by Lucy Ellis
‘You’ll fall in love, Gianluca,’ said Tina Trigoni, fitting herself into the curve of her husband’s arm. She barely came up to his shoulder. ‘And before you know it you’ll have six sons and six daughters. You’d better,’ she added. ‘I have no intention of sacrificing my children to the Benedetti legacy.’
‘Valentina—’ began Marco, but Gianluca gave her a faint smile.
‘Glad you’ve been paying attention, Tina.’
‘Although you’ll never settle down while you date these bubbleheads.’
He lifted a brow.
‘Women with bubbles over their heads—like in the cartoons,’ said Tina, making an illustrative gesture. ‘Blank bubbles for other people to fill the words in.’
Gianluca privately acknowledged she wasn’t far off the mark. But then he wasn’t looking for a mother for his children.
‘You’ve been talking to my mother.’
‘God, no. I’m not that brave. You do know she thinks a twenty-year-old Sicilian virgin would fill the nursery? I heard her talking to your sisters about it.’
Marco snorted. ‘Does your mother know you at all?’
Did his mother know him? Hardly. And that was the point. The Benedettis threw their boys out to be raised like Romulus and Remus in Rome’s foundation myth, to be suckled by the she-wolf of the military until they came of age.
His mother had conformed to the Benedetti traditions like all the women who came before her and expected him to do the same.
No, his mother didn’t know him—at all.
‘Find me a wife then, Tina,’ he said derisively. ‘A good, plump Sicilian virgin and I’ll follow all the customs.’
‘Find you a wife and thousands of hopeful women will weep,’ Marco observed, swigging his beer.
But Valentina looked interested. ‘I don’t know about virgins—are there any left over the age of twenty-one?’
Completely out of nowhere his mind reverted to a pair of unusual green eyes. There were some, he thought. Once. A long time ago.
‘But frankly, Gianluca, I don’t know if I should introduce any of my friends to you. It’s not as if you’re ever serious about a woman.’
‘Her friends are queuing up to be introduced,’ inserted Marco. ‘I’m glad I don’t make the kind of money you do.’
‘Yes, because then I would have married you for your money,’ said Valentina lightly, ‘instead of for your charm.’ She gave her husband a smart look. ‘Besides, I don’t think they’re entirely after his money, caro.’
Gianluca listened to Marco and his wife banter and for a moment acknowledged that this was what he would miss. All going well, Marco and Tina would grow old together, nurse grandchildren on their laps, reminisce about a life well lived.
In forty years’ time... He came to a dead stop. The way he was going he’d be a rich man in an empty castle. He looked past the happy couple and saw only his parents’ screaming matches, their empty lives performed on the stage set that was the Palazzo Benedetti. One of the most admired pieces of private real estate in Rome. If only people knew the generations of unhappy women who haunted its corridors.
His own mother had been a stunningly beautiful hot-blooded girl from the hills outside Ragusa. Maria Trigoni had married into the social stratosphere and contorted herself into the role of Roman principessa. She had played fitfully at being wife and mother when she hadn’t been completely taken up with her lovers or her much-desired role in society.
Her only real loyalty was to her family in the south—the Trigonis. Marco’s father was her brother. She would vanish down there for long periods of time. He remembered each one of those disappearances like cuts to his back. The first time it had happened he’d been three and had cried for a week. The second time he’d been six and had been beaten for his tears. When he was ten he’d tried to telephone his mother in Ragusa but she’d refused to take his call.
Privately Gianluca suspected the moment a woman put on the Benedetti wedding tiara she lost a bit of her soul. So sue him—he wouldn’t be passing on that little tradition.
* * *
He swigged his beer, barely tasting it as it went down. He had no intention of settling down, providing an heir to the Benedetti name. It was enough that he’d restored its honour.
Besides, after two years on active service he knew better than most that life was lived in the moment, and at this particular moment he was enjoying a little variety in his life. He knew it irritated his mother, disappointed his grandmother, but as a Benedetti male it was almost expected that he would pursue women in numbers.
The old cliché that there was safety in numbers was true. He had a reputation now for being a bachelor who couldn’t be hooked. He played up to it.
As if conjured by the direction of his thoughts a woman stepped out onto the terrace.
She was slender and curvy all at once, and the lights turned her hair platinum.
‘There’s my cue,’ said Gianluca.
‘Fast cars and fast women—this is why I refuse to introduce you to my girlfriends,’ Tina called mischievously after him.
As he approached, the blonde turned up a flawless face and batted long lashes over her Bambi eyes.
‘Come and dance with me, Gianluca.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said, shouldering past her. ‘Let’s get a drink...’ For the life of him he couldn’t remember her name.
‘Donatella,’ she said coldly, in that moment losing the little-girl act.
‘Donatella—si.’ He suspected from her tone that he’d forgotten her name more than once tonight. It wasn’t important. She’d only latched on to him because of his name, his reputation.
He slid a hand into his jacket, dragged out his PDA. He’d have a drink, do some work, lose the blonde. But she was a good excuse to put his head back into what mattered—making a deal, setting up the next one, keeping an eye on what the Asia-Pacific markets were doing overnight. Not contemplating what Marco had found seemingly so effortlessly: a good woman. While he, Rome’s pre-eminent bachelor, had been stood up by a sexless Australian dragon who clearly didn’t know her loss was what’s-her-name’s gain...
He rifled through his mind for the blonde’s name again, gave up, and hit the bar for another drink.
* * *
Ava gave her name to the hostess and naturally only drew a blank. Part of her had hoped she would just be waved on in.
‘Strawberries,’ she whispered.
‘Scusi, signorina?’
Ava cleared her throat. ‘I believe I’m listed under the name “Strawberries”.’
Her mouth felt dry, her skin prickled, and she was sure the couple behind her were finding this hilarious. She closed her eyes briefly to fortify herself. Public humiliation suddenly felt all too close. ‘I’m Signor Benedetti’s guest.’
Just saying it made this all real, and Ava felt her Dutch courage—a glass of white wine before she left the hotel and two reds downstairs—curdle in her stomach like milk left in the sun.
‘Ah, si.’
The hostess seemed to find nothing unusual in a woman being listed as a fruit on Gianluca Benedetti’s guest list, and the thought made Ava’s belly clench a little tighter.
She made her way through a crowd of women in slips and heels and men in Armani before coming to a standstill.
Gianluca Benedetti was lounging like some kind of broad-shouldered Caesar, with his arms thrown across the back of a black leather settee, his powerful shoulders and chest delineated in a form-fitting dark shirt. His high cheekbones, sensuous mouth and uncompromisingly firm jaw gave him the look of one of Michelangelo’s marble carvings of male beauty.
Genetics had been so good to him there had to be a price. Spitefully Ava wished she could be around to see it exacted from him. He wasn’t alone—as if she had ever expected him to be alone. What had she thought? He’d be waiting for her? This was some sort of date?
His head was angled negligently to one side for a scantily clad blonde to whisper
sweet nothings in his ear.
The blonde, naturally. The stab-your-heart-out heels blonde.
A sick feeling invaded her insides.
She was never going to be that woman.
For a teetering instant Ava was transported to that long-ago reception for her brother’s wedding. She had been a socially awkward young woman who just hadn’t fitted in with the glamorous, international crowd, watching from the sidelines as Gianluca Benedetti—Italian soccer star and possibly the most desired man on the planet—reclined on a banquette, gesticulating as he talked football with another guy. He’d had two girls wrapped around him like climbing vines, blonde and brunette. The equivalent of gelato flavours for grown men. He hadn’t even been paying attention to them.
At the time she had christened them vines, but, oh, how she had wanted to be like them. Just for one night to be a sexy, no-consequences girl, in slip and heels, hanging off the hottest guy at the party.
Even as she had struggled to come to terms with the odds of her ever being that kind of girl her eyes had moved over the object of their attention and for the first time in her life she’d been hit by something and hadn’t been able to hit back.
The tsunami of feeling that night had carried her past her inhibitions—past the little voice of caution that always asked if this was the right thing to do, if there would be consequences for her actions, the voice of a girl who’d had to look after herself from a very young age. That night she hadn’t cared about the consequences.
She had only cared about him.
Having him.
Feeling sick now, she was unable to credit that she had stepped so easily back into the same shoes, that she had learned nothing from her experiences.
Before she could even formulate her next move he was getting up, throwing back those broad shoulders and unexpectedly moving her way. It was so sudden her first instinct was to turn tail and flee, but she wasn’t an uncertain girl any more. She could handle this.
Sucking in her tummy, adjusting the line of her dress, she prepared herself for what she would say.
I came but I wish I hadn’t. You’re a womaniser, a cad and a bounder, and I wish I’d never met you.
He was less than a metre away when she realised he wasn’t coming over to her. His hard gaze moved unseeingly over her, as if she were one of the faceless crowd, and Ava realised she wasn’t going to have her moment.
He’d issued the invitation but he’d already forgotten about her. She hadn’t even made enough impact this morning for her face to register with him.
Her stomach buckled.
She watched him moving easily but inexorably towards the exit, the doors opening and swallowing him up.
Ava only became aware that she was struggling to push her way through the crowd when someone stepped on her foot and she lost a shoe. Pausing to scoop it up, she pushed through the exit doors, then virtually ran outside. She hesitated on the steps leading down into the square, but only to scan desperately for the direction he’d taken.
She gave a start as she caught sight of him, moving out of the darkness across the square.
Shoving it all aside—a lifetime of prudence, plans and protecting herself from men like this one...well, any man really...not to mention leaving her perfectly good A-line coat behind—Ava began to run after him.
CHAPTER FOUR
GIANLUCA HEARD THE FOOTSTEPS, light, fleet heels striking notes on the cobblestones.
He turned around and for a moment they simply looked at one another.
As she began to walk slowly up to him he wondered what had become of his determination never to let life take him by surprise again. His mouth ran dry, his body did what was natural when faced with this much woman. Because, Dio mio, she was a sight to make a man glad Adam had had a rib.
She’d obviously gone to some trouble in the transformation department.
It wasn’t a stretch to assume it was all for him.
He ran his eye from the erotic promise of her mouth to her decadent bosom and then to the dainty ultra-feminine shoes clasping her feet. No wonder.
The shirt and trousers she’d been hiding beneath this morning hadn’t advertised a shape that could only be fully appreciated by an Italian male—generous curves thrown into relief by the accent of her narrow waist.
This was the shape he’d discovered when he’d finally parted her from the puffy blue dress.
She was a walking fantasy if your tastes ran to Gina Lollobrigida.
His did. He’d had a poster of her on the wall of the room he’d kept at his grandparents’ villa outside Positano. Part of the pleasure of summer breaks from the military academy he’d been bricked up in by his indifferent parents had been getting back to that house, to his kind old grandparents, but also to Gina.
Almost at once the full force of the past swung in. She wasn’t the girl who had lain with him in the grass on the Palatino. That girl had never really existed. And now any trace of her was gone.
As she approached, the low lights of the square illumined her eyes and he glimpsed uncertainty and something else—hopefulness.
But it must have been a trick of the light, because she lifted her chin and her green eyes clashed like an army of the night with his.
There was a dark sort of satisfaction in the knowledge that she had come after him, and it cautioned him to wait and see what she would do.
At the same time he saw what else he’d missed. A huddle of paparazzo across the square. In a second they’d focus in on him, and in this mood the last thing he wanted was a mob of jackals around him.
As excuses went, it wasn’t a bad one.
Asserting the cool, dominant masculinity which got him what he wanted in most situations, he stepped up to her, hooked his arm around her waist and told himself this had nothing to do with what he wanted but rather was necessity.
‘Scusi, signora,’ he murmured, as if apologising for blocking her path, and in the next instant he was kissing her.
He spread his hand at the base of her neck and held her in place, aware this was incredibly intrusive...and undeniably very erotic as she wriggled frantically against him. He clamped his other hand on her wide shifting bottom.
It was still thumping through him exactly who this girl was when he began to enjoy her struggle. He wanted her fists to thump against his chest, her fury at being restrained to come out. Come on, cara, let’s see if you can get away this time.
He was fiercely turned on, not only by his thoughts but by the feel of her. Her body was so blatantly female every movement of it against his was virtually X-rated. The scent of night-blooming jasmine seemed to be everywhere. His mouth took hers again and then again, until hard and aching he forced himself to release her. All he could see were those bright, astonished green eyes, the curve of her upper lip pinpricked with tiny beads of perspiration, and lower the heaving of her bosom. Instantly he wanted to pull her in tight again, for the press of her warm curvy body that fitted him so perfectly.
In a world of women for whom high heels merely put them on stilts, failing to give them the length in their bodies he needed, he had one in his arms who was built to the perfect scale for a man like him—a little over six feet, with generous hips pressed to cradle his, her breasts soft and full against his chest.
He knew they’d been seen. So he bent his head close to hers. From any sort of distance it was an intimate gesture.
Her green eyes flew to his. Astonishment had given way to fury. It wasn’t just in her expression, it was in the aggressive tilt of her body. She was literally seething, and the female pheromones hit him hard and fast, tightening his body into the kind of surging lust he had been careful to keep in check on that long-ago night.
She had been so uncertain. He hadn’t wanted to overwhelm her...
But she wasn’t that girl any more. She was the woman who had run out on him... And he wanted her any way he could get her right now. Down a dark alley, working up her skirt, tearing her tights, teaching her who was in cha
rge. She didn’t run from him. Ever.
Gianluca could hear his own harsh breathing.
Why was she pretending not to know him? What had she been doing, walking into the bar dressed like this? What kind of woman was she? The kind who indulged in anonymous couplings with strangers and never looked back? Why in the hell was she back in his life now? What exactly had he walked into?
He glanced in the direction of the paparazzi.
Lust and anger mingled in a disturbing cocktail. What had happened to the cool pragmatic man of his reputation?
He looked down at her, reclaimed the higher ground.
‘Scusi, signorina.’ The irony in his scraped-down voice was clear, but his code of honour meant he must say it. ‘Mi volevi dire nulla di male.’
He meant her no harm.
No, no harm. He wanted to kill her.
* * *
Overwhelmed, shocked by the sudden proximity of a big, immeasurably strong male bearing down on her, Ava struggled to make sense of what had just happened even as she instinctively cleaved her body to his.
She should back away now. This was highly imprudent and anything between them couldn’t possibly end well. Now was her chance. He wouldn’t ask any questions. She was still a stranger to him.
But she hadn’t over-exaggerated the memory of the effect of this man on her senses. There had to have been something on that night so long ago that had made her throw all caution to the wind, and now she knew.
She suspected it had something to do with his dark adamantine voice, with that sexy, drawling Italian accent running so softly through everything he said, making her a little bit wild. If she closed her eyes she could feel his mouth trailing the softest butterfly kisses down the centre of her body as if anointing her. Nobody had ever touched her that way before or since.
‘Signora?’
Her eyes fluttered open. He was looking down at her with a hot intensity that liquefied her very bones and with something else—something dark and terrifying.
‘Signorina,’ she answered in a strangled voice. ‘Remember, I’m not married.’
He actually reared back slightly, before his eyes narrowed thoughtfully on her.