The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo (18 page)

She took a ragged, ravaging breath.

‘And to ensure I was docile and submissive I was given something to drink every night—something like roofies, I suppose. It turned everything into a kind of fog and I was so, so grateful. Because it blurred everything...everything that was going on...everything that was done to me...’

Her voice changed, he could hear it, and her gaze now followed the long, dark tunnel leading back into her past.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I had to wait. In a courtyard, on a terrace or a rooftop. I don’t remember too well.’ Her face furrowed. ‘I just remember that it was cold, and I was given some kind of wrap. And I used to look up and see stars. Stars that were very far away. I liked that. I liked that they were so far away...so far away from everything that I was doing...’

She stopped, and yet again her voice changed, becoming a kind of harsh whisper.

‘I wanted to be part of the heavens. I wanted to be taken up there—away from everything down here on the earth, away from everything that was happening to me. I wanted to be amongst the stars—as far away as they were. Because I could not
bear
what was happening.’

She swallowed. ‘Except it
was
happening...and I had to let it happen...or else my mother would die without seeing again the one place in the world where she had been happy, without getting to the one place in the world where she wanted to die—’

She stopped again, and this time she did not continue.

Rafael reached his hands down to her, taking both of hers so that her handbag fell to the floor, unregarded. He drew her up, still holding her hands.

‘I want you to understand something,’ he said. ‘Something that is very, very important for you to understand.’ He spoke carefully, because what he said now was the most important thing he would say in all his life. ‘We are judged, Celeste, not only by our acts, but by our reasons for those acts. It is the deed
and
the intent for that deed. Do you understand me? Do you understand?’

His voice was shaking with the immensity of what he had to get across, what he
had
to make her comprehend, even though she was looking at him with a deadened blankness in her eyes that was like a knife in his body.

‘It is because you did what you did not for yourself but for your dying mother that it is entirely and totally different! You forced yourself to do something that repelled you so much it traumatised you for years! It shut you in a prison of celibacy, cut you off from all normal relationships! That isn’t the reaction of someone who has no regrets because they don’t consider they did anything they didn’t
want
to do!’

He took a ragged breath, clasped his hands around the cusps of her shoulders. ‘To think that you stood here and compared yourself to Madeline! Insisted you were exactly the same! God Almighty—if you had only
told
me that night what you’ve told me now—what I had to find out for myself once my imbecilic brain had finally worked out what the
hell
was going on in your head! What had gone on in your life. Because if you had...’

His voice changed. Now it had a timbre in it that found its way into her nerveless body as she stood like a limp rag, scarcely able to keep standing without his hold on her.

‘If you had, then I would have done what I will do now, my most precious Celeste,’ he said.

And now his eyes were changing, too. The blaze of anger in them—anger at her silence, at his own unforgivable stupidity and blindness—was gone now, and in its place was not a fire, but a glow...a glow as warm as the palms of his hands curved over her shoulders.

‘I would have begged your forgiveness for not trusting you, not trusting everything I knew about you, not trusting everything we had together. I would have begged you, implored you, to come back to me.’

His eyes poured down into hers, reaching to her heart.

‘I would have begged you, implored you,’ he said softly, ‘to love me as I love you, as I always will love you, for your heart alone.’

He kissed her softly and cherishingly.

She looked up at him, not daring to believe. ‘I saw the revulsion in your eyes.’ Her voice was low, and shaken. ‘I saw it when you told me about Madeline. When I told you about myself.’

He looked down at her. ‘Do you see it now?’ he asked. ‘Do you see
anything
but love, Celeste?’ He shook his head. ‘You will never see it. Never see anything but love for all our days. What you did,’ he said, ‘took courage I doubt many could find, and I have for you, my most precious Celeste, only the deepest respect. I told you once, when I was condemning Madeline, that I would never condemn any woman who was driven into prostitution by desperation. Do you think you were different? Do you think you did it for any other reason than to give to your mother her dying wish?’ His gaze poured into hers. ‘What you did, you did as an act of love,’ he said.

He did not wait for her to answer. Waited only to see the darkness in her eyes finally start to clear. Letting back in the light of life. Of love.

Then, and only then, did he sweep her into his arms and hold her close, so very close, against his heart. Where he would keep her for ever.

She was weeping now, he could tell. Her thin body shuddered as he wrapped her against him. He let her weep, holding her safe in his arms. And when she was done and she lifted her head, her cheeks stained with tears, her eyes clinging to his just as her body clung to his, he looked down at her.

‘Shall we go now?’ he said, his voice still soft, still cherishing. ‘Shall we go together, as we shall be from now on—where we belong, with each other?’

He smoothed her hair, kissed her again, then loosed his arms and simply took her hand. He bent to pick up her handbag and gave it to her. Then he walked with her to the door and picked up her suitcase.

She looked at him, her heart beating...soaring... Soaring like a bird towards the heavens... Leaving the past behind—for ever, this time...

‘Where?’ she breathed.

Her eyes were wide—wide with hoping, with finally daring to believe. To believe everything he was telling her.

‘Into our future,’ he told her.

EPILOGUE

T
HE
WARM
BREEZE
lifted the fine netting of her veil. Through its misted folds Celeste could see the brilliant sunlit cobalt-blue of the Pacific. Feel the warmth of the sunshine on her face as she gazed towards the gazebo at the end of the pathway. Its position was perfect, framed by white bougainvillaea, enclosed in a little private glade from the rest of the gardens, and with the vista of the ocean behind it.

But it was not the gazebo that held her gaze. It was the man waiting for her.

Rafael—her beloved Rafael! Who had freed her with his love—freed her to love him as he, as she knew from every loving glance he gave her, loved her.

Her heart constricted. How much she loved him! How very, very much! He was looking back to her now, his dark eyes smiling with all the love in them that she had in hers for him. The priest was waiting for her and she started to walk forward, as tall and graceful as a lily in her wedding gown. Soft Hawaiian music played from hidden speakers and the scent of exotic blooms wafted to her.

She reached Rafael’s side and stood beside him, her heart singing with happiness. They had eyes only for each other. When the service began she gave her responses clear and low, as his were clear and resonant. She could feel her heart swell.

Then, at last, as the priest raised his hand in blessing of them both, Rafael’s mouth dipped to hers.

‘Señora Sanguardo...’ he whispered to her.

‘For ever,’ she whispered back.

Then, hand in hand, they walked back with the priest to the wedding breakfast that awaited them. And to the rest of their life together.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from A CLASH WITH CANNAVARO by Elizabeth Power.

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CHAPTER ONE

L
AUREN
RECOGNISED
THE
man as soon as he stepped out of the car, a shining silver monster of a thing that looked incongruous against the rustic outbuildings of the Cumbrian farmhouse and the verdant slopes of the fells above its wet slate roofline.

It was the man striding across the yard with his hair blowing like an untamed mane in the wind that her gaze was fixed on, however, as she finished securing the stable door for the night.

Tall, lean, in his early thirties, his expensive tailoring could do nothing to conceal a physique honed to prime strength and unquestionable fitness, or those shoulders which were wide enough to eclipse the moon. But he was a man she had never expected—or hoped—ever to see again, and she watched his approach now with a leap of something electric lighting her wary green gaze.

‘Hello, Lauren.’

If she was lost for words, then it was only because she was shocked to see him there on her Lakeland property. A property on which her late parents had blown all their savings to chase a dream of self-sufficiency—a dream that had never quite lived up to its promise and which was a world away from the glamorous capitals of Europe and the far-flung playgrounds of the mega-rich that the man before her inhabited.

‘Emiliano!’ She could have kicked herself for sounding so breathless and for wishing that she was wearing something other than her vest top and dungarees, or even that she had had a chance to comb her hair. After being out in the damp air, checking on the horses she stabled for the few paying customers who helped subsidise her meagre income from the local garden centre, she knew the flaming waves were falling untidily about her shoulders in a blaze of ungoverned fire. ‘What are you doing here?’

A definite wobble weakened the challenge in her voice. But then it wasn’t every day that she found herself facing Emiliano Cannavaro, Italian shipping magnate and steel-hard billionaire. The man who had taken the already international freight and ferry line his grandfather had founded and turned it into a global giant, spearheaded by a fleet of luxury cruise liners. A man who had used his Continental charm and his chocolate-rich voice to lure her into his bed, only to discard her in the most degrading and humiliating way after the marriage of her sister, Vikki, to his younger brother, Angelo, two years ago.

‘We have to talk,’ he said.

She had forgotten how tall he was, and how, without the benefit of high heels, she only just reached his shoulder. What she hadn’t forgotten was how it made her stomach flip just to look up into his olive-skinned features—features that had been redeemed from being too handsome by that slight bump in his nose, and by the glaring virility in that clean-shaven, yet heavily shadowed angular jaw.

She cupped a hand over her eyes to shield them from the low evening sun. ‘What about?’ Her tone was accusatory as she did her best to ignore the effect his sudden appearance was having on her.

‘About Daniele.’

Eyes fringed by lashes only a shade darker than her hair regarded him suspiciously. ‘Danny?’ Her voice cracked as she felt the burn of his hard masculine scrutiny over the flushed, perfect heart shape of her face.

With unsettling thoroughness he was taking in her rebellious green eyes, small chin and slightly turned-up nose with its cluster of freckles that her mother used to say was a sprinkling of stardust, before his gaze dropped with unconcealed insolence to her mouth. It was a full mouth, usually marked by a natural curve, but at this moment was definitely hinting at mutiny as his eyes came to rest disconcertingly on hers again.

His assessment made her feel weak, but it seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever as he gestured towards the ancient farmhouse and said, ‘Shall we go inside?’

Inside? Together? Alone? With him!

Her heart-rate doubled its pace. ‘Not until you tell me what this is all about.’

‘All right. If you want it straight. I would like to see him.’

‘Why? When you haven’t come near him or even rang to enquire after his welfare in over a year?’

If she wasn’t mistaken, Lauren heard him catch a breath. So he was feeling guilty. Good! she thought, cutting him no slack.

‘If I have neither telephoned nor been to see him,’ he responded with the firming of a mouth too sensual for any woman of child-bearing years to possibly ignore, ‘it is because you allowed none of us to know where he was.’

Lauren stared at him incredulously. ‘Is that what your brother told you?’ she exhaled, flabbergasted. ‘Or is that something you dreamed up yourself? Anyway, I didn’t think he mattered to you. Or to any of you Cannavaros,’ she expanded bitterly, recalling how his brother had as good as disowned his six-month-old son only weeks after Vikki’s death nearly a year ago. Still walking with the aid of a stick because of the injuries he had sustained in the car crash that had claimed her younger sister, Angelo Cannavaro had informed Lauren in plain, insensitive words that she could keep the baby her sister had used to trap him into marriage because he was cutting loose. That was the last time she had seen him. Or any member of the Cannavaro family! Though it had hurt her immensely for Danny’s sake, she couldn’t say that she hadn’t been relieved. And now here was Emiliano Cannavaro turning up and accusing
her
of being the one at fault! ‘You’ve got a nerve!’ she breathed.

He raked his hair back from his forehead with a long, lean hand. Hands which, in one weekend, had learned the pathways of her body and the whereabouts of every erogenous zone she possessed. His face was harder than she remembered, although even back then it had been a face stamped with authority, with a high forehead and cheekbones clearly defined. Add the midnight mystery of spectacularly dark eyes, thickly arched black brows—one of which was lifting now as though in dispute of what she had accused him of—and long ebony lashes that most teenage girls would probably have killed for, and she could see why she had been rendered helpless from the moment she had laid eyes on him.

‘As I suggested, could we go inside?’

His tone brooked no argument and so without a word she led him across the yard and in through the back door of the rugged little farmhouse, uncomfortably aware that he was probably enjoying a studied view of her back and the curve of her bottom and remembering...

‘So say what you’ve got to say.’ A strong sexual awareness made her tone excessively curt as she rounded on him in the large but shabby kitchen. But the memory of how this man had bedded her and then treated her as if she wasn’t even fit to tread the same ground as he did never failed to shame and humiliate her—even without suddenly coming face to face with him and having to relive it all over again!

‘As you wish.’ He didn’t seem at all perturbed by her unfriendly manner. ‘I shan’t...What is the term you use? Beat about the bush?’ Nevertheless, he seemed to hesitate for a second before continuing. ‘You are probably aware that Angelo died just over a month ago.’

She nodded. She had been shocked to read about it in one of the national newspapers. Accidental death, the verdict had been. Caused by a lethal mix of strong painkillers he’d been taking for his continuing back injury and an excessive amount of alcohol in his blood.

Lauren was sorry, but all she could say right then was, ‘So what does that have to do with me?’

‘Everything,’ he answered succinctly. ‘Because, from now on, this monopolising of Daniele is going to cease.’

‘I haven’t been monopolising him!’ she shot back. ‘At least, not intentionally. But if I have, it’s only because your brother took no interest in him whatsoever, which is one of the reasons Vikki left him.’ Among others, she thought with a mental grimace, before adding, ‘And neither have you.’

‘Something I fully intend to rectify,’ he promised. ‘But as I have already told you...’ he was beginning to sound impatient ‘...I did not have the first idea where Daniele was. As you probably...remember...’ his hesitation was marked, calculated, Lauren was sure, to remind her of an intimacy she didn’t even want to think about ‘...I live in Rome. But on those occasions when I visited this country, Angelo assured me that Daniele was being adequately cared for. It was only a short time before he died, when I put pressure on him to tell me where he was, that he said he had left Daniele with you and that he didn’t have a clue as to where you had taken him. Why would he have told me that if it was not true?’

‘Because he didn’t want you to know what the truth really was!’ Lauren returned hotly.

‘And exactly what is the truth, Lauren?’ Emiliano invited, in clearly sceptical tones.

‘That he abandoned Daniele because he couldn’t face the responsibility of being a father! He knew exactly where I was and how to find me. He could have come any time to see Daniele and I wouldn’t have stopped him,’ she fumed, hurting for her little nephew. ‘But he didn’t because he didn’t want to give up his gambling and his womanising and everything else about the self-indulgent high life that both of you enjoy so much!’

It was a cry from the heart at the injustice of what both her and her sister had had to pay for getting mixed up with the Cannavaro brothers. Heaven knew, Vikki hadn’t been any saint! But she hadn’t deserved the drunken abuse and infidelity that had forced her into leaving Angelo after less than ten months of marriage. Any more than she, Lauren, had deserved his brother’s scorn and bitter contempt...

‘Nevertheless,’ Emiliano said coldly, seemingly oblivious to her indictment of self-indulgence or to the pain that seemed to be turning her inside out, ‘Daniele
is
his son, and therefore my nephew.’

‘And you naturally want to see him.’ She had to concede that much. As the toddler’s natural aunt and uncle they were equal claimants for the little boy’s affections. Even so, she took some gratification out of being able to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid that it’s not going to be possible tonight because he’s already asleep.’

She sensed the tension in him and for the first time noticed the dark smudges beneath his eyes, caused, no doubt, by the recent loss of his brother. But then he gave the slightest tilt of his head, causing his hair to fall forward again in the way she remembered it doing. Somehow it seemed to emphasise the satanic darkness of his shadowed jaw.

‘I understand,’ he said, surprisingly compliant all of a sudden. ‘But I do not think you do, Lauren. You had, however, better know from the start what my intentions are and to be fully aware that I will be demanding much more than that.’

A queasy feeling took root in the pit of Lauren’s stomach. ‘Wh-what do you mean?’ she asked cagily.

‘The boy is a Cannavaro. Therefore it is only right that he should be with his family.’

‘He
is
with his family!’ she proclaimed, her face flushed with indignation to think he could even suggest anything else.

He was glancing around her kitchen, which she knew had seen better days with its chipped Belfast sink and genuinely distressed oak table and matching Welsh dresser that stood against the far wall, and he looked at her now with something remarkably like censure shaping the hard line of his mouth.

‘You think it fitting for a child of his background to be brought up in a place like this?’

His deprecating opinion of the home she had once shared with two loving parents and her sister cut Lauren to the quick, but she was determined not to let him see.

‘So it isn’t the mansion that
you
obviously think he should be living in,’ she bit back, fearful of what he intended to do about Daniele. ‘But, with respect...’ this last word was overlaid with sarcasm ‘...he’ll learn more above love and basic human values in this shabby old house than he’ll ever get to know in the sterile palaces your sort of people call home!’

Whether she had hit a nerve in his invincible armour, or whether it was just her audacity in speaking to him as she had that put that flush across his cheekbones and made his jaw tense as though he was clenching his teeth, Lauren wasn’t sure. But she was struck by the vivid recollection of seeing him look like that before. It was the second before he had driven into her hot and eager body and had finally succumbed to the release of his, until then, frighteningly controlled passion, taking her with him on a mind-blowing excursion to a fool’s heaven!

‘And what would you—or your sister—have learned about basic values?’ he challenged softly, as Lauren battled with spiralling and unwelcome sensations from remembering how it felt lying naked beneath this man’s warm and penetrating strength.

‘Nothing, according to you,’ she replied, with only the slightest quiver in her voice. Because, of course, he hadn’t listened to any explanation when he had labelled her and Vikki the worst kind of women, so there was no way she was going to try and convince him otherwise now, especially when he was adding child abduction to her sins as well!

‘And what do you imagine is my type of home?’

Strangely, she had never been able to place him anywhere, other than in the swish resorts where the rich and famous vacationed, or in some stark, state-of-the-art high-rise office at the heart of his maritime empire.

‘I don’t intend wasting any unnecessary thought over it,’ she retorted, wishing she wasn’t letting him reduce her to the level of sniping.

‘Not even to wonder where this nephew—whom you claim to be instilling with your own questionable values—is likely to be living?’

Lauren forced herself to bite her tongue. She was past caring over the last two years what Emiliano Cannavaro thought about her. Memories might shame, but they couldn’t hurt her. She had learned to shrug her shoulders, grit her teeth and carry on. But Emiliano Cannavaro wasn’t a memory any more. He was here—now as large as life, and he had it in his power to hurt her and would if she let him, by taking away the one thing she held most dear.

‘I don’t need to wonder, Emiliano,’ she said determinedly. ‘I know exactly where he’ll be living. And that’s with me. It was my sister’s wish that I should take care of Danny if anything ever happened to her before he became of age.’