Sins of the Past (13 page)

Suddenly, knowing him as she did, she couldn’t let go of the idea that it had all been just a ploy to get her there. But why? she wondered. Just to get even with her? By trying to
seduce her and make a fool of her for the way she had behaved with him in the past? She thought of how uninterested he had seemed that first morning, when she’d been trying to get a grip on what his grandmother wanted, and the constant changes to her proposals that had kept her coming back.

‘Are you sure there was even a job to begin with?’ she found herself flinging at him bitterly. ‘Or have you just been manipulating me for your own amusement?’

‘If I have then it would hardly be more than you deserve, would it?’ he suggested, in a tone that was unrelenting, still flaying her for keeping the knowledge of his son from him as she had. ‘I would never have found out the truth, would I? If it hadn’t been for my determination in bringing you under my roof?’

‘Don’t you mean under your thumb?’ she shot back waspishly.

‘Still fighting me, Riva?’ he mocked, though there was no humour in his eyes. ‘That’s going to have to stop in front of our child.’

He was right, but she couldn’t contain herself, knowing he had done nothing but use her to satisfy his ego since the day she had first knocked on his door.

‘And what do you mean—
your
roof?’ she queried pointedly as it sank it. ‘I thought it was your grandmother’s. I bet you don’t even have a grandmother—let alone a French one!’

‘A figure of speech,’ he responded, sounding impatient, but didn’t confirm nor negate her statement regarding his relative. ‘For heaven’s sake, Riva! Pull yourself together! We have a son, and he should be your first consideration.’

Hot colour suffused her cheeks as she squared her shoulders against this hunk of seething masculinity, who even now still managed to look like the object of every woman’s fantasy with those casual clothes emphasising his perfect masculine body and his black hair blowing wildly in the wind.

‘He is—and has been for the past four years—I don’t need you to tell me!’ she shot back, affronted by his suggestion that

Ben was anything but her first priority as she glanced towards the little boy, playing a few metres away. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t alter the fact that I’m employed by Redwoods—not you,’ she reminded him, glad to be able to use that lever to get herself off the hook. ‘You might think you’re their most influential client, but I’m working with a team on other important assignments, not just on a bogus job for you! Olivia’s never going to agree to me abandoning my work just so I can go swanning off to Italy!’

‘You presume too much,
cara,’
he said, with that same derisive note in his voice he’d used earlier. ‘Especially where I’m concerned.’

She frowned, unclear as to what he meant. Not that she cared!

‘You haven’t any right to start acting so possessively,’ she protested. ‘Until now we’ve managed perfectly well on our own.’

His retort came back like whiplash. ‘And whose fault is that?’

Biting her lip, Riva knew she couldn’t say anything. She had denied him his paternal rights and now he was getting his own back.

‘As for you,’ he breathed with a dangerous softness, ‘you’ll do it, Riva. You owe it to Ben, if not to me.’

It hadn’t fully sunk in yet that he was accepting responsibility for his child when all along she had believed the opposite would be true. She should have realised, though, that he was too proud, where family issues were concerned, to do anything other than his duty. The way he had cruelly exposed her and Chelsea Singleman in the belief that he was rescuing his uncle was proof of that.

He was right, she thought. She did owe it to Ben—to both of them—to let them get to know each other, no matter how much she rebelled against the idea of going away with Damiano herself.

‘Is your passport up to date?’

She nodded in response to his curt demand, feeling a net closing around her.

‘Good,’ he said as the little boy ran towards them with his mended toy, his face awash with pleasure. ‘We’ll be leaving before the week is out.’

T
HE
soft sand was warm between Riva’s bare toes, a creamy blanket stretching down to the turquoise sea.

When Damiano had said he was coming home, she had automatically assumed he meant to his home in Italy. It was for that reason—as well as on other equally disturbing grounds like the way his intense masculinity affected her, not to mention leaving her job—that she hadn’t wanted to go. Italy was Chelsea, Marcello. And painful pathways that she didn’t want to journey down. Memories. Excruciating. Bittersweet. She should have known, though, that a man as wealthy as Damiano would probably have homes all over the world.

This ocean paradise and the large white Colonial house shaded by verdant foliage, set against a forested hillside above its own semi-circular cove, were neutral territory.

Perhaps he had given consideration to that, she thought, in bringing her and Ben here to the Seychelles, so that he could make these first days of getting to know his son as easy as possible for them all. Because there were no ghosts here.

They had been here three days now, and with Ben playing in the garden with his new friend, the five-year-old grandson of Françoise and André, the Seychellois couple who looked after the house, Riva had grabbed the chance of a few moments alone. Even so, this beautiful location, with its clear blue skies and dreamy white beach, weren’t doing much to ease her anxieties—particularly about her job.

‘I need some time off,’ she had told Olivia, two days before Damiano had whisked her and Ben out here. ‘I know it’s rather short notice, but I’ve got some personal problems to sort out.’ And then, feeling that she owed her boss some explanation—as well as being keen to safeguard the job she had worked so hard for—she had come clean and told the woman that she was having to sort some things out with Ben’s father, without actually spelling out who Ben’s father was.

‘Well, if you must—you must,’ Olivia had responded, not looking particularly pleased. ‘It’s just as well that you’ve been taken off the D’Amico job,’ she’d added—obviously already informed by Damiano that he was shelving the project, Riva realised, still piqued by the way he had used her, although she had refused to let it show. ‘Otherwise I might have taken a much dimmer view of the whole thing.’

Now, slipping onto one of a pair of matching sunbeds that a groundsman had put there earlier in the shade of the overhanging palm trees, Riva sat back against the pale padded cushions and, closing her eyes, tried to relax.

‘Dreaming of paradise, Riva?’

With her eyes shooting open, Riva felt her pulses start to throb.

Barefoot, and in light linen trousers, Damiano was coming across the sand, his bronze chest exposed by the equally light shirt he’d left to blow open in the balmy wind.

‘I hardly need to when it’s within touching distance, do I?’ she sent up at him dryly as he drew level with her, and realised from the way his mouth twitched in response how he might be choosing to interpret what she meant. She turned her eyes quickly seaward, her cheeks aflame.

‘Now, is this not far better than being in the studio?’ he said, reminding her of the resistance she had initially put up to coming here with him as he dropped down on to the other sunbed beside her. ‘Or better than taking calls from impatient clients complaining about things which are totally out of your control?’ He was leaning back against the lounger and
suddenly seemed too close for comfort. Whoever had put the beds out must have decided that their illustrious employer and the young woman he had brought with him would want to be within touching distance of each other, she realised, catching the lemony fragrance of the cologne he had used that morning, with the disturbing sensuality of his own personal scent.

‘Or dealing with those who just waste your time?’ Sarcasm laced her response, at the way he had engaged her just to satisfy his curiosity about her when he’d had no real intention of using her professional skills at all.

‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he drawled, donning the sunglasses he had taken from the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘At least it gave you the chance to test your imagination for a while, and I’m sure the experience you’ve had with me will have helped to stretch you a bit.’

Riva refrained from retorting that she could have done without any stretching from him. He’d probably choose to put a different slant on it just to unhinge her, she thought despairingly, wondering why every word they uttered seemed rife with sexual meaning.

‘And I don’t consider it wasted,’ he said, slipping his arm behind his head, his shirt falling open. ‘It’s been a fascinating experience for me, seeing what you can do.’

‘Really?’ It took all her will-power to drag her gaze from the gleaming musculature of his chest, with its crisp sprinkling of hair, and her throat was aching with the crazy longing to touch it. ‘Well, I’m glad I kept you …
fascinated,’
she underlined with a coolness that hid her disappointment and those other, more complex emotions she didn’t even want to think about. ‘And now that you’re done amusing yourself it’s a case of, “Don’t call us—we’ll call you"?’

‘Scusi?’
As it dawned what she meant, he laughed and caught her hand. ‘You’re so defensive,’ he breathed, above the soothing wash of the ocean.

There was a line of spaced rocks jutting out of the blue water, worn smooth by the surf-crested waves.

Fixing her gaze on one shiny boulder, so that she wouldn’t have to meet the heart-stopping symmetry of his features, she murmured, ‘You annihilate people, Damiano.’

The few moments’ silence that followed emphasised the shrill chirruping of some native bird in the lush foliage behind them.

‘Is that what I did, Riva? Annihilate you?’ The mellifluous note in his voice was as caressing as the warm wind that took a corner of the coloured beach towel she’d spread out on her lounger, lifting it playfully across her shoulder.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she uttered, absently pushing it back. ‘I’m made of much sterner stuff.’ Only she wasn’t, she thought hopelessly, scared by how vulnerable she was where he was concerned. In an attempt to hide how disconcerted he made her feel, she glanced over her shoulder towards the house.

It was where Damiano’s mother had grown up, she had learned on the plane on the way over—a magnificent house which, with its open architecture, high sloping ceilings and airy verandas, had on her arrival taken her breath away.

‘Is Ben inside?’ She had heard him earlier, caught his laughter above the deep resonance of Damiano’s as they kicked a ball around on the terrace. Already he was forming a strong attachment to his new-found dad.

‘Sì,’
he assured her, and, seeing her gaze still resting on the house, ‘What are you doing?’ he enquired after a few moments. ‘Redesigning the architecture?’

His amused remark jolted Riva out of her anxious speculation as to whether or not he might insist on an equal say in Ben’s upbringing. Or worse.

Consequently, in a voice that was as shaky as it was hostile, she told him, ‘If you think I’m wasting my time and effort doing anything else for you, you’re very much mistaken, Signore D’Amico.’

‘Oh, very formal.’ His mouth moved sexily even while he was mocking her. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t pout like that. It makes you far too desirable.’

‘Well …’ Her heart was thumping, but she thought it safer to ignore his disturbing remark. She told him, on a sigh that emphasised the depth of her frustration, ‘I had lots of great plans for my room.’ She’d come to think of her project at the Old Coach House as
her
room. ‘I don’t expect you would have considered them great, but I was excited by them.’

He shifted his position, angling his lithe body towards her. ‘I’m always interested in what excites you,
cara.’
The thumb that brushed her slightly pouting lower lip sent a dangerously delicious shiver along her spine.

‘I suppose to you it’s just some sort of joke?’ she castigated, still annoyed at the devious method he had used to get her under his roof, besides trying to deal with the other, more primal sensations that that simple touch had sent soaring through her blood.

‘No, it isn’t. Share your thoughts with me,’ he invited, looking surprisingly serious.

‘Why? So you can amuse yourself with me and while away a few more hours at my expense?’

‘If I wanted to amuse myself with you,
carissima,
it wouldn’t be in conversation.’

No, she thought, tingling from the sensuality in that deeply accented voice, knowing exactly what he’d meant.

She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses, but she could feel them touching her, feel their heat against the pale skin of her shoulders, penetrating the bright multi-coloured sarong she wore tied above her breasts, and her eyes were drawn to his wide mouth, with its full lower lip, her gaze dropping further to the satin contours of his bare bronze chest and beyond.

The air was alive with their mutual chemistries, so charged that she began to talk quickly, to try and ease the tension between them—gabbling at first, but then speaking more easily as she lost herself in her innovations and unique ideas. The classical fountain she had imagined outside on a mosaic terrace, the Greek theme that would have extended indoors.

He listened without interruption while she rambled on, her face aglow, her eyes shining with enthusiasm.

‘This talent of yours. It’s bone-deep, isn’t it?’ he said appreciatively, and for once those strongly sculpted features weren’t actually mocking her. ‘You come alive whenever you talk about it.’

‘Do I?’ No one had ever told her that before. Obviously not alive enough for him to actually let her put her skills into practice, she thought, biting back a further dig about it by asking instead, ‘Have you never been set on fire by something, Damiano? And before you say the obvious, I mean by something you’ve really wanted to do.’

‘Many times. Otherwise I couldn’t have carried my business to where I’m fortunate enough to find myself today.’

‘Of course.’ She made a resigned little gesture. ‘Stupid question.’