The pot began to boil. She moved towards it but he caught her wrist and brought her back to his body. “But you weren’t? At some time?”
She thought about obfuscating, but there was no sense in lying to him. She was as far from her father and his life as she could be. Worlds apart. Besides, with Benedetto she felt … safe. It didn’t make sense, but she was completely at ease. “I guess not.” She smiled to brush him off. “Coffee? Black?”
He nodded, rubbing a hand across his stubbled jaw.
He had sent his picture. He had taken the revenge he’d desperately craved for years. Knowledge that Benedetto had slept with Katherine would undoubtedly torment Augustine, as he’d intended. He should, therefore, have made an excuse and ended things. There was no longer a purpose to their time together. And yet he felt an invisible tug towards her, like he was bound to her by a force beyond explanation.
“In what way?”
She stared, midway through emptying coffee into a mug. He tried not to grimace at the fact it was instant. Coffee was coffee.
“Huh?”
“In what way were you not living your truth, as you put it?”
She lifted the pot and was about to tip boiling water into the mug when he made a sound and took it from her gently. “Allow me.”
He lifted the mug over the sink and half filled it with the water before placing it on the bench. “Yours?”
Wordlessly she held her teacup to him and he repeated the action with the water.
She thanked him and poured a splash of milk into it before cradling it in her hands. “It’s cool this morning. You can tell Autumn is on its way.”
He nodded. “It’s always earlier here, too.” He nodded towards the terrace and she followed him silently.
The doors were swollen; again he had to nudge it with his shoulder. The terrace was overgrown, like the rest of the house. “It’s like Narnia,” she said softly then turned to look up at him with eyes that sparkled with magic. “Or the cottage in Hansel and Gretel. Everything all overgrown and whispering secrets of their own. Don’t you feel a bit like an invader? Like the house and the garden have their own little life and we don’t belong?”
He nodded. “It has always been like that. My parents lived here when they were first married. They had no running water. No electricity. It was exactly as it had been for centuries.”
“That must have been so romantic,” she sighed, settling herself into a cane chair and crossing her legs. She sipped her tea and stared out at the view. Perfect clouds drifted slowly before her, their edges rimmed in gold, their faces splashed with peach.
“Perhaps.”
“What happened to your parents?”
He took the seat beside her and sipped his coffee. He turned his head away so she wouldn’t see the way his features contorted in disgust at the taste. “My mother died when I was born. Here. In this house.” He turned his head to look inside the windows. “Labour was sudden. They had no phone. My father could not even get her into the car in time. I was born, and she bled to death in the garden.”
“Oh my God.” Kate stood up and crossed to sit on his lap. She wrapped an arm around his neck and buried her head in his neck. “I am so, so sorry. That’s awful.”
“Yes,” he agreed grimly. “Though romantic, this house and its remoteness, led to her death.”
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated, for lack of anything else to say.
He nodded. “There is no reason to think she would have survived if she’d been in town. In any event, my father modernised the home afterwards. It was painstaking.”
“I’m surprised he stayed, in a way. It must have been hard to be here without her.”
“Yes. Incredibly.” He sighed. “But it was where they’d been their happiest. He was … he met my mother and wanted to change his life completely. He grew up in the south of Italy, and moved here for her.”
“A new life together,” she smiled. “That’s so beautiful. They must have loved one another very much.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I believe they did.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Helena,” he tilted his head to see her face. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Because. It seems weird to be in her home and not know her name. Don’t you think?”
His heart turned over at the simple sentiment. “I think you have the habit of saying what I least expect.”
She laughed unsteadily. “Yes. I’m a bit weird.”
“No, not weird,” he assured her. “Unique. Beautiful.” Perfect. That word again breathed through his mind.
“What about your dad?” She asked, sipping her tea.
Benedetto stiffened imperceptibly. “He died a few years ago. He was in poor health.”
Fortunately, Kate was a romantic soul, and her mind took a different direction from her inquisitive path. “He must have been, in some way, waiting to join her for all those years.”
“Yes,” Benedetto nodded.
“How about your father?” He asked with a degree of assumed nonchalance that almost pained him. “Are you close to him?”
She was nowhere nearly as masterful at covering her emotions as he. “Not really.”
The answer surprised him. He had not known this. In every way he had seen proof of their tightness. In any interviews he’d ever given, Lord Beauchamp had boasted about his daughter; his protégé.
“No?” He sipped his coffee, hoping he seemed only casually interested in her revelation.
“We’re different people,” she said with finality. The conversation, so far as Kate was concerned, was over. She placed her tea cup down on the table in front of them and stood. “And we have a house to clean. Come on.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“You must get the most incredible fruit out here.” Kate reached up and plucked a single orange blossom to her nose. It was sweetly fragrant, a heady mix of sunshine and joy.
Beside her, Benedetto walked, hands stuffed in the pockets of the faded jeans he’d found in the wardrobe. His jumper was a dark grey and dressed like this, casually, he looked completely like himself. Kate knew the moment he appeared in this outfit that she had been right.
He might wear suits and tuxedos in his day to day life, but that was a costume. He was this person.
This outdoorsy, rugged, wild type of man.
“I would pick it, growing up, so that my father could make jam.”
“Your dad made jam?” She asked, picking another blossom and joining it to the other in her hand.
“The best,” his smile was teasing. “Don’t tell me you’re going to find that strange? And here I had you pegged as a feminist.”
“I don’t find it strange,” she laughed. “I like it. I especially like the thought of you wearing a cute little kiddy apron and helping him stir it.” She sobered. “It’s just … I can’t imagine my dad ever doing anything so domestic.” She pulled a face.
Benedetto nodded. “Tell me about him.” Only he didn’t want to know. The day they’d shared had shocked him for its easiness. They’d cleaned the house and she’d sung, showing that her voice was beautiful and melodious. They’d made love after lunch and dozed in the faded hammock that had once hung with splashes of bright colour between the fig and the olive tree in the front garden. And now, as the sun was dipping down over the surrounding hills, they walked side by side as though they’d known one another for years, not a day and a half.
The mention of Augustine Beauchamp filled him with a river of ill-will. It reminded him that he was full of hatred and anger. It reminded him that this woman was just a means to an end and that he was foolish to be getting to know her so well. It reminded him that he had used her for sex and sent proof of that act to the one man who would understand what he’d done, and why.
His face paled beneath his tan.
“And ruin this paradise?” She said with forced-lightness, grabbing another blossom and pinched all three between her fingers. “Look.” She held it out
to him; he saw only a collection of tiny flowers. “It’s a fairy bouquet.”
He arched a brow sardonically and she burst out laughing.
“I used to make them when I was little. Hundreds of them. One time, I picked all of the blossoms off our pear tree and made strands and strands and strands of white ribbons. It took me a whole day, but it was so beautiful.” She sighed at the memory. “Of course I was in so much trouble when my father found out. The tree hadn’t borne fruit for three years so I’d sort of ruined something special.” She shook her head.
“How old were you?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. Six or seven perhaps.”
“Too young to understand what you were doing,” he pointed out, taking the bouquet from her and twirling it in his own fingers. His eyes latched to hers and something sharp and bright flared between them.
Kate looked away from him, her eyes seeking out something — anything — that would distract her.
“What other fruits do you grow here?”
He was happy to let her move their conversation along. He draped an arm casually around her shoulders, though his brain was shouting at him to stop this madness. He had done what he’d set out to do and now he should have been driving her back to Rome and forgetting he ever knew her.
“I’ll have to check that the trees are in order,” he said thoughtfully. “But when my father lived here there were oranges, lemons, limes, cumquats, grapes, pears, apples, olives and a heap of macadamia nuts too. He had a goat that made his milk, and chickens for eggs.”
“Woah. It’s like your own River Cottage,” she said with a shake of her head. “How incredible it must be to live like that. I can barely open a tin of baked beans. I can’t imagine being so self-sufficient.”
“He was very in touch with nature.” Benedetto’s voice didn’t show how that statement pained him. To imagine his father leaving this paradise to answer fictitious charges in England. To have spent his dying days in a cold British jail!
“And you must have been too, to grow up like that.”
He shrugged.
Kate stopped walking so that she could stand in front of him and wrap her arms around his waist. The difference in their sizes was more obvious now than when they’d first met and she’d been in heels.
“When I first met you, I remember thinking that you were sort of wild. That you looked like a man who could tame a beast with his bare hands.” She linked her fingers through his now and brought them to her lips. “I think I was right.”
His heart was squeezing painfully in his chest. Why was she looking at him like that? As if he could give her something more than this? He couldn’t! He couldn’t give her anything. He’d taken from her exactly what he’d needed and soon it would be over.
“I left this life, remember? I turned my back on what my father had valued because I wanted to make my mark in the world. I didn’t want to idle in an ancient home, cara, even one so charming as this. You have a romantic impression of me that isn’t borne out by the facts.”
“You really prefer your life? A life of corporate boredom and money and meaningless sex and the trappings of success without any real …”
“What do you know of my life?” He demanded, with a sharper tone than he’d intended to employ. He saw something like fear clot her eyes and if he were feeling less emotional himself he might have stopped to wonder why she had that reaction.
She studied him carefully and then stepped away. “Nothing, I guess.” She wrapped her arms around her waist in a futile attempt to warm up. Only it wasn’t the cool wind that had chilled her. It was his sudden attitude shift.
It felt good to push her away. It felt right. He had let things get too complicated; a foolish, stupid move not worthy of him. After all, he was used to having meaningless sex with beautiful women.
But this place was magical.
This place could cast a spell on any who submitted to it as they had.
He felt the magic and it was changing him.
He would not allow it to.
“We have only just met,” he added, his tone cool now.
“I know.” She lifted her head to look up at him. Her eyes were bleak. He hated that. He hated that her eyes were as expressive as her father’s. In Augustine’s eyes he had seen belligerence and cruelty and disinterest. In hers he saw everything that was kind, good and vulnerable. “I guess I’ve known men like you before,” she said, and her words were like a knife in his gut. Was she possibly comparing him to her father?
“Have you?”
It wasn’t true; no one was like Benedetto Arnaud. “I hate the world you live in,” she said instead. “I hate the waste. The wanton spending. You threw two hundred thousand pounds at me as though it were nothing. Don’t you see how disgusting that is?”
“I gave the money to a charity,” he pointed out, wondering at how her face could fill with such passion.
“As though it were nothing,” she repeated. “You spent in the blink of an eye what most people spend a lifetime trying to save.”
“So it offends you that I have money?” He countered. “Yet you work for a charity that exists because of people like me.”
She frowned; he ached to kiss those pouted lips. “How do you make that sound wrong in some way?” She said finally.
“It’s not wrong. It is simply the way of the world.”
“What do you even do? To have this kind of money?”
He dug his hands back into his pockets. They were safer there. He needed a physical barrier to stop from reaching for her and reinstating the sweetness they’d been sharing a moment earlier. “I build things,” he said simply.
“What kinds of things?”
“High rises mostly.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you?”
“I guess if I had my phone I could have googled you.”
Icy panic dredged through him. If she had her phone and googled him she would have very quickly seen that his father had been incarcerated for murder and from there, a few clicks would have shown that her father had been the presiding judge.
He blinked his eyes closed and thanked the heavens for whatever stroke of luck had led to her forgetting her phone.
“Don’t google me,” he said, his voice thick. “I will answer any question you ask. I would prefer you to speak to me rather than read about me.”
She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “Why? Would I see something on the internet you wouldn’t like?”
“Anyone in my position has things on the internet about them that are simply not true.” He took a step forward, moving them nearer to the tangle of rose bushes. They were a mess. “My mother loved the rose garden; or so my father said. He used to take a tremendous amount of pride in maintaining it for her.” He sighed roughly. “He would hate to know it was like this.”
“Why don’t you hire someone to maintain the house and garden?” She asked, following his gaze into the garden. Her heart was beating fast; her head was spinning. Had they just been arguing? And if so, what about?
“It never occurred to me,” he said after a beat had passed. “I should though. You’re right.”
His quick agreement pleased her. She wrapped the words up and clutched them to her soul.
“You said last night that you haven’t been with anyone in a long time. Why not?” He asked, linking his fingers to hers and pulling her gently towards him. He pressed a kiss against her soft hair and he felt the answering thudding in her heart.
She closed her eyes and breathed in every detail of his nearness. “I haven’t been bought before.” Her words were an attempt at lightness. They didn’t succeed.
“That has no bearing on why you slept with me.”
“No,” she agreed. “If I hadn’t wanted you too I would have slapped you right across that gorgeous face for even suggesting such a thing.”
“You are a very sensual woman. I find it hard to believe you suppressed that side of your
self.”
“You’re the first man to ever think so,” she said, wondering at the kernel of shame that rolled through her. “Until I met you, I honestly thought I was some kind of prude.”
“You must be kidding,” he remarked, pulling back so that he could stare down into her eyes. It was a mistake. They were his eyes. Benedetto pulled her roughly against his chest, pressing his chin lightly against the top of her head.
“No,” she stroked his back. “My first time was …” she cleared her throat. “Is this weird to talk about?”
“Not at all,” he assured her, though he instinctively hated the thought of her having slept with others before him.
“My first time was with my boyfriend. I was eighteen. It was the most uncomfortable and simultaneously boring experience of my life. I remember lying there thinking: is this all sex is? Is that what all the fuss is about? I found out about a year ago that he’s gay. I guess that explains the lack of chemistry, maybe.” Her smile was wistful.
“That’s it?” He had no choice now but to look down on her.
She shrugged. “No. There was another guy.” Something like fear whispered across her features once more. “I liked him.” Jealousy, unmistakable, barbed in his gut. “He worked for my dad, so I’d known him for years.” She cleared her throat. “It should never have happened. I knew it would be … I knew my dad … it should never have happened.”
Benedetto processed the information she had given him, and the information she hadn’t known she was giving him. “Your father didn’t approve.”
She shook her head, as she remembered the expression on Augstine’s face when she’d revealed she was in a relationship with Connor.
“You will end it, or you will be sorry.”
“I don’t want to end it. I like him, and he likes me.”
“You will end it, Katherine.”
“No.”
She shouldn’t have spoken to him like that. It had been foolhardy and futile from the beginning to hope she could change his mind. She’d had to wear jackets for three weeks, despite the heat of the summer, to cover the bruises on her arms.
Seasons of Sin: Misbehaving in summer and autumn... (Series of Sin) Page 20