by Lynne Graham
Luca now surveyed her with thunderous disbelief. ‘That’s a joke...isn’t it?’
‘Of course it’s not a joke!’ Darcy grimaced at the idea. ‘Why would I joke about something so serious?’
As Luca sat up in one sudden powerful movement the sheet fell away from his magnificent torso. Outrage blazed in his dark eyes, his lean features clenched taut. ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’ he roared back at her, making her flinch in shock from such unexpected aggression. ‘I’m an extremely wealthy man...and as my wife, you dare to tell me that you plan to drag the Raffacani name in the dirt by scuttling round the banking fraternity begging for a loan? Are you trying to make me a laughing-stock?’
Darcy gazed back at him in stunned immobility. That possibility hadn’t occurred to her. Nor, at that instant, would the prospect have deprived her of sleep.
‘Accidenti...’ Luca swore rawly, thrusting back the sheet and springing lithely from the bed to appraise her with diamond-hard eyes of condemnation. ‘I now see that I have found a foe worthy of my mettle! You are one cunning little vixen! And if you dare put one foot inside the door of any financial institution, I will throw you out of my life the same day!’
A foe worthy of his mettle? An unearned compliment, Darcy conceded abstractedly, her attention wholly entrapped by the glorious spectacle of Luca striding naked up and down the bedroom with clenched fists of fury. Gosh, he was gorgeous. Glossy black hair, fabulous bone structure, eyes of wonderful vibrance. Broad shoulders, powerful chest, slim hips, long, long legs. The whole encased in wonderful golden skin, adorned with muscles and intriguing patches of black curly hair. All male.
She looked away, cheeks hot, shame enfolding her. She was so physically infatuated with the man she couldn’t even concentrate on arguing with him. It was utterly disgusting.
‘OK,’ Luca snarled, further provoked by that seemingly stony and defiant silence. ‘This is the deal. I will take over temporary responsibility for all bills relating to the Folly estate!’
Shaken by so unexpected not to mention so unwelcome a suggestion, Darcy turned aghast eyes on him. ‘No way...why would you want to do that?’
‘I don’t want to...but that arrangement would be preferable to placing an open chequebook into those hot, greedy little hands of yours! Porca miseria!’ Luca shot her an intimidating glower of angry derision. ‘The bedsheets are not even cooled before you start trying to rip me off again!’
He had a mind as complex as a maze, Darcy conceded, lost in wonder at such involved logic. He was so incredibly suspicious of her motives. All she had tried to do was stress how very urgently she needed to return home to sort out those problems with the estate, but Luca had flown off on another tangent entirely. He honestly believed that she had just tried to blackmail him. Admittedly, it should have dawned on her that he might be sensitive to the idea of his wife seeking to borrow money when he himself was filthy rich, but the reason it hadn’t dawned on her was that she didn’t feel remotely married to him.
‘I don’t want your rotten money...I’ve already told you that.’
‘Dio mio...you will not seek to borrow anywhere else!’ Luca asserted fiercely.
‘That’s not fair,’ Darcy protested.
‘Who ever said that I would be fair?’
‘You did....’ Darcy said in a small voice.
Luca froze at the reminder.
An electrifying silence stretched.
‘Suddenly I have a great need for the calm, ordered atmosphere of my office!’ Luca bit out with scantily controlled savagery. He strode into the bathroom and sent the door crashing shut.
So that’s the temper... wow!
The door flew open again. ‘Even in bed, don’t you ever think of anything but that bloody house?’ Luca flung, in final sizzling attack.
The door closed again.
Wow...Darcy thought again helplessly. He’s so passionate when he drops the cool front. He slams doors like I do. He’s a suspicious toad, so used to wheeling and dealing he can’t take anything at face value. But he also thought she had put one over on him, she registered. The beginnings of a rueful smile tugged at the tense, unhappy line of her mouth.
What was the matter with her? she questioned as she slid out of bed. Why was she thinking such crazy thoughts? Why did she feel sort of disappointed that Luca was planning to leave her? Why wasn’t she feeling more cheerful at that prospect? She stared down at the empty chair where she had draped her clothes the night before. With a frown, she finally noticed that her open suitcase had disappeared as well. She wandered into the dressing room and tugged open the unit doors to be greeted by male apparel on one side and on the other unfamiliar female garments.
Pyjama-clad, she knocked on the bathroom door. No answer. She opened it. He was in the shower.
‘Where are my clothes, Luca?’ she called.
The water went off. He rammed back the doors of the shower cubicle.
‘I got rid of them,’ Luca announced, raking an impatient hand through his dripping black hair and snatching up a towel.
‘Rid of them?’
‘Rather drastic, I know, but surely not a sacrifice?’ Luca gave her an expectant look. ‘Since you need lessons on how to dress. Porca miseria!’ He grimaced, watched her face pale and telegraph hurt disbelief. ‘That was tactless. But I just thought it would be easiest if I simply presented you with a new wardrobe. The clothes are in the dressing room. You won’t even need to go shopping now.’
Darcy’s eyes prickled with hot, scratchy tears. She was appalled. Never had she felt more mortified. This was a member of the opposite sex telling her she looked absolutely awful in her own clothes, telling her that he, a man, knew more than she did about how she should be dressing. ‘How could you do that to me?’ she gasped strickenly, and fled.
‘It’s a gift... a surprise...most women would be over the moon!’ Luca fired back accusingly.
‘Insensitive pig!’ A sob tearing at her throat, Darcy threw herself back on the bed.
The mattress beside her gave with his weight.
‘You have a beautiful face and an exquisite slender shape...but your clothes are all wrong,’ Luca breathed huskily.
Darcy was humiliated and outraged by such smooth barefaced lying. She knew better than anyone that she wasn’t remotely beautiful! Flipping over in a blind fury, she raised her hand and dealt him a stinging slap.
‘Nor...most...women,’ Luca muttered half under his breath, like somebody learning a very difficult lesson. With a slightly dazed air, he pressed long, elegant fingers to the flaming imprint of her fingers etched across one hard cheekbone and blinked.
Instantly, Darcy crumbled with guilt. ‘I’m sorry...I shouldn’t have done that,’ she muttered brokenly. ‘But you asked for it...you provoked me...go away!’
‘I don’t understand you—’
‘I hate you...do you understand that?’
Darcy coiled away from him. She hurt so much inside she wanted to scream to let the pain out. She hugged herself tight. When Luca put a hand on her shoulder, she twisted violently away. When he reached for one of her hands, she shook him off.
‘I actually liked you before I realised who you were!’ she suddenly slung at him in disgust. ‘I actually trusted you! Gosh, I’ve got great taste in men!’
‘Haven’t you already got what you wanted from me?’ Luca raked back at her in cold anger. ‘I have promised you my financial backing for the duration of our marriage. Your problems are over.’
Darcy regarded him with bitter outrage. ‘I’m not something you can buy with your money.’
Luca shot her an icy unimpressed appraisal. ‘If you’re not...what are you doing in my bed?’
There was no answer to that question. She couldn’t even explain that to her own satisfaction, never mind his. And that he should throw her sexual surrender in her face made her curl up and die deep down inside.
She listened to him dressing, and she was so quiet she barely breathed.
&nbs
p; Luca forced himself under her notice again by coming to a halt two feet from the bed. Clad in a lightweight beautifully cut pearl-grey suit, he looked absolutely stupendous, but icily remote and intimidating... like someone who ate debtors five to a plate for breakfast. But now she knew that his black hair felt like silk when she smoothed her fingers through it, that his smile was like hot sunlight after the winter and that even his voice trickled down her spine like honey and made her melt, she thought in growing agony.
‘This is not how I thought things would be with us. I’m civilised...I’m very civilised,’ Luca informed her with unfeeling cool. ‘We’re supposed to be skimming along the surface of things and having a great time in bed. So tell me who bought the Adorata ring and we’ll get that little complication out of the way. Then there is hope that peace will break out.’
‘I’ve already told you that I did not take that ring,’ Darcy whispered shakily.
‘And repetition of that claim has an excessively aggravating effect on my normally even temper,’ Luca drawled. ‘We’re at an impasse.’
Darcy studied him, cold fascination holding her tight but pain piercing her like cutting shards of glass—that same pain bright and unconcealed in her eyes. ‘I can’t believe that you’re the same guy I met three years ago...I can’t believe that we laughed and danced and you were just so romantic and warm and—’
‘Stupid?’ Luca slotted in glacially, deep-set dark eyes hard as diamonds but a feverish flush accentuating the taut slant of his high cheekbones. ‘Absurd? Ridiculous? After all, outside my own élite circle, I wasn’t streetwise enough to protect myself from a calculating little predator like you!’
Darcy was shaken by that response, dredged from her own self-preoccupation to finally think about how he must have felt when he’d believed he had been robbed by the woman he had spent the previous evening romancing in high style, the woman he had brought into his home, the woman he had made love to over and over again until they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms. And for the very first time she recognised the raw, angry bitterness he had until now contrived to conceal from her. He was very proud, hugely self-assured. The discovery that the ring had gone could scarcely have failed to dent his male ego squarely where it hurt most. Heavens, what an idiot he must have felt, she registered, with a belated flood of understanding sympathy.
‘Luca...’ she breathed awkwardly. ‘I—’
Luca vented a harsh laugh. ‘You were clever, but not clever enough,’ he murmured with a grim twist of his mouth. ‘I was a very conservative guy. I was twenty-eight and I had never felt anything very much for any woman. But with you I felt something special—’
‘S-something special?’ Darcy broke in helplessly.
Derision glittered in the look he cast her intent face. ‘You could have got so much more out of me than one night if you’d stayed around.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Darcy whispered unevenly, desperately wanting to be convinced to the contrary. ‘I was playing Cinderella that night’
‘Cinderella left her slipper behind...she didn’t crack open the Prince’s safe.’
‘But it wasn’t real... those hours we spent together,’ she continued shakily, still praying that he would tell her different, and all because he had said those two words ‘something special’. ‘You said all the right lines; I succumbed... Yes, well, maybe I more than succumbed. I guess I was a bit more active than that, but you had no intention of ever seeing me again...’ She shrugged a slight shoulder jerkily, no longer able to meet his shrewd gaze, and plucked abstractedly at the sheet. ‘I mean...I mean, obviously you never had the smallest intention of showing up on the Ponte della Guerra the next day.’
‘You remember that?’ Luca said, with the kind of surprise that suggested he was amazed that she should have recalled something so trivial.
Darcy remembered standing on that bridge for hours, and she could have wept at the memory. If there ever had been a chance that he would turn up, there had been none whatsoever after he had realised that he’d been robbed that same night. So it was all his fault. All her agonies could be laid at his door. And why was she thinking like this anyway? He couldn’t possibly find her beautiful. Though he had behaved as if he did that night. True, she had looked really well, but surely his standards of female beauty had to be considerably higher?
‘I have bright red hair,’ Darcy remarked stiltedly.
‘I could hardly miss the fact, but it’s not mere red, it’s Titian, and I’d prefer to see a lot more of it,’ Luca proffered after some hesitation.
‘But you must’ve noticed that I have a...a snub nose?’
‘Retroussé is the word...it’s unusual; it adds distinction to your face... Why am I having this weird conversation with you?’ Luca demanded freezingly. He strode to the door, glanced grudgingly back over one broad shoulder. ‘I’ll see you later.’
Emptied of his enervating presence, the room seemed dim and dull.
But Darcy lay where she was. Luca liked her nose; he liked her hair. What everybody else called skinny, he called ‘slender’. Strange taste, but she knew she wouldn’t have the heart to tell him that. So Luca, who resembled her every fantasy of physical male perfection, could get the hots for a skinny redhead with a snub nose. That fact was a revelation to Darcy. No wonder he was annoyed with himself, but all of a sudden she wasn’t annoyed with him at all.
He hadn’t made love to her just out of a desire for revenge. No, he wasn’t as self-denying as that. Luca had really wanted to make love to her. There was nothing false about his desire for her. Everything he had said in bed must have been the truth...even the part about no other woman being able to satisfy him since?
Something special? Why did she feel so forgiving all of a sudden? Why was her brain encased in a fog of confusing emotion? That wretched, hateful ring that had been stolen, she reflected grimly. Take that problem out of their relationship and how might Luca behave then? But even if she contrived that miracle, exactly how would he react to the news that the toddler from hell was his daughter?
It was early days yet, Darcy decided ruefully. A lot could happen in six months. Telling him that he had fathered a child the night of the ball might presently seem like an impressive counter-punch, but she didn’t want to use Zia like a weapon in a battle which nobody could win. In fact, she conceded then, unless their marriage became a real marriage, she was pretty sure she would never tell Luca that Zia was his child. What would be the point?
Right now she had much more important things to consider: the Folly estate and how she planned to save it in the short-term. Borrowing money appeared to be out of the question. And accepting Luca’s financial help would choke her. So was she going to have to steel herself to sell some of the Folly’s glorious Tudor furniture at auction? If she did so, the pieces could never, ever be replaced. But what alternative way did she have of raising the cash to keep her home afloat over the next six months?
An hour later, garbed in a figure-hugging sapphire-blue dress and horrendously high stilettos, Darcy bent down with extreme caution to lift Zia up into her arms, and bang—inspiration hit her the same second that her attention fell on the glossy gossip magazine the middle-aged nursemaid had left lying on a nearby chair. Didn’t people pay good money for an insight into the lives of the rich and famous? Wasn’t Luca both rich and famous? And didn’t she have a second cousin who was a secretary on one of those publications?
What would an interview and a few photos of Gianluca Raffacani’s bride be worth?
Darcy blinked, cringing from the concept but hardening herself against a sensitivity she could no longer afford. Luca had said that infidelity or desertion would be grounds for ending their marital agreement. But he hadn’t mentioned publicity...
CHAPTER NINE
HAVING heard the commotion, Darcy rose from her seat in the drawing room and walked to the door that opened onto the vast reception hall. She froze there, taken aback by the scene being enacted before her startled eyes.<
br />
On his return home, Luca was being engulfed by his sister’s dogs. It was like a rugby scrum. But astonishingly informative. Aristide and Zou Zou adored him, Darcy registered in surprise. And there he was, fondling shaggy ears and valiantly bearing up to the exuberant welcome he was receiving. Failing to notice her, Luca then took the stairs two at a time, a gift-wrapped package clutched in one hand.
Since Darcy was a very slow mover in the unfamiliar high heels, she didn’t catch up with him. And she was perplexed when he strode past their bedroom to turn up the flight of stairs that led to the nursery suite. She came to a halt in the doorway of the playroom. By the time she got there, Zia had already ripped the paper off a box which she was now regarding with enraptured bliss.
‘Dolly!’ she gasped, squeezing the box so tight in her excitement that it crunched. ‘Pretty dolly!’
Peer pressure and television had a lot to answer for, Darcy decided uncomfortably. All the other little girls Zia knew at the playgroup already had that doll, but Darcy had ignored all pleas to make a similar purchase. Why? Because that particular doll had always reminded her of Maxie. Now that seemed so inadequate an excuse when she saw Zia reacting like a deprived child suddenly shot into seventh heaven.
‘Shall I take her out of the box?’ Luca enquired helpfully.
While Zia pondered whether or not she could bear to part with her gift even briefly, Darcy studied Luca’s hard, classic profile, which showed to even better advantage when he was smiling. She was frankly bewildered by what she was seeing.
Zia extended the box. Hunkering down on a level with the toddler, Luca removed the packaging and finally freed the soft-bodied version of the doll. ‘See, Mummy!’ her daughter carolled with pride.
As Luca’s well-shaped dark head whipped round to finally note Darcy’s silent presence, Darcy reddened with awful self-consciousness beneath his lengthy appraisal. While unnecessarily engaged in smoothing down the skirt of her dress with damp palms, she strove to act unconcerned and evaded his scrutiny. ‘Did you say thank you, Zia?’