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He hadn’t anticipated that his blood would become hot and sticky and his hands clammy just to land in his home city and be under the same sky as her again.
And now that she was here, in the cabin of his plane, every cell in his body, dormant all this time apart, had awoken.
He could curse his logical mind. Why hadn’t he insisted she fly to Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to refuel, and board his plane there? He couldn’t have her fly all the way to Fiji separately from him—that would defeat the whole purpose of her being there—but he could have engineered things so they only had to spend a minimal amount of time on his plane together, not the full twenty-six hours it would take to travel to the other side of the world.
For the return journey he would fly with her to Australia and charter a plane to fly her back to Italy.
He’d listed all the excuses he could have made to avoid bringing her with him but it had all boiled down to one thing. This was for his grandfather, Jimmy Seibua. His terminally ill grandfather, who’d taken a cruise from Rome to Fiji with his family and an army of medical personnel in attendance and had arrived on the island three days ago. This weekend was all that had been keeping his grandfather alive, this one last visit to the homeland he’d left as a twenty-two-year-old the spark giving him the fight needed to beat the odds. Jimmy would celebrate his ninetieth birthday on the Fijian island of his birth, now owned by Massimo, with the family he loved. His grandfather thought of Livia as part of his family. He loved her as a granddaughter. His only regret at Massimo marrying her was that it meant he lost the private nurse who had tended to him with such care during his first battle with cancer.
And, whatever his own feelings towards his estranged wife, Massimo knew Livia loved Jimmy too.
‘Are you going to spend the entire flight ignoring me?’
Massimo clenched his jaw as Livia’s direct husky tones penetrated his senses, speaking their native Italian.
That was the thing with his wife. She was always direct. If she wasn’t happy about something she made damned sure you knew about it. For a long time the object of her unhappiness had been Massimo. Her declaration that she was leaving him had come as no surprise, only relief. Marriage to Livia had gone from being passionate and invigorating to being like a war zone. And she wondered why he’d spent so much time at work? The nights they had spent together those last few months had been with her cold back firmly turned to him. She’d even started wearing nightshirts.
He swallowed back the lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat and finally allowed his gaze to fall on her properly.
The lump he’d tried to shift grew but he opened his mouth and dragged the words through it. ‘You’ve had your hair cut.’
Her beautiful thick, dark chestnut hair, which had fallen like a sheet down to her lower back, now fell in layers to rest on her shoulders in loose curls. It was lighter too, streaks of honey blonde carefully blending with her natural colour. Livia was not the most beautiful woman in the world but to his eyes she was stunning. It was the whole package. A sexy firecracker with a dirty laugh. He’d heard that laugh echo through the walls of the church while they’d waited for his sister, the bride, to arrive and when he’d spotted the woman behind it he’d felt the fabric of his existence shift. He’d grabbed the first available opportunity to speak to her and had been blown away to discover she had a thirsty, inquisitive mind. He’d been smitten. In Livia he’d found the woman he’d never known he’d been searching for. Or so he’d thought.
Her dark brown eyes, always so expressive, widened before a choked laugh flew from her mouth. ‘That’s all you can think to say?’
She didn’t wait for a response; unbuckling her seat belt and springing to her feet.
She’d lost weight, he noted hazily.
Her kissable plump lips were tight as she stalked past him, the bathroom door closing sharply a moment later.
Massimo rubbed his jaw and struggled to get air into his closed lungs.
He hadn’t expected this to be easy but it was a thousand times harder than he’d envisaged.
Livia sat on the closed toilet seat and hugged her arms across her chest, willing the threatening tears back. She hadn’t expected this tumult of emotions to engulf her or for the ache in her chest to hurt so much.
She had shed enough tears for this man, so many she’d thought herself all cried out.
Massimo had never loved her. That was the truth she needed to keep reminding herself of.
But she had loved him. Truly, madly, deeply.
And in return he’d broken her.
The worst of it was he had no idea. For all his high intelligence, her husband had the emotional depth of an earthworm. She’d just been too blind to see it.
She closed her eyes and took three long inhalations.
There was no point in driving herself crazy with her thoughts. She had loved him once and while echoes of that love still beat in her heart they weren’t real. She didn’t love him any more. She was only there to honour the promise she’d made to him the day he’d let her go without a solitary word of fight to make her stay.
He’d wanted her gone. He’d been relieved. She’d seen it in his eyes.
Three more deep breaths and she got back to her feet and flushed the unused toilet.
She was Livia Briatore, formerly Livia Esposito, daughter of Pietro Esposito, Don Fortunato’s most trusted clan member and henchman until her father’s gangland murder when she’d been only eight. She’d been raised in the Secondigliano surrounded by drugs and brutal violence and she’d learned from an early age to show no fear. To show nothing.
Escaping Naples to study nursing in Rome had been like learning to breathe. Dropping her guard had not been easy—constantly checking over her shoulder when she walked a street was a habit it had taken many years to break—but she had forged a new life for herself and the joy it had given her had been worth the anxiety that had gnawed at her to be separated from her siblings. Life had gone from being a constant knot in her belly to being an adventure. She’d learned to laugh. With Massimo she had learned to love.
But her old protective barrier had never fully gone. It had sat patiently inside her waiting to be slipped back on.
To get through the next four days she needed that barrier. She needed to keep her guard up, not as protection against Massimo but as protection against her own foolish heart.
She took her seat and was not surprised to find Massimo working again on his laptop.
This time he raised his eyes from the screen to look at her. ‘I’ve ordered us coffee. Did you want anything to eat?’
‘I’ve eaten,’ she answered with strained politeness, not adding that all she’d eaten that day had been half a slice of toast. Her stomach had been too tight and cramped to manage anything else. The countdown to seeing Massimo again had wrecked the little equilibrium she’d regained for herself.
It was hardly surprising that there was an awkwardness between them but they had a long flight ahead and she didn’t want to spend it in uncomfortable silence. ‘How have you been?’
He pulled a face and turned his attention back to his laptop. ‘Busy.’
She dug her fake nails into her thighs. How she hated that word. It was the word he’d always used to justify never being there. ‘Are you too busy to stop working for five minutes and talk?’
‘I have data to interpret and an analysis to send.’
Two years ago he would have explained both the data and analysis to her, assuming rightly that she would find it interesting. The truth was she had found everything about Massimo interesting. Enthralling. The workings of his brain had never failed to astonish her. How could they not? This was the man who’d used his downtime from his computer engineering degree to create a web-based platform game that had taken the world by storm and which he’d sold upon his graduation for two hundred million US dollars. That money had been the linchpin for his move to America, where he’d formed his company, Briatore Technologies, whilst simultaneously studying for a PhD in energy physics, followed by a second PhD in applied physics and material sciences. His company, of which he was still the sole owner, now employed thousands worldwide, creating environmentally friendly solutions for many of the world’s greatest carbon-related threats. He was on a one-man mission to save the planet one invention at a time. That he’d earned himself a fortune in the process was almost incidental. Only a month ago he’d been named in the top thirty of the world’s most powerful people and in the top fifty of the world’s richest.
It would have been so easy for him to make her feel stupid but he never had. Anything she didn’t understand—which when it came to his work was most things—he would explain patiently but never patronisingly, his face lighting up when she grasped the finer details of something, like how a lithium ion battery worked and what carbon capture meant on a practical level.
She had been so thrilled that this man, clever, rich, successful and with a face and body to make the gods envious, had been as seemingly enthralled with her as she had been with him that she’d been blind to his emotional failings. Once the first flush of lust had worn off he’d retreated into the all-consuming world he’d created for himself, hiding himself away from the woman he’d married.
She wished she knew what she’d done to make him back away from her but every time she’d tried to get him to open up, the further into his shell he’d retreated.
The silence, filled intermittently by the sounds of Massimo tapping on the laptop’s keyboard, grew more oppressive.
She watched him work. The familiar furrow of concentration was etched on his brow. How could he tune her out so effectively?
But as she watched him she noticed subtle changes. Flecks of white around the temples of his thick black hair that had never been there before. The full beard, as if he’d given up the bother of shaving altogether. Dark rings around his eyes as if he’d given up sleep along with shaving. Not that he had ever slept much. His brain was too busy for sleep.
Livia swallowed back the pang that had crept through her. Massimo was thirty-six years old; old enough to not look after himself if that was what he wanted.
He reached absently for the strong black coffee on the desk beside his laptop and took a large sip. His attention did not stray from the screen before him. He tapped something else onto the keyboard. The sound was akin to nails being dragged down a chalkboard.
Suddenly she could bear it no more. Jumping back to her feet, she took the three steps to him and slammed his laptop lid down.
CHAPTER TWO (#uaa835b45-db34-569e-b4cc-308707a3c774)
MASSIMO CLENCHED HIS teeth together and placed a protective hand on his laptop to prevent Livia from snatching hold of it and throwing it onto the floor. ‘What was that for?’
Diminutive though she was in height, in presence she was larger than life and right then, standing over him, she seemed magnified, the anger rippling from her in waves. ‘We’ve been in the air for an hour and you’ve spared me only ten words.’
‘Twenty-six,’ he corrected through gritted teeth. ‘I have spoken twenty-six words.’
‘And now you’re being pedantic as well as rude.’ She pulled her hair together in a fist then released it. ‘How are we supposed to convince your grandfather and the rest of your family that we’re still together if you won’t look at me or talk to me?’
‘I’m not being rude. This is a very important time for me. On Monday we are running the prototypes on…’
‘I don’t care,’ she interrupted with a cry. ‘Whatever you’re working on, I do not care. I’m here as a favour to you for your grandfather’s benefit. The least you can do is treat me with some respect.’
‘If I’m being disrespectful then I apologise,’ he answered stiffly, biting back the retort of what did you expect? Livia had been the one to walk out on their marriage, not him. She had been the one to laugh in his face when he suggested they have a child. How did she expect him to be around her?
Damned if he knew how to act around her. Focusing his attention on the screen before him was the only tool he had to drive out the tumultuous emotions ripping through him. That these emotions were still there defied belief but Livia had always been able to induce feelings in him that had no place in his world, feelings that went far deeper than mere lust and friendship. She took up too much head space. She distracted him. That would have been easy to deal with if she’d only distracted his head when he’d been at home.
‘I don’t want your apologies. You don’t mean it. You never do. Your apologies are meaningless.’
It was an accusation she had thrown at him many times and usually preceded an escalation of her temper, which only got wilder when he refused to engage. Massimo disliked meaningless confrontation, considered it a waste of energy, and would walk away when she refused to listen to reason.
Unfortunately, right now there was nowhere for him to walk away to. To escape to.
Keeping his own temper in check—keeping a cool head when all those around him lost theirs was something he took pride in—Massimo inhaled slowly through his nose and gazed at the angry face before him. ‘What I’m working on is important. I’ll be finished before we land in Los Angeles. We can spend the time between Los Angeles and Fiji talking if that’s what you want.’
She laughed without any humour then flopped onto the seat opposite his and glared at him. ‘Great. You’re going to do me the huge favour of talking to me if I want. Thank you. You’re too kind.’
She’d folded her arms across her chest, slightly raising her breasts. He knew she hadn’t done it deliberately—intimacy between them had died long before she’d called time on their marriage itself—but it distracted him enough for a sliver of awareness to pierce his armoury.
Livia had a body that could make a man weep. Even dressed as she was now, fully covered in tight faded jeans and a roll-neck black jumper, her feminine curves were undeniable. The first time he’d made love to her he’d thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Her virginity had surprised and delighted him. Surprised him because he would never have believed a twenty-four-year-old woman with such a dirty laugh and who carried herself with such confidence could be a virgin. Delighted him because it had marked her as his in a primal way he’d never experienced before.
Sex had never been a great need for him. When he’d shot up from a scrawny teenager into the frame he now inhabited, he’d suddenly found women throwing themselves at him, something that had only increased when he’d sold his web-based game after graduation and become worth a fortune. If he’d been in the mood he’d been happy to oblige, finding sex a satiating yet fleeting diversion from his work. Livia was the first woman he’d been truly intimate with. When they had first got together they’d been unable to keep their hands off each other. For the first time in his life Massimo had found himself consumed by lust.
The loss of that intimacy had not been his choice. Their marriage had disintegrated to such an extent that the nights he had made it home, they’d slept back to back. A man could take only so much rejection from his own wife before he stopped bothering.
Had she taken a lover? It was a thought that sent a stabbing motion plunging into his chest and for a moment he closed his eyes and breathed the pain away.
It was none of his business if she’d taken a lover and it would be unreasonable to expect her to have remained celibate during their separation. If not for his grandfather they would already be divorced.
‘When did you last see your grandfather?’ she asked suddenly, cutting through his attempts to concentrate on the screen in front of him rather than the bombshell opposite.
Livia felt only fleeting satisfaction to see the caramel eyes raise to meet hers.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because when I saw him the day before he set sail for Fiji he complained that you hadn’t been in touch. I emailed Lindy about it.’
Lindy was Massimo’s PA, a dragon of a woman who ran his business life. She was the only person in the world who knew their marriage was over in all but name. As far as their respective families were concerned, they were still together.
When they’d married, Livia had hoped Massimo’s new status would encourage him to see more of his family but it hadn’t worked that way. In their two years of shared life they had spent one Christmas with his family and that had been it. Livia had made numerous visits from their house in Los Angeles to Italy alone, visiting her youngest brother and dropping in on Massimo’s family, all of whom she adored.
Since they’d gone their separate ways, her frequent visits had continued. They were used to her visiting alone so Massimo’s absence had gone unremarked. Only Madeline, Massimo’s sister, had the perception to see that anything was wrong but as she had a newborn child to take care of, her perception skills were less honed than usual. The ache that formed in Livia’s heart as she held Madeline’s baby only added to the ache already there but she would have been helpless to resist cradling the tiny bundle in her arms even if she didn’t have a show to perform.
None of the Briatores or Espositos had any idea she was back on Italian soil permanently. Whenever she was asked about Massimo—who rarely bothered to message his family and had never met his niece—she would say he was busy with work, satisfied that she wasn’t telling a lie. Massimo was always busy with work. Always. She’d lived with his grandfather as his private nurse for nine months and in that time Massimo hadn’t made one trip home. She’d accepted the family line that Massimo was too busy to fly home from California regularly but had come to her own private conclusion during their marriage that it was nothing to do with his schedule preventing him from spending more time with his family. He simply didn’t want to.
She would be glad when these evasions of the truth could be done with and they could tell his family they had separated. She hated lying, even if only by omission.
‘Lindy mentioned it,’ he admitted stiffly.
‘Did you do anything about it?’
‘I called him on the ship. He sounded fine.’ His gaze dropped back to his laptop.
‘He isn’t fine.’ Livia’s heart had broken to see how frail Jimmy had become. The elderly yet vital man who’d waged such a strong battle against his first diagnosis of cancer was fading, too weak to fly both legs of the mammoth journey to Fiji. It had been decided that a cruise was the safest way to get him to the other side of the world. Jimmy wanted to spend his ninetieth birthday with all his family around him, see corners of the world he’d never visited before and tread the soil he’d been raised on one last time.
Everything for him was now one last time.
‘I know that.’
‘Will you spend some proper time with him this weekend?’ she asked. It was pointless adding that spending real time with Massimo was Jimmy’s greatest wish. It was his parents’ greatest wish too.
Massimo thought the gift of his money was enough. When he’d made his fortune, he’d bought his entire family new homes of their own and a car each. As his wealth had increased so had his generous gifts to them. It had been Massimo who’d paid for the private treatment during Jimmy’s first diagnosis and all the associated costs including the agency fees for Livia’s wages as his live-in nurse. It was Massimo who had bought the island his grandfather came from and spent a fortune building a complex for the entire family to stay on. It was Massimo footing the bill for the cruise the rest of the family were taking with Jimmy to reach the island. He’d chartered an ocean liner for their sole use.
Yet for all his generosity, he was spectacularly blind to the fact his family would much rather have his presence than his presents. He also seemed blind to the fact that time was running out for his grandfather.
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll leave your laptop and phone switched off?’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘I know you won’t do that.’
His jaw clenched. ‘We can talk about this later.’
She laughed mockingly. ‘Later. Of course. Everything is always later with you, isn’t it?’
Without any warning, Massimo slammed his fist against the panel beside his seat. ‘And everything still has to be now with you. I said we could talk once I have completed my work but, as always, you don’t listen. This is important and needs my attention. If you can’t wait patiently for me to finish then I suggest you take yourself to the bedroom and give your mouth a rest.’
Massimo refused to feel guilt for his outburst, even when Livia’s face paled before him.
True to form, she refused to let him get the last word, getting to her feet slowly and glowering at him. ‘If anyone has a problem with listening it’s you. If it doesn’t involve your precious work then it’s insignificant to you. It’s been four months since you last saw me and you haven’t even cared to ask how I’ve been. If I’d had any doubts that leaving you was the best thing I could do, an hour in your company has proven me right. You never cared for me. You’ve never cared for anyone.’
She walked away, not to the bedroom but to her original seat. There was dignity in the way she moved that, despite the acrimony that thickened the air between them, touched him. Livia was a strange mix of toughness and vulnerability, traits that had first moved him then infuriated him. Her toughness meant she did not know how to back down from an argument but the underlying vulnerability found her easily wounded. He’d never known the words to say to repair the wounds he’d unwittingly inflicted on her. Eventually he’d stopped trying.
Her partition rose and she disappeared from sight.
Massimo sighed his relief and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours and was exhausted.
Ringing the bell, he ordered a fresh coffee when the stewardess appeared. Caffeine and sugar would keep him awake long enough to get his analysis done. Maybe then he’d be able to catch some sleep.
