Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2016 Books 1-4 - Линн Грэхем, Cathy Williams - Страница 18

CHAPTER EIGHT

A SOFT BREEZE wafted in through the open windows, making the filmy drapes at the window shiver like a bridal veil and the mocking significance of that didn’t escape Willow. She drew her hand over her clammy brow and looked around the luxurious room. She could hardly believe she was here, on Dante’s estate, or that he had persuaded her to come here for a long weekend, despite the many objections she’d raised.

But he’d made her feel guilty—and guilt was a powerful motivator. He’d said that her lies about being his fiancée had given his grandfather hope, and it was in her power to ensure that a dying man’s hopes were not dashed.

‘You seemed to want to let your family believe that you were going to be my bride,’ were his exact, silken words. ‘Well, now this is your chance to play the role for real.’

Except that it wasn’t real, because a real bride-to-be would be cherished and caressed by her fiancé, wouldn’t she? Not kept at a chilly distance as if she was something unwanted but necessary—like a bandage you might be forced to wrap around an injured arm.

They were installed in an unbelievably cute cottage in the extensive grounds, but in a way that was worse than staying in the main house. Because in here there was the illusion of intimacy, while in reality they were two people who couldn’t have been further apart. She was closeted alone with a man who clearly despised her. And there was only one bed. Willow swallowed. This time it was a king-size bed, but the principle of where to sleep remained the same. Was he really willing to repeat what had happened at the wedding—sharing a bedroom, while keeping his distance from her?

Dante had telephoned ahead to tell the housekeeper that they wished to be guaranteed privacy. She remembered the look on his face as he’d finished the call. ‘They’ll think it’s because we’re crazy about each other and can’t keep our hands off each other,’ he’d said mockingly.

But Willow knew the real reason. It meant that they wouldn’t be forced to continue with the farce for any longer than necessary. There would be no reason for Dante to hide his undeniable hostility towards her. When they were with other people they would be sweetness and light together, while in private...

She bit her lip, trying hard to block out the sound of the powerful shower jets from the en-suite bathroom and not to think about Dante standing naked beneath them, but it wasn’t easy. Their enforced proximity had made her achingly aware of him—whether he was in the same room, or not.

They had flown in by helicopter an hour earlier and Willow’s first sight of the Di Sione family home had taken her breath away. She’d grown up in a big home, yes—but this was nothing like the crumbling house in which she’d spent her own formative years. This, she’d realised, was what real wealth looked like. It was solid and real, and clearly money was no object. The white marble of the Long Island mansion was gleaming and so pristine that she couldn’t imagine anyone actually living in it. She had been aware of the endless sweep of emerald lawns, the turquoise flash of a swimming pool and the distant glitter of a huge lake as their helicopter had landed.

A housekeeper named Alma had welcomed them and told Dante that his grandfather was sleeping but looking forward to seeing them both at dinner.

‘And your sister is here, of course,’ she said.

‘Talia?’ questioned Dante as the housekeeper nodded.

‘That’s right. She’s out making sketches for a new painting.’ Alma had given Willow a friendly smile. ‘You’ll meet Miss Natalia at dinner.’

And Willow had nodded and tried to look as she thought a newly engaged woman should look—and not like someone who had recently been handed a diamond ring by Dante, with all the emotion of someone producing a cheap trinket from the remains of a Christmas cracker.

‘What’s this?’ she’d asked as he had deposited a small velvet box on her lap.

‘Your number one prop,’ came his mocking response as their helicopter had hovered over the Di Sione landing pad. ‘The bling. That thing which women love to flash as a symbol of success—the outward sign that they’ve got their man.’

‘What an unbelievably cynical thing to say.’

‘You think it’s cynical to tell the truth?’ he’d demanded. ‘Or are you denying that women view the acquisition of diamonds as if it’s some new kind of competitive sport?’

The awful thing was that Willow secretly agreed with him. Her sisters were crazy about diamonds—and so were plenty of the women she worked with—yet she’d always found them a cold and emotionless stone. The giant solitaire winked at her now like some malevolent foe, splashing rainbow fire over her pale fingers as Dante emerged from the bathroom.

Quickly, she looked up, her heart beginning to pound. She’d been half expecting him to emerge wearing nothing but a towel slung around his hips, and guessed she should be pleased that he must have dressed in the bathroom. But her overriding sensation was one of disappointment. Had she secretly been hoping to catch a glimpse of that magnificent olive body as he patted himself dry? Was there some masochistic urge lurking inside her which wanted to taunt her with what she hadn’t got?

Yet the dark trousers and silk shirt he wore did little to disguise his muscular physique and his fully dressed state did nothing to dim his powerful air of allure. His black hair was still damp and his eyes looked intensely blue, and suddenly Willow felt her heart lurch with a dizzying yet wasted sense of desire. Because since that interrupted seduction at her sister’s wedding, he hadn’t touched her. Not once. He had avoided all physical contact with the studied exaggeration of someone in the military walking through a field studded with landmines.

His gaze flickered to where she’d been studying her hand and his eyes gleamed with mockery. As if he’d caught her gloating. ‘Do you like your ring?’

‘It looks way too big on my hand,’ she said truthfully. ‘And huge solitaire diamonds aren’t really my thing.’

He raised his dark brows mockingly, as if he didn’t quite believe her.

‘But they have a much better resale value than something bespoke,’ he drawled.

‘Of course,’ she said, and then a rush of nerves washed over her as she thought about the reality of going to dinner that evening and playing the part of his intended bride. ‘You know, if we’re planning to convince your grandfather that we really are a couple, then I’m going to need to know something about you. And if you could try being a little less hostile towards me that might help.’

He slipped a pair of heavy gold cufflinks in place and clipped them closed before answering. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

She wanted to know why he was so cynical. And why his face had darkened as soon as the helicopter had landed here today.

‘You told me about being sent away to boarding school in Switzerland, but you didn’t say why.’

‘Does there have to be a reason?’

She hesitated. ‘I’m thinking that maybe there was. And if there was, then I would probably know about it.’

Dante’s instinct was to snap out some terse response—the familiar blocking technique he used whenever questions strayed into the territory of personal. Because he didn’t trust personal. He didn’t trust anyone or anything, and Willow Hamilton was no exception in the trust stakes, with her manipulation and evasion. But suddenly her face had become soft with what looked like genuine concern and he felt a tug of something unfamiliar deep inside him. An inexplicable urge to colour in some of the blank spaces of his past. Was that because he wanted his grandfather to die happy by convincing him that he’d found true love at last? Or because—despite her careless tongue landing them in this ridiculous situation—she possessed a curious sense of vulnerability which somehow managed to burrow beneath his defences.

His lips tightened as he reminded himself how clever Giovanni was. How he would see through a fake engagement in the blinking of an eye if he wasn’t careful. So tell her, he thought. She was right. He should tell her the stuff which any fiancée would expect to know.

‘I’m one of seven children,’ he said, shooting out the facts like bullets. ‘And my grandfather stepped in to care for us when my parents died very suddenly.’

‘And...how did they die?’

‘Violently,’ he answered succinctly.

Her eyes clouded and Dante saw comprehension written in their soft, grey depths. As if she understood pain. And he didn’t want her to understand. He wanted her to nod as he presented her with the bare facts—not look at him as if he was some kind of problem she could solve.

Yet there had been times when he’d longed for someone to work their magic on him. He stared out at the distant glitter of the lake. To find a woman he’d be happy to go to bed with, night after night—instead of suffering from chronic boredom as soon as anyone tried to get close to him. To find some kind of peace with another human being—the kind of peace which seemed almost unimaginable to him. Was that how his twin had felt about Anais? he wondered.

He thought about Dario and felt the bitter twist of remorse as he remembered what he had done to his brother.

‘What exactly happened?’ Willow was asking.

Her gentle tone threatened to undermine his resolve. Making him want to show her what his life had been like. To show her that she didn’t have the monopoly on difficult childhoods. And suddenly, it was like a dam breaking through and flooding him.

‘My father was a screwed-up hedonist,’ he said bluntly. ‘A kid with too much money who saw salvation in the bottom of a bottle, or in the little pile of white dust he snorted through a hundred dollar bill.’ His lips tightened. ‘He blamed his addictions on the fact that my grandfather had never been there for him when he was growing up—but plenty of people have absent parents and don’t end up having to live their lives on a constant high.’

‘And what about your mother?’ she questioned as calmly as if he’d just been telling her that his father had been president of the Union.

He shook his head. ‘She was cut from the same cloth. Or maybe he taught her to be that way—I don’t know. All I do know is that she liked the feeling of being out of her head as well. Or maybe she needed to blot out the reality, because my father wasn’t exactly known for his fidelity. Their parties were legendary. I remember I used to creep downstairs to find it looking like some kind of Roman orgy, with people lying around among the empty bottles and glasses and the sounds of women gasping in the pool house. And then one day my mother just stopped. She started seeing a therapist and went into rehab, and although she replaced the drink and the drugs with a shopping addiction, for a while everything was...’ He shrugged as he struggled to find a word which would sum up the chaos of his family life.

‘Normal?’

He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘No, Willow. It was never normal, but it was better. In fact, for a while it was great. We felt we’d got our mother back. And then...’

‘Then?’ she prompted again.

He wasn’t even angry with her for her persistence because now it felt like some rank poison was throbbing beneath his skin and he needed to cut through the surface to let that poison out.

‘One night there was some big row. I don’t know what it was about—all I do know is that my father was completely loaded and my mother was shouting at him. I heard him yell back that he was going out and then I heard her going after him. I knew he was in no state to drive and I tried to stop her. I...’

He’d done more than try. He’d begged her not to go. He’d run over and clung to her with all the strength his eight-year-old body could muster, but she hadn’t listened. She’d got in the car anyway and the next time he’d seen his mother was when she’d been laid out in her coffin, with white lilies in her hands and that waxy look on her cold, cold cheeks.

‘She wouldn’t listen to me,’ he bit out. ‘He crashed the car and killed them both. And I didn’t manage to stop her. Even though deep down I knew what a state my father was in, I let her go.’

He stared out at the grounds of the house he’d moved into soon afterwards when his grandfather had brought them all here. A place where he’d been unable to shake off his sorrow and his guilt. He’d run wild until his grandfather had sent him and Dario away to school. And he’d just kept on running, hadn’t he? He wondered now if the failure of his attempt to stop his mother had been the beginning of his fierce need to control. The reason why he always felt compelled to step in and influence what was happening around him. Was that why he’d done what he’d done to his twin brother?

‘But maybe you couldn’t stop her.’

Willow’s voice—suddenly so strong and sure—broke into his thoughts.

‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.

‘Children can’t always make adults behave the way they want them to, Dante,’ she said, her words washing over him like balm. ‘No matter how hard they try.’

Dante turned round, still unable to believe how much she’d got out of him. She looked like some kind of angel sitting there, with her pale English skin and that waterfall of silky hair. In her simple cotton dress she looked so pure—hell, she was pure. But it was more than just about sex. She looked as if she could take all the darkness away from him and wash away the stain of guilt from his heart. And her grey eyes were fixed on him, quite calmly—as if she knew exactly what was going on inside his head and was silently urging him to go right ahead and do it.

He wasn’t thinking as he walked across the room to where she sat at an antique writing desk with the oil painting of Sicily which hung on the wall behind it. The hot, scorched brushstrokes and cerulean blue of the sky contrasted vividly with her coolness. Her lips looked soft and inviting. Some warning bell was sounding inside his head, telling him that this was wrong. But some of the poison had left him now. Left him feeling empty and aching and wanting her. Wanting to lose himself in her.

She didn’t object when he pulled her out of the chair and onto her feet. In fact, the sudden yearning in her eyes suggested that she’d wanted him to touch her just as badly as he needed to.

His hands were in her hair and his mouth was hovering over hers, their lips not quite touching, as if he’d had a last-minute moment of sanity and this was his chance to pull back from her. Was that why she stood up on tiptoe and anchored her hands to his shoulders? Why she flickered the tip of her tongue inside his mouth?

‘Willow,’ he whispered as his heart began to pound.

‘Yes,’ she whispered back. ‘I’m right here.’

He groaned as he tasted her—his senses tantalised by the faint drift of her scent. Dropping his hands from her hair, he gripped her waist and he thought how incredibly light she felt. As light as those drifts of swansdown you sometimes saw floating across hazy summer lawns. He deepened the kiss, and as she sucked in a breath, it felt like she was sucking him right inside her. For a moment he thought about the very obvious place where he would like to be sucked and his hand reached down to cup her breast. He heard the urgent little sigh of delight she made. He felt the restless circle of her narrow hips, and he could feel control leaving him as she kissed him back. He tried to remember where he’d put his condoms and just how long they had before they were expected up at the main house. And all the time he could feel himself going under—as if he was being consumed by a tide of rich, dark honey.

But along with the sweet, sharp kick of desire came the reminder of all the things he’d told himself he wasn’t going to do. He’d messed up enough in his life. He’d failed to save his mother. He’d ruptured his relationship with his twin brother. In business he’d achieved outstanding success, but his personal relationships were not the same. Everything he touched turned to dust. He was incapable of experiencing the emotions which other men seemed to feel. And even though Willow Hamilton had allowed her stupid fantasies to manipulate events... Even though she had dragged him into her fantasy and made it impossible for him to walk away from her—that gave him no right to hurt her.

It would be too easy to take her innocence. To be the first man to claim her body for his own. To introduce her to the powerful but ultimately fleeting pleasures of sex. He closed his eyes because imagining her sweet tightness encasing him was almost too much to bear. He thought about easing into her molten heat, with his mouth clamped to one of her tiny nipples. He thought about how good it would feel to be able to come inside her. To pump his seed into her until he was empty and replete. To kiss her and kiss her until she fell asleep in his arms.

But a woman’s virginity was a big deal, and someone who had suffered as Willow had suffered deserved more than he could ever give her. Because he was programmed not to trust and never to stay. He would take pleasure and give pleasure and then close the door and leave without a backwards glance.

Dragging his mouth away from hers and dropping his hand from her breast as if it was on fire, he stepped away, trying to quieten down the fierce sexual hunger which was burning inside him. But when he saw the confusion clouding her beautiful eyes, he felt a moment of unfamiliar doubt which he couldn’t seem to block out.

His mouth twisted.

‘I meant what I said back in England,’ he gritted. ‘You aren’t somebody I intend to get intimate with, Willow. Did you think that because I’ve just told you something about my deeply troubled past...’ His voice took on a harsh and mocking tone. ‘That I would want you? Did you think any of this was for real? Because if you do, you’re making a big mistake. For the sake of my grandfather and his romantic ideals, we will play the part of the happily engaged couple whenever we find ourselves in his company. But when we’re alone, the reality will be very different. Just so you know, I’ll be sleeping on the couch.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘And I’ll do my best not to disturb you.’