by Lynne Graham
‘Kerry—’ In the act of fighting an angry desire to carry her bodily back to bed solely in the hope of silencing her, Luciano snatched in a deep restraining breath.
‘—the day Grandpa came out of that court room humiliated and ashamed of the level debt had sunk him to! You could afford to show compassion. That you didn’t should have been my warning. But one way or another, I will look after my grandparents and I don’t need you to do it for me.’
Angry that his generous attempt to make amends had been tossed back in his teeth, Luciano dealt her a cool appraisal. ‘To date, you haven’t contrived to look after them very well, have you?’ he pointed out drily.
At that crack, Kerry turned white. ‘You have a point. Obviously I was wrong to respect Grandpa’s right to be treated as if he could manage his own affairs.’ Spinning on her heel, her eyes filled with guilty conflict, she paused halfway across the bedroom to pick up the breakfast tray. ‘By the way, there’s a half-bath in the cloakroom on the ground floor. From now on, please just treat me like a housekeeper—’
‘Per meraviglia! You can’t act as though last night never happened—’
‘Oh, I won’t do that,’ Kerry countered tightly. ‘I’ll just remind myself that you’re not the guy I once thought you were and I don’t think I’ll be tempted to cross the boundary lines again.’
As the door shut in her wake, Luciano swore with savage frustration. He had been too honest with her and he had hurt her pride, but he refused to lie and it would have been a lie to pretend that the clock could be turned back. He would never forgive her for her lack of faith in him five years earlier.
But even as he reminded himself of that truth, he also found himself wondering for the first time whether he might have expected too much from her. She had only been twenty-one, unsure of herself and, in spite of their engagement, a lot less certain of him than he had ever appreciated. In fact, he had pretty much ignored her insecurity over Rochelle except when it affected his own comfort. After all, what male did not receive a vicarious thrill from having two attractive women vying for a share of his attention? He winced at that belated moment of truth with himself.
Furthermore, what had been the chances of Kerry crediting that he was innocent of theft when all the Linwoods, including her domineering father and employer, had judged him guilty? Or, perhaps even more to the point, how much loyalty could he have expected her to offer him when she had been deliberately led to believe that he had embarked on a fresh liaison with her stepsister?
Kerry was much too busy to have the time to dwell on her thoughts. With a dozen visitors due to arrive at ten for a tour of the castle followed by morning tea, she had plenty to do. But she felt hollow inside as if Luciano had ripped everything out and thrown it away. Wishful thinking had blinded her to the passage of time and the intrinsic complexity of the male she was dealing with. When had she allowed herself to forget Luciano’s cold, contemptuous attitude towards her in London?
Five years ago she had misjudged Luciano, and last night he had taken her virginity before suggesting a de-meaning joke of a continuing relationship: no commitment, no future, only humiliating dependency while he controlled virtually every aspect of her life. She tried to imagine living at Ballybawn, working for him, reliant on his goodwill but also sharing his bed when he was in Ireland. Agonised but angry hurt cut through Kerry, because he could not have made a more offensive offer had he tried. It would just be a convenient arrangement for casual sex. Scarcely a proposition likely to appeal to a woman who had once hoped to marry him. Yet again, Kerry was being forced to face the reality that Luciano was still very, very angry with her and now she was also realising that he might well be set on levelling the score. That he had just succeeded beyond his wildest dreams was a truth that she hoped to have the strength to keep to herself.
An hour later, sluiced clean of lake water but still unamused by the recollection, Luciano discovered that he could not even charge his laptop in the library because the lead would not plug into the elderly electrical socket. He was in the act of turning the air blue with Italian invective when he glanced up and froze in astonishment at the sight of the crowd of strangers watching him from the doorway.
Kerry stepped forward. ‘This is Mr da Valenza, the new owner of Ballybawn Castle.’
She had brought in a bunch of tourists to gape at him as if he were a zoo animal! He couldn’t believe she was doing that to him! What was more, Luciano recognised with raw incredulity, the visitors were awarding him a concerted look of disapproval as if nobody other than an O’Brien had the right to own the castle. Much as if he had not been there, Kerry went on to talk about the woodcarver responsible for the bookshelves and draw attention to the superb plasterwork ceiling before leading the group out again. Luciano frowned as he studied the same shelving and ceiling, noting for the first time and with some surprise that, although in need of professional attention, both were indeed worthy of note.
Kerry only breathed again when she was back in the corridor. At their entry, Luciano had looked up, lean, dark, handsome features impatient, golden eyes bright with annoyance below black spiky lashes. Her heart had jumped as though he had squeezed it, and so powerful and instantaneous had been the surge of tormented longing inside her that she had felt dizzy. In remembrance, she trembled and almost lost the thread of her speech in the next room. A little subconscious voice that she would have done anything to silence whispered that perhaps she had been too hasty in rejecting his proposition. How, after all, did she attach conditions when she had given herself so freely only hours before? But if Luciano could not even leave the vague possibility of a future open, what point was there in risking such hurt again?
But wasn’t she already hurt? To be plunged from happiness back down into despair and regret and self-loathing again? Last night she had not required reassurance, for she had believed in her heart that Luciano was on the way back to being hers again. How much more gullible could a woman be? To place sexual desire on a level with caring? To ignore the obvious fact that what she had once withheld, he had smoothly persuaded her to surrender?
Yet hadn’t Luciano also said that the onus was on him to make provision for her grandparents? A statement that suggested he had rethought his attitude towards the O’Briens. Ought she to dismiss out of hand an arrangement that would allow the older couple to return to their home and live there in comfort? But then even had she wished to accept that offer, it would be an impossible situation. No way could she openly live with Luciano in her grandparents’ vicinity!
Having watched the minibus of tourists depart, Luciano went off in search of Kerry. She was not in the kitchen. But as he turned to leave again, he noticed a familiar crumpled sheet of notepaper lying on the tall dresser. He was going to look, he knew he was going to look. Telling himself that nobody left really private correspondence lying around, he studied the letter that Kerry had been crying over the day before. His wide, sensual mouth compressed.
Kerry walked in and stopped dead at the sight of him. ‘I suppose you’re about to complain about the tour but you did say that business-related ventures should continue here—’
‘When did the letter about your mother arrive? Yesterday?’ Luciano cut in.
‘Didn’t you even think twice about reading it?’ Kerry swept up the letter and added it to the box of correspondence she had been sorting out for her grandfather.
‘I wanted to know why you were upset.’ Luciano rested his gleaming golden gaze on her in level challenge. ‘I’m sorry you got the news like that.’
‘You think it means that she’s dead too…?’
Luciano nodded his head in reluctant confirmation and watched her bright head lower to hide the pain and disappointment in her expressive face.
‘I used to think that no news might well be good news where your mother was concerned,’ Luciano confided bluntly.
‘That’s an awful thing to say…’ Tears pricking the backs of her eyes, Kerry spun away. ‘Just because you
r mother kept you and raised you in spite of everyone’s disapproval!’
Yet even as she upbraided him, Kerry was unhappily aware that her fond childhood fantasies of a loving mother returning to reclaim her had not survived what she had learnt about Carrie as she grew older. Her mother had been an only child and very much loved but almost from the moment she had become a teenager she had gone off the rails and had brought her parents nothing but grief. She had been expelled from several schools. There had been a scandalous hushed-up affair with a married man and a miscarriage as a result of it. At the age of eighteen, Carrie had left home without a word of warning and it had been more than ten years before she came back again.
‘Your mother, Carrie, has considerable charm,’ Hunt O’Brien had once told Kerry with great sadness. ‘But regardless of who is hurt, she will always do exactly as she wants and what she wants changes with the wind. As she won’t consider how her actions affect others, she can be very destructive towards herself and towards those who try to depend on her.’
Not a young woman likely to miss the burden of a child once she had become a divorcee, not a woman likely to agonise much over her own failings or indeed those she left behind, but a woman who lived for the day and the hour and her own self.
‘But then my mother was excessively fond of babies and small animals. No puppy or kitten was ever turned from the door and I fell very much into the same category,’ Luciano countered, forcing Kerry out of her self-preoccupation as he drew her back against his lithe, muscular frame with confident hands. ‘She accepted her lot in life because she was very humble. When my father set dogs on me, she was more shocked that I had dared to approach him.’
Kerry’s eyes widened to their fullest extent and she flipped round to look up at him. ‘Your father set dogs on you?’
‘They chased me…they didn’t bite,’ Luciano extended, seeking to make light of an event he had not intended to share.
‘I don’t care…how did it happen?’ Kerry prompted fiercely.
‘At school, I was taunted for being the good count’s little embarrassing mistake: he got drunk one night and honoured my seventeen-year-old mother with his attentions. When I was eight, I began hanging around outside the walls of his villa and I was soon peering over them, hoping to see him. My grandfather died and one day inevitably I went over the wall…and the rest as they say…is history,’ Luciano concluded with a look of mockery that in no way matched the roughened edge that had entered his deep, rich drawl.
‘What happened?’ Her blue eyes were soft. ‘Stop being macho about it.’
‘Tessari was in his garden and I went right up to him and asked him if he was my father. He panicked, denied it and put his dogs on me to get rid of me…’ His aggressive jawline clenched, golden eyes darkening and hardening. ‘The next day, my mother was told to leave our home on the Contarini estate—’
‘Oh, no, that was wicked!’ Kerry exclaimed.
‘My father was afraid of a scandal that might embarrass his lady wife and himself and, since giving my mother financial help would’ve been seen as an acknowledgement of paternity, he was careful from the day of my birth to keep his hands firmly in his pockets,’ Luciano told her with a raw derision that made her flinch. ‘We moved to the city, where we almost starved until my mother found work.’
Some of his history she had known but she had not heard it from him. She had read a more sensationalised account of his background in a newspaper a couple of years earlier and she had marvelled then at how much he had contrived not to tell her even when she had been engaged to him.
‘Why did you never tell me who your father was and what he did to your mother and you?’ she asked, her regret on that score unconcealed.
‘Because Roberto Tessari wasn’t my father in any way that I could respect. He was a hypocrite and a coward—’
‘But he did help you to fight to prove your innocence after you were imprisoned,’ Kerry reminded him gently.
‘Guilt…the fact that fate laughed in his face and he never had another child…the need of a dying man to make peace with his maker…who knows?’ Luciano shrugged, chilling indifference etched in his bronzed features. ‘My mother was only thirty-three when she died from pneumonia. She was never strong but to keep us she had to clean houses and take in washing. Roberto Tessari trashed her life. Do you think I could ever forget that?’
‘No…I suppose not,’ Kerry conceded in a rather wobbly undertone, her throat convulsing because she ached for the pain that he was so determined to hide from her.
‘I’ve depressed you so much you’re crying—’
‘No, of course you haven’t and I’m not—’
‘Finally…you’re crying over me, bella mia.’ Luciano awarded her a brilliant smile of approval. ‘And all I had to do was tell a sob story and touch your heart.’
Even as Kerry recognised the skill and determination with which he cast off unhappy memories and centred all attention back on to her, her mouth ran dry in receipt of the megawatt effect of that wickedly attractive grin. The hands he had loosely linked behind her slid down to her hips and curved her into connection with his lean, hard physique.
Her breath caught in her throat while intelligence urged her to retreat. In defiance of that awareness, she wanted him just to grab her and kiss her: that way she wouldn’t have to think about what she was doing. But Luciano had never made things that easy. Glittering golden eyes held hers in thrall. Her heart rate speeded up, constricting her breathing. A frisson of heat curled like a cruel betrayer in the pit of her stomach before settling into a dulled, throbbing ache between her thighs.
‘Touch your heart and…?’ Luciano teased with husky, knowing intimacy, tipping her forward a little more, long fingers flirting in provocation with the hem of the dress that had ridden up the backs of her slender thighs. ‘Isn’t self-denial painful?’
Helplessly, controlled by the fierce yearning of her own body, Kerry leant into him. She was wildly aware of every hard, sexy angle of his big, powerful frame against hers. Tiny little tremors of desire slivered through her. It was a revelation to her that even after the night that had passed he could still make her feel like that. ‘Kiss me…’ she muttered, her fingers spearing up into the black depths of his hair.
‘I couldn’t possibly make a move on my housekeeper.’ Brilliant dark golden eyes struck hers in ruthless challenge. ‘On the other hand, if you’re my lover…’
Rage, longing and wonderment engulfed Kerry all at once. At such a moment, only Luciano would have tried to exploit her weakness with calculated cunning. In response, she put into practice what he himself had taught her. On tiptoe to overcome the disparity in their heights, she pressed her lips to the wide, sensual curve of his firm male mouth and with the tip of her tongue conducted a more intimate exploration. The fractured hiss of his breathing and the raw tension tautening his muscular length against her were her reward.
‘I created a witch last night,’ Luciano growled in roughened acknowledgement of his own error.
He banded strong hands to her hips and lifted her up to him so that he could devour her lush mouth, over and over and over again with explicit, hungry demand. The plunge of his tongue between her lips set Kerry on fire with excitement. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get enough of his passion. With a muffled groan, he anchored her legs round his waist and lowered her down onto the edge of the table. In that position, she was agonisingly aware of the hard thrust of his arousal and every pulse in her entire body jumped with frantic energy until her own fevered craving became more than she could bear.
‘Luciano—’
‘Not here…not like this,’ he muttered thickly.
Acting on instinct, Kerry rocked forward into needy contact with his bold erection.
Surprise and appreciation shimmered in Luciano’s hot, hungry gaze and suddenly he no longer wanted to wait for the comfort of a bed. The depth of her desire excited him. She wanted him the way he had always wanted h
er to want him: without defence or conditions. He hauled her back to him.
‘I just want you…’ she heard herself confess shakily, possessed by the fierce need driving her but unnerved too by her inability to fight it.
‘How much?’ he prompted, sliding up her dress and hooking his fingers into the band of her cotton briefs.
‘You’re driving me crazy—’
‘And making you reckless. I like that…I really like that, bella mia,’ Luciano admitted, sexily grazing the delicate skin of her throat with his teeth and sending such a powerful surge of heat to the moist heart of her that she whimpered out loud.
The complete and glorious havoc that he could wreak with his mouth and his hands deprived Kerry of any true grasp of the sequence of events over the next few minutes. The belated awareness that she was half-naked beneath her dress startled her but she was way out of control by then and pitched to a wild high of anticipation. When he pulled her to him and entered her hard and fast, the sensation was so intense, so exquisite, she wanted the moment to last forever until he withdrew and surged into her again with renewed force and it was even more sublime. She cried out, lost in him, drowning in the fierce passion of his dominance. He sank his hands below her hips to deepen his penetration. As he slammed into her damp inner sheath, her raw excitement reacted with the explosive heat coiled at her inner core and pitched her into a shattering climax. In the heaving, gasping aftermath while she still clung to him, the sound of his cellphone ringing was a piercing intrusion.
‘It might be something important,’ Luciano finally groaned, retaining a possessive hold on her as he answered the call.
Still in a daze, Kerry pressed her hot face into his shoulder until she heard his caller speak as clearly as if she had been standing in the same room.