CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER NINE
K ELLY ’ S QUESTION HUNG in the air like a guillotine and for a second Romano was tempted to move away from the blade’s sharp reach. To shove aside the rumpled bedding and peel himself away from her naked body and put as much physical distance between them as possible. Because that was his default reaction whenever this kind of interrogation occurred. He always preferred to walk away rather than confront emotional demons, or answer intrusive questions.
But for once he didn’t want to leave the cushioned satin of her delectable body. He liked the way he was lying, with those abundant curls splayed across his chest and her soft breasts pressing against him. He wasn’t just feeling sexually replete, he was also feeling unusually…comfortable. And not only was the concept of comfort unfamiliar to him, it was never a trait he associated with any of his lovers.
But that was the thing about Kelly, wasn’t it? She broke the mould, defying his best attempts to categorise her. Forbidden to him for many years—firstly, because of her age, and then because of his perception about the kind of person she really was. And when at last he had been unable to resist her, all his preconceived ideas had been blown out of the water when he’d discovered her innocence…
Which she had kept from him.
Yet his anger at having been tacitly deceived by her had faded, especially since she’d told him about her mother’s bitterness towards men- which went some way towards explaining Kelly’s own behaviour. And wasn’t he fast discovering a primitive and previously unknown side of himself, which was positively revelling in the fact that he was her first and only lover?
But that posed its own particular danger, for he had zero experience of virgins. Wasn’t there a chance she might fixate on him or grow to idealise him? To see him as the answer to her dreams, despite his stern warnings to the contrary? He knew who he was and was cynical enough to comprehend that his hard body, keen intellect and colossal fortune more than made up for the fact that he had a heart of stone, which was why women fell for him in droves.
He didn’t want to hurt her. Even he wasn’t cruel enough to do that. She had told him plainly that she knew the score. That she accepted him for who he was. Yet hadn’t he looked into her bright eyes a couple of minutes ago, past the shimmer of the tears she had indignantly denied, and seen something else? A flicker of affection, which could easily assume a rampant life of its own if he fanned the flames. Wouldn’t the ugly truth cut those burgeoning feelings down to size, like the sweeping scythe which decimated a field of ripe wheat?
‘You want to guess why I don’t trust women?’ he said slowly.
‘I’m thinking it’s because maybe someone broke your heart.’
His laugh was bitter. She really was idealistic. Better tell her the truth. ‘Not exactly.’ He paused. ‘How much do you know about my mother?’
‘Not very much.’ She shrugged one bare, freckled shoulder. ‘Only that she was the first wife of Floriana’s father—your father—and she died years ago. And that, well…’ She hesitated. ‘Nobody really talks about her.’
‘Because very few people know anything about her,’ he ground out. ‘And that was deliberate. The facts were hidden. My father made sure of that. There was no social media to allow for other people’s version of events and the twisting of the truth.’ His words trailed away, because this was forgotten territory. How long since last he had entered this particular minefield? Not since he had walked out of the office of the therapist assigned to him in his early teenage years, never to return.
‘What was she like?’ she asked, her soft words punctuating his thoughts.
He tried to be objective. To piece together the fragments of things he had been told and the stuff he’d found out for himself. Far worse, of course, were the things he now allowed himself to remember… He swallowed. His own disturbing reality, which surfaced from time to time no matter how deeply he had tried to bury it. He’d often though it strange that there was a verb ‘to dream’, but no equivalent for the flipside of dreaming. Nobody talked about ‘to nightmare’, did they? And yet that was what his early childhood had been. A living nightmare.
‘She was very beautiful and very rich,’ he began heavily. ‘The only child of elderly parents who were entranced by their ravishing butterfly of a daughter and completely spoilt her.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Like so many before him, my father fell hopelessly in love with her, and she was pregnant with me when they were married. But very quickly, she began to be disillusioned with her new role.’
‘Go on,’ she prompted as his voice faded.
‘She got in with a wild crowd and grew to hate this castello and the life it offered,’ he stated, his mouth hardening. ‘She began to spend more and more time with her new friends in Rome.’
‘With you?’ she asked quickly.
‘Not initially,’ he answered. ‘For a while I was left here, with my father and a nanny.’
‘And you were…happy?’
‘How could I be?’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She might have been the worst mother in the world, but she was still my mother. And aren’t children living examples of the concept of hope over experience? They keep on going back for love from their parents, time after time, no matter how often they get pushed back. Don’t you know that, Kelly?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly, remembering the way she used to secretly dream of her father coming to find her, despite all the unflattering things her mother had said about him. ‘I do.’
He pulled her closer and now he was back there, frozen in that snapshot of time. How could the image still be so sharp, even after all these years? ‘And then, one night, she came here with a boyfriend in the howling rain and they bundled me into a car and sped off into the night.’
‘And nobody stopped them?’
‘No, Kelly. Nobody stopped them because in those days society was heavily weighted towards the mother’s wishes. Some of my male friends in the throes of acrimonious divorces tell me it still is,’ he added caustically. ‘She was apparently a consummate actress who convinced everyone she couldn’t bear to be parted from her only child. When required she was able to play the part of a loving mother while for the rest of the time, she took her pleasure in drugs.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Why so shocked? Plenty of people get addicted. Her drug of choice happened to be heroin.’
‘Romano—’
‘No. I’m giving you the facts. Which you asked for, remember?’ he bit out. ‘But if this is going to deteriorate into a mess of emotion then I’ll stop right now. I told you. Crying leaves me cold.’
‘I’m not crying,’ she said, for the second time, but this time her voice was sombre rather than defiant as she jabbed at her eyes with her fists. ‘Tell me what happened.’
He made a harsh imprecation beneath his breath. ‘Long story short? She overdosed and nobody knew about it. Even I didn’t at first, and I was alone in the house with her. At least not until after a couple of days of being unable to wake her, when I went to the front door of our place in Rome. I remember the door being so heavy and almost impossible to open,’ he reflected, as if this were important. Because wasn’t that an infinitely preferable memory than the vision of his mother’s waxy corpse, and the first fly buzzing in through the window to land on it, and the tears which were streaming down his cheeks as he was gathered into the horrified embrace of a kindly passer-by? ‘Perhaps if I’d raised the alarm sooner they could have taken her to hospital to have her stomach pumped and she might have survived, but we’ll never know.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Five,’ he stated abruptly.
‘Oh, Romano,’ she breathed, and he could hear the horror in her voice.
‘No,’ he said, steeling his heart to the distress which was clouding her beautiful eyes. ‘I told you because you asked and, for some reason, I wanted to tell you, because you know little of the ways of the world. To explain why I have no intention of ever marrying or having children of my own. But that’s it. That’s all. I don’t want your sympathy, however well meaning, and I don’t want to discuss it any further. Do you understand?’
Tiptoeing his finger slowly down over her belly, he saw her eyes darken although she had started biting her lip, as if she despaired of her own reaction. ‘This is what I want from you, Kelly. The only thing. An uncomplicated liaison. We take our pleasure until the well has run dry. Which it will.’ His voice dipped as he resisted taking the finger further and he waited until he could sense her growing restlessness before he framed his next question. ‘So. Is that enough for you?’
Was it?
Kelly’s head was still spinning from all the things he’d told her and she was having to work very hard to hide her reaction. But it wasn’t easy. Her instinct was to cradle him tightly. To try to absorb some of his obvious hurt—though you could never really take someone else’s pain away, could you? But his words had come as a terrible shock. She’d suspected there’d been some dodgy stuff in his past but the horror of his early years surpassed her worst imaginings. Didn’t it make his cold and critical attitude a lot more understandable?
She wondered if that was the real reason why he’d been so opposed to her friendship with his half-sister. Not, as she’d initially thought, because he was a snob—but because he’d thought she was leading Floriana astray, as his own mother had presumably been led astray. And she had allowed him to go on thinking of her as that wild person, hadn’t she, especially after he had rejected her and she had been nursing her hurt pride? In fact, hadn’t she gone out of her way to encourage him to still think she was a party animal? If she’d known about his background, would she have behaved any differently? Of course she would. But the gift of hindsight was a wasted gift.
She stared up into the ebony glitter of his eyes, trying to reduce the facts down to the bare essentials. He still wanted her and she still wanted him. What woman wouldn’t want him? But he had spelt out in coldly pragmatic terms exactly what he was offering her.
Sex.
Nothing more and nothing less.
Not compassion, or understanding, or sympathy.
It wasn’t going to grow, or evolve into something more. He wasn’t going to suddenly decide he’d been a fool and fall to one knee with a diamond sparkler in his hand, in front of a technicolour sunset. And if she started wishing for those sorts of things then it would show and he would run a mile. If she wanted him, she had to be practical and not hanker after the unattainable. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t give him affection, did it? Her heart gave a sudden lurch. Because wouldn’t this big, proud man have missed out on a lot of physical warmth in his life?
So she snuggled up closer, her silent acquiescence causing the rigid weight of his erection to nudge insistently against her belly and for a moment she felt shy as well as excited. Did he guess as much? Was that why he put his mouth to her ear, his breath warm against her skin?
‘Show me what you want, la mia piccola ,’ he instructed silkily. ‘Do not be nervous.’
Boldly, Kelly reached down to encircle the silky pole within her fingers, feeling his involuntary shudder of pleasure. ‘In that case… I think this,’ she murmured throatily. ‘This is what I want.’
‘You must come to Turin,’ Romano announced, without any kind of lead-in.
From across the other side of the fire-splashed room, he could see Kelly watching as he pulled the cork of a dusty bottle of wine he had just retrieved from the cellar. She was naked beneath his silken dressing gown, which swamped her as she sat curled up on a velvet sofa, nibbling at a grape. On the floor before her lay the debris of a cheeseboard, for they had been picnicking before the fire in one of the castle’s reception rooms, silently watched over by the sombre portraits of his ancestors.
Yet this rather domestic scene was liberally doused with feelings of confusion because Romano was aware that his mood was uncharacteristically carefree. For three whole days and three whole nights he and Kelly Butler had paid little attention to the convention of mealtimes—or, indeed, to any routine at all. Like teenagers or nomads, they had eaten when they were hungry and drunk when they were thirsty. Bath-time had served an infinitely more satisfying purpose than simply getting clean, morphing into long and sensual encounters involving slippery sessions of sex. He had been utterly absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure and that had inevitably spilled over into other areas of his life.
Unusually, he had instructed his office not to bother him unless it was urgent. He had put Graziana on leave and issued stern instructions for the security detail to retreat to the outskirts of the estate and leave them unobserved to do as they pleased. And they had certainly been doing that. Romano felt his groin harden. They’d been having sex at any and every opportunity and for once the castello had shed some of its grimmer associations. For so many years his visits here had been functional, almost grudging—yet now, for the first time, he found himself enjoying the many erotic possibilities offered up by the medieval stronghold with all its hidden nooks and crannies. Hadn’t there been something curiously triumphant about ravishing her on the ancient oak dining table, which could seat twenty-four? Or to have her suck him to sweet oblivion at the very top of the house in a forgotten room where a maid must once have slept?
He stared almost resentfully as Kelly’s nimble fingers hovered over the mound of fruit before popping another juicy grape between her glistening lips, and he swallowed. He had never given a woman so much constant attention before, nor existed in such a constant state of arousal.
He’d thought…
What?
That his appetite for her would have waned a little by now?
For sure.
Not sexually—for he was a man with remarkable appetite, technique and stamina who could pleasure women for many hours. But after seventy-two hours without a break from her company—effectively incarcerated with her in this hilltop castello —he had expected the rapid onset of boredom and ennui. He had anticipated an increasing desire to get away from Kelly Butler and return to his preferred state of solitude.
But that hadn’t happened.
Again, he frowned.
He just couldn’t seem to get enough of her.
Was that because her innocent eagerness for his sexual tutelage made her utterly irresistible, or because she was endlessly provocative in everything she did and said, without her actions seeming in the least bit contrived?
He felt…
Trapped?
He sighed as he poured two glasses of the rich wine and crossed the room to hand her one.
Not trapped, no. Nobody was keeping him here against his will and there was nothing to prevent him from walking away any time he wanted. Instead, he felt compromised—as if Kelly Butler were taking something from him without asking. Without him having given his permission for her to do so.
Her soft voice broke into his thoughts, reminding him that he’d just asked her a question.
‘Sorry. Nice offer, but I’m afraid I can’t come to Turin,’ she answered firmly, before taking a sip of wine.
He studied her thoughtfully, thinking how ungrateful she could be. Was she unaware of the compliment he was extending, by inviting her into his city home? As always, meeting resistance stirred his interest. ‘Why not?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve got to get back to England to sort out my life. Obviously.’
He made a sound of impatience. ‘That can wait.’
‘No, Romano. It can’t wait. And it’s slightly insulting of you to be so dismissive of my needs. We’ve already delayed my journey home for three days and I can’t keep swanning around this Tuscan castle with you and pretending it’s all normal, because real life is waiting in the wings. I need to find myself a new waitressing job—and, since the weather is picking up, I need to get back on my market stall, because trade is always very good in the springtime.’
Trade? Trade? Romano glared. Did she take some sort of perverse delight in reminding him of the disparity between their two lives? he wondered. He knew perfectly well that he could ease her financial woes in an instant, but something told him that not only would she view such an offer with disdain—it could also backfire on him. Might she not misread his motives and accuse him of trying to pay for sex, before slamming her way out of the castle in a fury? Because she really did have a temper to match that red hair, he conceded hungrily. ‘Surely you are allowed to have a couple more days’ holiday before you return to the daily grind?’ he questioned, in his most reasonable voice.
Kelly took another sip of wine and considered his question. Would a few more days really make that much difference? Probably not. The money she’d earnt from cleaning his castle would be more than enough to tide her over until she found a new waitressing job and she’d heard that Granchester’s newest restaurant would soon be recruiting for staff, though annoyingly it happened to be a pizza parlour. She sighed. If she was hoping it was going to be easy to forget all about Italy once she left the castello , she could think again.
But for once it wasn’t her precarious finances which were her top priority and today it wasn’t even the concern that she might be falling for the billionaire. Correction. Was falling for him. There was no doubt in her mind about that, despite the fact that he had explicitly warned her not to. But how could she help herself when, for her, he was the real deal? He made her laugh. He challenged her. He made her feel sexy. He brought out the best in her and for a person who’d spent her life racked with self-doubt, that meant a lot. She chewed on her lip, tasting the juice of the grape she’d just eaten.
No. Her current fears weren’t about something as straightforward as the inequality of their feelings for one another, but were rooted in a far more practical cause. She’d woken alone in bed that morning, knowing Romano would have gone downstairs to make a pot of the strong coffee he favoured—apparently not trusting anyone who wasn’t Italian to concoct a brew which was in any way drinkable. Idly, she had glanced across at her phone and noticed the date and…and…
Her heart had pounded and she had sat up in bed, rubbing furiously at her eyes as if to clear her vision and remedy the obvious error.
It couldn’t possibly be the twenty-eighth!
But it was. All day, as they said.
She had rapidly done a raft of reassuring sums in her head and told herself not to be so ridiculous. The first time she’d had sex with Romano had been on the night of the christening, which hadn’t even been in the middle of her cycle. And he had used protection every time. Obviously, the reason her period was late was because a lot had been happening. Big stuff. Once-in-a-lifetime stuff. There had been the initial stress of seeing him again when she had arrived at the storm-lashed castle and then the total weirdness of them becoming intimate in spite of all their differences. And yes, he’d lost his rag a bit when he’d discovered that she’d been a virgin. But they were in a totally different place now. They had reached a sort of sensual compromise. With no drama and definitely no future. They were supposed to be enjoying all the incredible pleasures of the present.
But she was late.
She was late and she was never late.
‘I don’t understand why you’re looking so concerned,’ he observed and Kelly looked over at him with a start, relieved to be plucked out of that nagging arena of worry, even if it was only temporary.
‘Is it really such a monstrous suggestion to ask you to come with me to Turin?’ he continued coolly.
‘Why are you so keen?’
‘Your lukewarm attitude is surprisingly enticing,’ he conceded drily.
‘But that isn’t why you want me to come,’ she observed.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Why, then? Tell me, Romano. We agreed to be honest with one another, didn’t we?’
He nodded. ‘I just don’t think we’re done yet, do you?’ he said softly, his black gaze boring into her.
No, they weren’t. Not as far as she was concerned. Sometimes Kelly thought she would never feel they were done. And although he wasn’t exactly pleading with her to accompany him, she forced herself to think sensibly. Surely it would be better to be with him, rather than going back to England on her own and driving herself mad with worry? Because what if she was pregnant?
It was the first time she’d allowed herself to even frame the word in her mind and with it came a series of powerful images. Suddenly, she could see herself standing on a freezing market stall, a slight bump beginning to show. She would be wearing a pair of those fingerless gloves which always left her with icy digits—her mind obsessing about a future she’d always been determined never to have. A future like her own mother’s. Bearing the baby of a man who didn’t want a baby. A man who would probably reject her, just as her father had rejected her own mother. And yet, if she was…
If she was , then she would deal with it—whatever fate threw at her and whether Romano wanted to be involved with his child or not. And she would do it without bitterness or resentment. If she had a daughter, she wouldn’t try to poison that child’s mind against men in general and one in particular. Not like her own mother…
And what the hell was she thinking of, sipping wine?
‘Okay, I’ll come to Turin,’ she croaked, quickly putting the glass down.
‘Don’t overdo the enthusiasm,’ he observed wryly as he sat down beside her on the velvet sofa, turning her head to cup her chin within the warm cradle of his palm. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Wh-why?’
His thumb traced the edges of her lips in a gesture which felt misleadingly like tenderness.
‘You look very washed out, that’s all.’
Oh, God. Wasn’t that a tell-tale sign? Should she tell him what was on her mind? No. That would be insane. Maybe if she was two weeks late, rather than two days. Kelly cleared her throat. Surely she wasn’t self-sabotaging her first sexual affair by being unnecessarily neurotic? ‘I’m not surprised I look washed out,’ she joked weakly. ‘I’m suffering from a distinct lack of shut-eye.’
‘But we have been having regular siestas,’ came his purring objection.
‘Which are also supposed to involve sleep.’
‘How can I sleep when I can’t keep my hands off you?’ he admitted huskily, tugging at the belt of her silken dressing gown, so that it fell open, her breasts already peaking towards him.
‘Good question,’ she mumbled as she homed in on his seeking lips and gave herself up to the rapturous touch of his hands. And this bit was easy, she thought. Almost too easy. Everything he did to her she loved. Liked , she corrected firmly, reaching for the zip of his jeans. Love had no place in a vocabulary where Romano Castelliari was concerned and if she told herself that often enough, she might finally get around to believing it. But the act of making love was pretty hard to beat. It could make your body feel as if it were soaring and that your heart was melting like marshmallow.
It could even temporarily remove all those nagging worries from your mind.