“I’ll have to check that the trees are in order,” he said thoughtfully. “But when my father lived here there were oranges, lemons, limes, cumquats, grapes, pears, apples, olives and a heap of macadamia nuts too. He had a goat that made his milk, and chickens for eggs.”
“Woah. It’s like your own River Cottage,” she said with a shake of her head.“How incredible it must be to live like that. I can barely open a tin of baked beans. I can’t imagine being so self-sufficient.”
“He was very in touch with nature.” Benedetto’s voice didn’t show how that statement pained him. To imagine his father leaving this paradise to answer fictitious charges in England. To have spent his dying days in a cold British jail!
“And you must have been too, to grow up like that.”
He shrugged.
Kate stopped walking so that she could stand in front of him and wrap her arms around his waist. The difference in their sizes was more obvious now than when they’d first met and she’d been in heels.
“When I first met you, I remember thinking that you were sort of wild. That you looked like a man who could tame a beast with his bare hands.” She linked her fingers through his now and brought them to her lips. “I think I was right.”
His heart was squeezing painfully in his chest. Why was she looking at him like that? As if he could give her something more than this? He couldn’t! He couldn’t give her anything. He’d taken from her exactly what he’d needed and soon it would be over.
“I left this life, remember? I turned my back on what my father had valued because I wanted to make my mark in the world. I didn’t want to idle in an ancient home,cara,even one so charming as this. You have a romantic impression of me that isn’t borne out by the facts.”
“You really prefer your life? A life of corporate boredom and money and meaningless sex and the trappings of success without any real …”
“What do you know of my life?” He demanded, with a sharper tone than he’d intended to employ. He saw something like fear clot her eyes and if he were feeling less emotional himself he might have stopped to wonder why she had that reaction.
She studied him carefully and then stepped away. “Nothing, I guess.” She wrapped her arms around her waist in a futile attempt to warm up. Only it wasn’t the cool wind that had chilled her. It was his sudden attitude shift.
It felt good to push her away. It felt right. He had let things get too complicated; a foolish, stupid move not worthy of him. After all, he was used to having meaningless sex with beautiful women.
But this place was magical.
This place could cast a spell on any who submitted to it as they had.
He felt the magic and it was changing him.
He would not allow it to.
“We have only just met,” he added, his tone cool now.
“I know.” She lifted her head to look up at him. Her eyes were bleak. He hated that. He hated that her eyes were as expressive as her father’s. In Augustine’s eyes he had seen belligerence and cruelty and disinterest. In hers he saw everything that was kind, good and vulnerable. “I guess I’ve known men like you before,” she said, and her words were like a knife in his gut. Was she possibly comparing him to her father?
“Have you?”
It wasn’t true; no one was like Benedetto Arnaud. “I hate the world you live in,” she said instead. “I hate the waste. The wanton spending. You threw two hundred thousand pounds at me as though it were nothing. Don’t you see how disgusting that is?”
“I gave the money to a charity,” he pointed out, wondering at how her face could fill with such passion.
“As though it were nothing,” she repeated. “You spent in the blink of an eye what most people spend a lifetime trying to save.”
“So it offends you that I have money?” He countered. “Yet you work for a charity that exists because of people like me.”
She frowned; he ached to kiss those pouted lips. “How do you make that sound wrong in some way?” She said finally.
“It’s not wrong. It is simply the way of the world.”
“What do you even do? To have this kind of money?”
He dug his hands back into his pockets. They were safer there. He needed a physical barrier to stop from reaching for her and reinstating the sweetness they’d been sharing a moment earlier. “I build things,” he said simply.
“What kinds of things?”
“High rises mostly.”
