Olivia Gates Bestseller Collection 2012 (24 page)

He ached to stop this, to spare her reliving her anguish. But he felt she’d refuse to abandon the subject. She more than wanted to tell him. It felt as if she needed to. He wanted to give her anything she needed. He asked quietly, “How?”

“Sh-she had rheumatoid arthritis. A severe condition. Then, during a regular checkup, she was diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. She was dead within two months.”

“You were with her when she passed away?”

She nodded. “She didn’t live here with me, because her condition deteriorated whenever she left the Mediterranean climate. I went to her every minute I could. When we knew there was no hope of remission, she wanted to live at home. I wanted to be the one to take care of her, so I moved into her villa. I’d taken paramedic courses and administered the palliative measures that were all that could be done until…until the end.”

“You had medical supervision during that time?”

She bit her lip, hard. “Her doctor was on call and two nurses came twice a day to check on my measures.”

“And they found everything to their satisfaction.”

“It was easy to get it right. There wasn’t much to be done.”

“Yet you’re still afraid you messed up those simple measures, didn’t give the mother you loved—who trusted you to take care of her during her last days—the best care.”

He saw shock rip through her, as if he’d reached inside and yanked out her heart. Then, to his horror, her face crumpled, her teary eyes spilling over. “Sometimes I wake at night crying,
terrified I gave her a wrong painkiller dose, that she was in agony and bearing it as usual, that I made her make the wrong decision in going home. That she died suffering because of me.”

Battling their physical need was one thing. But
this
need, for solace, he was powerless against. He hadn’t offered or sought comfort since childhood. He had to offer it now, seek it. To and from her.

He exploded to his feet, came around to her, pulled her up.

The moment she filled his arms, it was as if things were uprooted inside him. Separateness. Seclusion.

This.
He’d been waiting for this. This woman. This connection. And he’d never known he’d been waiting.

She lay her head against his heart and trembled. He stroked her hair as he’d longed to from the first moment. It was beyond anything his imagination had spun. And so was what he felt for her. He wanted her to let go, give him all her resurrected misery to bear. He wanted her to pour out the rest. He was certain she’d never unburdened herself.

He prodded her to give him all. “Why did your father take you to Sardinia when his business collapsed? Was he going home?”

“No.” She sniffed, stirred, her eyes beseeching him to resume normalcy. He complied, let her go, somehow, seated her, went back to his chair, signaled for Giancarlo to serve the main course.

She stalled, tasting her lobster in lime butter sauce, asking Giancarlo about the recipe. When she ran out of delaying tactics, was in control again, she began talking. “Dad had a friend who asked him to relocate us there so he could help, which he couldn’t do effectively if we lived thousands of miles away.”

“And did he? Help?”

“Above and beyond. He paid off Dad’s debts, tried endlessly to put him back on his feet. But no matter what he did, Dad kept spiraling downward. This friend even took care of us after he died, financed my education until I graduated.”

“And you didn’t like that. Even though you liked the man.”

“God, how do you keep working out how I feel? Do you read minds?” She groaned. “But of
course
you do. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” Before he could tell her it was only her he was so attuned to, she went on. “Yeah, I love him. But I hated feeling so helpless, so indebted. I worked, paid my rent and expenses, but he was adamant about not letting me get a tuition loan. I only accepted when he promised he’d let me pay him back.”

“But he was only humoring you so you’d accept.”

“Your insight is uncanny, isn’t it? You realized at once what I only realized when I got a great paying job and demanded to repay him only for him to—surprise—refuse to take a cent.”

“But you drilled your way into making him take it,
giusto?
”

“
Assolutamente giusto
…dead right. I bet he finally took the money so he’d hear the end of it. Not that that was the end of it. When my mom finally gave me a real idea of the magnitude of our family’s debt to him, I became consumed with the need to repay it all, so I’d feel free, and she would, too.”

“And I bet you managed to pay it all back.”

Her lashes fluttered down again. “Eventually, yes.”

“And that cost you. What did it cost you,
bellissima?
”

Her lips twisted in something too much like self-loathing. “Marrying the worst possible man.”

The world stopped. His heart followed. “You’re
married?
”

Her eyes slammed back to his, enormous with alarm and agitation. “
No.
I’m divorced. Six years ago now.
Grazie a Dio.
”

His heart attempted to restart, lurched and clanged against the insides of a chest that felt lined with thorns. “Was he rich?”

She winced. “Filthy.”

“Like me?”

“Uh, no. Your wealth transcends filthiness into obscenity.”

He couldn’t reciprocate her tremulous attempt to lighten things up. “You married him so he’d repay your family’s debts?”

“Actually, it was his idea. I was his PA and he heard me on the phone with my mom and used it as another pressure tactic.”

“He needed to? You weren’t attracted to him?”

“I felt nothing beyond unease that I couldn’t reciprocate his interest. But the job was great, so I kept hoping he’d find someone else. He didn’t, kept pointing out that I didn’t, either, that maybe I can’t feel…passion, which was okay because love stories never end well, anyway. I began to think he was right, as I knew nothing of what makes a relationship work or what a man who’d make a good husband was like. Compared to my father, he seemed like the essence of stability. And he made a solid case for a marriage between us built on mutual respect and realistic expectations.”

He barely stopped himself from snarling. “He conned you.”

“Oh, no. I decided to disregard my reservations, my lack of feelings for him, followed the lure of paying off my family’s debts in one chunk. I dug my own grave by being so mercenary.”

He snarled now. “You were nothing of the sort.
He
was the conniving bastard. If he felt
anything
for you, he would have freed you from debt and left it up to you to take him or not.”

“That would have only transferred my debt to him, and I would have felt honor-bound to marry him anyway.”

“He could have made it clear that there would have been no debt, or offered that you repay it in installments.”

“I did insist on including the condition in the prenups that our funds be separate and whatever he loaned me I’d return.”

“And he pounced on those terms,” he bit off. “You were what? Twenty? Twenty-one? And how old was he?”

“I was twenty-three. He was thirty-nine. And a widower.”

“He
did
con you. He convinced you to consider it a business deal in which pros outweigh cons, pretended he was satisfied with that. Until he got his hands on you.” Her shrug was loud with concession. He wanted to slam his fists down on the table. “And he didn’t pay off your debts.”

“How did you…? Oh, OK. I did say I married the worst man.”

“Actually, you said paying your debt cost you marrying said man. Most would assume that he did pay it. But I’d bet my fortune he didn’t. I know that because I know users, and that man was beyond that. He kept after you to break your resistance, but instead of building anticipation as he pursued you, he built up antipathy, planned to wreak vengeance on you as soon as he had you in his power.” He caught her hand, pressed it. “I only wish to God the extent of his aggression was the passive breaking of the pact he never meant to keep. But he didn’t stop there, did he?” She shook her head. “He abused you. Verbally, mentally.” The last word seemed to cut him as it came out. “Sexually.”

She stared at him again as if he’d torn her open and looked inside, distress brimming with the shock of exposure, with the misplaced shame of the victim.

At last she gave a choking gulp. A mortified nod admitted his insight. “I bought his excuses, his blame, for four months. I didn’t love him, he was frustrated, yadda yadda. Then he…he…”

“He hit you.”

She lurched. Her chest heaved. With a sharp inhalation, she muttered, “He put me in the hospital.”

D
urante had never considered himself a violent man.

Now, as he stared down at her bent head, murderous aggression took hold of his every nervous transmission. Need boiled his blood—to defend her in retrospect, to avenge her, to torture and cripple that vermin who’d hurt her.

Words left his lips in a vicious staccato. “Tell me you reported him and he’s now serving time.”

“Uh, no…actually, I didn’t.” He heard something rumbling, vaguely realized the sound was issuing from him. She rushed in to add, “But he didn’t get the chance to come near me again. I started divorce proceedings before I even reached the hospital.”

He glared at her, his brain seeming to expand in the confines of his skull with the brutal buildup of anger, the inability to vent it. At least not yet. He
would
pay that man back.

She suddenly shut her eyes. “Okay, let’s rewind and replay before I dig a hole to Malaysia. I made it all sound so pathetic and self-pitying, and that isn’t how I see my life. I’ve had it
way better than most people. Despite my father’s problems, so many things, starting with my mother and our benefactor, provided me with a secure and reasonably happy childhood. I had a great time at boarding school and college, and my marriage, ugliness and all, lasted only four months and I own up to my role in it. I’ve established my own company and I loved every second of exploring and achieving so much on the way. My mother died, but I’m thankful she didn’t suffer long and that I had such an incredible friend and parent for so long. So…I hope I haven’t caused you to reach your whining tolerance level.”

She was making light of her ordeals, and,
maledizione,
meaning it. The expectedness of her last words awoke his humor, which he thought an insult to the suffering she’d related. But her come-on, laugh-with-me expression forced him to submit.

He coughed a distressed laugh. “You sent my sense of perspective levels through the roof, after they’d dwindled to trace elements. You forced me to revise how I perceive my own life. Seems I’ve been guilty of letting my…issues rule my mind-set.”

She shook her head, teasing radiating from her heavenly eyes. “I thought higher beings like you had global obstacles and dilemmas and crises, but nothing so petty as ‘issues.’”

He gave a grunt laden with self-disgust. “Leave it to you to underline how oblivious and tiny and self-indulgent it all is.”

She chuckled. “Anytime.”

He reached out across the table, took her hand. He needed to be connected to her as he made his own confessions. “My experience with my mother reflects yours with your father. She died five years ago, but I too was eleven when I started to realize I was losing her. It was then that I set out to detach myself, that I learned that no one is guaranteed to be there for me. I’ve become so comfortable being disconnected, so driven and distracted, that I no longer notice all the good that fills my life.”

Her other hand descended to his, imbuing him with a calm
that was previously unknown to him, a restfulness to mirror the compassion that filled her eyes. “She suffered depression, too?”

He’d never discussed this, never given what his mother had suffered a name, not even with his siblings. He needed to talk about it now, with her, needed to name what had taken his mother away a piece every day, look it full in the face instead of evading it and having it invade far more of him instead.

“I think she was bipolar. Severely so.”

“So it’s true. No one is exempt. My father, a man who had everything, your mother, a queen with the world at her feet, both prisoners to something so dark and inescapable inside them.”

Pressure built behind his eyes as cold outrage at the injustice of it all gave way to the empathy flowing between them in sweeping currents. He surrendered to the release of sharing, of having another fully appreciate and understand.

Suddenly, urgency stained her gaze. Everything inside him became primed to defend, to contain. He had no tolerance for her distress, he was discovering. “What is it,
bellissima?
Tell me.”

She grimaced. “It’s nothing. It’s…” She stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “What the hell. I’ve put my foot in it too much already to get delicate at this late stage. I was just wondering if…if you’ve ever wondered if you have that seed of sourceless desperation and instability inside you?”

He stiffened with yet another jolt at how in tune she was with him, sensing fears that never came into focus, but cast their darkness over his existence nevertheless.

He let his counter-question acknowledge her insight just as it expressed his concern for her. “Do you?”

“Only since my mother died. I finally wondered if I’ve never been able to be close to others because I had something lurking inside me, because I subconsciously felt that emotional involvement would raise the chances that it would manifest.”

“And what’s your verdict?”

“I don’t know. What complicates matters and stops me from
coming up with anything conclusive is the fact that it wasn’t a struggle not to be close. I wasn’t even tempted until…”

She stopped. He couldn’t anymore. He cupped her cheek as he’d been aching to. “Until tonight.”

Warmth surged from his gut when she acquiesced, to the truth of his statement, to his hold, letting her flesh mold to his palm.

And he had to ask. “Did you ever wonder if whatever consumed your father wasn’t sourceless, after all?”

She nuzzled into his caress. “I guess
sourceless
is the wrong word to use, what with all the physiological and social factors involved in the development of such a major disorder. I guess it’s the out-of-proportion, ever-compounding emotional response that becomes so far removed from whatever triggered it, making it seem as if there were no origin.” She sighed, singeing his flesh with the heat of her breath. “As I said, I’ll never know what started my father down that spiral.”

“I know what started my mother down hers. It was my father.”

Such shock, such pain flooded her eyes at his muttered bitterness that he groaned, cupped her head, needing to alleviate her distress.

She reached out to his face, her hand trembling in a caress that assuaged some of the darkness festering inside him.

She finally said, “I’m so sorry you believe that. I can’t imagine how painful it is to think one of your parents was responsible for the other’s deterioration. It’s the only thing that holds me together, that I believe that there was no one to blame.”

He rose, bent across the table. He gazed into her misty eyes for a heart-thudding moment, then descended, pressed his lips to hers in a brief, barely leashed kiss.
“Grazie, bellissima.”

Her moan reverberated inside him. His fingers fisted in her tresses, spilling another moan from her lips, detonating charges of sensation across his skin. He withdrew before temptation overwhelmed him, sat down. His gaze pored over her, the image of her beauty burned onto his retinas.

Such beauty. Totally her own, following no one else’s ideas or rules, including his own before he’d set eyes on her. Beyond physical, with so many levels to it—levels he kept discovering with no end in sight. She was short-circuiting the civilized man he’d been certain he was, unleashing a primal male who wanted to possess, plunder. But it also made that same male want to protect, to pamper.

She inclined her head at him. “You can sing, can’t you?”

He blinked at the question—the statement, really. He didn’t even think to inquire about such a detour’s origin and intent. He just flowed with her along the wave of unpredictability, of freedom from rules and expectations.

“Can’t everyone,” he said. “to some degree or another?”

“Uh, no. Not according to my singing teacher, another suffering soul who told me she had nightmares of waking up in a world where everyone had my same singing ability, making her profession obsolete and putting her permanently out of a job.”

He frowned. “
My
teacher criticized my intentional truancy. He wouldn’t have disparaged my performance or made me feel responsible for it had it been a limitation on my part. That inconsiderate wretch who taught you had no business telling a child something like that, just because your talents didn’t meet her standards and your progress didn’t conform to her timetable.”

She beamed him such a look, full of mischief and embarrassment, that he wondered where he found the will to remain where he was. “Uh, I wasn’t exactly a child when the brilliant idea of taking singing lessons sprouted in my mind three years ago. And I did test her last tune-sensitive nerve by insisting on singing along with Whitney Houston and Maria Callas. The comparison was agonizing even to my own self-forgiving ears. But I have a feeling you can hold your own with the Elvises and Pavarottis of the world.”

He raised one eyebrow, goading her into telling him more. “Hmm, I wonder how you came by that conviction.”

Her grin grew impish and indulgent at once. “In your case, fishing will get you whales. You reaffirm that conviction every time you open your mouth and unleash that honed weapon you have for a voice.
Uomo cattivo
that you are, you unrepentantly use it to its full destructive effect. It’s very easy for me to imagine you taking your mastery over it to its highest conclusion.”

Stimulation revved higher. He let himself revel in the gratification of their repartee, challenged, fishing for even bigger whales. “I’ve heard many superlative singers who don’t sound special when they talk.”

“Sure, but I bet that’s not the case with you.”

“So what are you after? An admission? An audition?”

Her dimples flashed at him. “The first would be great, so I can gloat over my uncanny acumen. The second, alas, would be so much better even than having your ear for an hour—or a week—that I think it would warrant something larger than a ten-million-dollar bid.”

He reached for her hand and placed it on her fork. “I have a third option. Let’s finish this meal, and I’ll offer you something better than either at no cost but your willingness to accept it.” She sat forward, anticipation ablaze on her face. And he offered something he’d never imagined offering to anyone, ever. “A serenade.”

Darkness was melting under dawn’s advance, the horizon starting to simmer with colors, the rest of the sky’s blackness bleaching to indigo, the stars blinking out one by one.

Durante had taken his
bellissima
to the bow, initiating a match of quips around the
Titanic
movie parallel. Merriment had dissolved with the night into a silence filled with serenity and companionship. Soon it seemed as natural and needed as breathing for her to fill his embrace, just as she seemed to need to be contained there.

For the next hour, as the magic of the night segued into the
new spell of dawn, he encompassed her, her back to his front, his arms crisscrossed around her midriff, his legs parted to accommodate her, imbuing her with his heat, protecting her from the chill of the breeze. She accepted him as her shield, surrendered to his cosseting and to that of the wind on her face as the yacht sailed toward the sun.

In this proximity, there was no disguising the extent of his arousal. Not that he tried to. He’d admitted his reaction to her minutes into their first conversation. His body had made its own admissions to her the moment he gathered her to him, his erection obvious through the confines of clothes and control.

Her own state must be as acute. The only movements she seemed capable of were the spasmodic pressing of her hands on the railing, and trembling. Was she trying not to press back into him as hard as he wanted to grind into her?

But he wouldn’t fracture this intensity, this purity of feeling for anything. This was too rare to rush, too precious to squander even for the ecstasy they were certain to find in each other. Not yet. They had to have this first.

It was magnificent, sharing this with her, experiencing each other without words after the liveliness of their verbal communication. Now the only sounds that permeated the whispers and whistles of the wind and the splash of the water were his groans as he pressed his lips into her neck, against her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, her moans as her tremors spiked with every press and glide. He felt as if every inch of her was made to click into every inch of him, that the eight or nine inches he had on her five foot six or seven had been bestowed on him so he’d envelop her like this.

Then she turned her head, turned up eyes glittering with the wonder of what they’d shared since they’d met twelve hours or a forever ago, whispered,
“Ora, per favore.”

Now, please.
Indeed. So this was it. The moment of truth.

He’d never sung in another’s presence. Not since primary
school, anyway. And he was about to sing to this enchanted creature who’d appeared out of nowhere and made him forget everything, his exhaustion, his wariness. The world.

He let his arms tighten around her for a moment before he stepped away. Then he went down on one knee.

A sharp gasp tore from her. Then, with another distressed sound, she swooped down, tried to pull him up.

He tangled his hands into her hair, tugged gently, brought her down for another of those fleeting, tormenting kisses.