by Penny Jordan
‘I had to leave quickly, so I just brought what I could,’ she had told him disarmingly, when she had by some sleight of hand managed to get herself into the passenger seat of his Ferrari without him actually having invited her to do so.
That had been in May. From the little she had told him about herself he’d gathered that the man she had left had been part of the detritus swirling around in the wake of Cannes Film Festival—a ‘producer’ looking for young flesh to satisfy his own jaded appetite and those of the debased human beings he made his skinflicks for. But Gabriel hadn’t wanted to waste time listening to her talk when there were so many far more pleasurable uses for those soft full lips of hers. There was a practical streak to Sasha, as there was to all successful courtesans. She had quickly worked out that having to satisfy only one man would be a far more cost-effective way of using her body than risking being passed hand to hand by the producer and his friends.
Oh, yes, she was very practical. Within a year she had made plans to move onwards and upwards—not just into another man’s bed, but more profitably into his whole life. As his wife. And that man had been his own second cousin Carlo—a man old enough to be his father, never mind hers. It had been unthinkable that she would leave Gabriel; he was the one who controlled their relationship, not her. He paid the bills and called the tune; she was his for however long he desired her to be. But she had walked out on him, leaving behind an unpaid debt to his pride.
A debt for which fate was now giving him the opportunity to claim payment in full.
Sasha saw the familiar cruel smile curl down the edges of Gabriel’s mouth. How many times had he taunted her with that smile before giving in to her pleas and satisfying the aching wanting that he himself had aroused within her flesh?
She had thought when she had met Gabriel that she knew all there was to know about sex and her own body. The truth was she had known nothing whatsoever about pleasure, and too much about need.
When Carlo had offered her an escape route from Gabriel and from the life she had lived before him, she had told herself that the only way to save herself was to seize it with both hands and never look back. And that was exactly what she had done.
But, while she might never have consciously looked back, in her dreams she had gone back so many times, and in such dreadful pain. She shuddered, blinking fiercely. In the years since her sons’ conception she had taught herself to walk tall and to be proud for them, and for herself. She would never deny her past, but she believed she had learned from it, grown from it, and when the time came and her sons asked she would not lie to them about it.
For now, though, they were too young to be exposed to and tainted by her mistakes, and she would fight with everything she had to protect them from that and to keep them safe. The only way Gabriel would ever take them from her would be by taking her life first and then stepping over her lifeless body to get them, she told herself fiercely.
‘I’m not going anywhere without my sons.’
‘And they will be staying here. With me.’
‘With you? In Sardinia? Where? You don’t live here yourself,’ she reminded him.
‘I didn’t, it’s true, but now that I own the hotel I intend to turn it back into a private home. The boys will live here when they are not at school, so that they can grow up in their father’s culture, his old home.’
On the surface it was both a sensible and a compassionate plan, but compassion was an emotion that simply didn’t get under Gabriel’s defensive radar. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Some hidden agenda motivating him that he was keeping to himself. She looked quickly at her sons, her heart thudding with apprehension. It was easy to see their Calbrini heritage in their looks, even if they were too young to have developed the predatory Sardinian profile shared by both Carlo and Gabriel. Carlo had always said proudly that they were true Calbrinis, and he had promised her...
Her fingers curled tightly into her palms. Carlo had been a man of honour, she reassured herself. He would not have broken the promise he had made her before their birth.
‘The boys are due back at school in London in September,’ she told Gabriel warningly.
‘It is only July. They have the whole summer to enjoy being here, and to get used to my role in their lives.’
‘You’re planning to spend the summer here?’
‘Why not? Sardinia is my home, after all. It makes sense for me to be here to supervise the turning back of the hotel into a private home, and to spend time getting to know my wards.’
She lifted her chin.
‘You do realise that I shall be here with them?’
‘Hoping to make time to slip away to Port Cervo and find someone to take Carlo’s place? Another rich old man to sell yourself to? Or perhaps this time you’re hoping for a rich young one? Don’t get your hopes up too high, will you, Sasha? You’re getting older, and you’ve got a lot of competition. Plus, not every man wants to be burdened with another man’s sons. But then, of course, I was forgetting—that problem is easily solved, isn’t it? You’ll just put them in boarding school and go off and live your own life without them, like you did when Carlo was dying.’
‘You have no right—’ Sasha began, but it was too late.
Gabriel was ignoring her, stepping past her to walk determinedly towards the boys. She started to run over the slippery rocks, instinctively wanting to put herself between him and her sons, wincing as she slipped and the corner of one of the sharp rocks scraped against her bare leg, piercing the flesh. As though they sensed her anxiety, the boys had stopped playing to watch the two adults approaching them. Both of them now immediately hurried over to Sasha and stood one on other either side of her in a way that would normally have made her smile almost ruefully because of its instinctive maleness. The boys were totally identical, so much so that even she was sometimes almost deceived when they played tricks on people and pretended to change places. There were subtle differences between them, though, that only a mother could see,
She looked magnificent, Gabriel admitted. A tigress guarding her young, ignoring the blood trickling down her leg and the broken strap of her flimsy footwear.
Out of nowhere, raw, primitive and unwanted emotions savaged him.
Sardinia’s family hierarchies and patriarchs had long memories, and the history of the island was filled with tales of revenge and bitterness waged between warring families. He came from those people who truly believed in the rule of an eye for an eye, even though in these modern times they paid lip service to modern laws, and that ancestral history rose up inside him now. He had believed that Sasha was his, and that she would remain his until he no longer had any use for her. That he had been the one who controlled their relationship, and through it her. It had been the primary unwritten law that governed their relationship. But she had broken that law, and in doing so she had offended his pride.
He could never forget what his mother had done to him, and how she had chosen to reject his claim on her. As he had grown to manhood he had told himself that he would not have his power or his emotional security challenged or threatened by any woman. In those relationships with women he chose to have he would always be the one who ended them. He had planned to end his relationship with Sasha. But she had walked out on him before he could. And, worse, she had walked out into the arms of another man. His cousin! Oh, yes, Sasha owed him—and he intended to drink his fill of his chosen cup of revenge.
CHAPTER FOUR
SASHA WASN’T GOING to be parted from her sons, not for a minute—even if that meant she had to stay here with Gabriel, Sasha told herself fiercely. But thankfully it wouldn’t be for long. Not even Gabriel could hold back the start of the new school year. Which reminded her... She looked down at the rings on her fingers. Thanks to her diligence and determination she now had the satisfying credentials of a degree and an MBA. And thanks to Carl
o’s generosity the sale of her jewellery should give her enough to buy a small house in London close to the boys’ school, pay their school fees and put some money in the bank for a rainy day.
‘Come,’ Gabriel demanded autocratically, holding his hand out towards the nearest boy.
Sasha could feel Sam looking up at her questioningly.
It would be so easy to turn them against Gabriel, and to fill their pliable minds with thoughts of bitterness and resentment, to drip poison into them so that they became filled with hatred and fear for the man their father had appointed as their guardian. But, no matter what she felt personally, she could not do that to them. She would not damage them in that kind of way. They came before everything and everyone else, in her life and in her heart.
Forcing herself to smile, she gave Sam and then Nico a small gentle push towards Gabriel.
‘Your father has appointed Gabriel to be your guardian, and that means that we can stay here in Sardinia for the rest of the summer,’ she told them as lightly as she could.
It was better to keep things simple and easy for them to accept and understand. They both loved Sardinia, and why shouldn’t they? This country was, after all, a big part of them and their family history. They had spent every summer here since their birth.
* * *
IT FELT ODD to receive the formal handshakes of these two miniature representations of his own family genes mingled with those of their mother instead of embracing them in true Sardinian fashion, Gabriel acknowledged. But then their father had been an elderly father, very much of the old school, and part educated in England himself, so naturally their manners reflected that.
‘What are we to call you?’ Sam asked shyly.
‘Gabriel is the second cousin of your father,’ Sasha explained quickly, not willing to give Gabriel the opportunity to take control even in this small matter. ‘So perhaps you should call him Cousin Gabriel?’
‘Cousin Gabriel.’ Sam rolled the words around his tongue. He was both the more serious and at times the more reckless of the two boys, whereas Nico tended to follow his twin’s lead. ‘I like it,’ he announced judiciously.
‘Good. I am glad that you do,’ Gabriel told him cordially, neatly taking charge of the conversation. ‘I used to call your father Cousin Carlo when I first knew him.’
Oh, very clever, Sasha acknowledged, as she saw the way her sons were starting to relax and move closer to him, like to like, male to male, the boys drawn instinctively towards this new figure in their lives.
Carlo had loved them deeply, but when he had become ill two energetic youngsters had been too much for him to cope with other than for a few minutes at a time. So she had set herself up as buffer between her sons and her husband, wanting to protect both from pain—emotional pain on the part of her sons, and physical pain on the part of her frail husband.
‘Can we do some fishing this afternoon?’ Nico asked her eagerly.
Fishing was a new passion, and most days the three of them spent time sitting on the rocks, waiting for fish to bite on the lines Sasha had taught the boys how to bait.
But it was Gabriel who answered, before she could, saying calmly, ‘There are some matters I need to discuss with your mother, so we must return to the hotel. But perhaps this afternoon you can show me the best place to fish.’
He was seducing her sons every bit as easily as he had once seduced her, Sasha recognized, as the twins danced up and down with delight, eagerly falling into step beside Gabriel and abandoning her as they all made their way back to the hotel.
‘Can you play football?’ she could hear Nico asking Gabriel with eager shyness.
Immediately Gabriel stopped walking and turned to look down at the small earnest-looking face turned up towards his own. ‘Do fish swim?’ he teased Nico, adding with a small shrug, ‘I’m Italian, aren’t I?’
‘Sam supports Chelsea, but AC Milan is my team.’ Nico beamed.
‘I support Chelsea because half of us is English,’ Sam informed Gabriel seriously. ‘So it’s only fair, isn’t it?’
Her sons were so engrossed in talking about football with Gabriel that she might as well not be here, Sasha decided with a sharp pang.
‘You need to get that leg cleaned up.’ They had reached the hotel, and Gabriel’s terse instruction brought Sasha’s lips together in an usually tight line.
‘Oh, please.’ Her voice dripped sarcasm. ‘Don’t try to pretend you’re concerned. The compassionate act doesn’t suit you, Gabriel, and besides, we both know that you have no compassion for the female sex in general, and me in particular.’
She turned to look at her sons, who had been lagging behind but who had now caught up with them. ‘Boys, go and get cleaned up, please, and then down to the kitchen for lunch.’
Sasha believed in nurturing her sons with loving but firm boundaries. She upheld the importance of good manners, but this, in her opinion, was a double-lane highway. If she expected her sons to behave politely, and to understand the importance of good manners, they deserved to be on the receiving end of them themselves. So far—backed up, thankfully, by the same kind of attitude in their school—they were developing a happy mixture of automatic pleases and thank-yous accompanied by natural boyish high spirits and occasional forgetfulness.
‘You’re a fine one to talk about concern,’ Gabriel said as soon as the boys had raced upstairs, out of their hearing. ‘You may be clever enough not to employ full-time care for those two—Carlo would never have agreed to that, as we both know—but you obviously make sure you aren’t left with too much responsibility for their day-to-day care.’
‘Just because they asked you a few questions about football, that hardly makes me an uncaring or uninvolved mother,’ Sasha told him scornfully.
‘That wasn’t what I meant. I was referring to the fact that you are sending them down to the kitchen to eat while you, no doubt, will enjoy your lunch somewhere a little more elegant and without their presence. If you were left to your own devices you would probably also import a lover—possibly the same one you were seen dining with in New York.’
Sasha stared at him in outraged fury. She was too angry to even think about responding to him. She owed him nothing. Less than nothing. And she wasn’t going to give any kind of legitimacy to his accusations by bothering to defend herself from them. Why should she?
‘It’s a pity there isn’t something you could take for that perverted and warped sense of reality of yours, Gabriel. And, for your information, whoever you were paying to spy on me didn’t deserve their fee. If they had done their work properly then they would have known that the only man I spent any time with when I was in New York was the specialist oncologist I had gone to see. You see, unlike you, I didn’t want to sit around waiting for Carlo to die when there was the remotest chance that there could be some drug or treatment that might have given him some extra time,’ she told him contemptuously, before turning on her heel and following her sons upstairs.
He didn’t let her get very far, his fingers manacling her wrist and yanking her round to face him before she had climbed more than a couple of stairs.
‘Very effective—or at least it would have been if I did not know you so well. Has it occurred to you that Carlo could have been ready to die? That he might even have preferred to die peacefully in his own bed rather than have his life eked out for a few months, days or weeks, so that you could continue to feed off him? While he was alive he was your passport to the life you had always wanted, the life you sold your body to get. He was besotted by you and you knew it—so much so that he begged me to lend him more money at any rate I cared to name just so he could satisfy your greed.’
‘That’s not true!’
Her face was as white as the marble hallway and its curling flight of stairs. Her eyes had filled with tears. They clouded her vision, making Gabriel’s features shim
mer and break up. ‘It was Carlo’s pride that made him go on borrowing, not me. I didn’t even know what he was doing.’
‘Liar.’
He was still holding her wrist, and as she looked down at him she was abruptly reminded of another time and another set of marble stairs on which she had stood and looked down into his face—laughed down, in fact, with delight and teasing provocation. The stairs had been in an exclusive atelier, where he had taken her to try on the dress that she had been modelling for him, layers of black silk chiffon that sighed and whispered against her skin as she walked. She had leaned towards him, she remembered, not caring that the silk was slipping from her, in truth delighting in the fact that his gaze was caressing her semi-naked body, and that his hand was cupping her bare breast. She had still believed then that it just wasn’t possible for him to mean it when he said that love and emotion had no place in his life. She had been so crazily in love with him that she had believed the sheer force of her love for him would make him love her back. Then.
But this was now. Separated from the past by the ocean of tears she had cried, and the protective wall she had thrown up around herself. That wall was impenetrable, reinforced with the bitterness of reality and the strength of her hatred, bonded together with her tears.
‘I hate you so much,’ she told him fiercely, her emotions darkening her eyes. She could feel the blistering hiss of Gabriel’s exhaled breath against her skin as his own anger overwhelmed him and he jerked her towards him.
She had been standing awkwardly on the stair, caught in mid-step, and his angry movement made her overbalance and lurch into him. ‘So you say. But my bet is that you would still go to bed with me—for a price.’
The pain inside her was instant and savage, making her recoil and fight to escape it, her nostrils flaring and the smooth muscles of her throat tightening her skin.
‘You were the one who taught me to separate my emotions from my body, to treat sex as a physical activity with no connection to any kind of emotional feelings. So yes, I dare say if I wanted to have sex with you I could detach myself enough from my emotional loathing of you as a person to enable me to do so,’ she agreed thinly. ‘But I do not want to, and neither do I need to use my body as currency.’
