Chapter Eleven #2
‘You mean like friends—with benefits?’
He gave a slow smile of delight. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Flora absorbed the subtext to his heartless statement.
They could have all the sex they wanted and then, when she left, he would presumably bid her a civilised farewell and move on with the rest of his life.
That was always what he had intended should happen, she reminded herself savagely—he wasn’t backtracking on anything he’d already said—her stay here was never intended to be anything other than a temporary refuge.
But although there was no point in castigating him for his rigid stance, Flora suddenly found herself wanting to understand it.
‘So, what happened to make you so opposed to relationships?’ she questioned curiously.
‘I mean, I know your parents had an awful divorce but that happens to lots of people, and they don’t all end up living like monks.
And before you start looking at me like that, I’m not trying to get you to change your mind!
I’m just trying to understand you better so that when our child asks about you—as he or she inevitably will—I’ll be able to talk about you naturally, instead of just coming up with a blank. ’
He grimaced at this projection of the future and Flora thought he might try to shut the subject down by kissing her, or telling her that he needed to sleep.
But maybe he recognised the validity of her argument, because his heavy sigh was accompanied by a brief nod of resignation, although Flora didn’t miss the bitterness which flashed in his eyes.
‘Last night you asked me what it was like living with an actor and perhaps I was also guilty of understatement,’ he began.
‘If you must know, it was hell. After the divorce, my mother’s acting work dried up.
The offers just stopped coming in. I don’t know if my father had anything to do with that—he was a powerful man and he found it hard to forgive her. ’
Forgive her for what? Flora wondered but she didn’t ask, she just let him continue with his story in that strange, flat voice she’d never heard him use before.
‘As her looks faded, so did her ability to attract men. So, in the absence of any consistent confidante, she used to confide in me.’ His mouth twisted with something which looked like contempt.
‘One night, after too much brandy—she informed me that my little brother was the product of an affair, but that nobody knew. Apparently, Alessandro’s father was the owner of one of the film studios, who refused to leave his wife for her.
She said my father had always suspected she had been unfaithful, but couldn’t prove anything.
It was in the days before DNA tests were popularised and anyway, they divorced when my brother was still a baby. ’
‘But why did she tell you all this?’ questioned Flora.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe she wanted to offload her conscience. Or maybe she knew that I’d witnessed them screaming at each other and was just confirming the accusations I’d overheard.
’ He shuddered. ‘She said I must keep it secret and so I did. That’s when I learnt the skill of compartmentalising.
I locked that knowledge in a place in my head and never told anyone—until my mother was long gone and my father was on his deathbed and begged me to substantiate what he had always suspected.
And so I did.’ There was a long pause as he looked at her bleakly.
‘Because how can you possibly lie to a man who is dying?’
‘I’m guessing the answer is that you can’t. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,’ she whispered.
‘I thought that carrying her guilty secret had been the only burden I had to bear,’ he continued and now there was a hollowness to his words.
‘Until my father cut my brother out of his will. Despite the fact that I’d made my own fortune, he left everything to me.
And my brother, who hadn’t had an easy passage in life—got nothing.
So Alessandro came to me, demanding to know why he had been shunned, asking me whether I knew the reason.
And I found that I couldn’t lie to him either.
Because what right did I have to play god and deny him the knowledge of his true father, even though he had died many years before?
’ His voice cracked a little, like the splinter of long-neglected wood beneath the heavy blow of an axe.
‘I explained that I didn’t want or need our father’s money and to prove it, I transferred every last Euro of his fortune into Alessandro’s account, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.
He was angry with our mother, and with my father and of course, angry with me—because everyone likes to shoot the messenger, don’t they?
And he turned all that rage in on himself.
He started to use drink and drugs to blot out the pain and there was nothing I could do to stop him.
I loved my brother,’ he added brokenly. ‘But within a few short weeks of Papa’s death, he was almost unrecognisable. ’
‘Oh, Vito,’ said Flora, but he barely seemed to notice the fingers she gently touched to his cheek in an instinctive gesture of compassion. It was as though he had pulled the cork from a bottle of long-suppressed emotions and now they were spilling out in a dark and bitter stream.
‘One night he phoned me up to rage that life wasn’t worth living and the very next day he drove his car into a tree and died instantly.’ He swallowed. ‘And I don’t think it was an accident.’
‘You’re not blaming yourself for what happened are you, Vito?’ she asked him as she registered the almost unbearable pain in his voice. ‘Because you must know we are only ever responsible for our own actions and not for anyone else’s.’
‘You think it’s that easy?’ he demanded roughly.
‘Yes, I do feel responsible. Of course I do. My family was a total mess and I should have kept well away from the fallout of my parents’ toxic relationship.
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d lied to Alessandro and told him I knew nothing about his parentage. Whether he would still be alive.’
‘Don’t you think everyone does that? That at some point in our lives we find ourselves wishing time had a rewind button?
’ Flora demanded. ‘I remember I had a bad cold when Mum went off on her last climb and I used to think that if I’d asked her to stay, then she wouldn’t have been caught in that terrible storm on the mountain.
But you can’t turn the clock back and even if we could, it still might have turned out completely differently. ’
‘Yes, I know all this,’ he said impatiently. ‘But you need to know why I treat coupledom like kryptonite, Flora. Because families are just a path to pain and loss. People get hurt and I don’t want to be around that kind of emotion, ever again. Do you understand?’
Yes, she understood but Flora saw little point in trying to dispute his cold-blooded certainty by pointing out that there were always exceptions.
She’d asked him the reasons behind his aversion, not to try to talk him out of it.
And since he had told her, he must trust her to some degree—and wasn’t that an unexpected bonus?
So, instead of talking she wriggled closer, placing her hand on the flank of his hip and it felt like something of a victory that he didn’t push her away.
She held her breath as some of the tension left him and when she let her fingers drift over his belly, a different kind of tension entered his body.
When she inched her fingers down to clasp his rocky shaft within the palm of her hand, he groaned.
And soon after that she climbed on top of him and took him deep inside her, orchestrating their movements with the clench of her muscles, until at last he cried out and pulled her down so he could claim her lips in a hard, sweet kiss.
And in the end, the question of whether or not she should stay the night became academic because next time Flora opened her eyes, it was morning and the space beside her was empty.
Pushing the hair back from her face she surveyed the room.
Her expensive silk dress was lying on the rug, next to a pair of abandoned suede shoes, and there was Vito’s immaculate dinner suit beside them—carelessly discarded.
Flora bit her lip with remembered pleasure and leaned back against the pillows as Vito walked in.
He was completely naked—long, muscular limbs emphasising his strength and power.
He moved like the natural predator he was, she thought—this golden alpha man who made women’s hearts hurry.
The richness of his skin gleamed like oiled-silk and his black hair glittered with tiny beads of water, which he was rubbing at with a tiny white towel.
But despite his undeniable magnificence and the abundance of thrills he had given her throughout the night, it was the fact that he had confided in her which gave her an inner glow.
Hugging that knowledge to herself like a precious gift, she smiled up at him.
The smile he slanted back was lazy and contented—like a leopard at the zoo which had just been fed.
As he raised his ebony brows at her in mocking question, Flora could feel the flush of colour in her cheeks as he walked over to the bed and dropped the towel.
Keep it light, she told herself. Don’t scare him away with feelings.
‘So, cara, what do you say?’ he murmured. ‘Friends with benefits, si?’
He got into bed beside her, his mouth tracing a slow line down her neck and Flora would have defied any woman on the planet not to have agreed to his drawled suggestion.