Forbidden Until Midnight

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

New Year’s Eve four years ago, Prague

F IREWO RKS EXPLODED ACROSS Prague’s Old Town Square. In the distance, the fourteenth century church stared down at the hundreds of thousands of people cramming themselves onto its streets, each as eager as the next to count down the New Year by one of the oldest medieval astronomical clocks in the world.

The mishmash of old architectural styles, statues and memorials stood firm against wave after wave of tourists and locals alike, each entertained by the ferocious fireworks that exploded nearly at eye level, causing fear and delight in worryingly equal measure. Santo looked out upon them all, separated by a pane of thick glass, wondering what he would do with this one night a year if he had the freedom to choose for himself.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come this year,’ said Mads Rassmussen.

Santo gave him a death stare . For nearly twelve months, rather than the literal fires he had fought in previous years across his olive groves in Puglia, he had been defending himself against financial attack from not just one but two different sides, Edward Carson on one and Marie-Laure on the other.

Mads laughed. ‘You have nothing to fear from me, Sabatini. And besides, I’ve enough on my hands with Rassmuss Technologies to worry about olive groves. But I did hear a rumour that you might be interested in renewable—’

‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ Santo replied, cutting off the young Scandinavian before he could finish his sentence. A flash of concern rushed painfully through his body. The number of people who knew about his business interest in renewable energies could be counted on less than one hand. It was certainly something he didn’t want anyone here to know about.

‘Relax. When you’re ready, let me know and I promise it will go no further,’ Mads said, a business card palmed into Santo’s hand with a shake.

Santo waited until the other man had joined his father and some others before looking at the handwritten mobile number on the blank card with the initials MR embossed in the corner. He barely restrained himself from laughing at this silly game of cloak and dagger but, after the year he’d had, he understood the need for it—and appreciated Rassmussen’s understanding of that more than he’d care to admit.

Santo had expected Carson’s underhand tactics, Pietro and he had all but prepared for it, but when Marie-Laure had decided to use her investments to take out her frustration and resentment at his abandonment of her last year, it had forced him to split his focus and his business had suffered.

It had suffered because of Eleanor.

But that wasn’t why he was ignoring her increasingly desperate attempts to snare his attention from across the room. Steeling himself, he turned in the opposite direction, making his way to the bar of the old banquet hall acquired by the Svobodas for the evening. They must have booked it several years in advance; every window along the entire length of the hall had a view of the clock tower. But, no matter how much he tried to shake her off, she consumed his thoughts entirely.

Resentment and frustration reinforced his determination to keep her at arm’s length. He had never argued with Pietro before this year. Not once had they exchanged anything more than support and encouragement. But Santo’s feelings for Eleanor had become much more complex than simple attraction, and he’d struggled with Pietro’s decision to maintain the fragile status quo. Their heated exchange had made Santo feel as if he were both disappointing Pietro and himself at the same time. As if neither could win because neither was wrong. But with the disconcerting feeling that neither was right either.

Santo might have disagreed with Pietro’s decision, but he respected the man completely. And what was the alternative? Eleanor would hardly come to him, leaving her brother and her mother behind under Edward’s control. The helplessness of the situation ate at him and his sense of control in a way he disliked intensely.

And the difficulty he had in leashing his wants beneath the yoke of his word was enough to warn him of just how dangerous she had become to him. Almost as dangerous as he was to her. But his decision to keep distance between them seemed to make her only more desperate to seek him out.

Santo was no stranger to the feeling that eyes were on him. Edward had thrown a few daggers his way upon entry, which was only to be expected. That Santo had managed to slip out from the financial chokehold Edward had tried to get him in was a source of great amusement to some, and consternation to Carson and his supporters. Edward had moved too fast and too hard and had lost himself, and them, a significant chunk of money. But it had cost Santo personally. He’d had to pull his funding from the project he’d been working on in secret to do so and set himself back maybe three or so years. And that hurt.

As Santo moved through the various groups discussing their business interests, he kept his gaze purposely away from the Carsons. The less they interacted, the better for everyone concerned. But he could almost feel Edward’s attention being turned to him by his daughter’s behaviour.

Cristo. Hadn’t she learned anything from last year? he thought angrily, reluctantly realising that there was only one way that this would end, as he turned on his heel and stalked from the room.

He barely saw any of the grandeur of the old banquet hall as he entered the hallway, from which various private rooms led. And while there were nearly two hundred people in attendance that evening, he was painfully aware that only one tailed him down that corridor. Barely restraining a growl, he shoved open a door and shut it behind him, hoping that Eleanor Carson wasn’t so stupid as to follow him in here.

Eleanor wanted to know why he was ignoring her. Needed it like a feral thing in her blood.

All evening she’d hoped to snare his attention but had failed, again and again. At first, she’d simply wanted to thank him for last year. Again. Over the year, she’d come to think of him as her knight in matt black armour. Santo certainly had none of the shine and pomp of fairy tale heroes. But what use did she have for them? No, she needed the brutal honesty he offered.

But when she’d realised that he was ignoring her on purpose she’d been devastated...until that had turned to anger. She had been shocked by the fury that had whipped through her like wildfire. She’d almost had to physically hold herself back from going up to him and demanding why.

She knew it was dangerous to speak to him, it would draw her fa— Edward’s ire. More of it, anyway. She clenched her jaw, hoping that the tension would hold her still enough to stop her from looking his way. She knew they were by the bar set up along the back wall of the hall, speaking to the Müllers.

Her mother would be standing beside him, Eleanor imagined, wondering if anyone would notice the paleness of her skin beneath the make-up, or the brittle way she held herself. Fragile, breakable, fractured—most definitely—but not yet broken, Eleanor thought of her mother.

But the lies that lay between the three of them were like splinters stuck under the skin, festering, infected, untreated.

She’d thought that the worst thing had happened to her when she’d discovered that Edward wasn’t her father. But when she’d finally emerged from her room after the drunken disaster of last New Year’s Eve she’d found out the true extent of her situation.

Her grades at university had slipped under the strain of her personal life and Edward had decided that funding any future studies was a waste of his finances, so he had cancelled them. He had put a block on her cards and her account and finally she had realised how much of her life was under his control. Any attempt to circumvent his authority was met with the reminder that he would take Freddie and leave. Her mother’s desperate urging for her to do as he said only damaged what was left of her soul that bit more.

And standing in the grand banquet hall overlooking the cobbled streets of this beautiful, ancient European city, she’d just wanted someone who wouldn’t make her feel like a stranger in her own body. She’d wanted Santo. But he had cut her dead. It was the final straw and she barely cared whether Edward saw or not, as she followed him out of the hall and into the corridor.

With all the hurts and denigrations and misery she’d had to suffer this last year riding her hard, at that point it wouldn’t have even mattered if he’d gone straight to the men’s toilets, she would have followed him. A red haze had descended and even if distantly she could see that she was skirting the edge of hysteria...it didn’t matter. It was too late.

She turned the handle on the door she’d seen Santo disappear behind and pushed.

Barely half a step across the threshold and a hand snatched around her wrist and she was dragged into the room, the door slammed behind her, and she found herself pushed up against it, staring into the furious depths of Santo Sabatini’s unfathomable gaze.

‘Who do you think you are playing with?’ he demanded.

‘Wh-wh-what?’ she asked, everything in her—all the anger, the edge of hysteria, the determination—retreating under the sheer force of him . He crowded her, the press of his body oddly delicious to her near delirious state, his piercing aquamarine gaze flashing shards of ice that burned where they fell as he took in her every response.

Life . Her body had come to life for the first time that entire year.

She was touch-starved, and her body responded to his as if it were food. She wanted to gorge on him. Worse. She wanted him to gorge on her . To feast on her. To take everything that remained of her and leave nothing behind.

‘Little girl, do not mess with me,’ he warned, his voice a growl that sent shivers down her body to parts of her she’d been utterly unaware of until that moment. It called to her in a deep, primal way—the challenge, the dare, the taunt from him.

She had been dismissed, rejected, cast aside by almost everyone. Even him, and she was so damn tired of it.

‘Then stop messing with me ,’ she stressed, pushing herself away from the door and walking him back further into the room. ‘Why are you ignoring me?’ she demanded.

‘Why are you looking for me?’ he retaliated, his question, his tone throwing her off-course.

She clenched her teeth together. ‘I was looking for you because I thought you were different,’ she accused.

‘Don’t you dare compare me to them,’ he threw back at her almost before the words had left her lips. The slash of his hand through the air punctuated his response, his fury feeding her own.

‘Why not? You’re here every year, just like them. Your business is financed through investments in their companies and they invest in yours. You keep yourself pleasured with their wives,’ she lashed out, her eyes narrow and the seething anger that she wasn’t able to unleash anywhere else, here suddenly free to roam. It rose within her like a fire-breathing monster, consuming everything in its path.

‘Jealousy? It doesn’t suit you, cara ,’ he all but snarled at her.

‘I’m not jealous of a widow nearly twice my age,’ she lied. Because she was. Because Santo had looked at Marie-Laure in a way that he’d never looked at her. And she wanted that. She wanted something, anything other than the near violent fury that threatened to tear her sanity from her.

He frowned, just for a moment, as if he’d read her thoughts. As if she’d let them slip from the locked box she kept them in all year round.

‘You should go before someone finds you in here,’ he said, turning his back on her and once again dismissing her from his company.

Go here. Stay there. Don’t do that. Do this.

He was just like Edward. Ordering her around as if what she wanted, what she felt, had absolutely no importance to them.

‘No,’ she replied stubbornly. ‘I won’t.’

‘Fine. If you insist on behaving like a child, I’ll go.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned, moving to stand in his way.

Santo barked out a mean laugh. ‘Why? What are you going to do? Stop me?’ he demanded and made to push past her, but she moved to block his path.

Muscle clenching at his jaw, Santo could feel the anger in her pulsing from her in waves. But it was more complex than pure anger—something he was intimately familiar with. He could sense her helpless frustration, confusion, hurt... Arousal.

Cristo , she didn’t know what she was doing to him, he thought as he looked away.

She didn’t know how much he felt, as he wrestled with his own frustration and anger, his own confusion. They were both breathing hard, as if they were fighting battles and demons that demanded their all.

‘What do you want , Eleanor?’ he growled, hoping to scare her off, hoping to send her running back to the safety of the party. Back to someone else.

‘I want you to kiss me,’ she said. ‘Like you kiss her .’

A ripcord was wrenched within him, suspending him in mid-air on a piece of string tied right to her.

‘What?’ he asked, half convinced he’d imagined her words.

‘I want you to kiss me like you kiss her,’ Eleanor repeated, the dark gleam in her eyes swallowing the innocence whole.

Her tone left no doubt about whom she was speaking. Eleanor must have seen them last year. Merda , she didn’t even realise that she was the reason that nothing had happened between him and Marie-Laure. And that nothing would ever happen again.

And here Eleanor was, with that awful question on her lips. Couldn’t she tell how different they were? Couldn’t she see?

‘No,’ he bit out through clenched teeth. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘Then what use are you to me?’ she said, shoving back at him.

The taunt, the accusation, cut too close to the bone after years of stepping back and forth up to this line—the line that he couldn’t, shouldn’t, cross. Ever.

‘You want to use me?’ he demanded, stepping closer to her, crowding her a little more, letting just a little of his own anger loose.

‘No, I want you to use me ,’ she cried, stepping forward, closing the distance between them until they were head to head, more like enemies than potential lovers.

‘You want me to be just like all the other men in your life, do you?’ he demanded, sick to his stomach.

‘No, I want you to do what I want, on my terms,’ she cried. ‘Because I want this. I want to feel anything other than abandoned, rejected, unworthy, unloved and unknown.’ Each of these descriptions of herself twisted the knife in his chest. But then her eyes darkened.

‘And if you’re not going to help me, then I’ll find someone who will,’ she threatened, turning on her heel as if to leave.

His hand snaked out and slipped around her waist, pulling her back against his chest with gentle force. Fast breaths expanded her ribcage, flexing against his arm, tension holding her stiff in his arms as if she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to move or not, the scent of her rising from the curve of her neck and striking him deeply. Irrevocably.

He could lie to himself and dress it up a million different ways. But what really hid beneath the layers of protest and objection—towards her, the situation, the consequences that Eleanor Carson seemed wholly ignorant of—was that he had never, not once, been able to stop thinking about her...about the way she had looked up at him that night in Berlin. The way she had dared him to kiss her.

The way he’d wanted to, like nothing he’d ever experienced before in his life. The way he’d been tempted to throw away his promise to Pietro. The way he’d wanted to throw away everything he knew about himself and how devastatingly close he could be to his father sometimes and take what he wanted. It had nearly broken him and she’d had no idea. And here she was, threatening to find someone else to satisfy the same craving that coursed through his veins like a curse. And as she arched into his hold, her hands wrapping around the arms that held her tight, her backside restlessly pressing against his crotch, the last fragile tie to his sanity broke.

He spun her in his arms and her eager mouth met his in an almost violent confrontation. Tongues teased, teeth clashed, but it was her half-cried moan of sheer arousal that cut him off at the knees.

Santo pulled her tight against the length of his body, the hard ridge of his need for her pressing against her core. Unable to restrain himself, he felt feral, animalistic, primal and raw, in a way he’d never experienced before in his life. It was as if all their anger, all their frustration, all their hopelessness was bleeding out into their passion and he could only hope that it would run dry and leave him spent enough to let her go when it was done.

Eleanor pulled him against her by the lapels of his jacket, and he let himself be led straight into the drug that was Eleanor Carson. The boldness of her tongue had taken him by surprise and he was insatiable, addicted, unable to stop himself from going back for more... Dammit, for everything and anything he could get.

His pulse raged beyond his control, need a stronger impulse than his desire to breathe. She was pushing him closer and closer to the same hot-headed insanity of his father...and that alone was enough to make him sever the kiss.

He pulled back, breathing as if he’d run a marathon, the struggle to get himself back under control alarmingly close to a limit he rarely tested.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he demanded on a shaky inhale, his forehead pressed against hers, his eyes closed, half-hopeful and half-fearful of what he might see in the espresso rich depths of her eyes.

‘Because I have nothing left to lose,’ she whispered against his lips as if it were some great confession.

Santo hadn’t realised he’d been holding his breath until it whooshed, hot and hard and heavy—and devastated.

Her words had broken something inside him and he let her go from where he’d been holding her with numb fingers and turned, his back to her, while he gathered himself.

He shook his head. He should have known better. He should have realised. Oh, she probably hadn’t meant to be so cruel. But her words still cut him like a knife. She was only here, only asking that of him because she had reached the bottom of the barrel. She was only here because it was about her .

Had she still been the darling daughter of Edward Carson there was no way she’d have been standing here, begging him to kiss her. She’d have got as close to the flame as she could before running back to her friends with a near-scandal she could titillate and delight them with, without ever once having got her hands dirty. Because that was what she saw him as—playing in the dirt. She could walk away from him and wash her hands clean.

Oh, he had sympathy with her plight. But only to an extent. Because when his world had fallen apart he’d not had the luxury of buckling. He’d not had the opportunity to be self-indulgent and drink himself into a stupor, or act out like a child. No, he’d had to assume control of the Sabatini Group, and within months of his father’s death he was standing head-to-head with some of the men in this room who would have taken his company from him. Almost every day for nearly three years he’d had eyewatering, heart-stopping buyout packages. The kind that would have erased an entire country’s debt. And what was Eleanor doing? Dropping out of university and trying to lose herself in mindless hookups.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he sneered, returning to her words. Her self-pity, her self-absorption, burying the sharp sting of hurt beneath frustration and anger.

She looked back at him, wide-eyed and confused.

‘You’re such a child,’ he continued remorselessly. ‘You always have more to lose. If you have no care for yourself, then what about your mother? What about your brother? Or has it not even occurred to you that Edward could be using you against them ?’

‘Y-you know?’ Eleanor reeled back in shock as if she’d been slapped.

But she hadn’t. She’d just been told the truth, Santo thought grimly as he followed her back into the room. Something that had clearly been denied her far too long. And it had done her absolutely no good whatsoever.

‘Yes, I know,’ he confessed. ‘You said as much last year before I returned you to your mother.’

‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she begged.

A single bitter laugh burst from him. ‘Do you not think I would have done so by now, were I going to? Oh, not for you. And not because Carson hasn’t been trying to tank my business for the last twelve months. Your mother deserves none of this.’

Eleanor shook her pretty head, as if to try and both deny and assimilate what he was saying at the same time. Santo bit back a curse at the way she had paled.

‘Sit down, before you fall down,’ he ordered, ushering her towards a chair, before walking over to a glass-fronted drinks cabinet.

He reached for the whisky and retrieved two glasses from the backlit glass shelf. This was clearly some kind of after-dinner retirement room and had everything one would need. The décor was rich forest greens and golds and burgundy reds, so dark and so different from his own taste. And suddenly he just wanted to be home in his villa in Puglia, nestled in the olive groves beneath the heat of the sun and the simplicity of the landscape around him.

He was damn tired of all the politics and manipulation, the bribery and secrets and retaliations for perceived or real slights. He wanted to be away from it all. Including her .

He turned back to find Eleanor staring ahead as if in shock.

‘I hadn’t...’ She paused, cleared her throat and tried again. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ she confessed, as if ashamed.

He went to where she sat in the chair and passed her the glass, before going to stand by the window as far away from her as he could get.

‘Every single thing I thought I knew about my life was untrue,’ she said, as if putting her thoughts into words for the first time. ‘And I don’t know what that makes me,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know who I am.’

And wasn’t that the difference between them? Santo had never had the luxury of the lie—he had always known the terror and fear of his father, the false smiles of people who would never help his mother or him, but only profit from their silence. He had always known who he was: the son of a violent, selfish bastard. Santo had inherited his genes, his blood, and always had to be watchful for when those characteristics would appear, when that anger would finally take hold and he would break the things most precious to him. Like father, like son. And the only way to ensure that he didn’t inflict that kind of hurt on the people he loved was simple. Don’t love.

Eleanor’s fingers gripped the seat of the chair as her head spun. A distant part of her thought she should be used to this by now. But she wasn’t.

Santo’s kiss had been one thing—spectacular. A short-lived moment of ecstasy she could never have imagined. That rush of all that she had felt had thrust her to the very brink of what she’d thought she’d always wanted. Before she had dashed them both on the rocks with her thoughtless words.

She had realised her mistake almost the moment the words were out of her mouth. Guilt coloured her cheeks. She had asked him to use her, but she was the one using him. Tonight. Maybe last year and the year before that too. Shame coursed through her blood, thick, heavy and hot, and she deserved every minute of discomfort it brought her.

‘I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve—’

‘What I deserve or don’t deserve is nothing to do with you. You asked for a kiss. You got what you asked for.’

Eleanor paled beneath the realisation of the truth of his accusation. She had been behaving like a child, thinking only of how the situation had affected her.

She nodded and, leaving the glass of whisky he had offered her untouched, stood.

Her head swam a little and she wanted air. Fresh air. She needed to think. She couldn’t afford to be so selfish. She couldn’t afford to behave like a child. She couldn’t afford to keep hurting the people around her: her mother, her brother... Santo .

Raising a shaking hand to her lips, she knew that no matter who she kissed, or how many people, none would stand up to what she had felt with Santo.

‘I—’

‘You should leave. Now,’ he commanded, deliberately turning his back to her, and she knew that it was the end of the discussion. It hurt, but she’d done it to herself and it was time that she owned that.

But as she left the room she could only wish that her selfishness hadn’t cost her him .