Читать книгу A Passionate Reunion In Fiji / Cinderella's Scandalous Secret - Мишель Смарт, Michelle Smart - Страница 16

LIVIA TAMPED DOWN the gulf of feelings knotting her belly and boarded the white yacht. Although dwarfed in size by the cruise ship it was moored next to, it still dazzled with elegance. After their mammoth journey to the island she would have preferred to spend the day relaxing but this was the trip Madeline had forced Massimo to concede to. Livia knew what her sister-in-law was thinking: that forcing Massimo into close quarters would stop him hiding away.

Unfortunately, Madeline hadn’t reckoned on Massimo boarding the yacht with his laptop case slung over his shoulder and his phone sticking out of his shorts pocket and Livia saw her lips pull in tightly. When they set sail, Livia was the only one secretly pleased when he made his excuses and disappeared inside.

Disappointment was writ large on his family’s faces.

She met Madeline’s gaze and shrugged apologetically.

Barely three hours with Massimo’s family and she’d already made two silent apologies for him.

Sailing at a steady pace over the calm South Pacific, it took only an hour to reach the atoll. They whiled the time away in a lazy fashion, dipping in and out of the swimming pool and chatting. The captain anchored the yacht at a distance far enough away not to cause any damage to the precious reef but close enough for them all to see the clear turquoise water teeming with brightly coloured fish and all other manner of sea life. Madeline and Raul donned their snorkelling gear and jumped in, leaving baby Elizabeth in Sera’s capable hands.

Livia looked out at Madeline and Raul having the time of their lives in the water, at Sera playing happily with her granddaughter, at her father-in-law Gianni, book in one hand, large cocktail in the other, at Jimmy napping in his wheelchair in a shaded part of the deck, at the chefs cooking up a storm on the barbecue and felt a sharp pang rip through her chest.

Massimo should be there with them.

She hurried down the stairs and slipped inside in search of him.

The interior of the yacht was vast and as sleek and as elegant as the exterior and refreshingly cool after the hazy heat on deck. It took a few minutes before she found him hidden in an isolated section of the saloon, tapping away on his laptop. So engrossed was he in his work that it took a few moments before he noticed her presence.

‘Lunch is almost ready,’ she said briskly.

‘I’ll be ten minutes.’

‘And then you’ll turn your laptop off and leave it off?’

‘I can’t.’

She inhaled deeply to smother her anger. ‘Your family have been looking forward to spending time with you.’

‘And they will.’

‘When?’ she challenged. ‘Tomorrow, everything will be about the party and then you go back to LA. Today is the only day when it’s just us and you’re missing out. You’ve travelled thousands of kilometres to be here. It’s not going to kill you to turn your laptop off and spend some time with your family.’

His jaw clenched, his fingers now drumming on the table rather than tapping on his laptop.

Looking at the obstinate set of Livia’s jawline, Massimo knew she wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace until he joined the rest of them on deck.

It wasn’t that he disliked spending time with his family. Not really. It was that they were all so different from him. His approach to life was alien to them. They believed he worked too hard, never understanding that it was only when he was immersed in his work that he felt at peace with himself.

It would be easier to handle these few days with them if Livia weren’t there. It was hard enough dealing with his family’s suffocating love without adding his estranged wife and all the intense emotions she’d drawn back out of him into the mix.

How could he find ease in her company when his attention was consumed by her every movement? She stood a good five feet from him but awareness thrummed through him, a buzz on his skin, an itch in his fingers. Her black swimsuit was designed for functionality and not for flaunting her body but still he reacted as if she were wearing the skimpiest of bikinis. The itch in his fingers became unbearable when he noticed the smudge of mascara under her left eye from where she’d dried her face after her swim. He wanted to rub the smudge away.

He breathed in deeply through his nose and nodded. ‘I’ll turn my laptop off and join you in ten minutes.’

She inclined her head and backed away. Just when he thought he was rid of her she fixed him with a hard stare counteracted by a quirking at the corner of her lips. ‘If you get your phone out at all while we’re on this yacht, I can’t promise that it won’t become fish food.’

Two hours later and Livia almost wished Massimo would return to the saloon and do more work.

After they’d eaten their long lunch; barbecued fish freshly caught that morning and an array of salads, she’d gone snorkelling with Madeline and climbed back on board to find Massimo had removed his T-shirt and draped it carelessly on the back of his chair.

Trying hard to blur his magnificent physique from her sight, she wrapped her beach towel around her waist while Madeline went straight to Raul, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his balding head. In response, he twisted in his chair and squeezed her bottom.

Livia couldn’t stop her eyes from seeking Massimo, her heart throbbing as she remembered a time when they’d been as tactile and affectionate together as his sister and brother-in-law were. Her insides heated to match the warmth on her skin when she found his gaze already on her. Was he remembering those heady, carefree days too…?

His eyes pulsed before he looked away and reached for the jug of fruit cocktail. He refilled his glass then filled another and pulled out the empty chair beside him. Livia sat, accepting the drink with a murmured thanks, and tried again to blur out his naked chest. Even with the parasol raised to shade them from the worst of the heat, the sun’s rays were slow-roasting them. One of Jimmy’s carers had taken him inside for a nap.

Madeline pulled a bottle of sunscreen from her bag. Once she and Raul had slathered themselves in it, she passed the bottle to Livia, who rubbed the lotion over her face, covered her arms, shoulders, the top part of her chest not covered by her swimsuit and her neck. But she couldn’t reach all of her back.

‘Here, let me.’

Of course Massimo would offer to help. They had a watching audience, just as they’d had when they’d arrived at the lodge and he’d offered his hand to help her out of the golf buggy. His offer was for their benefit. If not for them, he would probably let her burn.

Trying valiantly to keep her features nonchalant, Livia gave the bottle to Massimo and twisted in her seat so her back was to him.

The anticipation of his touch was almost unbearable. And when it came…

Her breath caught in her throat.

Darts of awareness spread through her, memories flooding her of the first time he’d applied sunscreen to her skin. They’d been on their honeymoon in St Barts. They’d sunbathed naked, secure in their privacy. Massimo had rubbed the lotion sensually over every inch of her skin. By the time he’d rolled her onto her back and driven deep inside her, she’d been wet and aching for him. It had been the quickest she had ever achieved orgasm.

Now, he applied the lotion to her back briskly. His indifference made her heart twist with sadness but she worked hard to keep her lips curved upwards.

His hands pulled away with an abruptness that made the twist in her heart turn to an ache.

‘Turn around and I’ll do your back,’ she ordered, proud that her voice was as bright as she intended for their watching audience.

As he was so tall and broad, there was a lot more skin to cover than the small area of exposed flesh on her own back.

Resisting the temptation to squirt it straight onto his back and have the fleeting enjoyment of watching him squirm at the quick shock of cold on his warm skin, she placed a healthy dollop into her palm, rubbed her hands together to spread it equally between them then placed them on his shoulder blades.

He still flinched.

She worked as briskly as he had to rub the lotion into his smooth skin.

When had she last touched his back? She couldn’t remember. The coldness that had entered their marriage hadn’t appeared overnight. It had accumulated over time until one day there was nothing but ice where once there had been love.

She had forgotten how much pleasure she got from simply touching him. Massimo carried so much on his shoulders. She’d loved to massage his knots away and feel him relax beneath her fingers. There were knots there now beneath the pads of her fingers, at the top of his spine and around his shoulder blades. Big ones.

Livia gritted her teeth and, dragging her hands from the knotted shoulders, swept down to the base of his back and covered the last bit that needed protection from the blazing sun.

The weight on his shoulders and the knots formed by it were none of her concern.

The moment she was done she pulled her hands away with the same abruptness that he’d done with her then breathed a quick sigh of relief when the captain appeared on deck, distracting everyone’s attention. It was time to sail back.

His family’s natural exuberance, which Massimo had never inherited, made sailing a noisy affair. The three women were in the pool swimming with his niece, laughing and splashing, leaving him at the table with his father, grandfather and brother-in-law, answering questions as best he could about the carbon filter he was days away from testing the prototype of. He could see the effort it was taking for them to concentrate.

He couldn’t help his gaze drifting to the swimming pool, his attention as attuned as it had always been to Livia’s every movement.

He was also intensely aware that she’d left her phone on the table and intensely ashamed that he wanted to snatch it up, take it somewhere private and trawl through all her communications over the past four months. He wondered how she would react if he were to throw it overboard and give it the same fate she’d threatened his own phone.

As if it were aware of his attention, her phone suddenly burst into life.

His father peered at it. ‘Livia, Gianluca’s calling,’ he called to her.

‘Coming!’ She scrambled out of the pool, snatching her towel as she padded to the table, but her brother’s call had gone to voicemail before she reached them.

Her brow furrowed. ‘Excuse me a moment. I need to call him back.’

As she climbed the stairs to the top deck, Massimo’s mother got out of the pool and joined them at the table.

‘How is Gianluca doing?’ she asked him in an undertone, concern writ large on her face. ‘I know Livia has been very worried about him.’

But he never got the chance to ask what she was talking about for Madeline had sneaked up behind him and suddenly thrust a soaking Elizabeth into his arms. ‘Here you go, Massimo. You can hold Elizabeth for me.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere.’ She stood at the balustrade with a cackle of laughter that produced laughs from his parents and a sound that could have been laughter too from his grandfather.

With a wriggling baby thrust upon him, Massimo filed away his mother’s comment about Livia’s youngest sibling as something to query later. Gianluca was the only member of Livia’s family he’d met. He’d turned up at their wedding looking furtive, constantly looking over his shoulder. His behaviour, Livia had later explained, was a mirror of her own when she’d first left Naples, a habit it had taken her years to break.

He hoped Gianluca hadn’t finally fallen into the life Livia had escaped from and which she’d so dearly hoped he would follow her out of.

Teenage boys were pack animals. That was Livia’s theory for why he hadn’t attempted to escape yet. He went around the Secondigliano with his gang of friends on their scooters, chasing girls, playing video games, employed by the brutal men who ran the territory to keep watch for enemies and the police. Livia was convinced that it was a life her brother didn’t want but Massimo was equally convinced that Gianluca had been as seduced by it as the rest of her family had been and that sooner or later he would be seduced into committing a crime from which there would be no going back. Livia’s strength of mind and moral code were rare.

He stood his niece on his lap and stared at her cherubic face and felt the tightness in his chest loosen. This little one would be raised with security and love. She would never be exposed to the danger and violence his wife and her siblings had lived.

Huge blue eyes stared back. Unable to resist, he sniffed the top of her head. She smelled of baby.

‘When are you two going to have one of those?’ Raul asked with a grin.

Ice laced like a snake up Massimo’s spine in an instant.

All eyes focused on him…and the presence he sensed behind him. Livia had returned from her phone call.

She sat back down, phone clutched in her hand. ‘It’s not the right time for us to have a child,’ she said and shrugged apologetically. ‘You know the hours Massimo puts into his work.’

‘You would work those hours if there was a child?’ his mother said, looking at him with an air of bewilderment. It was a look he’d become used to during his childhood, a physical expression that the differences between Massimo and his family were felt as keenly by them as they were by him.

‘My work is important,’ he pointed out cordially. He didn’t expect her to understand. To his parents, work was only important in as much as it paid the bills. That hadn’t stopped his parents from accepting the luxury home he’d purchased for them and for which he footed all the bills and the monthly sum he transferred into their bank account for everything else they could possibly need. He did the same for his sister and his grandfather and for his father’s siblings and their offspring. He would have done the same for his mother’s siblings if she’d had any.

He had stopped them ever having to work again—work being something none of the extended Briatores had been enamoured with either—and still his work ethic bewildered them. He provided for them all and the source of their wealth came from the technology he was creating that would, hopefully, allow baby Elizabeth, along with future generations of Briatores, to live on a planet that wasn’t a raging fireball. And still they stared at him with bewilderment, unable to comprehend why he worked as hard as he did.

‘I know, but…’ His mother must have sensed something from his expression for her voice trailed off.

Livia had no such sensibilities. Pouring herself a glass of fruit cocktail, she said, ‘Your son is a workaholic, Sera. It makes for a lonely life for me. I could not bring a child into that.’

‘You could get help,’ his mother suggested hopefully.

Livia shook her head. ‘In America, any help would be from English speakers. I’ve been trying to learn but it’s very hard. I had a cut on my leg last year that needed stitching and it was very stressful trying to understand the staff at the hospital.’

Talk of that incident made Massimo’s guts clench uncomfortably and his gaze automatically drift down to her leg. The scar, although expertly stitched and incredibly neat, was still vivid. Livia had gone for a swim in their outdoor pool in LA. One of the pebbled tiles around its perimeter had broken away leaving a sharp edge that she had sliced her calf on when hauling herself out of the pool. He’d been at his testing facility when she’d called to tell him about it, saying only that she’d cut her leg and needed help communicating with a medical practitioner about it. He’d sent Lindy, fluent in Italian, to deal with it and translate for her.

He’d been furious when he’d returned home that night and seen the extent of the damage. Seventeen stitches, internal and external. Her reply had been the coolest he’d ever received from her—up to that point anyway—Livia saying, ‘I didn’t want to make a drama out of it and worry you while you were driving.’ He’d stared at her quizzically. Her lips had tightened. ‘I assumed you would come.’

It wasn’t his fault, he told himself stubbornly. He wasn’t a mind reader. He couldn’t have known how bad the damage had been.

The damage it had caused to their marriage in the longer term had been far more extensive.

‘Look!’ His sister’s exclamation cut through his moody reminiscences.

Everyone followed Madeline’s pointed finger. Holding Elizabeth securely in his arms, Massimo carried her to the balustrade. Swimming beside the yacht, almost racing them, was a pod of bottlenose dolphins.

Around thirty of the beautiful mammals sped sleekly through the water, creating huge white foams with their dives. It was as if they’d come to check them out and decided to stay for a while and play.

It was one of the most incredible sights he had ever seen and it filled him with something indefinable; indefinable because it was nothing he’d ever felt before.

He looked at Livia and the awed joy on her face and experienced a fleeting gratitude that she’d forced him from his work and enabled him to enjoy this priceless moment.

Elizabeth wriggled in his arms. He tightened his hold on her to stop her falling and, as he did, Livia’s blame as to their childless state came back to him and the brief lightness that had filled his chest leached back out.

Livia tried her hardest to keep a happy front going but it only got harder as time passed. Gianluca hadn’t answered her returned call and he hadn’t called or left a message since.

And then there was Massimo.

The excitement of the dolphins racing so joyously alongside them had waned once they’d finally swum off and the lightness she’d witnessed in his eyes had quickly waned too. Was she the only one to notice his underlying tension? She would bet the knots on his shoulders had become even tighter.

Her assumption that he would keep the reasons for his anger to himself was dispelled when they returned to the island. His family retired to their chalets for a late siesta before dinner, leaving them together on the terrace of the lodge drinking a coconut and rum creation the head bar steward had made for them.

The moment they were alone, he fixed her with hard eyes. ‘Why did you say all that rubbish about a baby?’

‘What rubbish?’

‘You let my family believe the issue of us not having children lies with me.’

‘I’m prepared to pretend that our marriage is intact but I’m not prepared to tell an outright lie.’

‘You’re the one who didn’t want a child. Not me.’

Confused, she blinked. ‘When did I say I didn’t want a child?’

His jaw clenched. ‘You laughed when I suggested we have one.’

‘Do you mean the time you suggested we have a child to cure me of my loneliness? Is that the time you’re referring to?’ Of course it was. It was the only time the subject of a baby had come up since their first heady days when they’d spoken of a future that involved children. ‘I laughed at the suggestion, yes, because it was laughable. And even if you hadn’t suggested a child as a sticking plaster for my loneliness I would still have laughed and for the reasons I shared with your mother—ours was no marriage to bring a child into.’

His hand tightened perceptibly around his glass. ‘You made it sound like you’re a neglected wife.’

‘I was a neglected wife,’ she bit back. ‘Why do you think I left you? To pretend otherwise is demeaning—’

‘You’re here this weekend so my grandfather can spend what is likely to be his last birthday on this earth believing everything is fine between us,’ he interrupted.

‘We’re not going to do that by pretending that you’ve suddenly turned into a model husband, are we? Your grandfather isn’t stupid—none of your family are, and they’re not going to believe a leopard can change its spots. I visited your family on my own and made excuses for you for over a year before I left and I’ve been doing the same for the last four months and they have been none the wiser about the state of our marriage. When we finally come clean that we’ve separated, the only surprise will be that it’s taken me so long to see sense.’

Livia knew she was baiting him but she didn’t care. She wanted him to argue with her. She’d always wanted him to argue back but he never did. It was a circle that had only grown more vicious as their marriage limped on; her shouting, him clamming up.

True to form, Massimo’s mouth clamped into a straight line. He pushed his chair back roughly and got to his feet but before he could stride away as she fully expected him to do, he turned back around and glowered at her. ‘Unless you want a fight over any divorce settlement, I suggest you stick to the plan and stop putting doubts about our marriage in my family’s head. I don’t care what my parents or sister think but I will not have my grandfather having doubts about us.’

‘If you want a fight over the settlement then I’ll give you a fight,’ she said, outraged at his threat, ‘but I am sticking to the plan! You’ve neglected your family for so long that they think it’s normal that you neglect your wife too.’

‘I’m not having this argument again.’

She laughed bitterly. Her hands were shaking. ‘We never argued about it. Whenever I tried to tell you how unhappy I was, you walked away from me. You never wanted to hear it.’

‘You were like a stuck record.’ He made crablike pinching motions with his hands. ‘I’m bored, Massimo,’ he mimicked. ‘I’m lonely, Massimo. Why do you work such long hours, Massimo?’ He dropped his hands and expelled his own bitter laugh. ‘See? I did listen. Maybe if you’d ever paused for breath between complaints I might have felt more incentivised to come home earlier each night.’

‘I only complained because you work such stupid hours!’

His eyes were cold. ‘I didn’t force you to move to America. I didn’t force you to marry me. You knew the kind of man I was before we married but you thought you could change me. Instead of solving your problems for yourself you sat around the house wallowing and complaining and expecting me to fix everything for you.’

‘I never wallowed!’ she said, outraged. Of all the things he’d just accused her of, for some reason that was the one that immediately bit the hardest. ‘And as if I would have expected you to fix anything—you aren’t capable of fixing anything to do with the human heart. You’ve spent so much time with your machines and gadgets that your heart has turned to metal.’

He took the three steps needed to smile cruelly down at her. ‘You did nothing but wallow. And sulk. And complain. For the first few weeks after you left I thought I’d gone deaf.’

And then his smile turned into a grimace as he turned on his heel and, parting shot delivered, strode off leaving Livia standing there feeling as if he’d just ripped her heart out.