and she’d asked to go with him. She had seen first-hand his commitment to his own city. The amazing Fonseca Community Centre that provided literacy classes, language classes, business classes and a crèche so that everyone in the community could learn.
When she’d gone wandering, left alone briefly, she’d found Luca in the middle of a ring of men, doing capoeira, a Brazilian form of martial arts. He’d been stripped to the waist, his torso gleaming with exertion, making graceful and unbelievably agile movements to the beat of a drum played by a young boy.
She hadn’t been the only woman ogling his spectacular form. By the time he’d finished, a gaggle of women and girls had been giggling and blushing. But a trickle of foreboding had skated over her skin... That had been the moment when he’d caught her eye and she’d seen something indecipherable cross his face. By the time he’d caught up with her again there had been something different about him. He’d shut down.
He’d brought her back here, to this apartment, and even though he’d stayed the night and made love to her, something had been off. When she’d woken he’d been gone, and she hadn’t seen him again until late that evening, when he’d arrived and, with an almost feral look on his face, had kissed her so passionately that all tendrils of concern had fled, to be replaced with heat, distracting her from the fact that he clearly hadn’t been interested in anything else.
The truth was that every moment she spent with Luca was ripping her apart internally. Especially when he looked at her as if she were some kind of unexploded device, yet kissed her as if his life depended on it. Clearly he was conflicted about her. He’d admitted that it was hard for him to come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t what he’d believed her to be. And Serena had the gut-wrenching feeling that Luca would have almost preferred it if she had been the debauched, spoilt princess he’d expected.
She had to face the fact that her confession, while liberating for her, had not proved to be so cataclysmic for Luca.
And of course it wouldn’t have been, Serena chided herself. For Luca this was just...an affair. A slaking of desire. The fact that it had brought about her own personal epiphany was all Serena would have to comfort her when it was over, and that would have to be enough.
* * *
When Luca walked into the apartment it was after midnight. He felt guilty. He knew Serena had been making dinner because she’d told him earlier, when he’d seen her on a visit to the charity offices. It was a visit that had had his employees looking at him in surprise, because he usually conducted meetings in his own office and had little cause to visit them.
The apartment was silent, but he could smell the faint scent of something delicious in the air. When he went into the kitchen it was pristine, but he opened the fridge and saw the earthenware bowl containing dinner. The thought that perhaps she hadn’t eaten because he hadn’t been there made him feel guiltier. He hadn’t even known that Serena could cook until she’d told him she’d taken lessons in Athens.
And he hadn’t known how deeply enmeshed he was becoming wi
th her until he’d looked at her in the favela and the enormity of it all had hit him. It had taken seeing her against that dusty backdrop—Serena DePiero, ex-socialite and wild child, looking as comfortable in the incongruous surroundings as if she’d been born into them like a native. In spite of the white-blonde beauty that had set her apart. He’d certainly been aware of the men looking at her, and the same black emotion that had gripped him at the beach had caught him again.
Jealousy. For the first time.
It was in that moment that a very belated sense of exposure had come over him and made him pull back from a dangerous brink. Luca knew better than anyone how fickle people were—how you couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t just pull your world out from under your feet within seconds.
His own parents had done it to him and his brother—setting them on different paths of fate almost as idly as if they were Greek gods, playing with hapless mortals. For years he’d had nightmares about his parents pulling them limb from limb, until their body parts were so mixed up that they didn’t even know who was who any more.
Serena was getting too close—under his skin. Everything kept coming back to how badly he’d misjudged her—and never more so than now. He’d just had a conversation with his brother, who was in Rio on business.
And yet as he stood in the doorway of her bedroom now and saw the shape of her under the covers, the bright splash of white-blonde hair, he was taking off his clothes before he even realised what he was doing, sliding in behind her, wrapping himself around her and trying desperately to ignore the way his soul felt inexplicably soothed.
Even as she woke and turned towards him, her seeking sleepy mouth finding his, Luca was steeling himself inside—because this would all be over as soon as she knew what his brother had just told him. Because then everything that had bound them from the past would be gone.
But just...not yet.
* * *
When Serena woke in the dawn light, the bed was empty. But the hum in her body and the pleasurable ache between her legs told her she hadn’t dreamt that Luca had come into her bed last night. Or dreamt the mindless passion he’d driven her to, taking her over the edge again and again, until she’d been spent, exhausted, begging for mercy.
It was as if Luca had been driven by something desperate.
She blinked, slowly coming awake. And even though her body was sated and lethargic from passion, her heart was heavy. She loved Luca, and she knew with cold certainty that he didn’t love her. But he wanted her.
His love was his commitment to the environment, to making the world a better place in whatever small way he could, born from his zeal not to be like his predecessors—a zeal she could empathise with.
And Serena knew that she wouldn’t be able to continue falling deeper and deeper without recognising that the heartbreak would be so much worse when she walked away.
It was only when she sighed deeply and moved her head that she felt something, and looked to see a note on the pillow beside her.
She reached for the thick paper and opened it to read:
Please meet me in my office when you wake. L.
A definite shiver of foreboding tightened Serena’s skin. No wonder there had been something desperate in Luca’s lovemaking last night. This was it. He was going to tell her it was over. The signs had been there for the last few days, since the favela.
Anger lanced her. To think that he would just send her away so summarily after sating his desire, which was obviously on the wane, and after she’d enjoyed working in the charity office so much. But, as much as she’d come to love Rio de Janeiro, she didn’t relish the thought of being in such close proximity to him in the future—seeing him get on with his life, take another lover.
She wasn’t going to let him discard her completely, though; no matter what had happened between them personally he owed her a job. In any event, she knew now that she had to go home. So, while Luca might be preparing to let her go, Serena told herself stoutly that she was ready.
It was only when she noticed her hands trembling in the shower that she had to admit her anger was stemming from a place of deep fear that she was about to feel pain such as she’d never felt before—not even when she’d been at her lowest ebb, trapped by her addictions. Before, she’d anaesthetised herself against the pain. Now she would have nothing to cling on to, and she wasn’t sure how ready she was to cope with that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN SERENA KNOCKED on Luca’s office door about an hour later she felt composed, dressed in plain trousers and a silk shirt. Hair tied back. It had been a mere two weeks since she’d come here for the first time, but she was a different person.
Damn him.
His assistant opened the door and ushered her in, and it took a second after the girl had left for Serena to realise that there was another man in the room. He was standing on the other side of Luca’s desk, and Luca stood up now from his high-backed chair.
‘Serena—come in.’
Her heart lurched. So formal. For a crazy moment Serena wondered if the other man was a solicitor, so that Luca could get out of the contract?
When she came closer, though, she saw a resemblance between the two men, even though this man had tawny eyes and dark blond messy hair. They were almost identical in size and build. The stranger was as arrestingly gorgeous as Luca, but in a more traditional way—in spite of the scar she could see running from his temple to his jaw. He oozed danger, even though he looked as if he might have stepped from the pages of Italian Vogue in an immaculate dark suit.
She sensed a subtle tension in the air, and had just realised herself who he was when Luca said, ‘This is my brother—Max Fonseca Roselli.’
She came forward and took the hand offered to her, suffering none of the physical reaction Luca caused within her with only a look. Even so, she saw the unmistakably appreciative gleam in his unusual golden-green eyes and could well imagine that he must leave a trail of bleeding hearts wherever he went. He had that same indomitable arrogance that Luca wore so well.
‘Nice to meet you.’
His hand squeezed hers. ‘You too.’
Serena pulled away, getting hot, sensing Luca’s intense focus on them and Max’s desire to needle his brother. When she looked at Luca, though, he gave nothing away and she cursed herself. Of course he wouldn’t be proprietorial or jealous.
Luca indicated for them to sit down and said heavily, ‘Max has some news for you...and me. I thought I owed it to you to let him tell you face to face.’
Now Serena was nervous, and she looked from him to Max and back. ‘What is it?’
Luca explained. ‘I asked Max to look into what happened at the club that night—to do some digging.’
Before she could properly assimilate that information, Max drawled in a deep voice, ‘My brother knows I have some...less than legitimate connections.’
Serena looked at him and her heart went out to both of them for what they’d been through as children. The way their parents had all but rolled the dice to decide their fate.
Huskily she admitted, ‘I... Luca told me what happened.’
Max’s eyes flared and he shot his brother a scowl.
Luca said warningly, ‘This isn’t about us.’
For a second Serena could have laughed. They might not be identical, but right then she could see how similar they were—and they probably didn’t even know it themselves.
Max looked back to her. ‘I did some digging and discovered who did plant the drugs on Luca that night. He was a small-time dealer and in the crush he spotted you together. He knew that if he could plant the drugs on you or Luca no one would ever dispute that you had been involved.’
Shame lanced Serena to be reminded that everyone knew of her exploits and how tarnished her reputation was, even as her heart beat fast and she wondered
why Luca had asked his brother to do this.
Max continued. ‘He’s actually in jail at the moment on another charge, and he’s been bragging to anyone who will listen about how he set you and Luca up—it would appear that he couldn’t bear to keep such a coup to himself. He’s been charged with the offence and hasn’t a leg to stand on because he’s confessed to so many witnesses.’
For a moment the relief was so enormous that Serena felt dizzy, even though she was sitting down. She looked at Luca, whose face was stern. ‘You can clear your name.’
He nodded, but he didn’t look happy about it. He looked grim.
Max stood up, rising with athletic grace. ‘My flight leaves in a couple of hours. I have to go.’
Serena stood up too. ‘Thank you so much. This means...a lot.’
Max inclined his head before sending an enigmatic look to his brother. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
Luca nodded. They didn’t embrace or shake hands before Max left, striding out with that same confident grace as his brother.
When he was gone, Serena sank down onto the chair, her head in a spin. She looked at Luca, barely taking in that he looked a little pale, his face all lean lines. ‘How...? Why did you ask him to do this?’
He sighed heavily. ‘Because I owed it to you to find out the truth. After all, you’ve been nothing but honest with me. The fact is that I think I suspected you were innocent in the jungle. This just proves that you were as much a victim as I was. You deserve to have your life back, Serena. And you deserve to have the slate cleared too. My lawyers and my PR team will make sure this is in all the papers.’
Serena felt an almost overwhelming surge of emotion to think that Luca was going out of his way to clear her name too. Perhaps now people wouldn’t always associate her with feckless debauchery.
Treacherously, this made her hope for too much, even when The End was written into every tense line of Luca’s body. Clearly he just wanted to move on now.
