Читать книгу Italian Deception: The Salvatore Marriage / A Sicilian Seduction / The Passion Bargain - Michelle Reid - Страница 5

THE storm raging outside was killing the signal. Shannon uttered a soft, tense little curse as trembling fingers reset her cell-phone then hit ‘redial’ before pushing the phone back to her ear.

Fear was crawling over her skin like a swarm of invading spiders. She couldn’t stop shivering—or was she trembling? She didn’t know, didn’t care, she just needed—needed to make this connection.

‘Come on …’ she prayed with teeth-gritting tension when still nothing happened.

Five minutes ago she had been dashing from a taxi to her apartment block with no other concern than to get out of the driving rain. She’d had a hell of a day from the moment she’d overslept that morning. In her haste to catch her flight to Paris, she’d rushed out of her flat forgetting to pick up her cell-phone as she left and had felt lost without it all day.

On top of that, her meeting had not been worth the time she had wasted on it. Temperamental supermodels and gifted graphic designers just did not mix, she’d discovered, especially when the supermodel in question took one look at the graphic designer’s slender, long-legged figure and regarded her as an instant threat. Why the heck the idiot had conjured up the idea that a five-foot-eight redhead could compete with a six-foot-tall sylph-slim blonde with cheekbones to die for was anyone’s guess. But all hope that the model was going to let Shannon design her self-promoting website went out of the window then and there.

Since then Shannon had flown back to London through the worst weather imaginable, struggled to get a taxi, then had got soaked getting from it to here. The first thing she saw on stepping through her front door was her cell-phone lying on the hall table, innocently telling her that she’d received a dozen missed calls—most of which were from her business partner Joshua demanding to know why the hell she wasn’t answering her phone.

But it was another message awaiting her that had sent her mind into a complete meltdown. ‘Shannon,’ it said. ‘Call me back on this number as soon as you can. There has been an—accident.’

An accident—Her throat closed on her effort to swallow. The relater of the message had not left his name but through the static his deep, smooth, accented voice had been familiar enough to put her into this state of raw panic. She guessed that the call was from her sister’s husband Angelo—and if Angelo had left such a message then it could only be because the accident involved Keira.

‘Damn,’ she muttered when still nothing happened, and was hitting redial again when the doorbell gave a short, sharp ring.

Distracted, she turned to walk down the hallway, barely noticing that she had to step over the bag she’d left dumped in the middle of the floor as she made her way to the front door. A set of harried fingers made a wild scrape through the silk straight weight of her rain-dampened hair before continuing on to grasp the door latch. The phone still wasn’t connecting. She tugged the door open, too preoccupied to wonder who might be standing on the other side of it so it came as a shock—a cold, hard, breath catching shock to find the last person on earth she ever expected to see standing there.

He stood over six feet two inches tall and was wearing a long black overcoat. The width of his shoulders almost spanned the doorway. For a few awful moments Shannon actually felt dizzy enough to clutch at the door while he stood there filling the opening like some dark, chilling force.

‘Luca.’ Dear God, she thought as her lips framed his name on a stunned whisper.

He didn’t utter a single word but just reached out with a hand to ease the phone from her numbed fingers, then began ushering her backwards by the economical means of taking a step forwards.

Her breath feathered against her ribcage, the fact that she wasn’t yelling at him to get the hell away from her said a lot about her state of near complete shutdown—though she did manage to register that both of them moved without touching anywhere. Like a dance between two opposing magnets, they made the manoeuvre into her hall without breaching each other’s defensive space until she was standing with her back pressed against a wall, eyes wide and fixed unblinkingly on him as he turned his back on her and in grim, grim silence closed the door.

The size of her hall suddenly shrank to nothing, she felt strange suddenly, as if she too were shrinking into herself in an effort to get away from what she was being faced with here.

This man, this larger-than-life figurehead of the vast Salvatore empire. Luca Salvatore, of Florence, a man of power and of unrivalled passion. Ex-lover to Shannon Gilbraith, woman of sin and sister to his brother’s wife.

He was also the man she had been going to marry. The man she had lived with like a wife for six wonderful months before it had all come crashing in. She’d loved him passionately; now she could barely have him look at her without feeling her heart wither in his presence.

He turned slowly to face her, shedding raindrops from his wide shoulders as he did so and filling the confined space with the smell of cold air and rain on wool. His long lashed gaze flicked her a glance then slid away to take in the bag dumped on the floor.

‘You’ve been away,’ he murmured levelly. His English was perfect, smooth and deep with the kind of accent that played across her senses like the brush of a lover’s—

Don’t go there, she told herself. ‘P-Paris,’ she said.

He nodded his dark head as if she’d just confirmed something for him, though for the life of her she couldn’t work out what. She was shaking all over, racked by too many confusing conflicts, aware that she should be thinking about her sister but able to think only about him.

Keira … Her throat convulsed on a wave of anguish, the flat of her palms pressed into the wall. Lifting anxious blue eyes to the hard, tight lines of his profile, she parted her lips to demand he tell her what had happened to Keira, but Luca spoke first.

‘Are we alone here?’ he questioned, and when she just gaped at him, unable to believe he had dared to ask that question, he decided to find out for himself. Stepping over her bag, he began opening doors.

Shock was replaced by burning dismay when she realised what he was doing. Two years ago Luca had arrived at his apartment in Florence to find her making a hurried attempt to cover up the evidence of what she had been doing while he’d been out of the way. What followed had been a gruesome demonstration of what came to pass when you played a Salvatore for a fool.

That time he had dragged her from room to room with him as he’d checked all the places in which she could have hidden a lover. This time he was prepared to make the search on his own—not that he had any right to do so.

‘You bastard,’ she breathed, and found the strength to push herself away from the wall and walk on trembling legs into her sitting room.

She hadn’t had a chance to come in here, she realised, staring blankly into the room’s chilly darkness that was softened only by the halogen glow from an outside street lamp filtering in through the window. It was automatic to reach for the nearest switch and flood the room with proper light—automatic to cross to the window to tug the cream curtains over the rain-soaked glass.

When she turned she found him standing in the doorway staring at her through narrowed dark brown, gold-flecked eyes set in a face that wore the proud stamp of his Florentine lineage. He was handsome but hard; handsome but cold; forge a statue in his image and you would have yourself a reflection of a modern-day god.

But this man was no god, she reminded herself quickly. He might have the face and the body of one, might possess the kind of power and arrogance the old gods liked to wield, but inside he was as mortal as anyone. Flawed and fickle, she concluded as she waited for the shock to ease so that the old bitter emotions could come flooding in.

Emotions like pain and anger, and the miserable ache of a love cruelly ripped away from her—a passionately professed, returned love that she’d learned the hard way had never gone more than skin-deep for him.

It didn’t happen. Standing here white-faced and tensed in readiness for it all to surge up and grab her, Shannon discovered that she continued to feel absolutely nothing, not even a slight twinge of that old sense of desperation with which mere thoughts of him used to fill her. Those eyes that used to turn her heart inside out were leaving her cold now, as did the slender mouth that used to act like a magnet to her own hungry lips. The slashing high cheek-bones, the dark golden skin, the magnificent body hidden beneath the heavy coat; she used to worship all of them with every touch, every breath or sensual homage she could find. The man in his whole god-like entirety was doing nothing for her any more.

It came as such a relief, because it had to mean that she was over him.

Over him at last and for ever.

‘Satisfied with your search?’ she asked with acid-tipped sarcasm. ‘Or would you like to check behind the curtains too?’

There was a hint of a frown before he acknowledged the comment with a small grimace.

‘No,’ was all he said and he shifted his gaze to take in the décor with its soft pastel shades and neat modern furniture that was such a contrast to the antique luxury he’d furnished his own home with. Her small twin sofas were covered with cream linen, her floor was of pale polished wood. His floors displayed priceless rugs thrown over intricate inlaid wood parquetry and his sofas were made of rich brown leather that were big and deep enough to stretch out upon two at a time to canoodle and kiss in exquisite—

Once again she was forced to bring her wandering thoughts up short. Why recall all of that when it no longer meant anything? she asked herself crossly, and moved across the room to flick another switch, which sent flames leaping up over designer logs resting on a bed of pale pebbles in her open hearth.

This time when she turned she found that his attention had switched back to her again, his hooded gaze moving over her pencil-slim skirt with its natty little kick pleat at the back, which gave her long legs a rather sexy shape. Did he like her legs? Of course he liked her legs; he used to worship them with his hands and his mouth and the teasing lick from his tongue as it trailed upwards on its way to—

Oh, stop it! she told herself. He looked up suddenly, as if she’d said the words out loud. Their eyes connected. Tension erupted to rush screaming round the room on the back of a mutual, intimate knowledge that would never go away no matter how much they both might want it to.

They’d been lovers, gorgeous, greedy, sensually indulgent lovers. They knew every inch of each other, what made the other sigh with pleasure and what would send them toppling over the edge. But those thoughts did not belong here—he didn’t belong here!

Say something, damn you! she wanted to scream at him. But he’d always been good at using silence to whittle down people’s nerves, and he continued to stand there looking at her as if he was waiting for her to say something. Say what? she wondered. Was he expecting her to invite him to sit down?

The phrase about burning in hell first whipped through her head.

Maybe he heard it. Maybe he was still able to tune himself in to what was going on inside her head because the black silk lashes flickered slightly as he shifted his gaze yet again and fixed it on something over her right shoulder.

Shannon didn’t need to look to know what it was that had now caught his attention. It had to be the framed wedding photograph standing alone on a shelf that showed the sweet face of her sister Keira smiling adoringly up at his handsome brother Angelo.

Behind the blissful couple and fortunately out of focus stood Luca, playing the dauntingly sophisticated best man to the groom and herself as the young and self-conscious chief bridesmaid. Luca had been all of twenty-eight years old to her own meagre eighteen at the time, but they’d enjoyed each other’s company that day.

Odd, she thought, that she should remember that now when there were so many bad things about Luca she could be remembering instead.

‘I think it might be best if you sit down.’

Muscles all over her body jerked suddenly, bringing her chin up sharply as her senses leapt in alarm. When someone told you to sit down it could only mean they were about to tell you something that was guaranteed to take the legs from under you, and the only way this man could do that to her was by bringing her bad news about—

‘What’s wrong with Keira?’ she shot at him sharply.

A hand came out; long-fingered and lean, it indicated to one of the sofas. ‘When you sit down,’ he countered, then watched calmly as if he was expecting it as she sparked like a firework.

‘Oh, stop being so bloody sensitive to my feelings, Luca, and tell me what’s happened to my sister!’ she cried. ‘All I got was some static-splashed message telling me that there had been an accident and would I ring a stupid mobile phone number that did not exist!’

‘It exists,’ he murmured.

And like a lightning strike Shannon suddenly realised what a terrible—terrible—mistake she had made. ‘It was your mobile number, wasn’t it?’ she bit out accusingly, struggling to believe that she could ever have mistaken the deep, terse tones of his voice for the warmer tones of his brother Angelo. ‘Poor Luca,’ she mocked with sudden bitterness, ‘being forced to give the wicked witch his new number and risk a second flood of unwanted calls.’

His half-grimace acknowledged her right to toss that remark at him. Two years ago she’d tried every which way she could use to get him to talk to her. She’d called him on his cell-phone night and day until suddenly the number had been no longer obtainable. He’d cut off her main source of contact—just as she’d been ruthlessly cut off from everything else that had been important to her.

‘Just speak, damn you,’ she prompted huskily.

With a grim pressing-together of his lips, Luca looked ready to continue holding out until she sat down. Then she saw his eyes make a flickering inventory of the way she was standing there, fine-boned and slender enough that the tremors now shaking her body almost forced her down. Stubbornness held her upright; stubbornness and a defiance that had always been one of her most besetting sins in his eyes—though not her worst sin.

Then—no, she slammed a door shut on that kind of thinking. Stop going there! she told herself angrily. Don’t think about anything. Don’t even bother to notice the way he’s looking at you again with a contempt he believes you deserve. So he hates and despises you. Let him, she invited. I don’t care—I don’t.

He moved then, and on a thick, inner quiver of fear she saw his expression alter from hard to grave. His eyes flicked away. He heaved in a deep breath. The fine hairs on her body started to tingle as he parted his mouth to speak.

Then the words came. ‘There has been an accident—a car crash this morning,’ he told her. ‘People are hurt—badly hurt,’ he then extended grimly.

‘Keira—?’ Her sister’s name arrived as a fragile whisper.

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘And I need you to be strong here, Shannon,’ he warned then, ‘because the prognosis is not good and we need to—Oh, hell—you mad, stubborn idiota!’

Shannon didn’t know she’d swayed until his hands arrived hard on her shoulders and forcibly manoeuvred her into the nearest sofa. She landed with a bump, eyes wide and staring.

‘Why can you never take good advice when it is offered to you?’ he ground out as he came down on his haunches and took a strong grasp on her ice-cold hands. ‘It was a simple request—a wise request. You almost collapsed as I knew you would. You are your own worst enemy, do you know that? I cannot believe you are still such a—’

She tugged her hands free. The action silenced his angry tongue, snapped his lips together and tightened the muscles in his face. In the new silence that developed Shannon struggled to get a hold of what was trampling through her. Her heart was palpitating wildly, her breathing reduced to tight and shallow catches of air. Keira was the only person left in this world that she truly cared about.

Keira, her beautiful Keira, whom everyone loved and wanted a piece of.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she whispered unevenly.

His mouth had developed a white ring of tension around it. She had to look away because she couldn’t bear to see him while he said what he had to say. ‘They were in the fast lane on the main autostradale into Florence when they ran into a heavy downpour of rain,’ he explained. ‘An articulated lorry skidded on the wet surface. It criccoaccoltellato—jackknifed directly in front of them, swerving right across the road. They did not stand a chance,’ he uttered in a voice like thick gravel. ‘With no room or time to take avoiding action they hit head-on and—’

The words stopped when he was forced to swallow. Silence returned, crawling all over the two of them while Shannon sat staring over the top of Luca’s dark head as the whole wretched thing played itself like a macabre action movie in front of her eyes.

‘Is she—?’

‘No,’ he cut in quickly—roughly.

Relief feathered through her, then she tensed again as the next dreaded thought flipped into her head.

‘They. You said they,’ she prompted shakily, and looked at him then, really looked at him and saw for the first time the strain etched into the fabric of his lean, hard features—and the pain burning in the deep, dark depths of his eyes. Realisation dawned, the muscles in her own face began to collapse, tears of a desperate, desperate understanding flooding into her eyes.

‘Oh, no, Luca—no,’ she choked out unevenly. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘not Angelo …’

But the answer she wanted to hear didn’t come, and as a set of her cold fingers jerked up to cover her trembling mouth Luca muttered something thick in Italian, then lowered his head to bury his face in his hands.

Dark mists of shock and grief wrapped around them. For what could have been an age Shannon couldn’t move or think or even feel. Angelo and Keira—Keira and Angelo—the two precious names spun in her head on an ever dizzying spiral while the rain lashed wildly at the window and Luca remained squatting in front of her with his face covered and his wide shoulders taut as he fought his own battle with shock and grief.

Luca and his brother were close. They worked together, played together, laughed and talked together all the time. To think of one without thinking about the other was—

‘Oh Luca …’ Lifting her hand with its trembling fingers, Shannon gently touched them to his rain-dampened hair. ‘I’m so s—’

It came without warning. At the first light brush of her fingers he was thrusting away from her with a violence that left her stunned and shaken as he climbed to his feet, turned his back on her and strode away several paces to then stand still and rigid while he fought a battle with his moment of complete collapse.

When he turned to face her he was back in control again, or as controlled as a man could be who’d just lost the brother he loved. Shannon hadn’t moved, and as his gaze lashed over her she saw the ice, the cold hatred, and knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he did not deserve to lose his brother and she did not deserve to have her sister still.

Yes, she thought, he hated her enough to think like that.

Bitterness returned, and with it came a welcome sense of foggy calmness. Shannon climbed to her feet, wished with all her aching heart that she could just walk away from him, but there were still things she needed to know.

‘Y-you said the prognosis for Keira isn’t good,’ she prompted, feeling the shake in her voice as well as in the fingers she used to smooth down the rucked fabric of her slender skirt. ‘Why isn’t it good?’

The tense shape of his mouth slackened slightly as he parted his lips to speak. ‘Her injuries were extensive. She had to be cut out of the car—’

Shannon flinched and lowered her eyes from him, painfully aware that the they had now changed to she. Did that mean that Angelo had been beyond help? She didn’t ask, didn’t dare, didn’t think she could cope with the answer.

‘By the time they freed her, Keira had lost a lot of blood,’ Luca continued in a low voice like rough sandpaper. ‘Thankfully she was unconscious throughout so was aware of—nothing …’

The nothing broke into uneven fragments, and as her heavy lungs tried their best to breathe for her Shannon wondered if Angelo had been aware of nothing.

Angelo. An ache hit low in her stomach. Never to see his lazy grin again or the teasing gleam in his beautiful eyes—’Oh,’ she choked and her legs went hollow, forcing her to sit down again and cover her face with her hands.

‘There were problems,’ Luca pushed on relentlessly, obviously deciding to get the whole wretched thing said now he had begun. ‘Some of which the doctors could fix, some they—could not …’

It was during this next thick pause Luca allowed to develop—presumably to give her time to absorb what he’d said—Shannon suddenly remembered something she should not have forgotten: there was still yet another being involved in this awful tragedy.

A sudden rush of nausea forced her to swallow thickly. Sliding her hand away from her face, she looked up at Luca, her eyes dark and haunted. ‘Oh, God, Luca,’ she whispered frailly. ‘What about the baby?’

Her sister was seven and a half months pregnant—the longest period Keira had managed to carry a baby, one of her many, many attempts to bear Angelo a child. His eyelashes flickered, lowering over dark brown irises to hide his own feelings about what he was about to say. ‘They had to do a Caesarean section,’ he informed her briefly. ‘Keira was haemorrhaging badly and it became a matter of urgency that they deliver the baby as quickly as they could—’

The abruptly spoken words came to a stop again. It seemed that he could only give information in short bursts before he had to pause to gather himself. It was all so dark and utterly wretched, shock piling upon shock upon horror and grief and blood-curdling dread.

‘And …?’ It took a tight clutching at her courage to prompt him to continue.

‘A girl,’ he announced. ‘She is quite small and needs the aid of an incubator to breathe, but otherwise the doctors assure us that she is fully formed and perfectly healthy. It—it is her mama that gives grave cause for concern. Keira now lies in a coma and I’m afraid the final outcome does not look good.’

In the cold, dark silence that followed, Shannon knew she was slipping into deep shock. Angelo was dead, her sister was dying, their baby daughter needed help to breathe. It couldn’t get any worse.

It could, she discovered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly.

But he wasn’t sorry, not for her at any rate. It was too late for him to murmur polite words of sympathy when he’d looked at her the way he’d done a few minutes ago. He resented bitterly the fact that he had lost his beloved brother while she, the undeserving one, could still cling to a small thread of hope.

‘Excuse me,’ she said thickly, ‘but I’m going to be sick,’ and, dragging herself up from the sofa, she made a dash for the bathroom.

He didn’t follow and Shannon did not expect him to—though he had to hear her retching because she hadn’t had time to close the door. But she could feel his presence like a scar on her heaving body because this was a scene they had played before, though under very different circumstances.

And remembering that ugly moment made her feel suddenly very bitter that it had to be him of all people to bring her bad news and then witness this.

Trembling too badly to stand unaided, she sank down on the toilet seat lid and tried to think. She had to plan, she had to deal with Luca on a calm and sane footing, because if she was sure about anything in this sudden dizzying nightmare she had been tossed into, then it was that he would have pre-empted her immediate needs and have had travel arrangements put into place before he had even knocked on her door.

It was the way of the man—of the Salvatore family as a whole. Incisive efficiency under pressure was their trade mark. They were rich, they were powerful, they dealt with their enemies in the same way that they dealt with tragedy, by closing ranks and, with shields in place, dealing with the situation as one dynamic force.

All for one, one for all, she mused bleakly. Then she thought about Keira lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and even as the family grieved for Angelo she knew that her sister would still be surrounded by their tight ring of protection. The image should have comforted her but instead she found herself having to make another lurching dive for the washbasin.

Why? Because she was not included. She was the outcast sent into exile for her so-called sins. And the prospect of having to break her way through the Salvatore guard to be with her own sister caused the same nauseating distress that had kept her out of Florence for the last two years.

‘Oh, Keira …’ she groaned on a sob of anguish. Then she thought of poor Angelo and knew that one constrained sob was not going to be enough, so she switched on the taps and wept with the rush of water drowning out the sound.

Luca wasn’t in the sitting room when eventually she went back to face him. The all too familiar scent of him lingered, though, catching at her nostrils and relaying messages to certain senses she did not want disturbed. Strange how she had not picked up on that scent earlier.

Even stranger that she’d dared to tell herself that she was over him.

Well, not any longer, she was forced to accept as she turned to go and find him and spied his overcoat lying across the back of one of the chairs in the old familiar way that brought weak tears springing back to her eyes.

Something had happened to her back there in the bathroom. A door inside her had opened and allowed too many suppressed memories to come flooding out. Memories of love and passion and a promise of perfect happiness turning to dust at her feet. And other memories of a sister she had loved more than anyone. Yet when she’d left Luca she had also turned her back on Keira.

Guilt thudded at her conscience, but it fought with resentment and a deep, deep sense of betrayal that still hurt two years on. There were many ways to break someone’s heart for them, she mused bleakly. Luca and Keira both had broken her heart in different ways.

She found him standing in her kitchen by one of the modern white units, his six-foot-two-inch frame dwarfing the room as it did most things—including her more diminutive size. He was in the process of pouring boiling water into her smart glass and steel coffee pot but on hearing her step he turned his dark head. For a brief moment she saw him as she had last seen him two years ago, angry, naked, the natural colour washed out of his skin by disgust and contempt and an appalling knowledge of what he had just done.

Then the image faded and now she saw a tired man living with the strain of grief locked up inside him and a knowledge that life had to go on just as duty must still be done.

He offered her a brief smile before turning away again. ‘I thought we both needed this,’ he explained levelly, drawing her attention to the freshly made pot of coffee he had prepared. ‘I have also made you some toast to help to settle your stomach.’

Following the indication of his dark head she saw a plate sitting on the breakfast counter bearing two slices of lightly toasted wholemeal bread. Her stomach lurched again—not at the thought of receiving anything in its tender state, but because the whole scenario was resurrecting yet more memories of the old times. Times when this wealthy, very sophisticated and utterly spoiled man had surprised her with domestic moments like this.

He owned homes in many prestigious places, owned aeroplanes and helicopters and a beautiful yacht that could take one’s breath away. He ran a huge multinational finance company that employed thousands of people right across the globe but he didn’t like servants intruding on his privacy, suffered their services as a necessity in his busy life so long as they did their work when he wasn’t there. He could cook, he could clean and he made the best cup of coffee she had ever tasted.

But here in her kitchen—acting as if he actually cared about her well-being?

Fresh bitterness welled at his damned hypocrisy. ‘I’d rather be going,’ she replied with as much composure as she could muster. ‘That is presuming you’ve made arrangements for me to travel to Florence?’

‘Of course,’ he confirmed. ‘But we do not have to leave for another hour. My plane needs to refuel and perform the usual checks then wait for a vacant slot before it can take off again.’

‘You mean you’ve flown here from Florence—today?’ Shannon was stunned and it showed in the stifled gasp she released.

‘Someone had to break the news to you.’ The way he shrugged a broad shoulder was meant to convey indifference to the task but they both knew it was a lie. His brother had just died in tragic circumstances. His sister-in-law lay gravely ill. His mother and his two sisters must need him desperately, yet here he was standing in her small kitchen making coffee and toast for her?

‘Wouldn’t a message to my answering service have been simpler?’

‘Would it?’ he said and only had to glance at her for Shannon to know what he was getting at. He had come in person because he knew her. He’d expected her to fall apart just exactly as she had done.

Turning with the coffee pot, he went to place it on the counter next to the plate of toast, then glanced at his watch with its thick gold strap that nestled into a bed of dark hair on a wrist built to lift heavy weights if required to do so. Everything about him was built that way. The formation of his muscular structure showed the power in him yet in some unfathomable way he still managed to appear contradictorily lean and sleek.

His suit was dark, his shirt sky-blue, his tie a slender strip of navy blue silk. Wide shoulders tapered down a long lithe back to narrow hip-bones, the power in his legs and arms lay hidden beneath the expensive cut of his clothes. He could pick her up with one hand—she knew this because he had done it once when she’d challenged him. Then they’d tumbled onto the bed in a fit of laughter because one recently bathed, slippery wet and wriggling naked female was not easy to balance by her seat.

There wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t have heart flutters when Luca was near them. She had done more than flutter; she’d positively vibrated. He’d personified Man in her estimation and no man since him had come close to equalling him.

‘Come and eat your toast.’

The dark tones in his voice made her flesh quiver. Glancing at the plate of toast, she felt a sudden desire to tell him where to go with his demonstration of concern. She didn’t need him standing about her kitchen pretending that there was nothing between them but a very loose sister-brother-in-law relationship. They’d sank into each other’s bodies for goodness’ sake! He was passionately Italian and she was passionately Irish. Both stubborn, hot tempered and as temperamental as hell. Standing here watching him stroll about her kitchen was enough to ignite her temper. But common sense was telling her to just shut up and put up if she didn’t want full-scale war to break out, because she knew Luca. When his mind was made up about something nothing could budge it. She had learned that the hard way.

Bitterness welled, once more she crushed it down and wondered yet again where she’d got the stupid idea from that she was over him when here she was flailing in the middle of a stomach-curdling crisis and all she seemed able to do was think about him.

Or maybe that was it, she then consoled herself as she used a trembling hand to pull out one of the two high stools that sat in front of her white laminate breakfast bar and hitched herself up onto it. Maybe obsessing about Luca was her mind’s way of distracting her from what was really threatening to tear her apart.

‘How are your mother and your sisters coping?’ she asked as she pulled the plate of toast towards her.

‘They’re not,’ he replied with a blunt economy that turned her stomach inside out. Then he relented slightly, sighed and added, ‘They are keeping themselves occupied at the hospital, taking turns to sit with Keira and the baby. It—helps them to be there.’

‘Yes.’ Shannon acknowledged her acceptance of that.

Luca used that moment to pull out the other stool and sit down beside her. His thigh accidentally brushed against hers as he reached over to pour coffee into her mug. Shannon’s mind went blank—although blank was nowhere near the right word to describe the sudden burning sensation that sprang to life low in her abdomen. Nor did the word suit the sudden fire-burst of images that went chasing through her head. Images of what that thigh felt like naked when brushing against her naked thigh, images of her hand stroking along its muscle-packed length and of his hand making the same sensual journey along the silken length of hers.

The old vibrations started up, running riot round her system and warming the sensitive place at her core. In an effort to pretend it just wasn’t happening, she reached for a slice of toast and lifted it to her mouth. She bit but didn’t taste, tried chewing though she knew she would struggle to swallow. Her mouth was too dry and she needed that coffee.

She needed him to move away so she didn’t have to feel like this. She needed to remember why he was here! Oh, God, she thought wretchedly. She was ashamed of herself—she could smell him, feel him, she could even taste him! What was it with her that she couldn’t keep her stupid, rotten appalling thoughts under control?

Her throat closed as she tried to swallow—hot, bright tears burned in her eyes. She despised herself; she despised him for coming here and doing this to her—for showing her up for the weak-willed, shallow person she had to be to be letting him get to her at a time like this when—

‘Milk?’ he asked.

Shannon looked at the two mugs of steaming black coffee and recalled how little it had always taken for them to want to fall upon each other. A look, a word, an accidental touch like the light brushing of thighs and they could lose themselves quite appallingly in the pleasures of the flesh. Making love with Luca had been passionate and daring and uninhibited. He had shown her pleasure she’d never known existed, lowered her so deep into her own senses that sometimes she’d struggled to float back out again.

Only twice had he actually hurt her: the first time they’d made love and the last time they’d made love. The first time Luca hadn’t understood what kind of woman he’d been dealing with and she hadn’t bothered to tell him that he would be her first lover so she’d accepted all the blame. When she’d cried a little afterwards he’d wrapped her in his arms and shown her a different kind of loving with the power of comfort and a need to put right what he saw as his own failure. He had done so, of course, many times and in many, many ways.

‘No,’ she managed to offer in answer to his question—while her mind rocketed off to recall the second time he had hurt her.

He had been blinded by fury, lost inside a frighteningly jealous rage. He had called her everything from slut to harlot and she had been so appalled that he could see her that way that she’d riled him on with biting sarcasm until he had snapped.

And it had not been the compulsive roar of sex that followed that hurt her, but the contempt with which he’d cast her aside afterwards that had ground her emotions to dust. Since then—nothing. No word, no contact—not even an acknowledgement to say that he had received back his ring.

Therefore—yes, she reiterated very grimly, she was over Luca Salvatore. The simple act of remembering those dark times was enough to kill anything she’d ever felt for him. Even if the truth came up and hit him in the face right now as they sat here pretending to be civilised and he got down on his knees to beg her forgiveness, she would not forgive.

So let her senses respond to his closeness, she invited. Let her foolish pulse quicken and her weak flesh vibrate and her shameful head try recalling the good times if it felt it had to do. But the bad times would always overshadow those good times.

‘I’m going to pack a bag.’ Getting up with an abruptness that startled him, she walked away without sparing his over-still, over-watchful frame a single fleeting glance.