by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
Her father was ignorant of her pregnancy and miscarriage. Just as he was ignorant of what a rat his best friend’s son really was. Her mother didn’t know either. In fact, the only other person in the world who knew about the precious baby she had lost was this man. And she could hardly expect compassionate understanding from her worst enemy.
He pushed into her apartment and she had no choice but to follow.
“This is nice.”
She looked around at the smallish apartment, which was almost a bedsit. It had its own bathroom, but the main area doubled as her daily living space and her bedroom when she pulled the ancient trundle bed down from the wall.
“It’s bright, like you.”
Like she used to be, maybe. She’d tried to make her home cheery and inviting with lots of yellow, white and rose-pink, but the décor had done little to improve her sense of loss and loneliness. Even the sunlight currently filtering through the window of the kitchenette seemed muted by the emotions that weighted her insides.
“Thank you,” she replied stiffly to his compliment when the silence had stretched on.
He made an impatient sound. “Change your clothes and I’ll take you to dinner.”
“What is the matter with what I’m wearing?” she demanded, immediately on the defensive.
“Nothing. Let’s go.” He took her arm and the contact seared her just as she knew touching him again would do.
“I didn’t say I was going with you,” she said, trying to pull her arm from his grasp.
“Would you prefer to fix me dinner here?” He smiled as he’d used to and she felt a twinge in the region of her heart. “It has been a long time since you cooked for me, but I remember what a wonderful cook you are. I would enjoy the experience.”
The sheer arrogance of that statement blew her away. “I would prefer you left.” She glared up at him, carefully avoiding actual eye contact. “You’ve seen me safely home. There’s no reason for us to prolong our time together.”
“You seem to be under a misapprehension.”
“What do you mean?” She gave up the struggle for possession of her arm. He wasn’t letting go and every movement, even infinitesimal, increased her awareness of his closeness.
“I’m not leaving you alone.”
Shards of fearful premonition sliced through her. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Until the auction is over, I am your faithful sidekick.”
“You, faithful?” she scoffed, trying very hard to come to terms with his grimly delivered assurance.
The grip on her arm tightened. “I was never unfaithful to you.”
She believed him, but she didn’t want to. Not when he’d refused to believe her similar claim when she told him about the baby. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of saying so, however. Instead she focused on the issue at hand.
“No.”
His fingers uncurled from her arm and began a light caress. “No, what, dolcezza?”
“You are not staying with me.” Her voice broke as his hand moved up to her collarbone. She felt like a bird being mesmerized by a snake. She couldn’t move, but she knew to let him touch her was disastrous.
“I made a promise to your father. I will keep it.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“That is not what he believes.”
“My father does not dictate my life either.”
“This is true. Unlike your sister, you have a disconcerting tendency to go your own way, but I would have thought that even so, your love for your father would not allow you to put him in a place of constantly worrying for your safety.”
She wasn’t going to be manipulated with that line. “According to him, he does that anyway.”
“He had an episode with his heart last month. Did he tell you?”
She felt as if all the air had been sucked from the room. “No.” Her voice came out a whisper. “He said nothing.”
Why hadn’t he called her? Why hadn’t his wife, Therese, told her? As she thought it, she said it.
“I do not know, but perhaps he did not wish to worry you.”
“I should have known!” The anguish she felt reminded her what an outsider she was. She belonged intimately to no one.
Salvatore studied her in a way that made her feel exposed. “Now you do. Are you willing to risk putting his heart under further stress?”
A sense of impotency filled her. Despite the fact they were not exactly close, she loved her father very much. And he hadn’t looked well the last time she’d seen him. “No.”
“Then I stay.”
With a tremendous effort of will, she stepped back, away from that insidious touch. “No. If Papa is that worried, I’ll agree to a bodyguard, but not you.”
“It is too important an assignment for me to put it in the hands of another.”
“Me, important?” She couldn’t help deriding.
His jaw went taut and fire rained down on her from those dark chocolate eyes. “Keep pushing, Elisa.”
His tone implied that, for her own sake, she had better do anything but. Only she couldn’t make herself stop. There was too much pain inside her to govern everything that came out of her mouth when she was with him.
He’d hurt her and there was a terrible part of her that wanted to hurt him back, even if it was just with digs that did no more than annoy his sense of masculine pride.
“Get me a different bodyguard.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I’ll call Papa and tell him I don’t want you around me.”
“And will you tell him why?”
Salvatore’s smooth question stopped her progress toward the phone on the small table beside the one armchair in her apartment.
“I don’t have to tell him why.”
“He wants the best for you and I’m the best. He will expect an explanation.”
The problem was, she knew he was right. Even though several of the Vitale Security operatives were ex-military, none of them had been trained as thoroughly as Salvatore. His father and grandfather had seen to that, going so far as sending him to spend his formative years’ schooling and training in an élite academy that taught a form of hand-to-hand combat second to none in the world.
It had been followed by a technical education at the university level that put him on a par with coordinators in the government’s secret service.
“Then I shall tell him.”
“And prompt a full-on heart attack? Does he mean so little to you?”
Her hands curled into fists at her sides. “Why are you doing this to me?” She spun to face him, her body vibrating with emotions she would give anything not to feel. “Haven’t you hurt me enough?”
There it was. The truth laid bare between them. He had the power to hurt her and he had exercised it.
His face looked set in stone. “I am not doing this to hurt you. You need my protection.”
“Just being around you hurts!” she cried, not able to hide that from him any longer. Perhaps if she was honest, told him just how hard it was to be with him, he would withdraw from the fray and assign someone else to guard her. His Sicilian guilt should be good for something to her. “I can’t stand the memories, Salvatore. Can’t you see that? Not seeing you is the only way I can even begin to cope.”
Pain shot through his expression, but then it was gone. “Pretending it did not happen is not coping.”
Suddenly she knew. He wanted to force a confrontation. The man who found talking about his feelings right up there with Chinese water torture wanted to talk things out. She could see it in his eyes, in the stubborn set of his jaw.
She couldn’t bear it. Rehashing the past would only hurt more, not heal.
He didn’t realize that, of course. Because he was not hampered by the soul-destroying pain of a betrayed love. He had never felt anything more for her than sexual lust.
Desperate to avoid the confrontation she sensed was coming, she took the lesser of two evils. “You said
you’d take me to dinner.”
“We need to talk, Elisa.”
She ignored that. “I’m really tired. I’d prefer not to cook tonight.”
His frown expressed his irritation with her refusal to talk, but in the end, and to her undying shock, he nodded. “All right. If you do not need to change clothes, we can go.”
“Just let me fix my hair and put on some lipstick.”
Again he agreed, giving her a much needed reprieve from his presence as she closed herself into the tiny cubicle that served as her bathroom.
Salvatore swore with frustration. He had believed it would be difficult to overcome her aversion to him, but had not been prepared for it to be almost impossible.
Elisa was not just angry with him. She hated him.
She had lost her baby because of him. She’d never said so, but their final argument, the stress of that confrontation had no doubt precipitated the miscarriage. It was a guilt he’d learned to live with, but he would not live with the knowledge he had done nothing to make it right.
However, it was patently obvious she was not prepared for talk of marriage yet.
He had to woo her. His mouth twisted cynically. He knew how he wanted to woo her. In bed. Seducing her would be far easier than talking the stubborn woman round to his way of seeing things. He would enjoy it more too.
She might not like it, but her body still reacted to him almost helplessly. Her pulse had increased with the barest touch of his hand on her neck. Given enough time and close proximity, it would simply be a matter of when they made it back into each other’s arms.
No matter what had gone before, back in her bed was a place he definitely wanted to be. Even marriage was not too high a price to pay to know that all her passion, all her fire would belong to him.
Elisa came out of the bathroom looking fragile, but lovely. She’d brushed out her hair and pulled it back with a clip. Her face had more color than it had earlier, but that was probably due to makeup rather than an improvement in her feelings. Not that her green eyes revealed anything. Their usually animated depths were blank of any emotion.
“Are you ready?” she asked, her voice as flat as her expression.
He detested that flatness, wanted to experience Elisa as she had been a year ago, not this buttoned-down stranger. But he had won one victory; he would consolidate his position before demanding more.
“I’m ready.”
Just those two words and her eyelids flinched. He wanted to curse. He’d been a stupid bastard a year ago. Even if she was like her mother, as her father had said, she’d been different in one key way. She’d wanted to marry him when she discovered she was pregnant.
He still wasn’t sure the baby was his. They’d only been together a month when she told him she was pregnant…What were the chances? But even so, he had decided to risk them because he had wanted her in his bed and in his life on a permanent basis. He’d made that decision too late and lived to regret his tardiness and stupidity.
“Let’s go.” He took her hand to lead her from the apartment.
She tried to pull away from him, the way she did from every single touch since they’d seen each other that morning in the jeweler’s. And just as before, he didn’t let go. She had to get used to his touch again. The prospect that she wouldn’t was not a circumstance he wanted to contemplate.
“Where are we going?”
“Does it matter?”
“No.”
“I did not think so.”
Two hours later, they were back in the apartment, dinner having been nothing short of a disaster. She’d avoided looking at him, touching him and talking to him if she could.
The strain of it was showing on both of them.
She yawned.
“You need to go to bed.”
She nodded.
He looked around the small apartment. The cozy and inviting undersized sofa didn’t look so cozy as a possible bed. It was several feet too short for his over-six-foot frame. The pull-down bed would have been a slight improvement, but he had no doubt she would refuse to share it with him.
He looked at the floor with even less pleasure. “I suppose you’ll expect me to bed down on the carpet.”
Her eyes grew wide and a flush suffused her face. “I don’t expect you to sleep here at all.”
“I thought we settled this before we left.” It was a blatant untruth. He’d known she would balk at him spending the night.
She stiffened in pure, independent female outrage. “You’re not sleeping in my apartment.”
“I am until the auction is over.” His voice was as grim as his mood after dinner as the undesirable pariah. It was not an experience he was used to. Usually women fawned over him, even ex-girlfriends—but not this woman.
The look of horror that came over her made no improvement on his deteriorating mood.
“I’m not going to attack you,” he ground out. “I’m here to protect you.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Do you have a better solution? I’m not leaving you alone,” he added before she could open her mouth to answer.
She gnawed at her lower lip in a gesture he remembered from before. It indicated she was in serious thought.
The look of horror turned to one of disgust. “If you insist on being my bodyguard, you can spring for a suite with two bedrooms at a hotel or sleep in the hall. You pick.”
He stared at her. It couldn’t be this easy. “A hotel.”
“Fine. Give me a minute to pack.”
Elisa threw clothes into a suitcase with little consideration for what she was packing. He’d looked shocked when she suggested the hotel, but she knew how intractable he could be. He would spend the night with her no matter what she wanted. Her apartment was out of the question. Just the thought of sharing such small living space with him made her cringe. She needed a door to shut between them, a room to call her own, a bed that would hold no memories.
Not that he’d ever shared her bed in this new apartment, but somehow, if he stayed, she knew it would feel tainted by his presence. She would have to move again.
She refused to consider why he had such a strong impact on her emotions still, or why hate sometimes felt like the other side of a bruised and bleeding love.
Chapter Three
LYING in bed in the luxurious hotel suite later, memories she was too exhausted to fight washed over her.
Seeing him had brought it all back.
The debilitating pain. The sense of betrayal. The grief of loss, but also the glory of possession.
For a short while, it had been the most glorious time of her life. She had belonged to someone, had a place in his life. Not a grudging place as she had with her mother. Not an inconvenient place as she had with her father.
Salvatore had accepted and desired her for herself.
Or so she had believed.
If it were possible to go back in time she would go back, not to the point where she had met Salvatore in an effort to make a different choice with him. But she would go back to those four short weeks when she had believed herself loved as she loved, and if she could she would stay there forever.
She would never know the misery of his defection, the humiliation of his hurtful beliefs about her, the desolation of his lack of commitment to her. All of that would be in a future she would not have to live…if it could be so. Nor would she know the pain of losing the one being she had been certain to belong to forever, who she would have spent a lifetime giving a mother’s love she had only ever dreamed of.
Her mind took her back to the moment when she had realized Salvatore was interested in her.
She’d been in Milan, attending an estate sale for a woman who was known for her jewelry collection. She remembered that her hotel room had felt stuffy because the air-conditioning unit was broken. The phone had rung just as she stepped out of a cooling shower. She’d considered letting the front desk just take a message, but in the end had traipsed across the room to pick it up,
dripping and naked but for a thin towel wrapped around her.
“Hello?”
“Elisa. Salvatore here.”
Salvatore? “My father’s friend?” she squeaked, unable to believe he was calling her in her hotel room in Milan.
“I hope your friend as well, cara.”
Oh, he was smooth. “Yes, of course. Is something the matter with him?”
“Him?”
“My f-father.” She stumbled over the words, tongue-tied in a way she hadn’t been since adolescence.
“Why should you think that?” his voice purred down the line at her.
“You’re calling me.”
“And a man cannot call a beautiful single woman with any other reason than to discuss her father?”
The gentle mockery had her knees going weak and she plopped down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Of course, I just…”
“Come, cara. Surely you realized I was interested in you.”
Funnily enough, she hadn’t. “You mean because you flirted with me?” she asked, feeling gauche for saying it. But still, “I thought you flirted with every woman.”
“Do I?”
“I don’t know.” He was practically a stranger to her. She had grown up with her mother in America and, as close as her father and Salvatore’s father were, she and Salvatore had met only infrequently over the years when she visited her father in Sicily.
“It seemed like it to me.” He’d certainly flirted with her from the moment he found her on the sunlounger by her father’s pool her second day in Sicily the summer before.
She could still remember the smooth joke about mermaids and the sexy glint in his eyes. Italian men took female appreciation to whole new levels, but she’d found Sicilians in a class all by themselves. And Salvatore was the most impressive of the lot.
He had proceeded to flirt with her on and off over the next two weeks whenever he and his family were guests in her father’s home or vice versa. Which, considering how close the two families were, was quite frequent.
She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks.
It had never once occurred to her the feeling might be mutual.
“You will have to get to know me better,” he was speaking again, “to see that I am not a flirt, cara, far from it.”
