Unexpected Pleasures

by Penny Jordan

  She turned her head to watch her sons. Yes, Carlo had healed so much within her, yet there had been one thing he couldn’t heal. One stubborn, emotional wound for which she still had not found closure.

  The worry of the last few months had stolen what little spare flesh she had had from her body, leaving her, in her own eyes, too thin. Her watch was loose on her wrist as she pushed the heavy weight of her sun-streaked tawny hair back off her face and kept it there with one slender hand.

  She had been eighteen when she’d married Carlo, and nineteen when the boys had been born, an uneducated but street-smart girl who had been only too glad to accept Carlo’s proposal of marriage despite the fact that he was so much older than her. Marriage to him had provided her with so much that she had never had, and not just in terms of financial security. Carlo had brought stability into her life, and she had flourished in the safe environment he had provided for her.

  She had been determined to do everything she could to repay Carlo’s kindness to her, and the look on his face the first time he had seen the twins, lying beside her in their cots in the exclusive private hospital in which she had given birth, had told her that she had given him a gift that was beyond price.

  ‘Watch, Mum.’ Obediently she obeyed Sam’s demand that she watch as he and Nico turned cartwheels. One day soon they would be telling her not to watch them so closely. As yet they hadn’t realised just how carefully she did watch over them. Sometimes, with two such energetic and intelligent boys, it was hard not to be over-protective—the kind of mother who saw danger where they saw only adventure. Her own thoughts silenced the ever ready ‘be careful’, hovering on her lips. ‘Very good,’ she praised them instead.

  ‘Look, we can do handstands too,’ Sam boasted.

  They were agile, as well as tall for their age, and strongly built.

  ‘You have made good strong sons for me, Sasha,’ Carlo had often praised her. She smiled, remembering those words. Their marriage had bought her time and space in which to grow from the girl she had once been into the woman she was now. The sun glinted on the thin gold band of her wedding ring as she turned again to look at the hotel on the rocks above them.

  She had travelled all over the world with her late husband, visiting his chain of small exclusive hotels, but this one here in Sardinia had always drawn her back. Originally a private home, owned by Carlo’s cousin, Carlo had inherited the property on the cousin’s death, and had vowed never to part with it.

  * * *

  GABRIEL STOOD IN the shadow cast by the rocks and looked down onto the beach. His mouth twisted with angry contempt and something else.

  How did she feel now? he wondered, knowing that fate had reneged on the bargain she had struck with it, and that the security she had bought with her body was not, after all, going to be for life. How had she felt when she had learned that her widowhood was not going to be one of wealth and comfort?

  Had she cursed the man she married, or herself? And what of her sons? Something dark and dangerous ripped his guts with razor-sharp claws. Just watching them had brought to the surface memories of his own childhood here on Sardinia. How could he ever forget the cruel, harsh upbringing he had endured? When he had been the age of these two boys he had been made to work for every crust he was thrown. Kicks and curses had taught him how to move swiftly and sure-footedly out of their range. But then he had been an unwanted child, a child disposed of by his rich maternal relatives, abandoned by his father, to be brought up by foster carers. As a boy he had, Gabriel acknowledged bitterly, spent more nights sleeping outside with the farm animals than he had inside with the foster family, who had learned their contempt of him from his mother’s relatives.

  Gabriel believed that such an upbringing either made or broke the human spirit, and when it made it, as it had his, it hardened it to pure steel. He had never and would never let anyone deflect him from his chosen path, or come between him and his single-minded determination to stand above those who had chosen to look down on him.

  His maternal grandfather had been the head of one of the richest and most powerful of Sardinia’s leading families. The Calbrini past was tightly interwoven with that of Sardinia. It was a family riven in blood feuds, treachery and revenge, and steeped in pride.

  His mother had been his grandfather’s only child. She had been eighteen when she’d run away from the marriage he had arranged for her, to marry instead a poor but handsome young farmer she had believed herself in love with.

  Strong-willed and spoiled, it had taken her less than a year to realise that she had made a mistake, and that she loathed her husband almost as much as she did the poverty that had come with her marriage. But by then she had given birth to Gabriel. She had appealed to her father, begging him to forgive her and let her come home. He had agreed, but on condition that she divorced her husband and left the child with his father.

  According to the stories Gabriel had been told as a child, his mother hadn’t thought twice. Her father had paid over a goodly sum of money to Gabriel’s father on the understanding that this was a once and for all payment and that it absolved the Calbrini family from any responsibility towards the child of the now defunct marriage.

  With more money than he had ever had in the whole of his life in his pocket, Gabriel’s father had left his three-month-old son and set off for Rome, promising the cousin he had left Gabriel with that he would send money for his son’s upkeep. But once in Rome he’d met the woman who was to become his second wife. She had seen no reason why she should be burdened with a child who was not hers, nor why her husband’s money should be wasted on it.

  Gabriel’s foster parents had appealed to his grandfather. They were poor and could not afford to feed a hungry child. Giorgio Calbrini had refused to help. The child was nothing to him. His daughter had also remarried—this time to the man of his choice—and he was hoping that within a very short space of time she would give him a grandson with the lineage his pride demanded.

  Only she hadn’t, and when Gabriel was ten years old his mother and her second husband had both been killed when the helicopter they were in crashed. Giorgio Calbrini had then had no alternative but to make the best of the only heir he had—Gabriel.

  It had been an austere, loveless life for a young boy, Gabriel remembered, with a grandfather who’d had no love for him and had despised the blood he had inherited from his father. But at least under his grandfather’s roof he had been properly fed. His grandfather had sent him to the best schools—and had made sure that he was taught everything he would need to know when the time came to take over from him and become the head of the house of Calbrini. Not that his grandfather had had high hopes of him being able to do so, as he had made plain to Gabriel more than once. ‘I have to do this because I have no choice, because you are the only grandson I have,’ he had told Gabriel, ceaselessly and bitterly.

  Gabriel, though, had been determined to prove him wrong. Not to win his grandfather’s love. Gabriel did not believe in love. No, he had wanted to prove that he was the better man, the stronger man. And that was exactly what he had done. At first his grandfather had refused to believe Gabriel’s tutors when they praised his grasp of financial politics and all the complexities that went with them. But by the time he was twenty Gabriel had quadrupled the small amount of capital his grandfather had given him on his eighteenth birthday.

  Then, three weeks after Gabriel had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his grandfather had died unexpectedly and Gabriel had inherited his vast wealth and position. Those who had predicted that he would never be able to step into his grandfather’s shoes had been forced to eat their words. Gabriel was a true Calbrini, and he possessed an even sharper instinct for making money than his grandfather. But there was more to his life than making money. There was also the need to make himself emotionally invulnerable.

  And that was exactly what he was, Gabriel reflect
ed now. No woman would ever be allowed to repeat his mother’s rejection of him and go unpunished.

  Especially not this woman.

  He could hear Sasha speaking to her sons, the sound of her voice, but not her words, carried to him by the breeze.

  Sasha! By the time Gabriel was twenty-five he had become a billionaire. A billionaire who trusted no one and who kept the women he chose to warm his bed as exactly that—bedmates and nothing else. The rules he laid down for his relationships with them were simple and non-negotiable. No talk of love, or a future, or commitment; absolute fidelity to him while they were partners; absolute and total adherence to his safe sex and no babies policy. And, just to make sure that this latter rule wasn’t broken ‘accidentally on purpose’, Gabriel always took care of that side of things himself.

  Over the years he had endured his share of angry, bitter scenes, with weeping women who had thought they could change those rules and then learned their mistake. Magically those tears had quickly dried once they were offered a generous goodbye gift. His mouth twisted cynically. Was it any wonder that he had become a man who trusted no one, and most of all a man who despised women? So far as Gabriel was concerned there wasn’t a woman in existence who could not be bought. His mother had shown him what women were, and all the other women he had come into contact with since had confirmed what she had taught him when she had abandoned him for money.

  Not that he didn’t enjoy the company of women, or rather the pleasure of their bodies. He did. He had inherited his father’s good looks, and finding a willing female partner to satisfy his sexual needs had never been a problem.

  ‘Sam, don’t go too far. Stay here, where I can see you.’ Sasha’s words reached him this time, as she raised her voice so that her son could hear it. A caring mother? Sasha?

  Like his bitterness, the past wouldn’t let go of him. It was here around him now, gripping him so tightly that he could feel its pain.

  After his grandfather’s death he had had closed up his grandfather’s remote and uncomfortable house in Sardinia and bought himself a yacht. With financial interests in property, it had made sense for him to travel, looking for fresh acquisitions both material and sexual. And if a woman invited him to use her for his sexual pleasure then why should he not do so? Just so long as she understood that once his appetite was sated there would not be a place in his life for her.

  By the time he was twenty-five he had also already made the decision that when the time came he would pay a woman to provide him with an heir—a child to which he would make sure he had exclusive rights.

  Gabriel watched Sasha with cold-eyed contempt. Six weeks ago, just after his thirty-fifth birthday, he had stood beside the hospital bed of his dying second cousin—the Calbrini family was extensive, and had many different branches—listening to Carlo pleading for his help for the two sons Carlo loved more than anything else in the world.

  The same warm breeze that was playing sensually with Sasha’s long hair was flattening the thick darkness of his own to reveal the harsh purity of a bone structure that bore the open stamp of Sardinia’s human history—the straight line of his Roman nose a classic delineation of masculine features that echoed the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, coupled with the musculature of a man in his prime. Centuries ago the Saracens had invaded Sardinia, leaving their mark on its history and its inhabitants through the women they had taken and impregnated. It had been Carlo who had told him that legend had it that boy children born to such women were said to possess the physical stamina and legendary merciless cruelty of the men who had fathered them. Gabriel knew that there was Saracen blood in his own family’s past, and he knew too that it showed in his attitude to life. He had no mercy for those who double-crossed him.

  Eyes as golden and as deathly watchful as those of an eagle studied the two boys. Privileged, and loved by a doting elderly father. Their childhood was so very different from his own. The sunlight gilded his skin, warmly gold rather than deeply olive. He looked on the promise Carlo had begged from him as an almost sacred trust, an admission from his cousin without words being spoken that he was entrusting his sons to Gabriel’s care because he did not trust their mother—because on his deathbed he had finally been prepared to admit that she could not be trusted.

  But still Carlo’s last words to him had been of her.

  ‘Sasha,’ he had told Gabriel. ‘You must understand...’

  He had been too weak to say any more, but there had been no need. Gabriel knew all there was to know about Sasha. Just like his mother, she had walked out on him. The memory of that was like a constant piece of grit rubbing against his pride, exacerbating the darkness within him. She was unfinished business, the cause of a blow to his pride against which it had banked a debt of compounded interest—which he was now here to claim in full.

  * * *

  A ROAR OF protest from one of the twins caused Sasha to turn to look in maternal anxiety, and then to call out, ‘Stop fighting, you two.’

  Something—no, someone—had moved between her and the sun. Immediately she shielded her gaze to see who it was.

  There were moments in life that happened both so quickly and yet so slowly that they could never be ignored or forgotten. Sasha felt the abrupt cessation of her heartbeat, then a suffocating sense of shocked disbelief, streaked with fear and panic—and something else so painful that she refused to give it either life or a name. She listened to the slow heavy thud of her heart as though it belonged to another woman, distantly aware of it propelling the blood into her veins, keeping her physically functioning while, emotionally, every nerve felt as though it had been tortured and then severed. Just one word was torn from her throat.

  ‘Gabriel!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  JUST ONE WORD, but it was so filled with anger, shock and fear that it seemed to reverberate between them.

  Sasha had to tilt her head back to look up at Gabriel, and she could feel the panicky beat of the pulse at the base of her throat. She resisted an urge to place a covering hand over it.

  ‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ It was a mistake to ask him that. He would be able to hear the panic in her voice and see how she was having to fight to control her fear. The way his mouth was twisting into that cruelly unkind and satisfied smile she remembered so well told her that.

  ‘What do you think I want?’

  His voice was so soft and gentle that it could almost have been the tender stroke of a lover’s touch against her skin, or the brush of an angel’s wings. Just for a second her body reacted to the memories it evoked. She was seventeen again, a desperate bundle of aching, emotional need she had kept hidden beneath a shield of bravado. Her body was bereft of its sexually challenging armour of short skirt and minuscule vest top, and her long hair, with its amateur blonde streaks, was still damp from the shower Gabriel had insisted she have. She was watching him watching her, overwhelmed by the feeling, the longing suddenly shooting through her; knowing for the first time in her life what it felt like to experience physical sexual desire. And she wanted him, desired him so very badly.

  A door had swung open on her past. She didn’t want to see what lay behind it, but it was already too late. She remembered how she had been too impatient to wait for him to come to her, running to him instead. He had caught hold of her, holding her at arm’s length whilst he studied her naked body. Even her flesh had signalled its eager readiness to him, her breasts firming and lifting as she imagined him touching her there. But when he did she had realised that her imagination had not had the power to tell her just how his touch would feel, or what it would do to her. The flesh of his fingertips had been hard and slightly rough, the flesh of a man who worked and lived physically, not just cerebrally. She had shivered, and then shuddered with uncontained delight when he had slowly explored the shape of her breasts. The erotic roughness of his touch had increased her aro
usal so much that she had suddenly become aware of not just how much she wanted him, and how excited she was, but how ready her body was for him, how hot and wet and achingly sensitive that most intimate part of her had felt. As though he had sensed that, too, Gabriel had trailed his hand down over her body, smoothly and determinedly. When he had allowed it to rest on her hip, cupping the gently protruding bone, she had been seized with impatient urgency and the need to feel him caressing her more intimately.

  Had she then moved closer to him, openly parting her legs, or had he been the one to propel her closer to him, moving his hand to her thigh? She couldn’t remember. But she could remember how it had felt, how she had felt, when he had bent his head to kiss the smooth column of her throat at the same time as he had stroked apart the swollen lips of her sex to dip his fingers in the slick moist heat that was waiting for him. She had almost reached orgasm there and then.

  A shudder punched through her. What was she doing, thinking about that now? She could feel the strain of her own emotions. Fear? Guilt? Longing? No, never again. The girl she had been was gone, and with her everything that that girl had felt.

  Sasha looked down towards the beach, where her sons were still playing, oblivious to what was happening, and then looked quickly away, instinctively not wanting to contaminate them with what was happening to her. Her sharpest and most urgent need was not to protect herself but to protect them. As she looked away she stepped to one side, as though to draw Gabriel’s attention to her rather than her vulnerable young. There was nothing she would not do to protect her sons. Nothing.

  Gabriel tracked the involuntary movement she made away from the two boys. Carlo had claimed that she was a very protective mother, but of course she would have been while she believed that Carlo was a wealthy man and her role as their mother gave her unlimited access to that wealth. Carlo, like many men who come to fatherhood so late in life, had worshipped the flesh of his flesh, evidence of his potency. His heirs... Now the heirs to precisely nothing. Gabriel’s tiger-eyed gaze pounced on the visual evidence of their privileged cosmopolitan lifestyle—expensive Italian clothes, healthy American teeth, upper-class English accents, their flesh and bones that of children who had from birth been well fed and nurtured. At their age he had been wearing rags, his body thin and bony.