He’d looked up at his mother’s beautiful face, at green eyes just like his own, thick dark curls bathed in light from the outside world. She’d leaned down to kiss him on the forehead lightly, her fingers still clutching his shirt collar, reminding him of her power. He’d begged her to forgive him, told her he hadn’t meant to come into her room, hadn’t meant to speak out loud. He had forgotten Mamma’s rule again.
She’d shaken her head, pushing him back. ‘Silence, piccolo mio. When you learn to be silent Mamma will let you come out.’
The door had closed with a bang, the echo bouncing off the marble tombs that lined the walls. He’d smacked his hands over his ears until the vibrations had stopped. Then there had been nothing. Only darkness so thick and black it had been as if light had never existed.
He’d sat down against the cold stone graves where his ancestors’ dead bodies nestled until the cold had seeped into his bones...
The breath returned to his lungs with a shuddering gasp and he felt a warm hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see Dara, the sun glowing in her blonde hair through the open doorway of the crypt. He became aware that he was hunched, sitting against the tomb nearest the door. How long had he sat here? And how much had she seen.
He stood up, wiping the dust from his jeans with quick sharp smacks, avoiding her eyes as he tried to get his heartbeat back under control.
‘Are you okay?’ She looked concerned, her brow marred by a thin line of worry.
‘I’m fine,’ he gritted.
‘You’re sweating.’ She reached a hand out to touch his forehead.
‘Damn it, Dara, I said I’m fine.’
He grabbed her hand, holding onto the warm skin and feeling its silky heat seep into him. Touching her skin seemed to remind him that his words were true. He was a grown man, and ghosts had no power over him.
He grasped her hand tightly and steered her out of his nightmare and into the light of the gardens.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked breathlessly as they powered through the overgrown gardens towards the low stone wall of the castle perimeter.
‘I want to show you something.’
He led them down ‘his’ path—the path he had always taken as a young boy. The smell of the sea filled his nostrils, loosening the tight pain in his chest. The rocks were tall and smooth as they descended the swift decline from the castle to the sea. His footsteps were steady and he held her hand tight, gripping her waist at times so she wouldn’t fall. The afternoon wind whipped around them as the weather took an unseasonably stormy turn.
The last of the smooth rocks ended sharply and he jumped down onto the sand of the beach, holding her by the waist and lowering her safely. His fortress still lay nestled in the rocks. A safe, sturdy structure made from stone and mortar. He pushed the door, feeling the hinges creak and groan as they gave way. The roof and walls were still intact—the water hadn’t yet claimed his little haven.
‘What is this place?’ Dara asked, her voice breathless from their climb down, her blonde hair wild around her face.
The small square room had stone floors and tiny latticed windows. He vaguely remembered the walls had been painted a dull white, but now years of damp had rendered them almost black in some places.
‘It was used as a boathouse at one time, back when my father still lived here. One day I was running away and I found it. It became my own little castle.’ He smiled at the memory.
‘Did you run away very often?’ She frowned.
‘Oh, all the time. I would plan my escape in detail, pack a suitcase and food and take off.’
He walked across to the small grimy window, looking out at the wild stormy sea outside.
‘I used to imagine I was a pirate, waiting for my ship to come and rescue me from a desert island. It varied, really, the mind of a boy is fickle. One day a pirate, the next day a dragon-slayer. I never could choose just one.’
She smiled, wrapping her arms around herself in the chill. ‘That sounds very exciting. Did you always return home after these little adventures?’
‘A boy runs out of food very quickly when he’s slaying dragons, Dara.’
‘Didn’t your mother ever wonder where you were?’
‘No. Never. I rarely saw her, you see. This was my castle, and her bedroom was hers. Our paths rarely crossed.’ He pushed away the memories.
‘Is that why you don’t want her room disturbed? Because it was her place?’
Leo crossed back to where Dara stood, shivering in the doorway.
‘I don’t want to talk about ghosts any more.’ He smiled, sliding his hands up and down her soft skin, warming her. ‘In my castle we play games until we’re forced to go back for food.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Adults don’t play games, Leo.’
‘Ah, my poor, serious Dara, I beg to differ.’ He leaned in, biting softly into the sensitive skin of her earlobe.
‘You can’t mean...?’ She gasped. ‘In here? But its freezing cold.’
‘I promise we can find ways to keep warm.’
* * *
Dara lay boneless and relaxed, listening to the sound of Leo’s breathing return to normal. His eyes were closed but she could feel the tension slowly returning to his body as he came down from the glow of their lovemaking.
This time seemed been more intense than before, with a pile of nets and blankets providing a makeshift bed for their heated bodies. As attentive and sensual as he had been, he hadn’t been able to shake the shadows from his eyes. It was as though some unknown force was still there and he was running, using the intense pleasure between them to get away from it.
She sat up on her elbows, looking down at his tousled curls against her bare stomach. ‘Tell me what happened back there?’ she asked gently.
His voice rumbled against her skin. ‘You mean when I lay you down and told you I would be the dragon this time?’
‘Be serious for once, would you? You were sitting in that crypt with a look of terror on your face, Leo. It scared me.’
‘I’m a grown man, Dara—’ He protested, sitting up on the makeshift bed and grabbing his jeans from the crumpled pile of clothes on the dusty stone floor.
She sat up too, placing a hand on his shoulder, stopping him from moving away from her. ‘Even grown men have nightmares.’
He laughed. ‘Nightmares would have made my childhood a little more entertaining. As you can see, I suffered from boredom.’
‘Children don’t run away from home because they’re bored.’
He sighed. Standing up, he walked over to a small chest of trinkets, his jeans draped low on his hips.
‘My mother liked silence.’ He spoke in a monotone, tracing his finger along the silver lid of the box. ‘She would fly into a rage whenever her peace was disturbed. I imagine it had something to do with the multitude of medication she took daily. Anyway, on occasion a young boy likes to make noise. When I got too loud she would send me there for quiet time.’
‘To the crypt?’ Dara felt shock pour into her veins. She remembered how pale and terrified he had looked, pushed tight against the marble wall.
‘I don’t know when I realised there was something wrong with her,’ he continued. ‘She would be fine some days, and then others...she just wasn’t. I was maybe five or six when she first put me in there. I lost my first tooth and I ran to her room to tell her. I forgot myself. It seemed like I was in that place for hours before she let me out.’
Dara felt tears choke her throat. How could a mother be so cruel to her own son? His reaction when the men had dropped the table suddenly made sense—he was used to being punished for touching anything in that room. He was used to being kept out. She sat up, forcing herself not to cry for fear he would stop.
He kept talking in that monotone, turning the trinkets over in his
hands one by one.
‘When I was twelve she came to find me one day. It had been months since the last episode. I had learned not to speak to her or provoke her. I had learned to be silent. She was in a blind rage—kept calling me Vittorio. Apparently I was beginning to resemble my father a little too strongly. I wouldn’t go to the crypt that tim. She never physically hurt me so I knew she couldn’t make me go. I just remained silent until she walked away.’
‘It sounds like you were forced to grow up much too soon.’
‘I thought I had learned how to keep myself safe. How to keep her happy. But I woke up that night and she was trying to set my bedroom on fire.’
Dara gasped, her breath stilling in her throat.
He turned to face her, his eyes grim and lined, ‘Nobody was hurt. The housekeeper had been awake and she heard my shouts. She and her husband put out the fire before it could spread too far. It was finally enough for my father to fly home from his business to take me and put me in a boarding school in Sienna.’
‘What did he do with your mother?’
‘She stayed here. The housekeeper knew how to keep it quiet. Father ordered more medication to help her sleep. He said she suffered with her nerves. I didn’t see her for six months after that night.’
Leo shook his head. Running his fingers through his hair, he walked across to the window, staring out into the distance.
‘She continued in her cycle of madness for years after that. I’d spend Christmas and summer with my father. He would bring me to see her occasionally, but she never spoke to me. I sometimes wondered why we even bothered. Boarding school changed me—I became rebellious and loud, and going back to the castle would make me feel like I was suffocating. Home became a distant nightmare. A few weeks before my eighteenth birthday I got accepted into Oxford in England. My father was determined his future CEO would get the best education. I don’t know what possessed me to travel down to see her. I felt like maybe if she knew I was leaving the country I might get some sort of reaction. When I got here the castle was empty. I’ll never forget the silence.’
Dara could tell by his posture that this was difficult for him. She wanted to tell him that it was fine, that he didn’t have to tell her any more.
‘I went to her room and she was lying on the bed wearing her best dress. I remember thinking she looked like Sleeping Beauty. I didn’t touch her. I just knew. There is a certain heaviness to the air when you’re in the presence of death.’
Dara covered her mouth with her hands, tears welling up in her eyes.
‘She had been there for more than a day—just lying there on the bed. A week’s worth of sleeping pills in her stomach. All of the staff had been sent away in one of her rages. They’d tried to call my father but he was on a yacht somewhere with one of his mistresses.’
Dara stood up and walked over to him, touching his shoulder to find he was deathly cold. ‘There was nothing you could have done. Mental illness is not something that can be cured by a son’s love.’
‘I don’t remember feeling anything towards my mother other than fear. From six years old I knew that she was ill. I’d learned to adapt. And the day of her funeral, standing there and watching them slide her casket into the tomb...’ He turned to look at her, genuine anguish hardening his features. ‘I honestly felt like a dead weight had been lifted from my shoulders. There was always a fear in me—even after I went away to school. I always feared she would come back for me. She truly hated me. And as I looked into my father’s eyes I saw that exact same relief and I knew she had been right. I was exactly like him.’
‘Leo, your mother was ill. People in that kind of mental state can see things very differently to reality.’
‘When the ceremony was over I watched him finish off his cigar and mash it into the ground outside the crypt. I felt something bubble up inside of me like never before. I had always strived to be the best, to get his approval. I’d always wanted him to notice me. He wasn’t ill—he didn’t have any excuse for his behaviour. I walked up to him and asked him why he never did anything to help her. He shook his head and said he couldn’t control her personality. She was weak and had brought shame on our family name. By keeping it secret he’d spared her a lot of embarrassment. So I punched him square in the jaw and walked away. I decided that I might look like him but I would never be as heartless as he was.’
‘So that’s why you sold his company? Revenge?’
‘Childish, maybe.’ He shrugged, sitting down behind her and pulling her back against his chest.
‘It wasn’t childish. He didn’t deserve your respect, Leo.’
Dara felt his warmth against her back, this marvellous man who had opened her eyes to so many things. He lived life to the fullest and disregarded the rules in order to escape all of this. Underneath the charming bad boy was someone who just wanted to be cared about.
The thought was almost too much to bear. She was beginning to care for him too much, and the feeling scared her. Knowing that he was just as damaged as she was made it harder to think of their relationship as it was. This new closeness between them was complicating things, tangling up her emotions in knots.
Leo held Dara in his arms and attempted to process the feelings trying to burst through his chest. He was thirty-three years old and this was the first time he had ever spoken about his upbringing to anybody. What was it about this woman that had made him want to lay himself bare?
His past was something that had always been buried in a deep crevice of his mind, filled with shame and confusion. But now, after saying it all out loud and hearing her say he was normal... He felt lighter than he had in years. The memories of fear were suddenly just that—old memories.
For the first time he felt entirely present in the moment, in this boathouse, with this woman in his arms. He felt as if he could stay still with her and not feel afraid. As if this was a safe place to stay for a little while—maybe even longer.
* * *
Later that night Leo stood in the doorway of the master bedroom while Dara slept soundly. When the call from his Paris club had awoken him he had debated on whether to wake her. But after another night of marathon lovemaking he’d decided to let her sleep. She had been working hard on the castello by day and spending each night in his bed. She deserved some quality sleep.
The Platinum club in Paris had got into some legal difficulty with licensing, and he was required there before midday to meet with his team of advisers. The jet was ready and he needed to leave as soon as possible. The realisation that he didn’t want to leave made him all the more intent to go. He needed some head space to process the events of the past few weeks.
For so long he had been someone who avoided emotional entanglements and kept his affairs at a distance. He had bared far too much to her yesterday. She had every right to call time on whatever it was that they were doing. She hadn’t signed up for a no-strings fling with an emotional wreck.
Dara’s eyes fluttered open just as he moved to walk out through the door.
‘Leo—where are you going?’
‘Paris. I have some business to attend to.’
He fought the urge to climb back into bed with her. The thought of a morning on a plane followed by an afternoon in a courthouse was hardly a fair trade.
‘Will you be gone long?’ She moved the covers teasingly close to her nipples, smiling like the wicked temptress she had become.
‘I’ll be back as soon as my business is done. You have work to complete here too.’
Leo paused, considering his words carefully as she sat up on the bed.
‘It’s time we started wrapping up this deal,’ he said finally, seeing the look of confusion on her face.
‘Is there something wrong?’ she asked.
‘I’m a very busy man, Dara.’ He moved towards the door. ‘We’ll talk when I return.’
* * *
Dara watched as Leo’s car disappeared down the drive and felt her heart sink in her chest. This wasn’t meant to happen. She sat down on the veranda, watching as the sun started to rise over the waves, orange and red mixing in with the mirror-like calmness of the water. He’d said this was just fun—two adults enjoying themselves and burning out an attraction.
When had it become more than that?
He knew she couldn’t give him any sort of future. She had told him she was a lost cause. It would be just like her to get the idea into her head that he felt something more just because they had shared their life histories. She had spent the past five years convincing herself that she was happy alone, and she had almost begun to believe it. Now, after only a week with Leo, she knew just what she had been denying herself.
Angrily, she stood up and got dressed.
Perhaps he pitied her because of her condition. Maybe it was out of some misplaced sense of chivalry that he had stayed so long. She didn’t truly want more, did she? He would never be happy with her. He was a Sicilian—it was in his blood to want children. He had never said otherwise. Sure, he lived a bachelor lifestyle now, but some time in the future he would settle down and start a family of his own. At least he had the choice.
The thought of him with another woman made her throat well up with emotion. When had she begun thinking of him as hers?
* * *
She spent the morning busy inspecting the repair work in the dining hall. All traces of water damage were gone, and the walls had been painted a burnished orange, true to the original style. She gazed up at the newly polished wooden beams on the ceiling, remembering how they had looked when they’d first arrived.
It was hard to believe it had been little more than a week since she had been thrown into Leo’s world. She missed him already, and he had only been gone a few short hours.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car coming up the driveway. He couldn’t have made it all the way to Paris and back already. She got to the door just as an unfamiliar silver sports car came to a stop in the courtyard.
Resisting the Sicilian Playboy (Winner of 2014 So You Think You Can Write) Page 12