Benedetto cursed inwardly. This was not the direction he’d expected the conversation to take. Hearing her defend her father like this was making his heart poundand his blood boil.
“Oh, yes?” He pushed, his words dangerously silky.
“Yes,” she spat. “You could never understand how hard it was for him to raise me on his own.”
Benedetto didn’t speak. He was incapable of forming words. He simply stared at her and Kate, anxious and filled with emotions she hadn’t felt in a long time, went on the attack. She had always been powerless with Augustine and she would not be with Benedetto now.
“Who are you to judge?”
“Meaning?” He paced around to her, so that he was standing just before her. But he didn’t touch her. Kate was skittish and Benedetto never, ever wanted her to fear him. The primal need to convince her that she was safe with him surprised him, but he could not ignore it. He forced himself to calm down, to relax his posture so that he wasn’t so large and intimidating. He relaxed his facial muscles, easing a look of bland disinterest across his expression.
“You work. You work really hard. You’re really great at making money. And you’re really great at … making love. But relationships? Looking after people? What of that?” She sucked in a deep breath, unable to countenance the realities she was confronting. “My father … isn’t … he’s a long way off perfect. But he never meant to hurt me. He just … I was … he worked so hard, Benedetto. He worked hard for me. So that I’d have everything I could ever want. And then he had to deal with me.”
“To deal with you? I do not think you would have been a difficult child,cara.”
“I was,” she responded, though in that moment she couldn’t think of a precise example as to why.
“In what ways?” He asked, as though sensing her confusion.
“I just was. Look, just drop it, okay?”
Benedetto shook his head. “If not your father, then what?” He tried to change the direction of his questioning, wondering if perhaps she might reveal more if she felt less threatened. “What do you do here? Why did you hide in this tiny apartment?”
“I’m not bloody hiding! Jesus! What are you talking about?” But the walls were closing in. It was all getting too real.
She spun away from him and lifted a shirt from the bag she’d brought with her.She pulled it on roughly, angrily, desperately. She held the secret tightly not because she didn’t want to share herself with him, but because she couldn’t make her past real again. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
“You obviously enjoyed a privileged childhood. Yet you live in a slum. You are private. You have an insecurity that is at odds with your personality. Why?”
“I don’t,” she said, and she was shivering uncontrollably now. He saw, and he felt as though a knife was cleaving through his chest.
“You don’t what?” He pushed, reminding her suddenly of her father in his relentless need for answers.
She swallowed. “I don’t know.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please drop it, Benedetto.” Her stomach rolled with pain. She couldn’t look at him when she spoke and so she kept her eyes closed, her lashes forming two thick, black fans across her pale cheeks. “It was just a dream tonight. It’s all just a dream now.”
God, how he wanted her to stop speaking in riddles. But he put an arm around her back and crushed her to his body as though he could pour his own strength into her. He held her against him until slowly he sensed that she was no longer shivering. He felt Kate returning to him, and he held her until he was certain she had.
“You’re safe now,” he said simply, hoping that it was true and knowing he would do anything in his power to make it so.
The text message he’d sent to Augustine sat like a bullet in his mind though. Hours later, as Kate slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling. His mind spun like a wheel, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Augustine had never responded.
But the message had gone through.
And the fact that he hadn’t replied didn’t mean he wouldn’t, somehow, react. In fact, Benedetto knew that he would. Without a doubt.
He propped up on one elbow so that he could study Kate. She was so beautiful. So ethereally lovely. She was smart, too, with a quick wit. She had left Augustine. She had run to another country and buried herself in cheap obscurity.
Taking care to be quiet, he pushed his feet out of the bed and moved quickly from the bedroom. He made a coffee and took it to his study. The place was as well equipped as any of his offices; he’d made sure he had the highest speed internet cabled in, and replaced the computer systems every twelve months. It was state of the art. Itneeded to be, to keep him in touch with everything he was overseeing across the world.
He clicked into a file with a numeric pathname – designed to arouse no interest in anyone but himself.
And there she was.
Katherine Beauchamp on The Kings Road. His heart ricocheted around his chest. He stared at the computer screen and felt a heightening sense of desperation. It had been taken years earlier. She looked younger. And yes, he could see why he’d looked at her with a sense of searing hatred, for she embodied everything he thought he despised. She looked so expensive and cherished in this picture – expensive because of clothes Augustine had bought her, and cherished by the man who had ruined his father’s life.
But when had he decided to use her like this?
