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‘You want me to go to Italy with you?’
To see Giorgio…
She had never once expected that any member of the Vincenzo family would allow her to do that, let alone insist upon it.
She was trembling so much that she had to do something—anything—so she got up, moving like an automaton over to the couch where she had left her own clothes. Mindlessly, she started to peel off the skirt she had worn for the commercial with fingers that shook.
Watching his brother’s widow, Romano couldn’t believe how calmly she could carry on functioning as though he had said nothing, his eyes dark, judgemental slits in the hard lean, structure of his face.
Coldly he regarded the way the virginal fabric slithered down her long, golden legs, pooled alluringly around her ankles, the way she stepped nimbly out of it in nothing but her lacy white camisole and briefs.
‘Had it been left to me I would never have entertained the thought of coming here,’ he stated with grim assurance. ‘I did so only because of a five-year-old who can’t understand why it is that he doesn’t have a mother. Who’s trying to make sense of what it is he’s done wrong.’
Libby choked back a small stifled cry as Romano continued, deaf and blind to how he was hurting her.
‘A kid who’s so distressed at being goaded by his peers he doesn’t want to go to school any more. Won’t sleep. Won’t eat properly. Won’t even play with his friends.’ A five-year-old going on six who couldn’t be placated with a new pony or a trip to Disneyland. Who foolishly believed his Zio Romano could make anything happen—including bringing home the mother who didn’t want him!
The child had been pushing him and pushing him until Romano—always able to solve the most intricate problems in his multi-faceted business empire—didn’t know what else to do. His trusting nephew. A bright, intelligent kid. Luca’s son.
He hadn’t realised just how many problems the boy had until recently. His mother had been right, though, he accepted grudgingly. His father would never have let Libby Vincent—as he’d recently discovered she called herself—near his grandson. That was if she had ever entertained any desire to see Giorgio, which he strongly doubted. The demands of a growing, energetic youngster would simply have put paid to her shallow, artificial life!
She was tugging off her camisole and, unable to help himself, Romano gazed broodingly at the willowy arc of her raised arms as she pulled it over her head, at the smooth, golden contours of her slender back.
Her skin was the texture of silk, her tapering waist amazingly small above the gentle flare of her hips. Unashamedly, as she turned slightly, his gaze flickered upwards to the outer curve of one beautifully shaped breast and desire kicked him in the loins, making his breath lock beneath the hard cage of his ribs.
She was a model. Just a face and body to promote whatever lucrative opportunities came her way. She was used to undressing in front of others. Yet now, as he found himself resenting every other man who must have seen her like this, he realised that her power to ensnare was as strong and as lethal to him now as it had ever been.
Because he had been bewitched by this girl! Had fallen under her spell from the first moment he had met her and she had fixed him with those proud yet wary emerald eyes. Wary, because she had known at once that he could see right through her; recognise—just as his parents had—what a scheming little gold-digger she was.
And yet that still hadn’t stopped him wanting her—stopped him envying Luca—or from lying awake at night, mentally beating himself up for allowing himself to become totally captivated by his younger brother’s wife.
She had appeared like a breath of spring in a jaded world, possessing a quiet maturity that went way beyond her years. But that cultivated innocence that was the other side of the coin—and which sometimes almost roused in him a ludicrous desire to protect—hadn’t fooled him. She was as heartless as he’d believed her to be—and as mercenary.
She was pulling on a cheesecloth shirt, for which he was extremely grateful, because even the reminder of what this girl was really like couldn’t cool the fierce desire she aroused in him, more strongly now, if that were possible, than she had in the past.
Tensely Libby fumbled with the buttons of her shirt, glaringly self-conscious of the way Romano had been looking at her ever since she’d unthinkingly pulled off her clothes. As if he wanted to wrench the rest from her body, she realised, with heat tingling along her nerve-endings, reawakening her to the frightening power of his sexuality.
‘My son is giving you problems and your family suddenly decides it wants to invite me back into its oh-so-loving circle!’ Her injured little statement was strung with all the bitterness she had harboured towards the Vincenzo family since she had been a vulnerable and powerless teenager.
‘Not the family,’ he negated tersely. ‘My mother is against it. And my father—as I’m sure you must know—is dead.’
Yes, she knew that. It had made all the papers six months ago. The demise of a man as wealthy as Marius Vincenzo didn’t go unreported. There had been a piece about Romano too. It was that that she had soaked up with the thirst of someone parched while knowing that they were drinking from a poisoned well. It had been a brief account of how an important area of Vincenzo-held interests—once floundering under Marius Vincenzo—had started to flourish again when his son had taken over to pull it out of stormy waters and, with his head for business and fearless judgement, shares had rocketed now that he was fully in command. His achievements really were quite remarkable. Since the demise of Luca’s grandfather, there was no doubt among the Vincenzo males where the real influence and talents really lay.
‘I’m sorry,’ she uttered curtly, experiencing a pang of guilt because she couldn’t feel any regret. Marius Vincenzo had been a tyrant and she had disliked him more than it was possible to dislike anyone. ‘For you, that is,’ she felt she had to add, because it wasn’t in her nature to be hypocritical. ‘And your mother,’ eventually she decided to tag on.
Sophia Vincenzo hadn’t liked her, any more than her overbearing husband had. In fact the only thing she had had in common with her rather frosty-tongued mother-in-law was that they had both loved Luca. A love that had festered hatred on the woman’s part towards Libby after the death of the woman’s favourite and idolised younger son.
The light from the high windows of the trailer emphasised the hard lines around Romano’s mouth as he dipped his head, acknowledging her. Her condolences had surprised him though. She had had as little time for his parents as they had had for each other, he thought cynically, remembering the farce of a united front his parents had shown to the world.
‘Well, then,’ Libby accepted pointedly, telling herself not to get too excited, hope for too much, though every cell was leaping from even the smallest chance of seeing her son again. ‘If your mother’s against it, there’s little more to be said, is there? After all, she’s his guardian.’
‘No.’
That incisive response brought Libby’s gaze flying to his. He was so big and darkly dominating in the confined area of the trailer that she could feel him, touch him, breathe him in almost, his lethally magnetic presence with the subtle spice of the cologne he used infiltrating the space around them, percolating the very air she needed to fill her lungs.
‘My mother’s too weary these days to cope with an energetic child. I’m the boy’s official guardian now.’
‘But I thought…’ Libby’s words tailed off. How could it be possible? Her son. Her baby. In the care of Romano Vincenzo? The man who had made his distrust of her felt in the way his parents had never done. Subtly and with a hard-edged intelligence that had hurt even more because, surprisingly, there had been odd times when he had shown snatches of consideration towards her.
‘You thought what, Libby?’ His hard mouth twisted with bitter derision. ‘That he’d be handed over to someone else? Packaged off as just a nuisance? In the way?’
As he thought she had packaged him off when Luca had died?
‘So you see, cara,’ he said with a controlled softness that sent shivers through her yearning insides, ‘whatever you decide to do, or how you act or decide to treat my nephew, you’re only answerable to me. Well?’
One thick eyebrow moved questioningly as she reached for her jeans. She could sense his eyes following her every movement as she pulled them on, hips moving with unintentional sensuality in her keenness to wriggle into them, her breath quickening from what he might be thinking, and from the sudden reckless speculation of what it would be like to have those long, dark hands shaping every curve of her lissom frame.
‘Well what?’ she challenged acridly, pushing the fitted shirt into her waistband, her movements agitated from the outrageous and unwelcome images that had suddenly invaded her mind. ‘I come back and fill the gap in Giorgio’s life until you suddenly decide you don’t need me any more?’ She couldn’t bear that. Didn’t think she could cope with the heartache of parting from him again once she had been allowed to play even a small part in his life. And yet she would! she resolved desperately. No matter how much it cost her emotionally, she would do it! Just to see him. Be with him again. Hold him in her arms, if only for the shortest time.
‘It’s Giorgio who needs you,’ Romano reminded her coldly. ‘I, fortunately, have been spared that particular privation.’
His words stung, as he’d intended them to.
‘Have you really?’ It was a shrill little retaliation as she battled not to give him the satisfaction of knowing it. Proudly she faced him with her head held high. Yet now, as her eyes clashed with the glittering depths of his, she was shocked to recognise the familiar desire she’d become accustomed to seeing in the eyes of nearly every man she met, only with this man she could tell it was a dark obsession for which he despised himself.
Way down inside her something throbbed. Some equally dark emotion she didn’t want to acknowledge.
‘Why do you hate me so much, Romano?’ For all her maturity her voice still quavered as that eighteen-year-old’s had done. ‘Is it because you hold me responsible for Luca’s death?’
His features seemed to darken from a well of repressed emotion. Clearly it still hurt to talk about the brother who had been six years his junior.
‘I’ve never blamed you for that.’
‘Well, bravo!’ Libby’s head came up in a toss of flaming cynicism. ‘Why not? Your father did!’
‘But I’m not my father!’ He was only barely restraining a surprising degree of anger, as something in what she had said sent a surge of colour slashing across his hard-boned cheeks. A second later, however, and he was back in control, though his features were still rigid as he said with marked acceptance, ‘Luca was careless in his driving that day—and he paid for it.’ He saw a shadow cross her face, swift as a bird, leaving a crease between the fine arches of her velvety brows. ‘And hate,’ he said now, ‘is rather too strong a word I’d use to describe any emotion I felt in connection with you. Hate is the flip-side of love—’ his tone derided, his sharp eyes assessing her for every change of expression, the smallest chink in her wavering composure ‘—and I think we’d both agree that whatever else was bubbling under the surface of our relevant personalities, love certainly didn’t come into it.’
Uncomfortably, Libby swallowed. However had they managed to get on to this?
Deciding though that he was merely trying to unsettle her, she ignored the prickly tension creeping through her to say, ‘So if I did agree to what you’re asking, what am I expected to do at the end of it all? When things improve? Just walk away?’
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult for you.’
Libby’s breath seemed to catch in her lungs as his remark drove into her like an antagonist’s spear.
‘How do you know what would be difficult for me? How do you know what it’s like? What it’s ever been like for me?’ she challenged, her flush deepening, her breasts rising and falling heavily from a long-buried anger that had no outlet, no hope of ever being assuaged.
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ he said, one long, tanned hand coming to rest on his ribcage. He knew only too well about women who gave up their babies for a better life!
‘You don’t have one!’ From the little she had read about him, there didn’t seem to be one woman among this very eligible billionaire’s acquaintance who could keep him interested for more than a few months, let alone commit him to undying devotion to her!
He laughed without humour, long ebony lashes drooping, concealing the darkened depths of his beautiful eyes. ‘That, cara mia, is rich coming from you. How much more heartless can you get than a woman who abandons her child?’
‘I didn’t abandon him!’ Pain, raw and crushing propelled Libby to her feet. She could feel his contempt beating against her like a tangible thing. ‘Anyway, I’m not the first woman ever to have had a baby adopted!’
‘No, you’re not the first by any means,’ Romano agreed, disdain twisting his mouth as he delivered with hard incision, ‘but it takes a certain kind of girl who can hand over her baby purely for cash!’
Libby felt as if she’d been hit in the solar plexus, the cruelty of his statement almost making her double up. She had to restrain a strong urge to punch her late husband’s brother right back between his spectacular eyes.
He must, however, have seen the anguish corrugating her forehead because he said with quiet, yet unmistakable censure, ‘It does sound rather distasteful, doesn’t it?’
Raw with emotion, Libby couldn’t answer. Nor could she get to grips with the fact that he could actually believe it.
‘Dio sa! You don’t deserve it, Libby. But I’m offering you the chance to make amends.’
‘Make amends?’ She looked at him obliquely, hot, angry tears smarting against her eyes. Just who did he think he was? Her judge and jury? ‘How magnanimous of you!’ she bit out, her defences in shreds. But, needing to ease the ever-present guilt, redeem herself in her own eyes if no one else’s, she was crying out in bitter denial, ‘I didn’t sell my child!’
The firm masculine mouth tugged with grim scepticism. ‘Find a way of telling that to Giorgio when he grows up.’
Pain darted across Libby’s already tortured features, pale now against the rich red lustre of her hair. ‘That surely isn’t what you…what your parents…’ She couldn’t bring herself to finish. It was too awful even to contemplate that they might have said as much to the little boy.
‘You think I’d be—’ he broke off, his eyes hard ‘—let anyone be that cruel?’
A surge of relief lifted Libby’s chest. Luca’s brother might feel only contempt for her, but he did seem to have some sensitivity where Giorgio was concerned.
‘I have evidence of it, Libby,’ he went on in those deep, relentless, self-assured tones. ‘You were paid…’ He paused before spelling out the exorbitant sum of money that his father had drafted into her bank account on the handing over of her eight-week old son. ‘And unless my accounts are well and truly—what is the expression?—up the creek—there isn’t any doubt that all the money was cashed within a few months.’
Well, he owed me something! Libby wanted to scream, though nothing had, or ever could, compensate for, or ease the loss of her child.
‘Yes, I cashed it,’ she uttered vehemently, because she had no intention of explaining to this hard-headed Italian who had formed so many erroneous opinions about her what she had done with the money. He was a Vincenzo after all and, with the exception of Luca, just like the rest. ‘I had to live.’
‘Si.’ There was only raw cynicism in his reply as his gaze fell on a back issue of a leading magazine someone had left on the cosmetics shelf. The cover featured a Ferrari with Libby draped over its gleaming red bonnet, dripping with the gold jewellery she had been advertising. ‘And quite well if that fancy car you drive out there and that string of homes you appear to own besides your expensive London apartment are anything to go by. One in Jersey. A couple on the continent. Two beach houses in Florida. Not bad for a girl who started out without a bean to her name.’
No, she had all that, she accepted gratefully. But, just like with the money, it was none of his business, and she was darned if she’d be made to feel accountable to him for why she had invested in so many homes!
Her chin coming up, exposing the pale line of her throat, she said simply, ‘Are you sure there isn’t anything else you’d like to throw at me?’
His dark gaze plundered hers as though searching for something beyond their defensive green depths.
‘I appreciate that you have commitments. That it isn’t going to be easy for you to…drag yourself away.’ Carefully chosen words, Libby felt, to make each statement a precision-aimed snipe. The lining of his jacket gleamed darkly as he reached for something in his inside pocket, the action exposing the dark shading of body hair through the fine material of his shirt. ‘So name your price,’ he invited silkily. ‘I’m sure together we can come to a suitable figure.’
To see Giorgio? He thought she needed payment before she’d consider helping her son!
‘How dare you?’ She lashed out at the black leather folder he was opening, almost hitting it out of his hands. ‘Get out! Get out of here if all you can do is stand there and sling insults at me!’
From the way his brows lifted, clearly her reaction had taken him unawares. His hands were remarkably steady, though, as he repocketed the offending cheque-book. ‘Forgive me,’ he said coldly. ‘I forgot. These days Vincenzo money doesn’t hold the same attraction for you that it did.’
‘No, that’s right,’ Libby breathed, hating him more with every second that passed. If he wanted to think the worst about her, then let him think it! ‘And as for my car and all my houses…I do have my image to think about!’
She thought he would come back with some further cutting remark, but all he did was stand there looking down at her for a few dissecting moments from his superior height.
Eventually he took something out of his wallet, handed it to her. A card with the familiar Vincenzo logo printed at the top. ‘I’ll be here in London for a couple of days, ‘ he stated in a cool, unperturbed voice. ‘If you’ve a glimmer of conscience or compassion behind that beautiful face of yours—call me. It might do you good to step down into the real world for a while—see how the other half lives.’
His comments flayed as he pushed back the sliding door, his broad shoulders filling for a moment the gap he had created, before he stepped lithely down from the trailer and strode away.
Staring after his lean, elegant figure, Libby felt frustrated tears bite behind her eyes. The real world, he’d said. Was that what he called the Vincenzo mansion and its accompanying millions? When it was his and his family’s world that had taught her how the other half lived! The half who could buy anything, threaten anything, just as long as they got exactly what they wanted, when they wanted it, regardless of who got hurt!
Her knuckles whitening as she gripped the open door, anguish a crushing weight in her chest, she almost gave in to the urge to call him back. Tell him that she would go to Italy with him. Now if he demanded it of her. Agree to anything he stipulated just so long as she could see Giorgio again. But he was already folding himself into the low sports saloon parked in front of her own favoured Porsche that he had spoken of so critically, and the next instant the powerful car was growling away.
Without even bothering to cream off her make-up, Libby packed up her few belongings and followed his example. The day, accommodatingly bright and cloudless for the shoot, was turning overcast as she headed back to the city and the rain had set in heavily before she had got very far. She tried to keep her mind on her driving, but even concentrating hard on the wet road through the double speed of the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep the bitter memories at bay.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE had still been at college when she had met Luca Vincenzo.
Motherless, with her father pensioned off early through ill health, she had been waiting tables at weekends and during term holidays in a chic little bistro in the Sussex village where she lived, eager to contribute in whatever way she could to their frugal finances.
She couldn’t deny that her unusually photogenic looks and striking red hair, which she accepted without a trace of vanity, helped to get her noticed with the customers, bringing in more than a fair share of tips from admiring male members of the clientele, from whom she always managed to pleasantly but firmly distance herself.
Luca had been the one exception to the rule. A handsome Italian boy with a daredevil attitude to life, he had dined there every night for a month, wooing her with his crazy Latin charm and that hint of devilry in his sparkling dark eyes until she took his threat of hiring a helicopter and lowering himself onto the top of Nelson’s column, where he promised to stay until she put him out of his misery and agreed to go out with him, as serious. It was only after she had laughingly consented to that she discovered exactly who he was; what a wealthy, respected and—in his own words—stifling family he had been born into.
Braking to allow a van to pull across into her lane, she remembered how much her father had liked Luca. As he’d liked Luca’s grandfather, Giovanni Vincenzo, she recalled fondly, whom he’d worked for, prior to his forced retirement, as head gardener on the man’s large country estate fringing the village. When Giovanni Vincenzo had died, it was Luca’s father, Marius, who inherited the family empire. Preferring to run his international enterprises from his native Italy, he had turned the house into a conference centre and country club and, with the exception of a few small properties, sold off the rest of the estate.
Earmarked for a responsible position in the family business, Luca had spent that summer getting experience at the conference centre that still remained in Vincenzo hands. At twenty-one and three years older than her, Luca had seemed like a man of the world, Libby thought, looking back. Well-travelled. Exciting. Although it was his warm humour and the feeling that he wasn’t wholly appreciated by a family who wanted to curb his adventurous spirit that had endeared her to him. A family, she thought disparagingly now, who were far too busy multiplying its millions to take much interest in anything Luca wanted.
Head over heels in love, when he had asked her to marry him after only a few weeks she didn’t even have to think about it, she remembered sadly, trying to focus on the road through the spray thrown up by the van in front of her. They had been married almost immediately in a small private ceremony in the local register office with only her father and another waitress from the bistro as witnesses. It had all seemed so exciting and romantic at the time. It wasn’t until her new husband had taken her to meet his parents in their restored castle in Italy that she had realised how strongly they’d objected to Luca’s marrying her. Regardless of her studies, she was just a part-time waitress with no money and no prospects, and in their eyes an opportunist and a gold-digger. Their unveiled coolness towards her could have been chipped at with an ice-pick, his mother’s unrestrained remark privately to Libby that she had anticipated a far more suitable match for her son leaving Libby in no doubt as to exactly where she belonged. Anywhere but in the close-knit Vincenzo family circle!
As she steered her car through the slow-moving, increasingly heavy traffic, it still hurt to remember her in-laws’ attitude towards her, even though she had tried desperately to win their respect. Because of the conditions his father had laid down, she had had plenty of opportunity. They were to live in the castle, he had stipulated unswervingly. Otherwise he would take it to mean that their son was no longer a Vincenzo.
Luca had been all for walking out, Libby recalled, until she had persuaded him against it. The last thing she had wanted was to be responsible for a break-up between her husband and his family.
‘They’ll come round. You’ll see,’ she had naïvely reassured him, unaware of how influencing him to stay only served to reinforce her in-laws’ derogatory opinion of her. After all, she thought with cutting poignancy now, if she had allowed Luca to oppose his father she would have been walking away from the fortune he would have eventually inherited, wouldn’t she?
The van in front of her stopped dead, causing her to ram on her brakes. Through her obscured vision she could just make out that there were traffic lights ahead.
Berating herself for her lack of concentration, she tried to steer her thoughts back to the present. But the floodgates of her past, blown apart by that earth-shattering visit from Romano, had unleashed a torrent of unwelcome memories and, now that they had free passage, nothing could stem the flow.
Romano had been working abroad, she remembered, when Luca had taken her to Italy, but had come home within a few days of their arrival, sent for, she was sure, to meet, vet and generally dissect his younger brother’s new wife.
At twenty-seven, Romano Vincenzo had already been a powerful player in the family’s global commercial empire. Where Luca was warm, witty and handsome, Romano Vincenzo was cold with a serious mind and an incisive intellect, linked with that raw animal attraction that transcended mere good looks. It wasn’t just the hard structure of his face and that athletically built physique that made one notice him, Libby accepted resentfully, watching the rain streaming down the windscreen. It was everything about him—and he had it in bucketfuls. Presence. Personality. Poise.
Standing there in the castle’s imposing drawing room, he had intimidated her from the first, asking her questions about herself, innocent enough on the surface but leaving her feeling as though he was testing her with every perfectly articulated syllable, while his richly accented English ran like honey off his well-trained, interrogative tongue! Consequently, nervous and awkward in his presence, she had cloaked herself in a confidence she was far from feeling.
Sometimes during that first trip home of his she’d glanced up to catch him watching her, the dark absorption in those penetrating eyes disturbing her as much as she was sure it had been his intention to, before he’d resumed whatever it was he had been doing and turned dispassionately away.
It was the day he was due to fly back to whatever area of the Vincenzo empire was calling him that stood out in her memory. Having said his goodbyes to the rest of the household, he had come out onto the terrace, where she had been emerging from the pool after seeking some relief from the strained atmosphere inside the house.
‘It’s been more than…interesting meeting you, Libby,’ he’d told her silkily, his dark, executive image doing untold things to her equilibrium as she’d stood there in nothing but her skimpy bikini. ‘In fact it’s been rather remiss of me, but I do believe I haven’t yet kissed my brother’s new bride.’
