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‘But it is, of course, strong enough for you to come here and verbally stone me. It’s been over ten years, Gabriel. Isn’t it time—’
‘Isn’t it time what? That I claimed the debt you owe me, along with its accrued interest? I’m a man who likes payment in full, Sasha. Carlo knew that.’
Something—either old knowledge or female instinct—iced down her spine in a cold trickle of awareness she didn’t want but couldn’t ignore.
‘What do you mean? What did Carlo know?’
‘He knew that when he asked me to lend him money that money would have to be repaid.’
‘You loaned Carlo money?’
Gabriel inclined his head. ‘Against the security of the deeds to his hotels. He had overtraded, and badly. I told him that, but he believed he could borrow his way out of trouble, and since we were family I could not refuse him the help he wanted. Unfortunately for him he did not manage to turn the business around. Fortunately for me his debt was covered by his assets. My assets now. Including this place, of course.’
Sasha stared at him.
‘Yours?’ She couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. ‘You mean that you own this hotel?’
‘This hotel,’ he agreed, ‘and the others. And your home, the money in your bank, the clothes on your back. It all belongs to me now, Sasha. Everything. Carlo’s debt is repaid,’ he told her softly, ‘but yours to me is still outstanding. Did you think it had been forgotten? That I wouldn’t bother to seek retribution?’
She wanted desperately to look at her sons, to reassure herself that they were there, whole and safe, and that none of this could touch or harm them. But she was afraid that somehow just looking at them would draw Gabriel’s attention to their vulnerability.
Instead she drew in a deep, unsteady breath and said, ‘You seek retribution from me? I was the one who was the victim in our relationship, Gabriel. You were the one who—’
‘You were the one who sold herself to the highest bidder.’ Somehow she made herself look at him. ‘You left me with no other option,’ she told him quietly.
It was, after all, the truth. She had gone to him looking for all those things she’d never had, still able to believe that miracles could happen, even for girls like her, and that all the wrongs in her life could be made right. She had still trusted in her dreams then. She felt pity for the girl she had been, was glad that she was gone, and even more glad to be the woman who had taken her place.
Before Gabriel could say anything else she demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you want, Gabriel? I assume you haven’t wasted your precious time coming here just to gloat? Or did you think it would be amusing to throw us out personally? Well, I’ll save you the bother. It won’t take us long to pack.’ Of all the luxuries she would have to give up this was the one she would miss the most. The luxury of pride. Because she knew so well just what a luxury it was.
‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he told her.
There was more? What? Surely it wasn’t possible for things to be any worse?
‘Before he died, Carlo appointed me as his sons’ legal guardian.’
It was a joke. A cruel deliberate attempt to frighten her. Payback time with a vengeance. But of course it couldn’t be true.
‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Gabriel demanding softly when he caught her swift indrawn breath and the shocked disbelief she was trying to hide. ‘Surely Carlo told you that he intended to appoint me as their legal family guardian in accordance with traditional Sardinian law?’
He knew, of course, that Carlo had done no such thing because his cousin had told him so himself.
‘It is for the best,’ Carlo had whispered painfully to Gabriel. ‘Even though I know Sasha won’t see it that way at first.’
She certainly didn’t, Gabriel recognised. Her eyes were wild with disbelief as she shook her head in denial.
This couldn’t be happening, Sasha thought frantically. This was the nightmare to end all nightmares. The ultimate betrayal. A knife-sharp edge of fear sliced into her heart and paralysed her defences.
‘No!’ she told him, shock bleeding the colour from her face, clenching her hands into small, anguished fists. ‘No. I don’t believe you.’
‘My lawyers have all the necessary papers.’
This wasn’t some kind of malicious joke, Sasha recognised numbly. This was real. Her head was aching, bursting with unanswerable questions. She was too distraught to maintain the protective distance of remote disinterest.
‘I don’t understand…Why would Carlo do something like that? Why?’
Gabriel shrugged, a small movement of powerfully strong shoulders. Sickeningly for a second the scene in front of her swung crazily out of focus and she was seeing another, younger Gabriel, sea water sluicing from the bare tanned strength of those same shoulders as he hauled himself up out of the ocean onto the deck of his yacht, his body naked and unashamedly ready for her, just as hers had been equally ready for him.
And she had always been ready for him. Ready, eager, wanting. Hungry for the intimacy of any sexual act that would bring him closer to her and keep him there. She had had no inhibitions, and she suspected he would not have allowed her to have any. With their privacy guaranteed she had thought nothing of shrugging on one of his shirts and wearing nothing else, as turned on by the knowledge that beneath it she was openly available to his touch as she knew he had been. As a lover he had opened her eyes to a whole new world of pleasure, and he had imprinted that pleasure on her body in such a way that she knew she would never be able to forget it. There had been long hours when he had held her on their bed and caressed and kissed his way over every inch of her—the curve of her throat, the tender flesh inside her arm, her fingers. If she closed her eyes she knew she would almost be able to feel the slow wet curl of his tongue as he drew slow patterns of almost unendurable erotic stimulation along the whole length of her.
Aroused to a fever pitch, she would invariably forget his command to remain still and reach for him, arching her back, spreading her legs, moaning with raw delight when he carefully held apart the outer lips of her sex and stroked his tongue-tip the full length of it. Her orgasm would begin before he entered her, her body welcoming his fierce thrusts even while deep down inside herself a part of her ached to feel him there without the barrier of the condoms he’d always insisted on using.
Abruptly Sasha realised the danger of what she was doing. No! Her silent tortured denial reverberated inside her skull. What was happening to her? How could he be making her remember that now?
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she could hear Gabriel saying coolly. ‘Carlo knew the state his financial and business affairs were in. He told me himself that he wanted to do everything he could to protect his sons and their future. Obviously by making me their guardian he believed he would be morally compelling me to provide for them financially.’
‘No, he wouldn’t do that,’ Sasha protested. But even as she said the words she knew that she was deceiving herself. It was exactly the sort of thing Carlo would have done—albeit for the best of motives. Carlo had had such a deep-rooted sense of family. He had been proud of being a Calbrini, proud too that the twins would bear that name. He had cared about her, and he had protected her from the pain of loving Gabriel and being rejected by him, but the boys had Calbrini blood in their veins, and in the end that had mattered more to him than her.
Sasha was trying hard to remain strong, to focus on what Gabriel was saying instead of slipping back into the past, but the memories Gabriel was evoking had a dangerously strong hold on her and were making her feel frighteningly weak. How could it be that just standing here with him could awaken the kind of erotic thoughts she had truly believed she had left behind in her past?
‘To provide for them financially,’ Gabriel repeated, adding as smoothly as though he were sliding a knife up through her ribs and straight into her heart, ‘and to protect them from their mother.’
It took several seconds for her brain to absorb what he was saying, and then several more for her to react to the cruel injustice of his words. ‘They don’t need to be protected from me, and neither do they need you.’
‘Carlo obviously didn’t agree with you, and neither will the law. I am their guardian. They are my wards. That was their father’s dying wish.’
‘But I am their mother.’
‘The kind of mother who some might say they would be better off not having.’
‘You have no right to say that. You know nothing about my relationship with my sons.’
‘I know you. You went to Carlo because he was prepared to give you what I would not. Now he is dead, and sooner rather than later you will be looking for another man to take his place. Obviously Carlo feared that should you remarry your new husband might not have Carlo’s sons’best interests at heart, and he wanted to protect them.’
‘I would never marry a man unless I thought he would love them as though they were his own.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
Sasha suspected she knew what he was thinking. ‘You still haven’t forgiven your mother, have you? Well, I am not her, Gabriel. I love my sons—’
‘Enough! This has nothing to do with my mother.’
Sasha wasn’t going to argue with him. What was the point? It would be like trying to break down granite with her bare hands. But she knew that she was right. Gabriel measured women by the yardstick of his mother’s failure to be a mother to him, and he condemned them all along with her. He wanted to believe that all women were capable of abandoning their children for money because he needed to believe it; because not to do so meant accepting that his own mother had left him because of some failure within himself to merit her maternal love. He spoke his beliefs as though they were a truth written in stone, and Sasha knew that inside his head, in what passed for his heart, they were. In his eyes she was already condemned and would remain condemned. What he believed could not be changed, because he did not want it to be changed.
She had learned so much on her own sometimes difficult and painful journey to maturity and acceptance of her own past. And most of all she had learned that it was impossible to make another person’s journey of self-knowledge and healing for them.
Gabriel had decided a long time ago to sacrifice the ability to love and be loved in exchange for the protection of a bitter pride that would not allow him to see her sex as motivated by anything other than the most callous form of self-interest.
Carlo might have believed he was doing what was right, but Sasha wished he had not brought Gabriel back into her life—and more importantly into the lives of her sons. They meant everything to her. There was nothing she would not do to protect them, no sacrifice she would not make.
‘You didn’t have to agree to Carlo’s request,’ she forced herself to point out. ‘Why did you? My sons mean nothing to you.’
Gabriel could hear the hostility in her voice. He looked towards the two boys. Sasha was right, of course; they meant nothing to him beyond the Calbrini blood in their veins. His initial reaction when Carlo had told him his intention had been to refuse. Why should he burden himself with the responsibility of his cousin’s sons, especially when he knew what their mother was? It was obvious what Carlo was trying to do. He was bankrupt and in debt, his sons were too young to fend for themselves, and their mother could not be relied on to protect them; she would sell herself to the first man who could afford her. All this must have gone through Carlo’s mind as it would have done his own. So Carlo had turned to him, on his sons’ behalf, knowing that morally Gabriel could not and would not reject the claim of their shared Calbrini blood.
Since then, however, Gabriel had had more time to reflect on the situation. He had reasoned to himself that in accepting the role of guardian to Carlo’s sons he could spare himself the necessity of producing heirs of his own with all the potential legal pitfalls that could entail. Carlo’s sons were Calbrinis. He had decided that he would spend some time with Carlo’s sons to evaluate for himself whether or not they were worthy of raising as his own heirs. If they were, then as their guardian he would raise them exactly as he would have done his own sons, to become the heirs his vast empire and wealth required. As for Sasha…
He could feel the burn inside his body like that of an old unhealed wound. Their shared history was a page of his life he had never been able to remove. The women who had gone before her, like those who had come after, had never managed to leave the imprint on his senses that she had. She was a payment owed to him in the balance sheet of his life. Fate was now giving him the opportunity to salve his wounded pride.
Once he had collected the capital and interest on her debt to him, once he had reversed the past and forced her into a position where he would be the one to walk away from her—for nothing else would salve his pride—then he would make it plain that there was no place for her in the new lives of her sons, and certainly not in his. Gabriel did not envisage any real problems. He knew Sasha. She was a hedonist and a sensualist, driven by sexual and financial greed. He was not foolish enough to think that he could simply trick her into doing what he wanted. The minute she guessed what he was planning she would cling to the boys, determined not to let go of her passport to his wealth. He would have to be subtle and thorough.
And ultimately, if she refused to relinquish her claim to her sons…?
If she was foolish enough to do that then she would soon realise her mistake.
‘No, but they meant a great deal to Carlo.’ Gabriel answered Sasha’s question coolly. ‘And my word means a great deal to me. Since I have given him my word that I will act in all ways towards them as though they were my own, that is exactly what I intend to do.’
‘What?’ His own? The shock of what Gabriel had said rocked Sasha back on her heels. Why hadn’t she anticipated this? She knew how much Carlo had loved the boys, but she knew too how deep his Sardinian roots went, and how important his family and its honour were to him. If only Carlo had told her what he was planning she could have done something, anything—whatever it would have taken. Pleaded, begged, demanded that he didn’t do this to her. He had known how Gabriel felt about her, how much he despised her. And he had known too…
She took a deep breath. She hadn’t thought about any of this in years. She hadn’t allowed herself to—not once since she had slipped from Gabriel’s bed in the pale light of a false dawn while Gabriel slept, unaware of her intentions. She had taken nothing with her when she left the yacht—not the expensive clothes he had bought her, nor the jewellery—only her passport. And enough money to get the hotel where Carlo was staying, to give herself and her future into his keeping. She had been eighteen then, and Carlo had been in his midsixties. Small wonder that a month later, when he had married her, the officials had thought he was her elderly father. She had not cared, though. All she had cared about was that now she was safe.
She could see Gabriel looking at the boys, and she reacted immediately to what her maternal instincts translated as a threat, reaching for his arm, wanting to stop him from going to them. But before she could touch him Gabriel swung around, his own grip on her wrist making her wince. His body was tensed like that of a hunter, a predator, waiting for her to try to escape so that he could punish her. A shudder of recognition ripped through her belly as she was subjected to the once-familiar signs of her own body’s arousal. How could this be happening? It was over ten years since Gabriel had last touched her. The twins’ birth had flooded her senses and emotions with an intensity of a different kind of love that had obliterated all she had once felt for Gabriel. Or so she had told herself.
How could one touch do this to her? How could he make her feel like this—her lower belly hollow with anticipation, her legs trembling, sweat springing up along her hair line and adrenalin forcing its way along her veins? It was a trick of her own imagination, that was all, she tried to reassure herself. She did not want or desire him. How could she? But the ache of longing inside her was intensifying and drowning out rational thought. Arousal and anger, desire and dislike, all the sweet, savage sexual alchemy of their shared past swept back over her.
She had, she remembered, felt like this the first time she had seen him. Only then the liquid heat erupting inside her body had not been shadowed by either pain or knowledge. The physical ache of her longing for him had seduced her before he had even touched her, and when he had touched her…She closed her eyes, not wanting to remember but it was too late. Inside her head she could hear her own voice as she cried out to him, caught up in the grip of her own unbearable pleasure, her eyes wide open with the awed shock of it while he leaned over her in the shadowy coolness of the yacht’s main cabin, watching her as the expert touch of his fingers brought her to orgasm. Her first orgasm. He had waited until its shuddering hold on her body had eased before giving her the look of hooded triumph that would become so familiar to her and saying laconically, ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to tell me your name?’
She opened her eyes abruptly. Her face burned now at the memory of her own behaviour then. She had only been seventeen, she reminded herself shakily. A child whose head had been stuffed with daydreams. Still, she had felt she knew all there was to know. She was now twenty-eight, a woman who knew enough to realize how dangerous her past had been, and how lucky she was to have escaped from it, and from Gabriel. She was free of that now. Of that and of him, and of all that he had made her feel and want.
She could feel Gabriel looking at her, focusing on her, the intensity of his concentrated gaze making her tremble. He couldn’t guess what she had been thinking, what she had been reliving. She was far too mature now to betray herself to him. Nevertheless, the dull ache inside her was refusing to subside and, as though she had no control over it whatsoever, she could feel her gaze being drawn to his body, to his throat, and the vee of sun-warmed flesh exposed by the neck of his polo shirt. Beneath it his torso would be ridged with muscle, the darkness of his body hair arrowing downwards over the tautness of his belly. Her gaze followed the downward arrowing of her thoughts, coming to rest where her hand and her lips had once rested so intimately and so pleasurably. She could still remember the hard sleekness of male flesh over rigid muscle, its smooth supple movement beneath her eager touch…
What was she doing? Frantically she pushed back the memories. She wanted badly to swallow, to wet the nervous dryness of her lips, but she was afraid of doing so in case…in case what? In case Gabriel guessed what she had been remembering and subjected her to the kind of savagely sexual possession she had once found so exciting? Here, with her sons less than ten yards away?
‘Let go of me,’ she breathed, trying to pull her wrist free.
‘Are you sure that is what you really want? Once you begged me for my touch. Remember?’
She couldn’t help it. She shuddered violently.
‘Ah, yes. I see that you do,’ he taunted her as he released her. Her flesh felt cold without his next to it. Cold and bereft. She mustn’t let herself think like that.
‘Let me warn you, Sasha, just in case you have forgotten. I know exactly what you are.’ He studied her body with a contemptuous and knowing sexual inspection that made her want to hit him.
‘I am the twins’ mother, and that is the only way you will ever know me from now on, Gabriel,’ she fired back at him. Were those words for his benefit, or for her own? He released her arm so quickly she almost lost her balance. She looked at him. His back was turned towards her. She shuddered. How could she ever have been so foolish as to have loved him? But she had. Desperately, wholly and completely, hungering for him to return her feelings, believing that she could trade sex for love. What a fool she had been. But she wasn’t that fool any longer.
CHAPTER THREE
STILL gripped by shock, Sasha watched Gabriel turn towards the boys. She couldn’t get her head around the enormity of what Carlo had done. But they were different from other men, these Sardinian men. They lived by a different code; theirs was a paternalistic society, and the belief in their right to order the lives of their families absolute.
When Carlo had told her about Gabriel’s mother she had seen that he did not share her shock that Gabriel’s father should seek to force his daughter into a marriage of his choosing.
‘No wonder she ran away,’ she had commented.
Carlo had frowned at her and shaken his head. ‘She was fortunate that her father forgave her and that he was powerful enough to persuade Luigi to marry her despite the humiliation she had forced on him.’
‘But to make her marry a man she did not love—’
‘It was his right as her father.’
‘And forcing her to abandon Gabriel, her baby? You can’t believe that was right, Carlo.’
‘Not right, no, but Giorgio was a proud man and the head of our family. The purity of the Calbrini bloodline was a matter of honour to him, and to accept as his grandson a child whose blood—’
‘But in the end he had to accept Gabriel, didn’t he?’
Carlo had inclined his head, as though in acceptance of her argument, but Sasha had known that in his heart he was as old-fashioned and traditional as Gabriel’s grandfather. She suspected that he had only told her the story of Gabriel’s birth because, despite what Gabriel had done to her, Carlo had still felt he had a duty to stand by his second cousin. He might have offered her the protection of his money and his name, but he had still been a Calbrini. And so were her sons. Carlo had never forgotten that, and neither must she—although for very different reasons.
Gabriel was still watching her sons.
‘There isn’t any point in me introducing you to them. After all, you are hardly likely to be playing a hands-on role in their lives, are you?’ she challenged him.
‘On the contrary. I intend to make my duties as their guardian a priority—which is why I am here. Who knows how badly they may have been damaged by the circumstances of their life?’
He had answered without even looking at her.
‘They miss Carlo, but his death has not damaged them…’
Gabriel swung round to face her.
‘The damage to which I refer is not that caused by the death of their father but rather by the life of their mother.’
A terrible cold stillness had her in its grip.
‘You have no right to say that.’
‘I have every right. They are my wards. It is my moral and legal duty to protect them.’
‘From me? I am their mother!’ Her hands were curled so tightly her nails bit into her flesh.
He turned slowly to face her, the golden eagle eyes as flat as polished stones.
‘You may be their mother, but you are also a woman who craves the lifestyle only a very rich man can provide. When such a man pays you for the use of your body he will not want his enjoyment of that body to be interrupted by the needs of a pair of nine-year-old boys. In the eyes of most courts such a mother would be considered derelict in her maternal duty and not worthy of the name.’
She could almost feel the acid burn of his bitterness.
‘Just because your own mother abandoned you—’
‘You will not speak of her.’
Sasha had never felt more angry, nor more afraid.
