‘Please, Vito,’ she gasped.
‘What is it that you want?’ he teased softly, and he could see she was very close to the edge…
‘You know what I want,’ she breathed. ‘You.’
‘Well, since you asked so nicely…’ With another hard thrust she began to spasm around his aching shaft and he was ambushed by his own release. He found himself choking out incomprehensible words as he lost himself deep inside her and afterwards, he lay there, too dazed to think, or even to speak—because that had been sex on a whole new level. He pushed a damp strand of hair away from her forehead.
‘Mmm,’ she murmured as she opened her eyes. ‘That was nice.’
‘Nice?Is that a classic example of English understatement?’ he demanded.
‘Okay. That was a poor choice of adjective. It was amazing. You know it was.’ She gave a big yawn. ‘But I guess I ought to think about getting back to my own room.’
His territorial instincts aroused, for women rarely took the initiative about absenting themselves from his bed, Vito edged his finger around the kiss-swollen outline of her lips. ‘Why?’
She gave the fingertip an absent lick before moving her head away. ‘Because if I don’t I’m going fall asleep and stay here all night and that might cause problems in the morning.’
‘What kind of problems?’
With difficulty, Flora held back an impatient sigh, wondering if he was being deliberately dense. She wasn’t going to lie to him. Besides, it would have been difficult to fabricate anything when she felt as if he had stripped her bare in more ways than simply the physical. Beneath his gaze and touch, she had felt completely exposed and that had been scary and wonderful, all at the same time. It had been the most incredible sex of her life—even better than last time, though maybe that was because Vito had been more tender than she remembered. Or was she guilty of seeing things she wanted to see, rather than things which were really there?
‘Because then your staff will get even more confused,’ she said. ‘They are used to us having separate bedrooms.’
‘So what? I don’t live my life pandering to the sensibilities of my staff.’
What aboutmine, she wanted to object,but that would definitely smack of neediness.
‘They’ll think we’re a couple—a real couple,’ she persisted. ‘And we’re not, are we?’
There was a pause and his eyes narrowed, as if she were laying down a trap he had encountered many times before. ‘You know the answer to that, Flora,’ he answered silkily. ‘But I see no reason why we can’t enjoy each other’s company while you’re here.’
‘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 tellyouall 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.
