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‘So you’re doing this to make things better for yourself?’ Valentina sneered. ‘Because you don’t want a fainting staff member serving your VIP guests?’
Valentina wasn’t sure why she was so angry, just that she was. Blistering. It was something to do with the way her father had shown no enmity towards Gio. And it was more than just gratitude for having saved his life. After a long private conversation, she and her mother had been allowed back into the room and the first thing her father had said to her was, ‘You should have told us about your job, piccolina....’
So not only had Gio told them about her disaster, they also now knew that she was working for him. And didn’t seem fazed by that knowledge at all. She’d looked at Gio accusingly but his face had been completely impassive.
If anything, her parents had been looking at Gio almost adoringly. And then her father’s consultant had come into the room and Gio had cleared his throat and announced what he would like to do to help.
Her parents had been taken aback by his audacious offer and Valentina had looked on in shock as her mother had gripped her husband’s hand and begged him with tears in her eyes to do as Gio suggested.
‘What’s the problem, Valentina? I would have thought you’d be happy to know that your father will be receiving the best treatment.’
Valentina uncrossed her arms and her hands curled to fists by her sides. ‘You put them, all of us, in an awkward position—how could they say no? But you know we can’t afford this treatment. How do you think we can ever pay you back?’
Gio’s face tightened. He waved a hand. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. I’ll take care of it.’
He started to walk towards his jeep and Valentina called impetuously from behind him, ‘Do you really think money will make up for it?’
Gio stopped in his tracks and after long silent tense seconds he turned around from the bottom of the steps. His face was stark. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Valentina had gone too far now. Something very personal and dark was pushing her over this edge. ‘You know what I’m talking about. You’re trying to atone—’
Gio bounded up the steps again so fast and with such ruthless intent that Valentina took a step back.
‘So what if I am?’ he asked rawly. ‘Is that so bad if it saves your father?’
Valentina felt like something was breaking apart inside her. ‘Yes. Because it won’t bring him back.’
Gio took her arms in a tight grip with his hands. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’
For a second Valentina glimpsed a depth and level of stark pain in Gio’s eyes that made her want to cry out. It echoed within her like a keening cry. And another echo sounded deep within her, telling her she was a fraud of the worst kind, because she was deliberately pushing Gio away to avoid facing up to a dark truth inside her.
It was the same reason she’d hurled those cruel words at him last week at the track: Since when have you cared so much for others...
She’d been able to push it down for seven years, but standing in front of him now—it was rising inexorably within her, demanding that she acknowledge it. And she couldn’t. Gio was unwittingly forcing her look at herself and she didn’t like what she saw. Breaking the intense eye contact Valentina ripped herself free of his grip and stepped around him to hurry down the steps. She went straight to a nearby hospital taxi rank.
Before Gio could stop her she’d got into the first taxi and was pulling out of the hospital forecourt. He looked at the taxi’s break lights winking just before it disappeared completely. A wave of bleakness washed over him. Was Valentina right? Was he interfering where he shouldn’t? Acting out of a crippling sense of guilt? Trying to buy his soul back by saving Mario’s father?
The fact that Mario’s parents had apparently forgiven Gio was small comfort now. Gio knew that the only hope he had for his soul to find some peace was through Valentina’s forgiveness, and her father’s words came back to Gio then: It was very hard for her to come to terms with...she was so angry...she still is.
The anger Valentina felt was palpable, not in question. She’d only come to him for help because he was literally the only person on the island who would defy his aunt to employ her. His mouth firmed and he made his way to his jeep. He would not apologise for wanting to help her father and he was not doing it to buy forgiveness. He was doing it because Mario wasn’t here to take care of his family, but Gio was. And Valentina could rant and rail all she liked.
* * *
Valentina stared blindly out of the taxi window, the lights of a busy Friday Palermo night flashing past. But the lights blurred as weak ineffectual tears filled her eyes. She’d just run away like the abject coward that she was. Angry with herself for feeling so emotional, Valentina dashed them away, avoiding the driver’s curious glances in the rearview mirror.
She hated the ease with which Gio had been so comprehensively all but welcomed back into the bosom of her family. She hated the ease with which he was able to guarantee her father’s well-being. And she hated herself for being like this.
Gio was highlighting the big flaw that was Valentina in her own family. Mario had been the one on whom all hopes and dreams had rested. So Valentina had been more or less forgotten about. Not the most academic of students anyway, she’d left school at sixteen to work with her grandmother in the small trattoria.
Mario had known of her ambitions to succeed and make something of herself. But when he’d died, that link had gone and her parents had been despondent, left with their only other child who had no glittering prospects.
That’s why Valentina had worked so hard to build up a business. But even when it had taken off, her parents had been wary more than proud. They were of the old school and thought that what really counted was academic qualification and a solid career. And also that Valentina should find a nice man and settle down, find someone who would provide for her...and them. Provide them with grandchildren.
But instead, her nemesis Giacomo Corretti had been the one to step into the breach. In more ways than one. Little by little she was becoming more and more beholden to him. She resented him for it but then she’d been the one to invite him back into their lives so she had no one to blame but herself.
She remembered what it had been like to look into his eyes just now, to see the abject pain in those green and brown depths. The way her heart had clenched, the way her conscience had mocked her. And worse, the way her pulse had pounded with a deeply unsettling rhythm just to be near him. As it always did, as it always had. Why did he still have to have this effect on her?
The taxi was pulling up outside her apartment building now and Valentina paid the driver and refused to let Gio dominate her thoughts any more. It was only when she fell into a fitful sleep sometime later that he came to haunt her in her dreams.
* * *
‘What’s this?’
Valentina stood in front of Gio the following Monday morning in his office. Her head was still reeling at how fast things had moved in just thirty-six hours. Her father was already settled in the private clinic in Syracuse and she’d moved into the staff accommodation the previous evening.
Gio was sitting behind his desk looking absurdly out of place in his grey T-shirt. He looked far too vital and virile and sexy to be sitting at a desk.
Valentina dragged her attention back to his question. ‘It’s the advance on my pay that you gave me. I need to pay you back for what you’re doing for my father. I realise that it’ll take a lot—’
Gio stood up abruptly, making Valentina stop talking. His face had darkened visibly and he held the cheque back out to her. ‘Don’t insult me, Valentina. Please.’
Valentina refused to take the cheque, her own face darkening as blood rushed into it. She felt embarrassed. ‘When I came to you looking for work it was to make enough money to support and care for my parents. What I earn should go into their care and as you’re paying for that at the moment...’ She trailed off, a little scared at the way Gio’s eyes had darkened almost to black by now.
‘I offered to pay for your father’s treatment with no strings attached.’
Valentina observed scathingly, ‘There’s always strings attached.’
Gio shook his head and looked at her pityingly, making a hot rush of humiliation rush through Valentina. He came around his desk to face her and she wished he hadn’t. In flat runners he towered over her own not inconsiderable five feet seven inches.
‘What happened to you? What made you become so cynical?’ He frowned. ‘Was it a love affair gone wrong?’
Valentina nearly choked. A love affair gone wrong? Gio had no idea. She’d had plenty of men chasing after her but she’d kept them all at arm’s length. Terrified on some level of getting close to anyone. Terrified of the way one minute someone you loved could be there, and the next minute they could be gone. For ever. That realisation seemed to explode into her consciousness like a bomb going off. She’d never even really articulated it to herself like that before. She’d just always instinctively avoided relationships. Losing Mario had made her cynical. It had twisted something inside her soul.
Made weak by this insight, Valentina was barely aware when Gio took her hand and folded the cheque back into it, closing her fingers over it. His hand was big and warm around hers and she looked up at him. They were standing much closer than she’d realised and his scent, musky and warm, unleashed an avalanche of vivid memories in her imagination.
Jerkily she pulled her hand back from his, with the cheque in it, and stepped back. The only coherent thing in her head was that she needed to get out of there now. Before Gio saw something she herself couldn’t really understand.
She got to the door and then looked back and blurted out, ‘It was you. You made me like this.’
All Valentina saw before she fled was Gio’s face darkening even more. She made her way back to the kitchen and busied herself, silently begging everyone around her to leave her alone.
Where did she get the nerve to say these things to him? It was as if every time he came within feet of her she had to lash out. Say the worst thing possible, terrified that if he got too close he might see her cruel words for what they were—a very flimsy attempt to keep him at a distance at all costs.
Valentina knew on some rational level that Mario’s death had been a tragic accident; Gio hadn’t forced her brother onto that demonic horse. She’d even heard him discouraging it, initially. The knowledge that her parents appeared able to forgive him had been a huge blow to her own justification to stay angry at him. But the fact was, for so long now she’d held Gio responsible.
Her anger had been compounded by the way he’d disappeared after Mario’s death only to turn up playing the part of a playboy bent on nothing but slaking his basest needs. Disgusted with herself for having been so invested in what he was doing, Valentina had nevertheless stored up every tiny example of Gio carousing and generally acting as if he didn’t have a care in the world, while they’d mourned Mario.
Her anger at him had always comforted her on some level. It was familiar and...necessary. For her sanity. In all honesty Valentina knew that she was very afraid of looking at what might be left behind if she couldn’t hold Gio responsible. If she couldn’t be angry with him. That thought was so terrifying that something must have shown on her face.
‘Val? Are you OK?’
Valentina sucked in a big breath and forced a smile at Franco, who was looking at her intently across the island they were working at. She nodded abruptly. ‘Fine...I, ah, just remembered something I need to do.’
Thankfully he left her alone and that evening Valentina escaped to the clinic to see how her parents were settling in, rather than unpack in her new accommodation, telling herself it was more than just a ruse to avoid bumping into Gio again.
* * *
That evening Gio cursed volubly outside Valentina’s suite of rooms. There was no answer. She wasn’t there. Even though he knew logically she was most likely visiting her parents, he had to battle a spiking of something very proprietorial. And he didn’t like it.
Women had never been anything more than a diversion to him. His long childhood years of feeling less than, and inadequate, had left him with too many scars to trust anyone, apart from Mario. His subsequent successes had done much to chase away that sense of inadequacy, but since Mario’s death, the joy had been taken out of it to a large extent.
Gio’s mouth twisted wryly just remembering how Mario had been the one who’d fallen in and out of love like some besotted Romeo. Something within Gio had always remained aloof with a woman. They hadn’t ever touched some deep secret part of him. In the two years after Mario’s death there had been an endless parade of beautiful women but none he’d connected with, and more often than not Gio had found himself waking alone.
Valentina. She’d always been different. She’d snuck into a place that was locked away deep inside him. But he’d been acutely aware that his feelings and desires for her were strictly forbidden.
When he’d left Sicily first she’d been only ten or eleven. A gap-toothed child only on his radar as his best friend’s kid sister who had trailed them with almost religious devotion.
But when he’d returned years later—a millionaire, the new owner of the racetrack in Syracuse with plans to rebuild—she’d been fifteen. And Gio had found himself aware of her in a way that had made him ashamed. So he’d flung himself into socialising with Mario, pursuing the local beauties, anything to push dangerous thoughts and desires from his mind.
Over the next two years she’d only grown more and more beautiful and mature. She’d started to flirt with him, but with such sweet innocence that it had twisted his heart. One day he’d been weak. She’d arrived to look for Mario, who’d already left. A miscommunication. Gio had seen her get startled by Misfit and had acted on an impulse, lifting her onto the horse.
He’d swung up behind her, wrapping his arm around her taut young body. The weight of her firm breasts had been heavy on his arm. Those stolen indulgent minutes had been the most erotic in his life....
Gio grimaced now and turned away from Valentina’s door. What was he doing hanging around like some besotted fool? Yes, he still wanted her. More than ever. But that was all. The capacity to feel anything more had long ago withered to dust inside him, poisoned by grief and guilt.
And Valentina...? She hated him with every cell in her body and if she had ever felt anything for him, physical or otherwise, it had been destroyed that night in the hospital in Palermo when she’d seen her dead brother laid out on a slab in the morgue.
* * *
The Corretti Cup was fast approaching. Valentina and her staff were flat-out making sure they had everything ordered and organised. That evening as she hung up her apron, she had to concede reluctantly that Gio had done her a favour by insisting she stay on-site. She wasn’t half as exhausted as she had been. And the lines of worry and stress had disappeared from her parents’ faces.
She’d avoided him since their last cataclysmic meeting the day before and she didn’t like the way guilt pricked her conscience again. Driving down that disturbing feeling, Valentina walked around the front of the stadium to get back to her accommodation.
She had a suite of rooms to herself, complete with a kitchenette, living area and en suite bedroom. The understated opulence of the accommodation had blown her away. It was in an old reconverted stone stables. She had a private balcony which looked out over the back of the stadium where the gallops, stables and training ground was based.
But she loved this view over the racetrack. The sun was setting over the sea in the distance, turning everything golden and orange. She stood at the railing and sighed deeply, and then heard from not far away, ‘It’s beautiful when it’s like this, with no one around. That’ll all change in a few days though.’
Valentina had tensed at the first word. She turned her head and saw Gio sitting on one of the stand seats behind her—that’s how she’d missed him. The thought of him watching her for those few seconds made her feel warm. Instantly she doused it. ‘Yes,’ she said stiffly, ‘it’s lovely.’
She made to walk on but Gio lifted something out of an ice bucket beside him and she realised he was holding out a beer, and that he had his own one in his other hand. Ice cold water droplets ran down the side of the cold bottle and suddenly she was parched.
She looked at Gio and all she could see were those broad shoulders and his messy hair, flopping over one eye. She felt weak. He said easily, ‘I bring out some beers for the racetrack workers most evenings. It’s a tough few weeks getting ready for the cup.’
Torn between wanting to run and wanting to stay, which was very disturbing, Valentina remembered what she’d said the previous day and then stepped forward and took the bottle. Her fingers brushed off Gio’s, sending a spark of awareness jumping between them. ‘Thanks.’
She stepped over the bottom seat and sat down near him, and then looked at the view again as if it was the most absorbing thing she’d ever seen. She took a gulp of cold beer, not really tasting it. Silence grew and lengthened between them and she fiddled with the label on her bottle. Unable to stand it any more she turned to face him. Awkwardly she started, ‘I...I’ve said things to you...’
She stopped, cursing her inability to be articulate and tried again. ‘I owe you an apology. What I said yesterday...’ She shrugged one shoulder minutely. ‘You seem to bring out the worst in me.’
Gio shook his head, his eyes unreadable in the growing gloom. ‘Valentina, what happened in the past—’
She cut him off with an urgent appeal, suddenly terrified he’d mention Mario. ‘Let’s not talk about it, OK?’
Gio closed his mouth. She could see his jaw clench, but then he just said, ‘OK, fine.’
Valentina turned back to the view, an altogether edgier tension in the air now. Desperate to find something, anything innocuous, to talk about she seized on something she’d overheard earlier. ‘Some of the staff were talking about the regeneration project for the docklands. It sounds interesting.’
Gio looked at Valentina’s profile. The straight nose, determined chin. Long dark lashes. The graceful curve of her cheekbone. She was trying to make small talk. The moment felt very fragile, a tentative cessation of hostilities. Gio’s mouth tightened. ‘It’s a project put in place primarily by my grandfather, Salvatore, in some kind of effort to bring everyone together. Hence the grand wedding that never happened.’
Valentina looked at Gio. ‘Isn’t that a good thing—I mean, not the wedding failing but bringing everyone together?’
He smiled tightly. ‘It would be if everyone’s interests were altruistic.’
Valentina frowned. ‘Are your interests different to the others?’
Gio shifted; they were straying into an area he wasn’t entirely comfortable with now. Reluctantly he said, ‘I’ve been interested in the docklands area for some time. I think it could be a very useful space for youth projects.’
‘What kind of youth projects?’
Gio shrugged, tense. ‘The kind of projects that brings kids together, teaches them things, lets them explore their limits in a safe environment. Gets them off the streets basically.’
Brings them together so they don’t feel so isolated, like I always did even with Mario...
Gio clamped his jaw shut as if those rogue words might spill out. He wasn’t sure why he felt so vulnerable telling her about something that was so close to his heart. Was he afraid she’d laugh at him? Accuse him again of trying to atone?
Valentina seemed to absorb this information in silence and then she asked, ‘Your brothers were mentioned too. Do you see them much?’
Gio’s mouth tightened. Little did she realise that any question about his family was akin to walking blindfolded into a minefield. He dragged his gaze away from the provocative curves of her body beside him in simple jeans and T-shirt and looked out to the falling night. ‘No...is the simple answer.’
‘They weren’t at the wedding?’
Gio shrugged. ‘Not that I saw. They should have been.’ He took a gulp of beer, suddenly wondering if he’d been wise to alert Valentina to his presence here.
He felt her turn to look at him. ‘You didn’t spend much time with them growing up, did you?’
He glanced at her then and took another gulp of beer and swallowed. ‘You know I didn’t.’ Because he spent all his time with Mario. He didn’t have to say it.
‘Were they mean to you?’
Gio looked away again. What was this? Twenty questions? But he unclenched his jaw. ‘No, they were never mean to me. They had their own battles to fight. They both took more after my father than I did. I never had that drive or ambition, that sense of competition to be the dominant Corretti. They just...they were preoccupied with their own stuff.’
Gio glanced at Valentina again and she was looking down into her beer bottle, swirling the liquid. Her hands were small and graceful. Capable. He had a sudden memory of being much smaller, when Valentina had been sitting on the sidelines of some game he and Mario had been playing.
At one point he’d gone up to her and asked if she wanted to join in, stuttering over the words. Instinctively he’d been tensed for her reaction, to laugh at him or mimic him, but she’d just stood up and put her hand in his.
Sounding as if it was almost half to herself Valentina said now, ‘You’ve been very successful.’
Gio smiled minutely, brought back to the present, and the reality of a very adult Valentina. ‘The horse-racing business is very lucrative and I had a good horse.’
