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And never before had the phrase ‘so near and yet so far’ meant so much to her. Never before had it slashed at her with the cruel truth that she was so near to Marco that all she had to do was to take a couple of steps forward and she could be close to him. She could look down at him and see how much he had grown, how he had changed—because he had to have changed, surely, in the time she had been away.
Perhaps she could even reach out and take him in her own arms…
No!
Even in her dreams that was just a step too far.
She knew that Ricardo would never let her touch their son. And deep inside she really knew that it would be just too much to bear if she did. How could she reconnect with her little boy after all this time? She knew how the world would look at her—how Ricardo would see her. What loving mother, what good mother, would abandon her baby, walk out on him, leaving him alone with his father?
It had taken her long enough to accept that she had been ill. To acknowledge that she hadn’t been able to find any alternative. The doctors said that she was well again now—but she didn’t know it, deep in her heart.
Cruel, bitter tears flooded her eyes, blurring her vision. All she knew was that she couldn’t stay in this hateful, appalling, ‘so near and yet so far’ situation and not give herself away.
She felt as if her already wounded heart would break, splintering into tiny pieces that scattered all over the paving stones at her feet. And yet this was what she had come this far for, after all. She had crept onto this island, sneaking past the security, just for this. The chance to see her little son.
But not like this. Not when she was not ready, not prepared.
And not with Ricardo Emiliani’s cold, dark eyes watching her, cruelly assessing everything she did.
Stumbling slightly, she turned away. Not looking where she was going, not caring, she headed in the vague direction of the way she had come, hoping that she would reach the shore, and the boat, before the pain got too much and she sank to the ground and howled like an animal.
The crack that came when her foot landed on a fallen branch sounded appallingly loud in the stillness of the evening. There was no way that Ricardo could not have heard it. Freezing, Lucy tensed, waiting for the inevitable.
‘Who’s there?’ Ricardo’s voice was sharp, harsh in contrast to the soft tones of just moments before.
Not daring to look back to see if he had actually spotted her, Lucy plunged on, dashing into the bushes in the hope of hiding from his sharp-eyed gaze.
‘Stop!’
There was no way she was going to respond to that…
‘Marissa! Here—now…’
Behind her, Lucy vaguely heard the sound of swift footsteps—female footsteps—hurrying down the stone steps to where he was in the garden.
‘Take Marco…’
That was the last thing she heard as she fled headlong, pushing aside branches that got in her way as she ran. Twigs snapped back, slapped her in the face, but she didn’t care. All she could think of was getting away, reaching the boat and heading back across the lake. Anything other than facing an angry and aggressive Ricardo.
‘Stop!’
How had he got to be so close behind her already? He had had to hand the baby over to Marissa—the nanny?—and then come after her but still it sounded as if he had made up so much ground that she could almost imagine that he would catch up with her at any moment. Heavy footsteps pounded behind her, making her heart race even faster in fear and apprehension.
‘Giuseppe…Frederico…’
Ricardo was speaking to someone else. A swift, desperate glance over her shoulder revealed that he had taken out his mobile phone and had flipped it open, speaking into it as he ran, not breaking stride or even adjusting his breathing. A string of curt, sharp commands in Italian were flung into the receiver and Lucy’s thudding heart lurched in even greater fear.
He was calling security. Summoning the trained bodyguards who watched the island boundaries for him, protecting his privacy—and making sure that his baby son was safe. And now he was setting his bloodhounds on to her.
And he was not pleased. There was no mistaking that tone of voice. She’d heard it often enough when she and Ricardo had been together. That tone meant that security had failed him and he was furious. Ricardo Emiliani didn’t countenance failure and heads would roll as a result of this.
A furious Ricardo was not someone she wanted to face. She had come here to try and talk to her husband, it was true, but she had planned to tackle him with the advantage of surprise on her side. Facing him now was quite a different matter. Seeing little Marco so unexpectedly had ripped away the flimsy protective shield she had built up around herself, taking with it several much needed layers of skin and leaving her raw and bleeding deep inside. She needed to get away, regroup and gather her strength again before she dared risk taking things any further.
The shore where she had left the boat was just around the corner. If she could just put on one last spurt, force her tiring and shaking legs into action, she might just do it. But whether she could get the boat onto the lake and actually get away was a very different matter.
Making a last effort, she pushed herself to breaking point, her breath coming in laboured gasps as a lack of fitness resulting from the past few months started to tell on her. She couldn’t look where she was going, caught her toe on a clump of grass, missed her footing and fell headlong.
Or, rather, started to fall.
Just as she felt herself totally lose her balance, convinced that the ground was coming up to meet her, she felt a hand grab her flailing arm, clamping tight around her wrist and holding firm.
‘Got you!’
With a jarring jolt she was jerked back from the fall, hauled upwards so that she balanced upright for just a moment, swaying precariously, before tumbling the other way. Straight into the arms of the man behind her.
‘Oh, no!’
She hit him like a ton of bricks but, although he staggered back, he didn’t fall and the punishing grip around her arm didn’t loosen for a moment. If anything, it tightened bruisingly so that she had no hope of pulling away.
‘So who the devil are you?’
There was no way that Lucy could answer him. Her mouth seemed to have dried so much that her tongue couldn’t form a word and her throat felt as if it had tied itself into knots.
But Ricardo didn’t seem to need an answer. Instead, he adjusted his hold so that he could spin her round, bringing her to a position facing him where he could see her for himself.
‘I said…you!’
It took every nerve in Lucy’s body to force herself to look him in the face, though she flinched away from meeting his eyes, terrified of the darkness she would see there. She could almost feel the cold burn of his glare on her skin, flaying it from her bones.
‘Me,’ she managed and the uncomfortably jagged beat of her heart made her voice sound brittle and defiant.
The stunned silence that greeted her response stretched her nerves to near breaking point. In desperation, knowing he wasn’t going to be the one to break it, she pushed herself to say something—anything—to try to show that he didn’t totally have control of this situation.
‘Buona sera, Ricardo.’
The sound of Ricardo’s breath hissing in between his teeth told her that she’d caught him on the raw and the way his hand tightened about her arm betrayed the struggle he was having with himself to control the burning temper that she knew was flaring inside him.
But all he said was one word—
‘Lucia…’
Her name. Or rather the Italianised form of it that only he had ever used. The low, almost whispered syllables slid off his tongue in a way that could have been a verbal caress or then again might have been the hiss of an angry snake, preparing to strike. And not knowing which brought her eyes up in a rush to clash with his glittering black gaze, the ice in their burning depths making her shiver in uncontrolled response.
‘Lucia.’
He said it again and this time there was no doubting the way that he meant it. The venom injected into the syllables of her name made her quail inside, shrinking away from him as far as his cruel grip on her arm would let her.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Don’t tell him the truth.
The warning words slid into her thoughts as if spoken aloud.
Don’t say a word about Marco. If you put that weapon into his hands, then he will use it against you.
‘I said…’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’
Somehow she found the strength to answer him, to put a note of defiance into her tone. She even managed to lift her chin in an expression of rebellion that was a million miles from what she was actually feeling. And although she actually made a pretence of looking into his eyes, of meeting their savage glare head on, the truth was something so very different. Deliberately she let her gaze slip out of focus so that all she could see was the dark blur of his face up above her. The jet-black pools of his eyes were bleak hollows where no light, no hint of feeling showed in their depths.
‘I certainly haven’t come to try to renew our marriage.’
‘As if I’d think that was why you were here.’
Ricardo’s tone was rough but laced with a deadly control that refused to allow any real emotion into the words. And although he still held her, she felt that his attention was not on what he was doing but on the thoughts that were inside his head. The thoughts that his icy command refused to let show in his face.
‘Our marriage is over. It was over before it really started.’
From the moment he had accused her of trapping him into marriage. Of letting herself get pregnant purely to get her hands on some of the vast wealth he possessed.
‘Well, that’s something we both agree on, at least.’
Lucy tried an experimental tug to try to free her arm, recognising how much of a mistake the action was when Ricardo’s grip tightened, restraining her without any real effort.
‘If it’s not that—grazie a Dio—then what is it?’
He was finally starting to recover from the shock of seeing her, Ricardo admitted privately to himself. Finally coming to terms with the fact that she was here, in front of him—the woman he had never wanted to see again for the rest of his life. The woman who had deceived him, played him like a fool. The woman he had thought was gone for good, out of his life for ever, and that had suited him to perfection.
And yet here she was, standing before him, her arm tensed against the pressure of his, her head flung back, her small chin raised, and those blue, blue eyes glaring into his in wide, determined defiance.
She hadn’t changed much, he acknowledged unwillingly because he didn’t want to notice anything about her. He didn’t even want to look into her face, into that lying, devious face, and see the beauty that had once caught him, entrapped him—deceived him. A beauty that had once knocked him so off balance that he had forgotten all the careful rules by which he lived his life.
More than forgotten. He had ended up breaking every single one of them and had turned his life into a form of hell from which he had been only too glad to escape. The one and only time he’d broken his self-imposed rule, he’d been caught by a scheming gold-digger in the guise of an innocent lamb. And he was not about to let that happen again.
She had lost weight, it seemed, losing some of the softness of her face and her body. He wouldn’t be human—or male—if he didn’t feel a pang of regret at the loss of the soft swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips. But then she had been pregnant for so much of the time they had been together that naturally her figure had been more lush, the feminine parts of her body more emphasised. If she hadn’t been pregnant then he would never have married her, would never have rushed into the union that he had come to regret so badly. Would never have tied himself to a woman he had come to detest so savagely and so soon.
‘If you’ll let go of my arm, then maybe we can discuss this like civilised human beings!’
‘Civilised!’ Ricardo scorned. ‘That’s not the word that comes to mind when I think of how I’d like to be where you are concerned.’
Now there was a word he would never use to describe Lucy Mottram—Lucy Emiliani as she was now, though the thought of his family name being attached to someone like her brought a sour taste into his mouth. Civilised didn’t describe a woman who had deliberately let herself become pregnant just to trap herself a rich husband, and then walked out on her marriage when that baby had not even been two months old.
‘And it’s not the way I’d want to describe your behaviour in the past.’
Had she actually winced, flinching away in response to the taunt? If she had then she had recovered almost instantly, tossing her hair back and glaring defiance up into his face.
‘Equally, it’s hardly civilised to hold me prisoner like this—just because you’re stronger than me.’
‘Oh, si—and if I let go then you will run off again and I’ll never find out just what you’re up to.’
‘I’m not up to anything! And I promise I’ll stay still.’
He’d be a fool to believe that. But, all the same, he eased his grip on her arm just a little. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Giuseppe and Frederico, his damned inefficient security guards, had finally come up behind them, each one taking an approach from a different side, and he realised that he could at least afford to relax a little.
‘I’d be a fool to trust you,’ he declared, letting her hand drop in a gesture of deliberate distaste. ‘But there’s no way you can escape three of us.’
‘Three bully boys onto one little woman!’ Lucy flashed at him, her eyes sparking rebelliously. ‘That’s really balancing the odds.’
‘There will be no bullying,’ Ricardo tossed back. ‘And you’re hardly such a little woman!’
Deliberately he let his gaze slide over her tousled blonde head, her flushed face, and down the length of her body to where her narrow feet in the battered canvas shoes betrayed her mood in the way that they moved restlessly on the dusty path.
Her height had always been one of the things that he had liked most about being with her. The fact that he only had to bend his head just a little to meet her eye to eye had been a delight. The way that her mouth was just inches away from his when he did so had been a new and enjoyable experience after having to almost stoop in order to kiss the other women he had had relationships with.
Those eyes were what he remembered most about her in the past. The clear, bright blue that had seemed to reflect the colour of the sky on a summer’s day when she smiled, or sparkled in amusement like the warm waters of the lake that surrounded this private island. At other times they had flashed in deliberate provocation when she had thrown a challenge at him. And then at other, very different times darkened into cloudy sensuality, heavy lids drooping into an almost sleepy look when all the time he knew that she had never been further from sleep. That her senses were on high alert, her body warming with awakening desire, her…
No!
With a brutal mental effort he caught his thoughts back from the dangerous path they were on. They threatened to scramble his ability to think, heating his blood and sending his brain into meltdown at just the memories.
That was the way she had caught him the first time around. That was never ever going to happen again. Never, damn it.
‘So now…’ his voice was rough with the effort of control ‘…I’ve waited long enough. I want an explanation and I want it fast.’
For a couple of seconds Lucy’s mind hazed over as she struggled to find the words with which to answer him. Once again that warning voice sounded in her head and she acknowledged the fact that she couldn’t let Ricardo see into the real depths of her heart. To do so would be to make herself too vulnerable, too exposed and defenceless. And she knew that, hating her as he did, Ricardo would take great delight in using her deepest need against her. He would exploit the overwhelming longing to see her baby again like a weapon and he could hurt her terribly that way, wrenching her heart into so many little pieces that it would be impossible to put it back together again.
‘Lucia…’
Her name was a warning, a command and a threat all rolled into one and simply hearing it made her mouth dry in panic so that she had to swallow long and hard in order to find the strength to answer him.
‘I…’ she began, but he had already started to speak again, too impatient, too angry to wait for her to find the words.
‘Just tell me why you are here and what you want!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve wasted too long on you when I have better things to do.’
‘Better things like what?’ Lucy challenged, stung by his dismissive tone. ‘Signing more contracts? Making more millions? Or perhaps you have some hot babe waiting for you…’
The words shrivelled on her tongue as the image that they conjured up scorched her brain. She struggled to try to force away the memory of Ricardo in bed, as she had seen him so many times during their brief marriage, his jet-black hair ruffled and his bronzed skin dark against the whiteness of the sheets. She couldn’t allow herself to remember how it had been. To do so would destroy what little was left of her self control and she knew that if Ricardo spotted just the slightest chink in her carefully protective armour then he would pounce.
But she had reacted too slowly. He’d already seen it and he had no hesitation in taking advantage of it.
‘What’s the matter, cara?’ he drawled cynically. ‘You’re not jealous, surely?’
‘What would I have to be jealous about?’
‘What, indeed? After all, you were the one who declared that our marriage was over, and then walked out.’
Leaving your baby behind. He didn’t actually say the words but he didn’t have to. It was as if they hung there between them, big and dark and carved from ice.
