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His eyes seemed to heat and smoulder the longer they held hers. ‘It’s the only reason I have sex.’ He paused for a beat as his gaze continued to stoke hers. ‘What about you?’
Bella felt a tremor of unruly forbidden desire roll through her like a bowling ball pitched down a steep descent. Her body shook and sizzled with it, every sensitive nerve suddenly awake and alert. She shifted in her seat, crossing her legs under the table, but if anything it concentrated the wicked sensations in the secret heart of her. It was as if he had a direct line to her womanhood by just looking at her. He was stroking her with his gaze, making love to her with his mind. She could see it in his expression—the knowing curve of his sensual lips and the slightly hooded gaze as it focused on her mouth.
She felt his kiss as surely as if he had closed the distance between them and pressed his mouth to hers. Her lips buzzed and tingled. Her tongue grew restless inside her mouth in its hunger to feel his mate with it. Her breasts felt full and sensitive behind the lace of her bra. Her knickers were damp. She could feel the moisture seeping from her and wondered if he had any idea of how much sensual power he had over her.
Of course he did.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
Bella felt a blush steal across her cheeks. ‘That’s because it’s none of your business.’
‘You asked me first,’ he pointed out. ‘Fair’s fair, and all that.’
She pressed her lips together for a moment. ‘Sex is an important part of an intimate relationship,’ she said. ‘It’s a chance to connect on both a physical and emotional level. It builds a stronger bond between two people who care about each other.’
‘You sound like you just read that from a textbook,’ he said, his mouth still cocked mockingly. ‘How about you tell me what you really think?’
Bella felt her flush deepen. It seemed to spread all over her body. She felt hot. Scorching hot. She had never had a conversation like this with anyone, not even with one of her girlfriends.
Sex was something she’d had to work at. She had never felt all that comfortable with her body. She had spent most of the time during sex worrying if the cellulite on her thighs was showing or whether her partner was comparing her breasts to other women’s.
As for her pleasure, well, that was another thing she wasn’t too confident about. She had never been able to have an orgasm with a partner. She just wasn’t able to relax or feel comfortable enough to let herself go.
That was why Julian had been such a refreshing change from her previous dates. He had never pressured her for sex. He had told her he was celibate and intended to stay that way until he was married. He had made a promise to God, and he was going to keep it. She had found that so endearing, so admirable, she had decided he would be the perfect husband for her.
‘I think sex means different things to different people,’ she finally said. ‘What’s right for one person might not be right for another. It’s all a matter of feeling comfortable enough to express yourself in a … sexual way.’
‘How do you know if you’ll be comfortable with this Julian fellow?’ he asked.
Bella picked up her wine glass for something to do with her hands. ‘Because I know he’ll always treat me with the utmost respect,’ she said. ‘He believes sex is God’s gift to be treasured, not something to be dishonoured by selfish demands.’
He gave a little snort. ‘You mean he’ll pray before he peels back the sheets on your wedding night.’
She gave him a withering look. ‘You are such a heathen.’
‘And you are a silly little fool,’ he threw back. ‘You haven’t got a clue what you’re getting yourself into. What if he’s hiding who he really is? What if this celibacy thing is just a ruse to get his hands on your money?’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’
‘I mean it, Bella,’ he said, his blue-green gaze suddenly intense and serious. ‘You are one of the richest young women in Britain. It’s no wonder men are beating a steady path to your door.’
Bella froze him with her stare. ‘I don’t suppose it has ever occurred to you that it might be because of my dazzling beauty and vivacious personality?’
He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something but then closed it. He let out a long breath and pushed back a thick lock of his hair that had fallen forward on his forehead. ‘Your beauty and personality are without question,’ he said. ‘I just think you need to be a little more objective about this.’
She sat back in her chair with a thump. ‘Thus speaks the man who measures everything by checks and balances,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t you do things sometimes just because it feels right?’
His eyes remained steady on hers. ‘Gut feeling doesn’t cut it with me,’ he said. ‘It’s too easy to allow your emotional investment in something or someone to cloud your judgement. The heavier the investment, the harder it is to see things and people for what or who they are.’
‘How did you get so cynical?’ Bella asked.
His eyes moved away from hers as he reached to top up their wine glasses. The sound of the wine making a glock-glock-glock noise as it poured out of the bottle was deafening in the silence. ‘Born that way,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe that.’
He met her gaze, his mocking half-smile back in place. ‘Still trying to save my sorry soul, Bella?’ he asked. ‘I thought you gave up on that little mission years ago.’
‘Have you told anyone about your childhood? About where you came from?’ she asked.
A mask slipped over his features like a dust sheet over a piece of furniture. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘You must have had parents,’ she said. ‘A mother, at least. Who was she?’
‘Leave it, Bella.’
‘You must remember something about your childhood,’ Bella pressed on. ‘You can’t have blocked everything out. You weren’t born a teenager with authority issues. You were once a baby, a toddler, a young child.’
He let out a short, impatient-sounding breath and reached for his glass. ‘I don’t remember much of my childhood at all,’ he said and drank a deep mouthful of his wine.
Bella watched his Adam’s apple go up and down. Even though his expression was masked, there was anger in the action as he swallowed the liquid—anger and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. ‘Tell me what you do remember,’ she said.
The silence was long and brooding, the air so thick it felt like the ceiling had slowly lowered, compressing all the oxygen.
Bella continued to search his features. The stony mask had slipped just a fraction. She could see the flicker of a blood vessel in his temple. The grooves beside his mouth deepened as if he was holding back a lifetime of suppressed emotion. His nostrils flared as he took a breath. His eyes hardened to granite. His fingers around his glass tightened until she could see the whitening of his knuckles.
‘Why did you get kicked out of all those foster homes?’ she asked.
His eyes collided with hers. They were dark with a glitter that made the backs of her knees go fizzy again. ‘Why do you think I was kicked out?’ he asked with a tilt of his lips that looked more like a snarl than a smile. ‘I was a rebel. A lost cause. Bad to the core. Beyond salvation.’
Bella swallowed a thick knot in her throat. He was so intimidating when he was in this mood but she was determined to find out more about him. His enigmatic nature intrigued her. She had always found his aloof, keep-away-from-me manner compellingly attractive. ‘What happened to your parents?’ she asked.
‘They died.’ He said the words as if they meant nothing to him. He showed no emotion at all. Not even a flicker. His face was like a marble statue, a blank, impenetrable mask.
‘So you were an orphan?’ Bella prompted.
‘Yeah, that’s me.’ He gave a little laugh as he swirled the contents of his glass. ‘An orphan.’
‘Since when?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how old were you when your parents died?’
It seemed like a full year before he spoke; Bella waited out each pulsing second of the long, protracted silence. It was a silent battle of wills, but somehow she suspected the battle was not between her and him. It was between two parts of himself: the aloof loner who didn’t need anyone and the man behind the mask who secretly did.
‘I don’t remember my father,’ he said with the same blank, indifferent expression.
‘He died when you were a baby?’ she guessed.
‘Yes.’ There was still no emotion. No grief or sense of loss.
Bella moistened her lips, waiting a beat or two before asking, ‘What happened?’
At first she didn’t think he was going to answer. The silence stretched and stretched interminably.
‘Motorbike accident,’ he finally said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Can’t have been pretty.’
Bella winced. ‘What about your mother?’
A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm tugged at the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘I was five,’ he said and twirled his wine again, his eyes staring down at the liquid as it splashed against the sides of the glass.
‘What happened to her?’
‘She died.’
‘How?’
There was another silence before he spoke. A bruised silence. ‘Suicide.’
She gasped. ‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’
He gave a careless shrug. ‘It wasn’t much of a life for her once my father died.’ He tipped back his head and drained his glass, setting it down on the table with a little thump.
Bella frowned as she thought of him as a young motherless boy. She had been totally devastated when her mother had driven away that day, but at least she had known her mother was still alive. How had Edoardo coped with losing his mother so young? ‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’
‘Yep.’
‘And your mother?’
‘English,’ he said. ‘She met my father while on a working holiday in Italy.’
‘Who looked after you after she died?’
He put his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table, his expression closing like a door that had been clicked shut on a sliver of a view. ‘Fergus needs to go outside,’ he said. ‘He’s too stiff to use the pet door now.’
Bella sat back with a frown pulling at her forehead as she watched him stride from the room. He had told her things she was almost certain he hadn’t even told her father. Her father had said Edoardo had always refused to speak of his early childhood and he wasn’t to be pressured to reveal things he didn’t want to reveal. She, like her father, had assumed it had been because Edoardo was ashamed of his background, given that it was so different from theirs. His youth had been misspent on rebellious behaviour that had alienated him from the very people who had wanted to help him. He had used the very words the authorities would have used to describe him: a rebel, a lost cause, bad to the core, beyond salvation. Was he really all or any of those things? What had happened to make him so distrustful of people? What had made him the closed-off enigma he was today?
And why on earth did it matter to her to find out? It wasn’t as if it was any of her business.
He was her enemy.
He hated her as much as she hated him.
She chewed at her lower lip as she looked at his empty chair. It shouldn’t matter to her what had happened to him. He had been surly and uncommunicative for as long as she had known him. He had clearly inveigled his way into her father’s trust and taken control of her life. He had done nothing but taunt and ridicule her from the moment she had turned up at what used to be her house. He was threatening to ruin her wedding plans. He was the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the brick wall she had to climb over or knock down.
It shouldn’t matter … But somehow—rather surprisingly—it did.
CHAPTER FOUR (#u284e518f-c973-5813-8e12-e33ca15a7b9f)
EDOARDO waited for Fergus to sniff every tree and shrub in the garden as the moon watched on with its wise and silent silver eye. The air was cold and fresh; the smell of the damp earth was like breathing in a restorative potion.
It cleared his head.
It grounded him.
It reminded him of how far he had moved from his previous life—a life where he’d had no control. No hope. Only pain and miserable, relentless suffering.
Haverton Manor was his sanctuary, the only place he had ever called home. The only place he had ever wanted to call home.
He clenched his fists and then slowly released them. The past was in the past and he should not have let Bella get under his skin enough to pick at the hard crust that covered what was left of his soul. Inside him were wounds he would allow no one to see. The scars he wore on the outside of his body were nothing to the ones on the inside. He could not bear pity. He could not stomach people’s interest in what he wanted to forget. He didn’t want to be painted as a victim. He had no time for people who saw themselves as victims.
He was a survivor.
He would not allow his past to cast a shadow over his future. He had proved all his critics wrong. He had made something of himself. He had used every opportunity Godfrey Haverton had offered him to better himself. He was educated. He was wealthy. He had everything he had ever dreamed of when he had been that cowering child shrinking away from the drunken blows of a cruel and sadistic stepfather. He had pictured his future in his head as a way to block out what was happening to him: he had pictured the luxury cars, the lush, rolling fields of a country estate, the opulent mansion, the beautiful women and the designer clothes.
He had made it come true.
Haverton estate was his: every field and pasture, every hill and hillock, the lake, the woods and most importantly the manor—his very own regal residence, the ultimate symbol of having left his past well and truly behind.
No one would be able to take it off him. No one could toss him out on the street in the cold and wet. No one could deny him a roof over his head.
When he was a child he had dreamed of owning a place such as this. His very own fortress, his castle and his base. His home.
Godfrey had known how important the manor was to him: it was the first place he had felt safe. The first place he had put down roots. The first place he had discovered friendship and loyalty. Within these walls he had learned all he needed to learn in order to make something of his life. Before he had come here he had been close to giving up. He had gone beyond the point of caring what happened to him. But Godfrey had woken something in him with his quiet, patient way. He hadn’t pressured him to open up. He hadn’t bribed him or coerced him in any way. He had simply planted the seeds of hope in Edoardo’s mind, seeds that had grown and grown until Edoardo had started to see the possibility of changing his life, becoming something other than a victim of circumstance and cruelty.
He was no longer that pitiful child with a constant fear of abandonment, with no one to turn to, with no one to love or be loved. He was no longer that brooding, resentful teenager with a chip on his shoulder.
He depended on no one for his happiness.
He had no need of anyone but himself. He was totally autonomous. He didn’t want the ties and responsibilities that other people saw as a natural part of life. Marriage and children were not something he had ever pictured for himself. Life was too fickle for him to chance it. What if the same thing happened to him as had happened to his father—his life cut short in its prime and his wife and child left to fend for themselves as best they could, easy prey for the scurrilous, conscienceless predators out there who would do anything to get their hands on money for drugs and drink?
No. He was fine on his own; perfectly fine.
Bella was in the kitchen stacking the dishes into the dishwasher when Edoardo came back in. It was a domestic scene he wasn’t used to seeing. She had never been one to lift a finger about the place. She had grown up with a band of willing servants to cater to her every whim. He had always thought her father had been far too lenient with her. She had never had to work for anything in her life. It had all been handed to her on a silver plate with the Haverton coat of arms emblazoned on it. She had flounced around issuing orders as if she was already lady of the manor, even as a small child. Not even as an adult had she ever considered the sacrifices Godfrey Haverton had made to provide a secure future for her. She hadn’t even had the decency to be by his side as he drew his last, gasping breath.
He had been the one to watch Godfrey pass from life to death.
He had held his frail hand and listened to the sounds of the breath slowly leaving the old man’s rail-thin body.
He had been the one to close Godfrey’s eyes in final rest.
He had been the one to weep with grief at losing the one person on this earth who had truly believed in him. He had sworn on Godfrey’s death bed that he would do the right thing by him and protect Bella. He would make sure she stayed out of trouble until the guardianship period was over. He would not let her waste her father’s hard-earned money. And in the meantime he would continue to restore Haverton Manor into the grand old residence Godfrey had loved so much, thus keeping a part of his mentor and friend alive.
Bella closed the dishwasher and straightened, her tongue darting out to moisten her lips. ‘I was going to make some coffee,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’
Edoardo couldn’t help a little lip curl. ‘You mean you actually know how to boil water?’
She pursed her mouth and tossed the dishcloth she had been holding on the sink. ‘I’m trying to be nice to you, Edoardo,’ she said. ‘The least you could do is meet me halfway.’
‘Nice?’ He gave a rough sound of derision. ‘Is that what you call it? You’re sucking up to me to get what you want.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you told me about your parents—about being orphaned so young. I didn’t understand how devastating it must have—’
