Sins of the Past (2 page)

‘You’ve been sent here for a specific purpose, and I expect you to honour that purpose. Otherwise I shall have no hesitation in telling your very hard-nosed employer that I shall be taking my business elsewhere.’

A car engine starting up in the courtyard below the window broke the small shocked silence that stretched between them.

His secretary leaving. Leaving her alone with him, Riva decided, with an inexplicable little shudder.

Her blood started pounding, a thundering drum-roll in her ears. Of course. He was more valuable to Redwoods than she was, she realised. And if she refused to work with him, and he reported her lack of co-operation, then it would be her the firm would let go for losing such a prestigious client—not the other way around.

The green eyes looking up into the dark ebony of his sparked with accusation. ‘You mean … you’d get me fired?’ Her voice was strung with anger, disbelief.

His shoulder moved again in that subtly careless gesture. ‘You’d get yourself fired, Riva. Or not. The choice is yours.’

And if she made the wrong one, refused to do exactly as he said, he would destroy her. Just as he had destroyed her dear and oh, so vulnerable mother, because without his cruel intervention Chelsea Singleman would almost surely be alive today!

‘Go back into the sitting room,’ he ordered, in no doubt of the power he wielded.

Reminding herself of how hard she’d worked for this job,
and of all she had to lose if she walked away from him, Riva thrust past him again, steeling herself against the sensations that assailed her this time when he didn’t move to allow her an easy route back and once again her arm grazed the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Do that again and I’ll take it that you’re inviting more than just my custom. And we both know what happened the last time you did that, don’t we?’

He had used her, ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly, employing that lethal mix of easy charm and magnetism to snare her. She had been too na?ve and inexperienced to recognise the calculated game he was playing, only realising it afterwards with her pride and her dignity in shreds!

‘I didn’t invite your custom, Damiano. You’re forcing it on me.’

‘Like you’ve probably convinced yourself it was me forcing you … what was it? … four and a half—nearly five years ago?’

Surprisingly, the vital images his words conjured up still had the power to make her blood race, the memory of those warm, skilled hands on her body making her cheeks flame with humiliating shame.

Because she had been a willing conquest beneath those practised hands of his, mindlessly inviting their intimate caresses, mistaking tenderness for affection, his cold, calculated seduction for something much, much more.

Acridly she murmured, ‘No. That was nothing more than my own stupidity.’

That dark head tilted slightly, and a humourless smile still played around the corners of his devastating mouth.

‘You could scarcely blame me for wanting to get at the truth.’

‘The truth? Hah! You wouldn’t recognise the truth if it uprooted itself and tried to wrap itself around your throat!’

He smiled coldly at her graphic metaphor. ‘I didn’t have to. All the evidence spoke for itself.’

Because she had lied to him—and big-time!—covering up even the most personal facts about herself. But only because she had been embarrassed, so unbearably ashamed. He’d been angry with her afterwards, but more, she’d suspected, with himself. Perhaps finding out he’d used a virgin in his plan to destroy Chelsea Singleman didn’t sit too comfortably on his conscience. If he had one! Riva thought vehemently, although she doubted it.

Green eyes glittering with a host of complex emotions, she breathed accusingly, ‘You ruined my mother’s life.’

Damiano’s mouth moved grimly. ‘Because I was instrumental in preventing her from marrying my uncle? I would have been guilty of neglecting my duty if I hadn’t. Anyway, I’m sure she got over it. Women like Chelsea—and I’m afraid to say like you,
cara
—aren’t left grieving too long over one lost opportunity. If she hasn’t done so yet, I’m sure that before long she’ll find some other rich … what do you English call it? …
sucker
who will fall prey to her devious charms.’

Pain as sharp as a whiplash cut into Riva’s heart, and it took all her self-control to stop herself lunging forward and knocking the disdain right off that hard, arrogant face.

‘My mother’s dead!’

His obvious shock was a picture she would have relished if she hadn’t felt so raw inside.

The sound of a man whistling for his dog in the quiet lane beyond the courtyard filtered through the open window—the only thing intruding on the loaded silence.

‘I’m sorry.’

She’d have to admit that he looked it, if she hadn’t known him to be incapable of such selfless emotion.

‘No, you’re not.’ How could he even say that when he had contributed so directly to the woman’s inevitable slide into the despair that had finally killed her—and at such a brutally young age?

‘What happened?’

‘What do you care?’

His features hardened at her lack of response. ‘Tell me.’

She didn’t want to. It hurt too much to talk about her once effervescent young mother—who had insisted on Riva calling her Chelsea—especially in front of the one man she had hoped never to see again.

His whole demeanour, however, commanded, and reluctantly she found herself yielding to the sway of his forceful personality by saying, ‘If you must know, it was an accidental overdose of drugs she’d been taking for depression.’ She had also been drinking too, although she didn’t tell him that. The doctors had said it was a lethal mix.

‘When?’

‘Just over a year ago.’

That firm mouth compressed. ‘As I said, I’m sorry.’

She gave a brittle little laugh. ‘Don’t be. After all, it wasn’t
your
fault she sank into depression after her wrecked engagement to the man she loved!’

‘You’re holding me responsible for that?’

‘If the cap fits.’

‘Unfortunately, Riva, it doesn’t.’ He glanced across to the window, his clean-shaven yet darkly shadowed jaw a statement to his hard and potent virility. ‘You know full well why Marcello broke off his engagement to your mother,’ he stated with dogmatic cruelty. ‘She was investigated and found wanting. You both were.’

‘Yes, but only by you!’

‘Because Marcello was too bewitched by a pretty face and a pair of dancing blue eyes to see beyond the superficially sweet smiles and the cleverly crafted cover-up.’

‘Which you weren’t, of course?’

‘Hardly.’ His jaw-line hardened as he expounded. ‘And, while my uncle might have been treated to a watered-down version of the truth from your mother, he wasn’t the one chosen to be the recipient of the most blatant lies.’

He was talking about her, and she cringed now at the elaborate story she had woven around herself, around her
background and her upbringing, shuddering from her naïveté in believing he would never find out. Nothing, though, could reverse that, and she could never tell him exactly why she had lied.

‘Now, if it’s all the same to you, you won’t mind if we get on and do the job you’ve been sent here to do.’ His outstretched arm demanded that she precede him out of the room.

Glad to let their conversation drop, Riva complied.

Watching the way she moved as he directed her back downstairs to the room he wanted redesigning, he couldn’t help noticing the proud little tilt to her pointed chin and the slim back held straight as a rod beneath the soft jersey top.

She had spirit. He had to hand her that.

He caught a waft of her perfume, flowery and fresh, and felt a kick in his loins that shook him to the very core of his being.

With that fiery hair, that milky skin, and breasts that certainly couldn’t be called buxom, she wasn’t the tall, blonde, leggy type he usually gravitated towards, but there was something about her … something that attracted him even as it irritated him. He was having to acknowledge that he still wanted the arty little creature, as he had wanted her from the moment he had first laid eyes on her all those years ago in his uncle’s villa.

When Marcello had informed him that he was getting married, he’d been naturally delighted, he remembered. His uncle—his late father’s brother—had been a widower for more than ten years. But Damiano couldn’t deny that when he had arrived at the villa at Marcello’s invitation, to meet his proposed new bride, he had been shocked to discover a woman half Marcello’s age with a fully-grown daughter in tow.

At first he had thought they were sisters. On first name terms, and so alike in build and stature, with their loose floral
skirts and their long straight hair—except that, unlike the vibrant redhead, the other had been a platinum blonde.

He had been dubious about them from the start. Who were they? Where had they come from, with their joss-sticks and their beads and their home-made sandals, which the younger of the two had often preferred to discard? And what woman, still only in her thirties—as he’d discovered the older one was—would want to tie herself to a handsome, yet nevertheless elderly widower? Unless she was attracted less to his warmth and generosity of spirit than to his status as head of one of the oldest families in Italy, with all the money and influence that went with it?

That Marcello had plucked them both from a market stall selling hand-made jewellery in some English seaside resort had only fuelled Damiano’s need to find out more about them, since his uncle had been too infatuated with his new fiancée even to want to know or care.

He had put his own staff on the job, and set about pumping the more reserved though equally—as he’d believed—worldly daughter for all the information he could get out of her, while maintaining his resolve not to let her get to him in any way.

Her father, she’d told him, had been an officer in the Royal Navy. A brave man, decorated for services to his country, who’d been away from home a lot while she had been growing up. Chelsea, she had convinced him, could have used her talents as a commercial artist, but her husband had always frowned on her having her own career, believing that it was demeaning for the wife of a man in his position to have to work. He had given Riva the best possible education, she had told him with undisguised admiration, but then he’d been tragically killed in a car crash while on leave. He had left her and her mother well provided for, she had gone on to assure him, although the lovely house where they’d lived had been far too big for the two of them after he’d died.

She had given him more—far more—than he could ever have expected, he thought grimly, and not just information.

A nerve twitched in his jaw as he thought about it, because even now it still rankled with him that he had deflowered a virgin in his determination to get at the truth. Yet he had salved his conscience by assuring himself that in going to bed with him the scheming little witch must have had a very marked agenda of her own.

He shuddered now as he thought of the consequences that falling for her charade of experience and sophistication could have brought down on his head, because he had been proved right by the team he had paid to check out both her and her mother.

They were drop-outs, protest marchers—troublemakers, in his opinion—and, as he’d suspected all along, just a pair of gold-diggers. Nothing Riva had told him had held a gram of truth.

Born illegitimate to parents who had never bothered to marry, she had come from a grossly under-privileged area, attending only basic, run-of the-mill state schools. Her mother, far from being a potential career woman, had found it hard holding down even the most menial job to pay the rent—or not, as the fancy took her—on a changing assortment of cheap, downmarket digs. The closest her father had come to being a ‘naval man'—as both Chelsea and Riva had referred to him—was when he’d been employed for a time unloading barges, and the only uniform he had worn had been inside one of Her Majesty’s prisons, where he’d been serving a well-earned sentence for fraud! The one scrap of authenticity in the whole story was that he
had
been killed in a car accident—the year after his release and under the influence of drink!

That he had saved his uncle from the clutches of such a dubious pair of women was something Damiano would continue to be thankful for. He regretted what had happened to Chelsea Singleman.
Per amor di Dio!
He would hardly be human if he didn’t! But it was galling to realise that if she had married
his uncle, who had sadly died after a short illness eighteen months ago, and Marcello had left everything to his grieving widow, then because of Chelsea’s unfortunate death since, this little opportunist would now be enjoying the benefits of all Marcello D’Amico’s wealth!

‘So what do you think?’ His voice was harsh from the turn his thoughts had taken as he watched her surveying what the studio had informed her was to be redesigned as a crafts and hobbies room. ‘We were imagining something with more of a Continental feel, perhaps. Are you up to the task?’

Riva took in the rather drab décor and the few pieces of furniture—mostly covered in dust sheets, apart from a tall bookcase and a large rectangular table that stood against one wall. It was a room obviously designed as a private sanctuary, tucked away at the back of the house. She could see that someone—perhaps the woman herself—had already tried to add a classical feel and fallen far short of what they had been intending. The only redeeming feature was the pair of floor-to-ceiling doors that looked out onto a quiet terrace—although some of the paving stones were broken. There was a pleasing aspect of the old manor, though, she noted, through the specimen trees.

Meeting that hostile masculine gaze now, she said, ‘Are you asking me—or telling me?’

‘I take it it’s within your capabilities?’ he pursued, ignoring her barbed question, and didn’t fail to notice the way her tight little mouth compressed.

He had her where he wanted her—jumping to his command—and she knew it, he realised. He derived a rather guilty pleasure from that.

‘What does your grandmother do?’ Grudgingly she moved away into the centre of the room, studying its lay-out, its dimensions, its position—whether or not it faced the sun. There was nothing, though, not even in the empty bookcases, she realised, dropping her bag down on the table, to give her any clue as to the woman’s character.