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His mother drifted to the balcony overlooking the rear courtyard. “I don’t know how the children would cope without Tullia,” she said fretfully. “She’s been with them since they were babies, and they cling to her now. They seem to need her more than they need us.”
“And they need us more than they need an aunt they wouldn’t know from Adam,” Salvatore interjected, slipping an arm around her waist and leading her from the room. “Come, Lidia, my love. Stop worrying about Caroline Leighton and start looking after yourself. You’ve barely closed your eyes since we heard the dreadful news, and you need to rest.”
She went unresistingly, but turned in the doorway at the last second. “Will you still be here later, Paolo?”
“Yes,” he said, his glance locking briefly with his father’s and correctly reading the plea he saw there. “I’ll be here for as long as you both need me. You can count on me to do whatever must be done to keep our family intact.”
Although determined to keep such a promise, he hoped he could do so and not end up despising himself for the methods he might have to employ.
The Air France Boeing 777-200 touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris just after eleven o’clock on the Tuesday morning, completing the first leg of her journey to Rome. She’d left San Francisco exactly ten hours earlier, which wasn’t such an inordinately long time to be in the air, especially not when she’d reclined in Executive Class comfort the entire distance. But the fact that it was only two in the morning, Pacific Standard Time, played havoc with Callie’s inner clock, not to mention her appearance.
She’d never been able to cry prettily, the way some women could, and her face bore unmistakable evidence of weeping. It would take considerable cosmetic expertise and every spare second of the two hours before her connecting flight to Rome, to disguise the ravages of grief. But disguise them she would, because when she faced Paolo Rainero again, she intended to be in control—of herself and the situation.
Perhaps if, after deplaning, she’d been less involved in plotting her strategies, she might have noticed him sooner. As it was, she’d have walked straight past him if he hadn’t planted himself so firmly in her path that she almost tripped over his feet.
“Ciao, Caroline,” he greeted her, and before she had time to recover from the impact of Paolo Rainero’s voice assaulting her yet again out of the blue, he’d caught her by the shoulders and bent his head to press a light, continental kiss on each of her cheeks.
She’d wondered if she’d recognize him. If he’d changed much in nine years. If the dissolute life he’d pursued in his early twenties had left only the crumbling remains of his formerly stunning good looks. Would the aristocratic planes of his face have disappeared under a sagging layer of flesh, with his sleek olive skin crisscrossed by a road map of broken veins? Would his middle have grown soft, his hairline receded?
She’d prayed it would be so. It would make seeing him again so much easier. But the man confronting her had lost nothing of his masculine beauty. Rather, he had redefined it.
His shoulders had broadened with maturity, his chest deepened, but not an ounce of fat clung to his frame. The clean, hard line of his jaw, the firm contours of his mouth, spoke of singleminded purpose. There was dignity and strength in his bearing. Authority in his somber, dark brown gaze.
He had a full head of hair. Thick, black, silky hair that begged a woman to run her fingers through it. And only the faintest trace of laugh lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes.
Stunned, she stared at him, all hope that he’d prove himself as susceptible to the passage of time as any other man, evaporating in a rush of molten awareness that battered her with the force of a tornado.
It wasn’t fair. He’d shown a flagrant disregard for the frailty of human life, driving too fast, living on the edge, and daring death to slow him down. At the very least, he might have had the good grace to look a little worn around the edges. Instead he stood there, splendidly tall and confident—and still dangerously attractive, despite the tragic reason for his coming into her life again.
Woefully conscious of her own disarray, both physical and mental, and unable to do anything about either, she stammered, “Why are you here?”
He smiled just enough for her to see that he still had all his teeth, too, and that they were every bit as white and even as she remembered. Amazing, really. She’d have thought some irate husband would have knocked a few of them out by now. Paolo had had quite a taste for other men’s wives, when he wasn’t seducing virgins.
“Why else would I be here, but to meet you, Caroline?”
She wanted to smack him for the way he seemed to suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere and leave her fighting to breathe. “Well, in case you’ve forgotten, you booked me all the way through to Rome, and we’re not even in Italy yet.”
“There’s been a slight change of itinerary,” he said, rolling his R’s in melodic cadence. “You will be traveling the rest of the way with me, in the Rainero corporate jet.”
“Why?”
He lifted his impeccably clad shoulders in a shrug. “Why not?”
“Because there’s no need. I have a ticket on a regular flight. All other considerations apart, what about my luggage? The inconvenience of my not showing up—”
“Do not concern yourself, Caroline,” he purred. “I have seen to it. By standing here throwing up obstacles, you inconvenience no one but me.”
Another thing about him remained unchanged. He was as arrogant as ever, and it was still all about him! “Well, heaven forbid you should be put out in any way, Paolo!”
He regarded her with benign tolerance, the way she might have regarded a fractious two-year-old trying to bite her ankle. “You are exhausted and sad, cara, and it’s making you a little capricciosa,” he decided, relieving her of her carry-on bag with one hand, and cupping her elbow with the other.
“That shouldn’t come as any surprise, all things considered!”
“Nor does it, which is why I thought to spare you the tedium of spending time waiting here in a crowded airport, when it is within my power to have you already safely arrived in Rome before your originally scheduled flight leaves Paris.”
“I don’t mind the wait.” She tried ineffectually to squirm free of his hold. “I’m actually looking forward to the chance to freshen up after being cooped up in an aircraft for ten hours.”
“Be assured, the company jet has excellent facilities, all of which are at your disposal,” he countered. “Come, now, Caroline. Allow me to spoil you a little, especially now when you have all you can do to hold yourself together.”
Supremely confident that he’d overcome her objections, he swept her out of the terminal and into the back of a waiting limousine. After a brief exchange with the uniformed driver, Paolo joined her, settling himself beside her close enough that his body warmth crept out to touch her.
Unnerved, she inched farther into the corner as the car joined the traffic heading out of the airport toward the city center. Noticing, he smiled and said, “Try to relax, cara. I am not abducting you and I intend you no harm. You’re perfectly safe with me.”
Safe with him? Not if he was anything like the man he’d been nine years ago! Yet his concern seemed genuine. He appeared more tuned in to her feelings, and less focused on his own. Could she have misjudged him, and he had changed, after all?
Callie supposed anything was possible. Heaven knew, she was nothing like the girl he’d seduced, then cast aside so callously. Perhaps they’d both grown up.
“Ah!” His shoulder brushed hers as he leaned past her to look out of the window. “We’ll soon be there.”
Huddling even farther into the corner, she said, “Where’s ‘there’ exactly?”
“Le Bourget. It’s the airport most commonly used by private jets.”
Soon—much too soon for Callie’s peace of mind—they arrived, and in short order had cleared security, passed through the departure gate and were crossing the open tarmac to where a Lear jet waited, its engines idling. Buffeted by the wind, she mounted the steps to the interior, and barely had time to fasten her seat belt before the aircraft was cleared for takeoff.
Was she crazy to have allowed Paolo to coerce her into changing her travel plans? she wondered, as Paris fell away below, and the jet turned its nose to the southeast. Did he have an ulterior motive? Or was she looking for trouble where none existed?
“You’re very silent, Caroline,” he observed, some half hour later. “Very withdrawn.”
“I just lost my sister,” she said. “I’m not exactly in a party mood.”
“Nor am I suggesting you should be, but it occurs to me you might wish to discuss the funeral arrangements…” He paused fractionally, his long fingers idly caressing a glass of sparkling water. “Or the children.”
“No,” she said, turning to stare at the great expanse of blue sky beyond the porthole to her left. “Not right now. It’s all I can do to come to terms with the fact that I’ll never see Vanessa again. I keep hoping to wake up and find it’s all a horrible dream. Perhaps once I’ve seen the children, and your parents…How are they coping with this terrible tragedy, by the way? Your parents, I mean?”
“They’re even more devastated than you claim to be.”
Sure she must not have heard him correctly, she swung back to face him and found him watching her with chilling intensity. “Are you suggesting I’m faking how I feel, Paolo?”
Raising his glass, he rotated it so that its cut crystal facets caught the light and flung it at her in a blur of dazzling reflections. “Well, if you are,” he said silkily, “it wouldn’t be the first time, would it, cara?”
There was nothing kindly in his regard now, nothing compassionate, nor did he pretend otherwise. In that instant, she knew that she should have listened to her instincts. Because, in stepping aboard the Rainero corporate jet, she’d made a fatal mistake.
She’d put herself at the mercy of a man who, whatever his stated reasons for meeting her in Paris, no more cared about her now than he had nine years ago. He was exactly the same callous heel who had ruined her life once, and given half a chance, he’d do the very same thing a second time.
Chapter Two
“SO YOU don’t bother to lash out at me for such a remark?” he drawled. “You don’t take exception to the fact that I imply you’re less than honest?”
Swamped in an anger directed as much at herself as at him, Callie retorted, “Don’t mistake my silence for an admission of guilt, Paolo. It’s simply that I’m floored by your audacity. You may rest assured I take very great exception to your accusation.”
“But you don’t deny the truth of it?”
“Of course I do!” she spat. “I have never lied to you.”
“Never? Not even by omission?”
Again, she was left speechless, but from fear, this time. He couldn’t know the truth—not unless Vanessa or Ermanno had told him.
Oh, surely not! They stood to gain nothing by doing so, and would have lost what they most cared about.
“You’ve turned rather pale, Caroline.” Utterly remorseless, Paolo continued to torment her. “Could it be that you remember, after all?”
Less certain of herself by the second, Callie fought to match his offhand manner. “Remember what, exactly?”
“The day your sister married my brother—or more precisely, the night following the wedding.”
So her secret was safe, after all! But as relief washed over her, so, too, did a wave of embarrassment. “Oh,” she muttered, helpless to stem the heat flooding her face. “That!”
“That, indeed. Let me see if I recall events accurately.” Ever so casually, he tapped the rim of his water glass. “There was a moon, and many, many stars. A beach with powder-soft sand, lapped by lazy, lukewarm waves. A cabana that offered privacy. You in a dress that begged to be removed…and I—”
“All right,” Callie snapped. “You’ve made your point. I remember.”
As if she could forget—and heaven knew she’d tried hard enough to do just that! It was the night she gave him her virginity, her innocence and her heart. Not even the slow passage of nine years could dim the clarity of those memories…
“Isn’t he the most divinely handsome man you’ve ever seen?” Radiant in her pearl and crystal encrusted wedding gown, Vanessa had peeked from behind the drapes fluttering at the French windows of the suite set aside for the bride and her attendants. In the grounds below, her groom chatted with the more than three hundred guests who’d arrived that morning in a flotilla of private yachts, and were now milling about the terrace.
As weddings went, Callie supposed this one came as close to fairy-tale perfection as reality could get. Isola di Gemma, the Raineros’s private island, was aptly named—truly a jewel, set in the shimmering Adriatic, some thirty miles off the coast of Italy.
But, like her sister, she barely noticed the huge urns of exotic blooms framing the flower-draped arch where the ceremony was to take place, or the rows of elegant white wrought-iron chairs linked together with white satin streamers. Instead she inched out onto the narrow Juliet balcony, the better to spy on the groom’s tall, dark-haired younger brother, busy adjusting the gardenia in the lapel of his white jacket.
He’d landed by helicopter on the island the night before, arriving just in time for dinner, and Callie’s mouth had run dry at the sight of him. Charming and handsome, with a worldly sophistication to match his good looks, he reduced the young men she usually dated to pitifully clumsy boys.
She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him since. She’d even dreamed about him. Vanessa’s wedding might be a fairly tale, but in Callie’s opinion, the best man was the stuff princes were made of.
“Yes,” she breathed to her sister, leaning over the balcony to get a better view. “He’s…divine.”
Perfect. Godlike!
As if he could read her mind, he glanced up, trained his gaze directly on her, and sent her a slow, conspiratorial smile, as if, between them, they harbored a secret too deliciously wicked to be shared with anyone else. At that, an unfamiliar sensation trickled through her, startling and sweet. Suddenly weak at the knees, she clutched the balcony railing.
“Come away from there, both of you,” their mother had scolded. “It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride beforehand, and while having the maid of honor fall headlong from an upper floor balcony might amuse some people, I doubt it would impress your future father-in-law, Vanessa.”
How true! Salvatore Rainero had made scant secret of the fact that he had reservations about his son’s marriage to an American. That he considered Audrey Leighton and her two daughters socially inferior, and quite possibly fortune hunters, had been apparent from the outset, but Ermanno had remained adamant. He intended to marry Vanessa with, or without, his father’s approval.
Fortunately his mother, Lidia, had scoffed at her husband’s suspicions, and given the couple her blessing, thus smoothing over the tensions threatening their future. Whatever his other personality flaws, Salvatore was a doting husband who adored his wife. If she was willing to embrace into the family their son’s choice of a mate, he’d swallow his misgivings and indulge her wish to throw a lavish wedding.
And lavish it was, with champagne enough to float a boat, a feast worthy of royalty—the Raineros actually had been members of the nobility in times gone by, which probably accounted for Salvatore’s elevated notions of grandeur—and a two-foot high wedding cake created by an army of Rome’s most renowned bakers and pastry chefs. For Callie, though, the high point of the whole affair had been when the best man escorted her onto the dance floor and took her in his arms.
She melted in the warmth of his dark-eyed gaze, in the bold intimacy of his hands sliding down her spine and urging her close. Intoxicated by his scent, by the sheer power of his masculine aura, she let him mold her body to his, and cared not one iota that his father scowled from the sidelines.
“So beautiful una damigella d’onore outshines the bride,” Paolo murmured hotly in her ear. “It is my good fortune that my brother chose to marry your sister, and left me with the greater prize.”
No boyfriend had ever spoken to her with such unfettered, lyrical passion, nor held her so close that she could feel the hard thrust of his arousal pressing against her, undeterred by a pair of finely tailored black trousers or the folds of a silk chiffon bridesmaid’s gown.
No boyfriend had dared slide his arm so far around her waist that he could brush his fingers up the under-slope of her breast and, in so doing, incite a wash of heat between her legs.
All of which, she concluded dizzily, was what separated the man from the boys.
Later, he danced with his mother, the mother of the bride, and the other four bridesmaids. Waltzed sedately with an elderly widowed aunt. Twirled the flower girls around the terrace, much to their shrieking delight. Boogied with other men’s wives, then returned them to their husbands, flushed and breathless and decidedly reluctant to let him go.
Finally, with the wedding festivities reaching a fever pitch of laughter and music and wine, he sought out Callie again.
“Come with me, la mia bella,” he urged, tugging her by the hand beyond the flare of twinkling lights illuminating the terrace, and into the shadows of the garden. “Let me show you our island, made all the more lovely by moonlight.”
The mere idea left her quivering with anticipation, but, “I think we’re supposed to stay until the bride and groom leave,” she replied primly.
“But they will not leave,” he assured her, snagging an open bottle of champagne chilling in a silver wine bucket. “Italian weddings do not end with the setting sun, cara mia. They are celebrated well into the small hours of the morning. We will return before anyone has the chance to miss us.”
She fought a brief, losing battle with her conscience, knowing her mother wouldn’t approve of her abandoning her maid-of-honor duties to run off with the best man. But wedding decorum couldn’t hold a candle to Paolo’s magnetic pull.
Fingers entwined with his, she followed him as he skirted the shrubbery separating the garden proper from the shore. The moon cast a path of hammered silver over the sea, and feathered in black the clumps of grass lining the beach.
“It’s breathtaking,” she whispered, entranced by the sight.
But Paolo grinned, his teeth blindingly white against the night-dark olive of his skin, and dragging her farther away from the light and music of the wedding, said, “You have seen nothing, yet, bella. Follow me.”
She knew the first thread of uneasiness, then. What, after all, did she really know about him? But as if he sensed her sudden qualms, he cupped her chin and, raising her face to his, said thickly, “What, Caroline? Are you not at all the woman I took you for, but a shy, untutored girl, unused to the attentions of a man like myself? If so, you have but to speak out, and I will take you back to your madre.”
“No,” she said, the faintly scornful laughter in his voice spurring her to recklessness. “I want to be with you, Paolo.”
He kissed her then, a hot, openmouthed kiss drenched in passion. She’d never been kissed like that before, with such ardent finesse. Never savored the heated taste of a man. Never realized that the thrust and retreat of his tongue in the dark moist confines of her mouth could arouse an elemental craving for the same invasion, there in that cloistered, feminine part of her no boy had ever stirred to awareness.
Conscious of the dull, sweet ache in her lower body, she let him guide her around a small outcropping of rock, to a secluded crescent of beach. A cabana stood in the lee of the low cliff. A private, safe place, perfect for an illicit tryst.
Without a word, she went inside with him. Let him pull her down beside him on a long, cushioned bench. Laughed, and pretended she was used to champagne, drinking it directly from the bottle, as he did.
It coursed through her blood. Stripped away her inhibitions. She felt his hands toying with the tiny straps holding up her gown, the cool play of night air on her bare breasts.
In some misty recess of her mind, it occurred to her that she should stop him. But he was flicking his tongue in her ear, whispering, in Italian, words of love no sane woman could resist: tesoro…bella…te amo…
Then his mouth was at her breast, and she was clutching handfuls of his hair and gasping with startled pleasure. She wanted more, and so did he. She heard his muttered curse, and the whisper of fragile chiffon splitting.
He pressed her down on the bench, ran his palm under her skirt. Up her legs. Between her thighs.
She stiffened, not so much afraid, as embarrassed. She didn’t want him to discover that her satin panties were damp…there, in that private place.
He stilled his hand immediately, and lifted his head to look at her. Although moonlight filtered through the latticed window openings, his face was shadowed, preventing her from reading his expression clearly, but she heard again the sudden doubt in his voice. “You want me to stop, cara mia? You are, perhaps, not as eager or willing as you led me to believe?”
