Chapter 6 #2
“You can’t need the money.”
He laughed. “I haven’t needed the money in a decade. I have more money than I could spend in a hundred lifetimes.”
“Then why risk everything?”
“What is life without risk?”
“A safe one. Have you always been a gambler?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had a serious girlfriend?”
Her swerve of subject caught him by surprise.
She smiled knowingly and drank more of her wine. “You’re thirty-eight years old, Mr Vicario. It would be strange if you had not.”
“I’ve had a lot of girlfriends, but the life I lead isn’t conducive to a serious relationship.” And nor did he want one.
“Tell me how you came into the life you live. Is it something you were born into?”
He drained his bourbon. “Not at all. I grew up in an ordinary family with ordinary Italian values. My father ran a garage, my mother was a bookkeeper.”
“Where?”
“Here in Milan. I was raised a twenty-minute walk from here. I had many friends and acquaintances who were in gangs and sold drugs. It was easy money but a fast-track journey to either a morgue or a prison sentence. Not the life for me. I wanted to be one of the men who drove through the streets of Milan in the flash cars that caught everyone’s attention. ”
“You wanted to be somebody?”
“Yes. I wanted to be respected, but more than anything, I wanted to be rich.”
“Why?”
“Because I watched my parents work all the hours God gives and still struggle to make ends meet. I wanted more than that. I left school the minute I was allowed and started working.”
“Doing what?”
“I worked as a mechanic for my father by day and in a local nightclub by night. I saved every euro I earned. By the time I was twenty-one, I’d saved enough to put down a deposit to buy the nightclub. I got a bank loan for the rest. I paid the loan back within fourteen months.”
“How?”
“By transforming it into something so exclusive that everyone wanted to be a part of it. I introduced a membership fee that only the seriously wealthy could afford.”
“A risky gamble.”
He reached for her unwanted glass of bourbon and raised it. “The best gamble I ever made.”
“But what made it such a success? Surely there are private nightclubs throughout the continent?”
“None that offer what I offer.”
“Which is?”
“Business and hedonism all mixed together under the one supremely discreet roof.”
The faint line in her forehead appeared.
“Do you want me to explain it to you, Miss Marino?”
After a small hesitation, she nodded.
He unhooked his ankle and put his foot back on the floor.
Leaning forward, glass in his hand, elbows resting on his thighs, he held her stare.
“All my clubs follow the same basic template. Inside them are four distinct areas I call zones. There is the business zone, with private rooms businessmen can use to negotiate deals in without prying eyes or ears. When they have finished, they can relax in the chill-out zone, and eat and drink, play a hand of cards, whatever they want. Or they can head into the nightclub itself and dance. For those who are feeling…let’s call it amorous, they can avail themselves of the fourth zone. The sex zone.”
Her eyes flickered, her cheeks flushing beautifully.
Good. Maybe if Francesca truly understood the kind of man he was and the kind of business he’d created, she would know to keep her distance from him and stop her attempts at flirtation.
“The sex zones are a series of rooms, much like you would find in a hotel. They each come with a large bed and an attached shower room and an array of toys and condoms. There is no requirement to pre-book the rooms. Each door has a colour-coded lock. If it’s green, it means it’s available.
If it’s red, it’s taken. If it’s amber, then it signifies that it’s taken, but that others are welcome to join the participants… If you know what I mean?”
Her face still saturated with colour, she made another slow nod.
“Sex sells, Miss Marino. More than anything else. And my clubs offer the perfect hedonistic experience. The only rule is that everything is consensual, and I have a variety of measures in place to ensure this.”
When she finally responded, her voice was a whisper. “Do you use those rooms?”
“No. When I am at my clubs, I am there to work.” The good Lord alone knew the temptation that had been thrown his way through the years; the women who’d connived and cajoled in all manners of sensuous fashion to entice him into one of those rooms.
“But you’ve had a lot of women?”
“Yes.”
“More than one woman at a time?”
“Yes.” Not taking his eyes off her, Gino drank a good measure of his bourbon.
After wiping the corner of his mouth with his thumb, he slowly said, “If you want me to go into detail about my sex life, then I will as that’s the deal we made, but ask yourself first if you want to hear the answers.
I will never marry or have children, and I’ve never had a serious girlfriend for the reason that life is short and for living, and I am living my dream, so you need to keep that in mind if you choose to ask more probing questions. ”
There was a tremor in her hand as she drained her wine. Only after she’d refilled her glass and tucked her feet back under her bottom did she speak again, this time in a stronger, more measured tone. “Do you find me attractive?”
Of all the questions she could have asked…
The static that felt like a constant presence in his bloodstream heated and thrummed. “Yes.”
His answer hung in the air between them.
Her voice dropped again. “Is that why I unnerve you?”
“You unnerve me for all manner of reasons.”
“Because I’m not what you expected me to be?”
He gave a tight laugh. “You are nothing like I expected you to be.”
“For good or bad?”
“I haven’t worked that out yet.”
“Do you wish you hadn’t made the promise not to touch me?”
He wasn’t going to pretend not to understand her meaning. “No.” His fingers tightened their grip on his glass. “I don’t have much of a conscience, Miss Marino, but on the very rare occasion it nudges me, I listen to it. I’m too old and cynical for an innocent like you.”
Gino found himself holding his breath with no awareness of what he was holding it for. And while he held it, his eyes refused to look away from the beautiful innocent with the colour-saturated cheeks studying him so intensely.
“Tell me about your parents. They’re still alive?”
Her latest swerve of conversation took a moment to sink in, something he found as disarming as everything else about her.
Expelling the held breath slowly, he nodded. “Yes. They live on a yacht.”
“That sounds fun.”
“It is. They’ve always dreamed of sailing the world.” And it kept them out of the way and safe from his world.
“You bought the yacht for them?”
“Yes.”
“You made their dream come true.”
“It was the least I could do after all the sacrifices they made for me.”
The beautiful features he’d only vaguely realised had tightened, loosened. She smiled the soft smile he’d glimpsed earlier. “I think you’re a much better man than you want me to believe.”
“I can assure you, I’m not.”
She brought the wine glass to her lips, the smile becoming mischievous again. “We’ll see.”
His fingers gripped even tighter around his glass.
Francesca found herself having to summon courage to leave the bathroom.
The thrills that had zinged through her body pretty much since she’d woken seemed to have become turbo-charged. Everything inside her felt different. Thicker, somehow, and yet gooey. Her heart had turbo-charged itself too. It had done since Gino admitted he found her attractive.
She hadn’t planned to ask that. The whole purpose of her interrogation had been to annoy and needle beneath his skin.
..and to learn more about him. She didn’t deny that.
She found Gino fascinating and deeply attractive, and he knew it.
It was why he’d described the sex rooms of his club.
He’d wanted to repulse her, and she’d instinctively recoiled, just as he’d wanted.
What he absolutely would not have wanted was for the pulse of heat that had flooded her system on the tail of her revulsion.
Gino might not participate in the hedonism enjoyed in his clubs, but he facilitated it, and she just knew it was a hedonism he participated in elsewhere.
Whereas she’d never even kissed a man. Never been attracted to a man.
How could she have when she’d gone to a private all-girls school and then spent her university years ferried to and from her lectures, a ghost amongst her peers, vanishing before the offer of a date could even be thought of, never mind asked?
That her kidnapper happened to be as handsome and sexy as the stars of the movies she so enjoyed had made it inevitable her hormones would zing to life for him.
Flirting and teasing had been easy when she’d assumed he found her as attractive as a pair of old boots, but knowing the attraction was reciprocated.
.. That put a whole new complexity to it and a complexity to her feelings.
Other than when he’d carried her clothing, she’d not felt an ounce of self-consciousness in front of him, but now she felt hugely self-conscious in the silk pyjamas that had been included in her earlier delivery.
A pretty dusky pink, they were long-sleeved with buttons running down the front, the bottoms falling to her ankles.
They showed minimal flesh, yet she felt more exposed in them than she had when she’d unthinkingly run out of the dressing room waving the hairdryer in that silk evening dress that showed half her breasts.
More exposed than in Gino’s t-shirt when she’d deliberately flashed her bare bottom to him.
Swallowing hard, she opened the bathroom door.
The only light in the bedroom was her reading lamp. Gino was in bed, propped against his headboard, working on his phone.
Their eyes caught for a fleeting moment before, his jaw set, he turned his attention back to his phone. It was a fleeting moment that made her insides feel even gooier and her heart even heavier.
She sensed his stare flicker back to her when she climbed into her bed.
Lying on her back, she opened her book. She couldn’t remember anything of the last chapter she’d read. Working her way back, she realised not a single word of what she’d read in his office had sunk in. She turned the pages back to the first chapter and started again. Tried.
She heard movement. A quick side-eye showed Gino had put his phone down and settled beneath his duvet.
The words on the page in front of her blurred. She blinked them back into focus. Three paragraphs in, and she had to go back to the beginning.
All she could see was Gino. His bare chest. His erection jutting through his pyjama bottoms. The way his eyes crinkled on the few occasions she’d broken through his austere front to make him laugh.
Funny, but earlier she’d barely registered him wrapping his fingers around her wrist. Now she could feel it like a branding.
Maybe she shouldn’t have asked that question. Better not to have known. Better to have taken delight in her own attraction and the wonderful zings in her body that came from it.
Closing her book, she put it on the floor and turned the light out.
The pounding of her heart was a roar in her head.
Was his heart beating as fast as hers? Was it her face he was seeing behind his closed eyes?
“How many women have slept in this room?” she whispered through the darkness enveloping them.
His voice sounded hoarse. “Interrogation time is over, Chicca.”
It was the first time he’d not called her by the formal Miss Marino, and her heart caught tightly at his use of her family’s pet name for her.
But the inflexion of his tone was different to her family’s. When they called her it, it was just the diminutive of her full name, the way her father sometimes called her Franci. The way Gino said it sounded like the sweetheart endearment Chicca also meant.
Or was that just wishful thinking? Probably.
She swallowed. “I know. I’m just curious.”
“Don’t be.”
“I can’t help it. You know I’ve never been with a man.” Never experienced all that her body was designed to feel.
She heard him sigh. It didn’t sound like his usual exasperated exhale.
“What’s the man my family want me to marry like?”
A long time passed before he answered. “That is something you will have to determine for yourself.”
“I don’t want to marry a stranger. Please, tell me your opinion of him.”
“My opinion is not worth anything in this matter.”
“It’s worth something to me.”
“Well it shouldn’t be.” His voice suddenly became rough. “I kidnapped you, Miss Marino. I forcibly snatched you from the street and am holding you captive for a ransom. Don’t ever let yourself forget that. I am the last person in the world you should be seeking opinions about anything from.”