Читать книгу A Dangerous Solace - Lucy Ellis - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

AVA FORCED HERSELF to block the encounter out of her head as she followed his directions and caught her first glimpse in seven years of the Spanish Steps. Despite the crowd she found her tour group and fastened on, all too aware she was already hot and tired and flustered.

He’d followed her.

Yes, but he likes women. That’s his modus operandi. He sees a girl. He takes her.

He saw you, he wants you.

Ava tried to focus on what the guide was saying about Keats’s death, but all she could think about was her own small death of pride, which had her desperately wanting to go to this club tonight, to see him again...

She shut her eyes and screwed up her resolve. She wasn’t the kind of woman who slept with random men—and that was all it ever could be with a guy like Benedetti. A night, a handful of hours—entertainment for him.

You liked it. He saw you. He wants you.

It wasn’t any kind of reason for offering herself up to be hurt again.

It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose. You’re a single woman and this is Rome.

For a moment her resolve slipped and her surroundings rushed in. For beyond the hurried crowd and the noise of traffic was the city itself, imprinted on her mind by countless Hollywood films. Bella Italia, where magical things were supposed to happen to single girls if they threw coins in fountains. And sometimes those things did happen—but this girl had misread the signs.

Every time she got it wrong. She wasn’t going to get it wrong again.

Emotions welled up unexpectedly, filling her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She’d been crying again this morning and she never cried! Not even when Bernard had rung her three days ago, at the terminal in Sydney International an hour before take-off, to tell her he wouldn’t be coming to Rome.

Just as her realisation had begun to take shape that there would be no romantic proposal in front of the Trevi Fountain, and before she could examine the overwhelming feeling of relief that had washed over her, he’d broken the news that he had found another woman—and that with her he had passion.

It had been a low blow, even for Bernard. He’d never been particularly sensitive to her feelings, but she had assumed up until that moment that half the blame for their lacklustre sex life was shared by him.

Apparently not. Apparently it was all down to her.

‘Passion?’ she had shouted down the phone. ‘We could have had passion. In Rome!’

Yet ever since—on the long-haul flight, on the taxi ride from Fiumicino Airport to her historic hotel, over the two nights she’d spent staring at the walls as she listlessly ate her room-service dinner in front of the Italian melodrama she was just starting to get hooked on—Ava had nursed a suspicion that she had chosen Rome as the site of her proposal for entirely romantic reasons that clearly had nothing to do with Bernard.

She was beginning to suspect there were unplumbed depths of longing inside of her for a different life.

A romantic life.

But it was no use. Romance belonged in the movies, not in real life. Certainly not in her life. She’d learned that young, from watching the break-up of her parents’ marriage, seeing her mentally ill mother struggle to support them on a pension, that the only way to survive as a woman was to become financially independent.

So she had worked hard to get where she was, but it meant she had never had time for a social life, had never gone through the rites of passage her peers had taken for granted.

As a consequence she had done a very silly thing seven years ago, and another silly thing when she’d convinced herself to marry a man she didn’t love.

No, Bernard was not the right man for her. But neither was an oversexed soccer player who thought he could just pick up a woman like a coin in the gutter and put her in his pocket.

Her fist opened to reveal the embossed card she’d been carrying around for the last half hour. She held it up and read the simply inscribed name and several contact numbers. A memory slid like a stiletto knife between her ribs. All those numbers—but she’d rung his numbers before, hadn’t she? None of them led to him.

Giving herself a shake, Ava slipped away from the group. She was going back to the hotel.

Everything was a mess and it was his fault.

Not Bernard’s. What had she been thinking, being with Bernard for two long years? Going so far as to orchestrate a romantic proposal? Booking the plane fares, a luxury hotel, a driving tour of Tuscany...?

What had possessed her to set up such a ridiculous romantic scenario with a man she didn’t love, in this city of all cities...?

Ava’s heart began to pound, because she had the answer in her hot little hand.

* * *

What was she doing back in Rome?

It was the million-dollar question and it had Gianluca entertaining scenarios that, frankly, were beneath him.

Behind him the private party was in full swing—a welcome back to Rome for his cousin Marco and his new wife—but Gianluca found himself constantly scanning the piazza below for a certain dressed-down brunette.

He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head all day. It wasn’t the fresh-faced girl who had lain down with him in the grass on the Palatino who was rifling through his thoughts, though, but the tense, angry woman who looked as if she hadn’t had a man between her thighs in a good many years. The sort of woman who, for whatever reason, had forgotten how to be a woman—although in this lady’s case he suspected it might be a wilful act.

He smiled slightly, wondered how hard it would be to perform that miracle.

Given the sexual attraction that had flared between them in the street today, not hard. Anger, he acknowledged, could be a powerful aphrodisiac.

His smile faded. His parents had conducted that kind of relationship. Volatile, glass-breaking performances on his Sicilian mother’s side, and passive-aggressive acts of sabotage from his father as he withheld money, access to the family jewellery, use of the Benedetti palazzi dotted around the country. Yes, the married state had a great deal to recommend it.

The irony was that he was here celebrating a wedding. The advent of a baby. The things that made up happiness in other people’s lives. Just not if you had Benedetti attached to your name.

It was a lonely thought and he pushed it aside. Life was good. He was young, fit and obscenely successful. Women fell at his feet. Men scrambled to get out of his way. Everything he touched turned to gold these days. Forget the dragon. Forget the past. Take those lessons and apply them to what was to come now.

He turned away from his contemplation of the famous square below and strolled across the terrace to join the party.

* * *

‘Signorina, we sit here all night or I take you somewhere else? Give me something to work with!’

Across the road Ava could see women in tiny scraps of nothing much going happily into the popular nightspot. She shoved money at the driver, took a breath and launched herself out of the cab. The cool air licked around her legs and she almost dived back in.

She knew she was being silly. The burgundy red cocktail dress came to her knees and covered her shoulders and arms. It was perfectly acceptable. Perhaps it clung to her long thighs as she moved, and her calves in black stockings felt exposed as she made her way across the road, heels clicking on the pavement, but nobody was going to laugh at her and point.

As she approached the glass front of the upmarket nightclub she began to feel a little differently. The pulsing blue and gold neon lights gave a dreamlike quality to the atmosphere, and far from feeling on show she realised for once that with her hair and her dress and her heels she fitted right in. There was nothing show-offish about her appearance.

She had a very real fear of making a spectacle of herself in public. Growing up, she had seen her mum’s illness provide far too many opportunities for that to happen. She had set up her life to avoid social situations as much as possible, but tonight she didn’t have much choice.

The doorman said something pleasant to her in Italian and Ava found herself inside, waiting behind the other patrons, relieved she had dressed up. For the umpteenth time her fingers went to the ends of her hair.

This afternoon she’d taken her long brown plait to the hairdresser, and after a process of a great deal of pointing and gesturing her hair was now swinging with more bounce and life than it had ever had around her shoulders. She’d left that hairdresser feeling as chic as any Roman woman, very modern, and in control of her own destiny once more.

As with cutting several inches off her hair, it had been her choice to wear a cocktail dress. That it was brand-new, bought today, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a frock had absolutely nothing to do with a man this morning telling her she had forgotten how to be a woman.

She couldn’t see him anyhow as she came down the steps and made her way slowly through the crowded bar. Confusion assailed her. Should she wait? Should she ask for his table? Worryingly, the place seemed to be full of beautiful women not wearing very much clothing. She couldn’t possibly compete.

As if to hammer this home a glamorous blonde slunk past her on stab-your-heart-out heels, scantily clad in a dress that looked sewn on. Ava followed her progress, along with every man in the vicinity, although her thoughts—She must be cold—probably didn’t align with theirs.

Perhaps she’d over-estimated the transformative powers of a new hairstyle?

Feeling her confidence slipping away, Ava scanned the room, spotted the winding stairs at either end. There was another level. She caught sight of the blonde making her wiggly way up and up. Should she go upstairs? Should she ask for his table?

For the first time it occurred to Ava with a stab of unease that the invitation had been general, more along the lines of come along—enjoy yourself. Not specific—not I find you attractive, perhaps even on some subliminal level remember you, and I want to spend some time with you. It was entirely possible she had misinterpreted him.

Yes, Ava, you’ve got it wrong again...

But in that moment she caught sight of a dark-haired woman in a burgundy dress staring back at her across the room. Her eyes were made up with kohl and lashings of mascara, dark and mysterious, her mouth was a vivid splash of red colour like a full-blown rose, explosive and passionate. She was something other than beautiful. She was dramatic.

It wasn’t until she lifted her fingertips once more to her hair that Ava experienced the little shock of recognition. It was a mirrored wall. The woman staring back at her was—well, her.

She ignored the thundering voices that told her she was lining herself up for a fall and made her way upstairs.

* * *

Marco handed him a fresh beer. ‘To the future.’

This was the first time Gianluca had been able to catch up with his cousin since the massive wedding back in Ragusa. They’d played professional football together in their early twenties. Marco had been dropped due to injury; Gianluca had cut his contract at the height of his career and fame to perform the military service expected of a Benedetti male.

He was still feeling the reverberations of that early shot at sporting immortality. Soccer was his country’s religion, and for two short years he had been its idol—Rome’s favourite son—and nobody let him forget it.

‘Your future,’ he amended, and scanned the room for the bride. Sure enough she was nearby, deep in a huddle with her girlfriends. She was also noticeably pregnant. She saw them and made her way over.

‘We were just toasting the Benedetti heir,’ Gianluca informed her, kissing each warm cheek she proffered gently.

‘That’s your son, not mine,’ Marco reminded him.

‘There aren’t going to be any, my friend. So drink up.’

‘According to Valentina there will be.’

‘You’ll fall in love, Gianluca,’ said Tina Trigoni, fitting herself into the curve of her husband’s arm. She barely came up to his shoulder. ‘And before you know it you’ll have six sons and six daughters. You’d better,’ she added. ‘I have no intention of sacrificing my children to the Benedetti legacy.’

‘Valentina—’ began Marco, but Gianluca gave her a faint smile.

‘Glad you’ve been paying attention, Tina.’

‘Although you’ll never settle down while you date these bubbleheads.’

He lifted a brow.

‘Women with bubbles over their heads—like in the cartoons,’ said Tina, making an illustrative gesture. ‘Blank bubbles for other people to fill the words in.’

Gianluca privately acknowledged she wasn’t far off the mark. But then he wasn’t looking for a mother for his children.

‘You’ve been talking to my mother.’

‘God, no. I’m not that brave. You do know she thinks a twenty-year-old Sicilian virgin would fill the nursery? I heard her talking to your sisters about it.’

Marco snorted. ‘Does your mother know you at all?’

Did his mother know him? Hardly. And that was the point. The Benedettis threw their boys out to be raised like Romulus and Remus in Rome’s foundation myth, to be suckled by the she-wolf of the military until they came of age.

His mother had conformed to the Benedetti traditions like all the women who came before her and expected him to do the same.

No, his mother didn’t know him—at all.

‘Find me a wife then, Tina,’ he said derisively. ‘A good, plump Sicilian virgin and I’ll follow all the customs.’

‘Find you a wife and thousands of hopeful women will weep,’ Marco observed, swigging his beer.

But Valentina looked interested. ‘I don’t know about virgins—are there any left over the age of twenty-one?’

Completely out of nowhere his mind reverted to a pair of unusual green eyes. There were some, he thought. Once. A long time ago.

‘But frankly, Gianluca, I don’t know if I should introduce any of my friends to you. It’s not as if you’re ever serious about a woman.’

‘Her friends are queuing up to be introduced,’ inserted Marco. ‘I’m glad I don’t make the kind of money you do.’

‘Yes, because then I would have married you for your money,’ said Valentina lightly, ‘instead of for your charm.’ She gave her husband a smart look. ‘Besides, I don’t think they’re entirely after his money, caro.’

Gianluca listened to Marco and his wife banter and for a moment acknowledged that this was what he would miss. All going well, Marco and Tina would grow old together, nurse grandchildren on their laps, reminisce about a life well lived.

In forty years’ time... He came to a dead stop. The way he was going he’d be a rich man in an empty castle. He looked past the happy couple and saw only his parents’ screaming matches, their empty lives performed on the stage set that was the Palazzo Benedetti. One of the most admired pieces of private real estate in Rome. If only people knew the generations of unhappy women who haunted its corridors.

His own mother had been a stunningly beautiful hot-blooded girl from the hills outside Ragusa. Maria Trigoni had married into the social stratosphere and contorted herself into the role of Roman principessa. She had played fitfully at being wife and mother when she hadn’t been completely taken up with her lovers or her much-desired role in society.

Her only real loyalty was to her family in the south—the Trigonis. Marco’s father was her brother. She would vanish down there for long periods of time. He remembered each one of those disappearances like cuts to his back. The first time it had happened he’d been three and had cried for a week. The second time he’d been six and had been beaten for his tears. When he was ten he’d tried to telephone his mother in Ragusa but she’d refused to take his call.

Privately Gianluca suspected the moment a woman put on the Benedetti wedding tiara she lost a bit of her soul. So sue him—he wouldn’t be passing on that little tradition.

* * *

He swigged his beer, barely tasting it as it went down. He had no intention of settling down, providing an heir to the Benedetti name. It was enough that he’d restored its honour.

Besides, after two years on active service he knew better than most that life was lived in the moment, and at this particular moment he was enjoying a little variety in his life. He knew it irritated his mother, disappointed his grandmother, but as a Benedetti male it was almost expected that he would pursue women in numbers.

The old cliché that there was safety in numbers was true. He had a reputation now for being a bachelor who couldn’t be hooked. He played up to it.

As if conjured by the direction of his thoughts a woman stepped out onto the terrace.

She was slender and curvy all at once, and the lights turned her hair platinum.

‘There’s my cue,’ said Gianluca.

‘Fast cars and fast women—this is why I refuse to introduce you to my girlfriends,’ Tina called mischievously after him.

As he approached, the blonde turned up a flawless face and batted long lashes over her Bambi eyes.

‘Come and dance with me, Gianluca.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said, shouldering past her. ‘Let’s get a drink...’ For the life of him he couldn’t remember her name.

‘Donatella,’ she said coldly, in that moment losing the little-girl act.

‘Donatella—si.’ He suspected from her tone that he’d forgotten her name more than once tonight. It wasn’t important. She’d only latched on to him because of his name, his reputation.

He slid a hand into his jacket, dragged out his PDA. He’d have a drink, do some work, lose the blonde. But she was a good excuse to put his head back into what mattered—making a deal, setting up the next one, keeping an eye on what the Asia-Pacific markets were doing overnight. Not contemplating what Marco had found seemingly so effortlessly: a good woman. While he, Rome’s pre-eminent bachelor, had been stood up by a sexless Australian dragon who clearly didn’t know her loss was what’s-her-name’s gain...

He rifled through his mind for the blonde’s name again, gave up, and hit the bar for another drink.

* * *

Ava gave her name to the hostess and naturally only drew a blank. Part of her had hoped she would just be waved on in.

‘Strawberries,’ she whispered.

‘Scusi, signorina?’

Ava cleared her throat. ‘I believe I’m listed under the name “Strawberries”.’

Her mouth felt dry, her skin prickled, and she was sure the couple behind her were finding this hilarious. She closed her eyes briefly to fortify herself. Public humiliation suddenly felt all too close. ‘I’m Signor Benedetti’s guest.’

Just saying it made this all real, and Ava felt her Dutch courage—a glass of white wine before she left the hotel and two reds downstairs—curdle in her stomach like milk left in the sun.

‘Ah, si.’

The hostess seemed to find nothing unusual in a woman being listed as a fruit on Gianluca Benedetti’s guest list, and the thought made Ava’s belly clench a little tighter.

She made her way through a crowd of women in slips and heels and men in Armani before coming to a standstill.

Gianluca Benedetti was lounging like some kind of broad-shouldered Caesar, with his arms thrown across the back of a black leather settee, his powerful shoulders and chest delineated in a form-fitting dark shirt. His high cheekbones, sensuous mouth and uncompromisingly firm jaw gave him the look of one of Michelangelo’s marble carvings of male beauty.

Genetics had been so good to him there had to be a price. Spitefully Ava wished she could be around to see it exacted from him. He wasn’t alone—as if she had ever expected him to be alone. What had she thought? He’d be waiting for her? This was some sort of date?

His head was angled negligently to one side for a scantily clad blonde to whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

The blonde, naturally. The stab-your-heart-out heels blonde.

A sick feeling invaded her insides.

She was never going to be that woman.

For a teetering instant Ava was transported to that long-ago reception for her brother’s wedding. She had been a socially awkward young woman who just hadn’t fitted in with the glamorous, international crowd, watching from the sidelines as Gianluca Benedetti—Italian soccer star and possibly the most desired man on the planet—reclined on a banquette, gesticulating as he talked football with another guy. He’d had two girls wrapped around him like climbing vines, blonde and brunette. The equivalent of gelato flavours for grown men. He hadn’t even been paying attention to them.

At the time she had christened them vines, but, oh, how she had wanted to be like them. Just for one night to be a sexy, no-consequences girl, in slip and heels, hanging off the hottest guy at the party.

Even as she had struggled to come to terms with the odds of her ever being that kind of girl her eyes had moved over the object of their attention and for the first time in her life she’d been hit by something and hadn’t been able to hit back.

The tsunami of feeling that night had carried her past her inhibitions—past the little voice of caution that always asked if this was the right thing to do, if there would be consequences for her actions, the voice of a girl who’d had to look after herself from a very young age. That night she hadn’t cared about the consequences.

She had only cared about him.

Having him.

Feeling sick now, she was unable to credit that she had stepped so easily back into the same shoes, that she had learned nothing from her experiences.

Before she could even formulate her next move he was getting up, throwing back those broad shoulders and unexpectedly moving her way. It was so sudden her first instinct was to turn tail and flee, but she wasn’t an uncertain girl any more. She could handle this.

Sucking in her tummy, adjusting the line of her dress, she prepared herself for what she would say.

I came but I wish I hadn’t. You’re a womaniser, a cad and a bounder, and I wish I’d never met you.

He was less than a metre away when she realised he wasn’t coming over to her. His hard gaze moved unseeingly over her, as if she were one of the faceless crowd, and Ava realised she wasn’t going to have her moment.

He’d issued the invitation but he’d already forgotten about her. She hadn’t even made enough impact this morning for her face to register with him.

Her stomach buckled.

She watched him moving easily but inexorably towards the exit, the doors opening and swallowing him up.

Ava only became aware that she was struggling to push her way through the crowd when someone stepped on her foot and she lost a shoe. Pausing to scoop it up, she pushed through the exit doors, then virtually ran outside. She hesitated on the steps leading down into the square, but only to scan desperately for the direction he’d taken.

She gave a start as she caught sight of him, moving out of the darkness across the square.

Shoving it all aside—a lifetime of prudence, plans and protecting herself from men like this one...well, any man really...not to mention leaving her perfectly good A-line coat behind—Ava began to run after him.