by India Grey
God, she remembered it as if it was yesterday. She‘d been so disapproving of Cristiano Maresca and what he did for a living, so determined to be cool and professional and not to be swayed by his legendary good-looks and notorious sex appeal. But the moment she‘d reluctantly lowered herself into the passenger seat of his terrifying car her pretence at sophisticated detachment had been completely shattered. By the time they‘d reached his villa in the hills she‘d been a wreck—a fact that had been impossible to disguise. It had also broken down the professional distance between them.
She closed her eyes, shifting restlessly in her seat as jagged arrows of desire pierced her, not wanting to think about what had happened next.
‗Do you feel scared now?‘
In the velvet darkness behind her closed lids Cristiano‘s voice was like gravel. But still it made her shiver, because it was the voice that she had heard in her dreams for so long.
Mutely she shook her head.
Not of the car or the road anyway. But the strength and force of her own longing, held in check for all these years, terrified her.
As they drove further north the clouds parted and the stars came out. It was suddenly much colder. Stopping for petrol and to fit snow chains on the tyres, Cristiano could feel the ice in the air. The mountains lay all around, like giant slumberous beasts.
Walking back to the car, after paying the awestruck teenage boy in the kiosk for the petrol, he flexed his cramped shoulders, putting off the moment when he‘d have to get back into the driving seat. The Campano CX8 might be hailed as one of the fastest and most desirable cars in the world, but it wasn‘t going to be winning any awards for its spacious interior. Something about the intimacy of the small space; the warmth inside and the cool scent of Kate Edwards‘ skin, the darkness and cold outside, made him feel restless and edgy.
As he reached the car he saw that she was still asleep, and felt an unfamiliar clenching sensation in his chest. Frustration, probably, he told himself sourly as he opened the door and slid into the driver‘s seat. If he‘d been alone he would have reached the chalet ages ago.
Starting the engine, he thought about what she‘d said. She‘d been afraid in the car with him before, because of her brother. Did that explain why, from the moment they‘d left Monte Carlo, he‘d been driving with such uncharacteristic caution? On some level did he know about her fear? Somehow, somewhere in his head, did he remember?
His mind raced as possibilities rushed through it. And hope. He‘d recognised her. Not consciously, but as soon as he‘d seen her at the party earlier he‘d responded viscerally—physically, dammit—proving that his body remembered her even if his head didn‘t. That was a good sign, wasn‘t it? All those memories were there. He just needed to access them, and hopefully spending the next twenty-four hours with her would see to that.
The powerful V8 engine gave a gratifying roar as he pulled away from the garage, the kiosk attendant watching open-mouthed through the window.
There were lots of tunnels on the road up into the mountains, and every one he drove through brought his thoughts back to the one at Monaco, where his car had left the track and hit the barrier. He‘d watched the footage countless times, but still he couldn‘t remember it. Six weeks until the start of the season, he thought bleakly. Abandoning his rigorous training schedule at this stage was a huge gamble—God only knew what Silvio would say when he found out. But ultimately he had no choice. He‘d do whatever it took, gamble everything he had, to get his life back.
Because if he lost this, he lost everything. There was nothing else. Never had been. He had been a sixteen-year-old on a fast track to self-destruction when he‘d spotted Silvio‘s car parked outside the theatre in Naples on that hot summer night and hotwired it. If Silvio hadn‘t given him a chance, hadn‘t seen some glimmer of potential in him that had singularly eluded both his mother and the nuns at school, Cristiano would almost certainly have been in prison long ago. Or dead.
Racing wasn‘t just his career, it was his life. It was his means of proving to the world that he wasn‘t the failure everyone had told him he was as a boy. And winning was his justification for destroying his mother‘s life. His vindication.
A not-quite-complete moon had broken free from behind the mountaintops and now floated above him, turning the road ahead into a river of silver and making diamonds glitter in the snow at the side of it. Eventually a sign for the exclusive mountain resort where Francine Fournier‘s chalet was situated loomed out of the darkness. As he turned off the main road onto the narrow mountain pass Kate stirred, arching her back and seeming to fight for a moment against the restriction of the seatbelt. Cristiano kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the narrow road ahead as the Campano‘s wheels spun on the ice and Kate‘s head fell sideways onto his shoulder.
He stiffened instantly, gritting his teeth as the pulse in his head was joined by an increase in the persistent throb of desire that he had been trying to ignore for the last four hours. Scowling out into the darkness, he tried to block out the butterfly whisper of her breath against his throat, the scent of her hair, and concentrate instead on finding Francine‘s house…
Chalet les Pins.
The headlamps lit up the sign on the gatepost—and the huge snowflakes that were now silently swirling out of the blackness. Grazie a Dio. Cristiano felt dizzy with exhaustion as he drove the last two hundred metres down the track towards the house and switched the engine off.
There was a light on over the porch of the chalet. He opened the car door and got out stiffly, taking care not to move suddenly and wake Kate as the icy air rushed at him like an avalanche. Collecting the bags from the Campano‘s tiny boot, he wearily climbed the steps and unlocked the front door, depositing them just inside and switching on the light before going back to get her.
He opened the passenger door. She had barely stirred for the last couple of hours and was still deeply asleep, so that even the sudden cold didn‘t wake her.
Turned sideways in the seat towards him, she had one hand tucked under her cheek. The car‘s harsh interior light gave her skin an unearthly pallor and made her long lashes cast spiky shadows over her cheeks.
He couldn‘t bring himself to wake her. Gathering her into his arms, taking care not to hit her head on the low roof as he eased her out of the car, he felt an odd, light-headed sensation. Her body was pliant and warm against his, and he had to clench his jaw against the lust that stabbed him in the gut as she sighed and shifted in his arms. He kicked the car door shut behind him.
Her eyelids flickered, and he felt her stiffen. He tightened his grip.
‗Mmm?‘
‗It‘s OK.‘ His voice, rusty from the long hours of silence, seemed to echo slightly in the cavernous night. ‗We‘re here. Go back to sleep.‘
Inside the house it was blissfully warm. The front door opened straight into a large open-plan room that was typically Alpine in style, and as he headed straight for the stairs that rose from one end Cristiano was vaguely aware of a huge sofa in front of the central fireplace, soft rugs in faded shades of crimson and indigo, and the soothing scent of woodsmoke and pine resin. He felt a moment of gratitude to Francine Fournier.
At the top of the stairs he pushed open the nearest door. The room was filled with moonlight from a large window, and it fell across a bed. Gently he placed Kate down on it, feeling her body go momentarily rigid as he let her go.
She breathed in sharply, struggling to sit up. An expression of exquisite desolation flickered across her face.
‗ Cristiano…‘
‗I‘m here.‘ He answered automatically, instinctively lowering his voice to a whisper in the velvety silence of the dark house.
Her eyes opened. They were filled with anguish, swimming with tears. For a moment they fixed on his face with a sort of hazy, unfocused pain, and then they closed again, the tears silently spilling over.
‗Kate…‘
His heart faltered. Without thinking he lowered himself to sit on the be
d beside her and pulled her against him, pressing his mouth against her hair and murmuring soothing sounds that were somewhere between English and Italian. Her hair smelled clean and sweet, and her body felt soft and voluptuous in his arms.
Unlike his. His body felt uncomfortably taut and rigid.
He lay very still, his teeth gritted against the huge, powerful waves of lust and want that battered against him, not daring to move, calling up every ounce of the iron self-discipline and will-power that had got him through the last four years.
And then, very gently, he felt her pull back from him and raise her head, so that she was looking up into his face.
‗You really are here…‘ she breathed.
And then, as if compelled by primitive forces completely outside their control, their mouths met. Kate‘s limbs were stiff, and chilled from sleeping in the cramped seat, but the touch of Cristiano‘s lips against hers brought her to life again, until her body was flaming and fluid with want.
She was still in some place halfway between sleeping and waking. Dimly she was aware of warmth, the scent of woodsmoke that filled the house, and moonlight spilling silver through the window onto the blissfully smooth sheets of a bed. But all of that was simply a background to the otherworldly ecstasy of his kiss. The anguish of the familiar dream still lingered, firing her with a fierce, focused passion, and as her fingers slid into his silken hair her senses reeled with the scent of his skin—carried in her head all this time.
She clutched at his back and felt hard muscles moving beneath her palms as he tore his mouth from hers and gazed down at her with eyes that burned through the half-light.
‘Kate…?’
It was a thousand questions in a single rasping word. She answered them by slowly reaching up and pulling off the jumper she had put on over her dress earlier that night. Her cheeks were still wet with the tears she had shed when she‘d thought this was just another dream, another goodbye.
She‘d said goodbye to him so many times in her dreams these last four years and woken alone. But now he was here, and the sheer miracle of that fact made her uncharacteristically bold. She wanted him. She had wanted him for so long that her body cried out with an urgency that wouldn‘t be hushed until he was inside her.
Her eyes never left his face. It was set like granite—as cool and pale and expressionless as an effigy on a tomb—but she saw the flare of molten desire in his eyes and it made her blood quicken and sing. Reaching up, she began to undo the buttons of his shirt with shaking fingers. Delicious, desperate want was building inside her like a silent scream as, inch by inch, his olive-skinned chest was revealed.
With a muffled curse he brought his hand up, trapping hers.
‗Is this what you want?‘ he growled.
‗Yes.‘ Her voice was a breathless shivering whisper. ‗I want you.‘ Freeing her hands from beneath his, she reached up and took his face between them, speaking with ferocious longing into his eyes. ‗I want you to remember.‘
For a second they gazed mutely at each other, and then with a sort of moan of surrender he was pulling her against him as his mouth came down on hers. The quiet room was filled with the sound of their breathing, the rustle of satin, and Kate‘s whimper of bliss as his hand slid beneath her skirt to meet the bare flesh of her thigh. Arching her back reflexively, she lifted her knees, bringing them up around his waist, opening herself for him.
The bed was soft and wide, and the black and silver world of moonlight and shadow beyond it had ceased to exist. Their fingers tangled together as they both fumbled with the buckle of Cristiano‘s belt. Kate raised her hips, desperate to be free of the tiny silk knickers Lizzie had insisted on buying, wriggling out of them and spreading herself starfish-like, throbbing with anticipation, on the feather quilt.
Every inch of her skin tingled with the need for his touch. She wanted him—all of him—on her and in her, with an urgency that struck her dumb.
But he understood. His hands moved up the insides of her thighs. Big hands.
Clever, strong, capable hands. Expert hands that left a quivering trail of rapture in their wake. His face was inches from hers. Their mouths opened and clashed again in a searing, devouring kiss before he pulled back again, holding her in his dark, hypnotic gaze as he entered her.
Oh, God, the relief. The screaming, delirious relief and joy and rightness turned her boneless and emptied her head of thought. She grasped a fistful of his silken hair as the rhythm of their movements grew more urgent and the old wooden bed creaked with every hard, hungry thrust.
Bliss opened up in front of her like a chasm. She felt Cristiano falter, heard his indrawn breath as his body tensed, and for a shimmering, breathless moment she teetered on the brink as time stopped and tears rained down her cheeks. And then she was falling, her fingers digging into the hard muscle of his back as she hurtled downwards into ecstasy.
Her high cry of pleasure echoed through the dark house, then faded into silence. Downstairs a clock ticked steadily, and the mountains stood around like watchful sentinels, impassive witnesses to her fragile joy.
Chapter Five
DAWN came, painting the sky a translucent and delicate shell-pink. Kate watched the last few diamond stars blur and dissolve, and the moon fade until it was little more than a pale fingerprint.
She had slept little and woken when it was still dark, watching as the room that had been no more than a shadowy background to last night‘s bliss gradually assembled itself into wood-panelled walls, a sloping, heavily beamed roof, solid pieces of furniture. Cristiano‘s arm was hooked around her waist, his hand resting between her breasts, his body hard and delicious at her back.
She felt warm, sated, oddly at peace. It was as if her brain, shocked by an overload of pleasure last night, had simply shut down, leaving nothing but the physical sensations of the moment. The past seemed as distant and unreal as a bad dream, and the future beyond this room, this wooden house surrounded by pine trees and snow-covered mountains, was impossible to contemplate.
She stretched her legs out, twisting carefully onto her back so that she could look into Cristiano‘s sleeping face. He stirred slightly, moving his arm and letting it come to rest again with his palm against her midriff, but his dark lashes barely flickered.
She felt her heart crack open.
Against the white pillow, beside her pale English skin, his was exotically dark, but aside from that, and the shadow of stubble on his jaw, every line of his face reminded her with exquisite poignancy of Alexander. She let her gaze wander over his fine dark brows and perfectly straight nose, downwards to the steep curve of his upper lip, the slight indentation in the lower one, the firm, square chin.
God, he was so beautiful. But, more than that, he was the man who had helped create the little boy she loved so much. The father of her child.
Gently she eased herself out of his arms and slid out of the bed. Taking great care not to wake him, she reached for the shirt he had worn last night and slipped her arms into it, then picked up her velvet evening bag from a red-upholstered armchair and opened it up to get out her phone.
Beside it was the letter. The letter with its bald lines stating the facts of Alexander‘s existence, the address of the sterile solicitor‘s office where any further contact should be directed. She felt a small pulse of pain and quickly snapped the clasp shut again. Dropping the bag back onto the chair, she tiptoed out of the room.
None of the curtains had been closed, so the clear pink light flooded in, making it easy for her to find her way downstairs. It was like a treehouse, Kate thought in wonder as she made her way silently through the smoke-scented living room and into the kitchen. Everything—from the panelled walls and beamed ceilings to the rug-strewn floor and hand-made kitchen cupboards—was made of polished, mellow wood. As she filled the kettle at the huge porcelain sink she felt like Goldilocks, making herself at home in the house of the Three Bears.
Champagne bottles clinked in the door of the fridge as she opened it to
look for milk, and she saw that the shelves were stocked with eggs, slender packets of smoked salmon, and paper-wrapped parcels of butter and cheese.
Francine Fournier was a life-saver in more ways than one, she thought wryly.
A Scandinavian long-case clock ticked softly at one end of the low room, and, glancing at it, Kate picked up her phone. It was still very early, and an hour earlier in England, but as both Alexander and Ruby were horribly early risers it was highly likely that Lizzie and Dominic would have been up for a while. Waiting for one of them to answer, Kate looked out of the window at the silent mountains, as pink as marshmal-low in the rising sun, and pictured their familiar big, untidy kitchen. She felt as if she was on another planet, rather than merely in another country.
‗Hello?‘ The voice on the other end of the line sounded distracted.
‗Lizzie—it‘s me.‘ In the silent house Kate kept her voice low. ‗Did I wake you?‘
‗Kate, honey! Of course you didn‘t wake me—we‘re on our second game of Snakes and Ladders here. I just didn‘t expect you to be up this early. You‘re supposed to be either lazing around in bed and making the most of valuable child-free time to sleep, or having wild sex with the gorgeous Signor Maresca.‘
