The Truth About De Campo

by Jennifer Hayward

She stepped closer, her gaze on his face. “This is about Giancarlo.”

  “Dammit, Quinn. Go.”

  “What happened with him? You are clearly not okay, Matteo.”

  Frustration erupted like a spew of volcanic ash. Rose up inside him like an unstoppable force, curling his hands into fists at his sides, sending his breath flaming through his nostrils. “It’s the anniversary of his death tomorrow. It’s a bad night for me, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” She pushed her hair out of her face, her beautiful eyes gleaming with compassion. “I’m so sorry. How long has it been?”

  “Three years,” he said bleakly. Three years of hell.

  She stepped closer, her fingers curving around his forearm. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “One kiss does not make a confessional,” he rasped, jerking away. “The only thing that makes this better is alcohol or a woman, Quinn, and since I’ve sworn off the former as a source of anesthesia and we’ve agreed you are off-limits, you need to walk away.”

  She stared up at him, her hazel eyes huge. “I don’t think... I don’t want to leave you like this...”

  “Walk, Quinn.” Close to the edge and terrified of her seeing him go over it, he reached up and brushed his fingers across her cheek. “I’m doing my best to keep this strictly business. But you in that dress tonight isn’t anything about business. All I can think about is stripping it off you and knocking my brain senseless because I know it would work.” He ran his thumb down over her full, lush mouth. “I know you would blow my mind enough to pull me out of this. But we both know that can’t happen. So leave...now.”

  Her mouth quivered under his thumb. She stood there and for a moment, he thought she might stay. Then she stepped back and did exactly what he’d known she would. Retreated. But her gaze remained firmly fixed on his face.

  “I’m in the suite at the end of the road if you need someone to talk to. At any time, Matteo.”

  Then she turned and left.

  He waited until she was out of earshot. Then he let out a primal yell the pounding surf swallowed up.

  It was not nearly enough. It would never be enough.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN A SLEEPLESS night had only made your brain more combustible, your balance on the high wire that was life more tenuous and your need to scream near deafening, you did whatever it took to make it through the day.

  Fortunately for Matteo, working in François Marin’s kitchen was an intense form of therapy that left no room for thought. A well-oiled machine, his kitchen ran with military precision, timed down to the minute, with no room for mistakes. Exactly what he needed right now on this darkest of days.

  He had spent the morning touring the kitchens with François, Margarite, Daniel and Quinn, followed by an exhaustive study of the hotel’s new menus. His knowledge of food and the unique wine pairings he’d suggested for François’s menu had elicited an excited response from the chef. They fit perfectly with Quinn’s eclectic vision and made Daniel Williams look like a neophyte in the process.

  Exactly as planned. He sliced up a scallion with ruthless efficiency. After the menu review, much to Daniel William’s chagrin, Matteo had joined the other sous chefs in the kitchen to prepare for tonight’s chef’s challenge. The guests weren’t due until seven, but the preparation for this type of an event was massive. He alone had three sauces on the go and salads to plate.

  Adrenaline pounded through his veins and fired his movements as the clock ticked until he was a finely tuned cog in the machine, operating on command. He started on the hot peppers, tearing through them with a razor-sharp knife. If he moved from point A to point B to point C without deviating, he might, just might, not become unhinged.

  Might forget that Quinn had seen into the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind last night. A place he’d never let anyone go.

  * * *

  Quinn tossed her pencil on the desk, sat back and rubbed her hands over her eyes. She’d finally gotten that report on her progress over to her father last night, but the rest of her paperwork and troubleshooting emails for the Mediterranean hotels had taken until well into the early hours. She was good at existing on six hours of sleep but anything less than that and she started to get distinctly unbalanced, her judgment skewed and unreliable.

  Right now was a case in point. She should be working. Instead she couldn’t get the haunted look on Matteo’s face last night out of her head. The way he’d looked ready to tip over the edge. She’d had some tortured moments in her life, like the morning the private investigator had turned over that file on her parents and she’d found out the truth. That it had been her they hadn’t wanted. But it hadn’t come close to the look of pure agony on Matteo’s face. Like he was being tortured by something beyond his control....

  She frowned and steepled her fingers against the edge of the desk. Losing a best friend must be awful. She couldn’t imagine losing Thea. But it had been three years since Giancarlo had died. Time enough to heal. So why was Matteo so tortured?

  Picking up the pencil, Quinn pressed it against her temple. As if questioning her sanity. Because last night, even after Matteo had made it clear women were his anesthesia, that likely any woman would have done in that moment, she’d been tempted to stay. She could have said it had been her human side making a rare appearance. She was afraid it was a whole lot more than that.

  She would check on him. Shoving her palms against the desk, she rolled to her feet. She’d stop by the kitchen, see how he was doing, then dress for the chef’s challenge. Not that Thomas was going to need her help. Unlike his counterpart at Le Belle Bleu on the other side of the island, who apparently, from the paperwork, did not have everything running smoothly, Thomas was a genius at running a high-end establishment.

  Quinn sighed. Tonight would be fun. Tomorrow, when they did their walk-through, she’d deal with Le Belle Bleu.

  Taking a shortcut through the back of the hotel, she stepped into the kitchen. She’d seen grown men reduced to tears in François’s pressure cooker of a production, but there was Matteo, working in a group of a half dozen sous chefs, looking like he’d spent his life there.

  She watched, fascinated, as he pulled the pan half off the burner and tossed in four or five herbs. Was there anything the man couldn’t do? And how had she ever pegged him a flirty playboy? He was a brilliant businessman. He also made chef’s whites look outrageously good.

  She stepped closer to see what the last sauce was. He gave her an even look. “Quinn.”

  “Just wondering what you’re making,” she said brightly. She pointed at the green sauce. “What’s that?”

  “An Indian mint sauce.”

  “Looks exotic.”

  “And I can’t mess it up.” He gave her a dark look. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “Just checking to see how you’re doing.”

  He threw a couple of drops of hot sauce into the third sauce. “You’re distracting me.”

  “How could I be distracting you? I’ve been here two seconds.”

  He gave her a deliberate once-over. “Do you really want to know?”

  Heat burned a path up to her cheeks. “Not so much.”

  His eyes glittered. “François,” he called out, pointing a finger at her. “She needs to go.”

  The chef quirked a finger at Quinn. “You know the rules. Out.”

  She gave Matteo an outraged look. “That was low, calling in the teacher.”

  He added the mushrooms to the hot sauce and shook the pan over the flame. “I want to win. Out.”

  Quinn turned around with a huff and left. He wanted to win because he wanted to make Daniel Williams look even more lackluster than he had this morning going through the menus. It had been painful to watch. He was rapidly shifting the tide and he knew it.

 
She got dressed and greeted the guests and judges with Thomas. The judges spanned everything from a native pop singer who’d made it big on the international music scene, to the prime minister and governor general of the island, to one of St. Lucia’s most celebrated artists.

  The evening went smoothly. Dinner was a gastronomic study in perfection, but it was François’s main course—the lamb with Matteo’s green mint sauce that stole the night. Quinn didn’t even need to see a scorecard to know who had won it was so patently obvious from the looks on the judge’s faces.

  As the results were being tabulated, the chefs changed and came out to mingle with the crowd. She watched Matteo turn on the charm, drawing the VIPs to him like moths to a flame, including the St. Lucian pop singer, Catrina James, who was beautiful and vibrant in a fire-engine-red dress that showed off her creamy, perfect skin. Quinn had never seen such a chameleon as Matteo. He molded himself into exactly what he needed to be at any given moment. Brilliantly.

  He had changed into gray pants and a white shirt, his olive skin darker, swarthier from the hot rays of the Caribbean sun. It made his startling gray eyes stand out even more. Added to the intensity surrounding him, sitting just below the surface. Made him look even more dangerously attractive. If that was possible.

  He caught her gaze. She pulled hers resolutely away and sat down at the bar, ordering herself a soda water. She’d been running all night, making sure things went smoothly. Sitting for a couple of minutes and reviewing the itinerary the manager of Le Belle Bleu had sent over for their walk-through tomorrow would be a beautiful thing the way her feet ached.

  Matteo slid onto the stool beside her just as the bartender delivered her soda water. The sexy scent of him drifted into her nostrils. Made it hard to concentrate.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Si. That kitchen was smoking hot.”

  Not the only smoking hot thing around here, her recalcitrant brain proclaimed. She ordered him the island beer he’d favored at dinner, and turned to him.

  “You were brilliant in the kitchen. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  He gave her a thoughtful look. “I am hopeless under the hood of a car. Desperately bad at sudoku. And my grammar is sometimes suspect.”

  “Shameful.”

  “I wasn’t blowing you off, Quinn. It was an act of self-preservation.”

  From what? Her stomach did a funny little jump. “How,” she asked deliberately, “are you today?”

  He pulled the beer the bartender set down toward him. “I’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “Matteo—”

  He held up a hand. “How about I ask you a question?”

  Quinn surveyed him warily as he took a long swig of his beer. “All right.”

  He propped his elbow on the bar and rested his chin in his hand. “What was with the one-year marriage? Most people’s exercise routines last longer than that.”

  She felt her face turn into fully petrified papier-mâché. “We were...incompatible.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not looking for the press release, Quinn. I’m looking for the truth.”

  “That is the truth.” And a million other intricacies she couldn’t even begin to get into.

  Matteo looked at her for a long moment, those gunmetal-gray eyes of his seeming to look straight through her. “I think you were too strong a personality for him. He wasn’t man enough to be with you.”

  She choked on the sip of wine she’d taken. “That’s a big assumption coming from someone who doesn’t know anything about it.”

  His eyes glittered. “I know you, Quinn. You aren’t that hard to figure out.”

  She bit into the side of her mouth. “I think Julian would disagree,” she said tightly. “He would tell you I was a boring workaholic who didn’t know how to have fun.”

  “Then he’d be as much of a fool as I thought.” His baldly stated words made her heart jump. “Any man with balls would recognize that for the lie it is. There isn’t any part of you that could ever be described as boring, Quinn. As anything but full-on fascinating.”

  A flush of warmth swept through her. “You don’t have to feed me compliments, Matteo. I have thick skin.”

  “Then you can take me telling you the truth.” He let the loaded statement sit on the air until he was sure he had her full attention. “If we were doing anything but negotiating a ten-million-dollar deal right now, we’d have been in bed together already. And I’d be taking apart the puzzle that is Quinn piece by piece.” His gaze held hers, the intent behind it riveting. “I guarantee you I wouldn’t be bored.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. Refused to continue on its way up to her brain where she needed it most.

  “You are not a woman to be discarded,” he said harshly. “He was a fool.”

  Quinn sat there speechless. Drowning in a new perspective that had never occurred to her before. Had Julian been intimidated by her? Had he tried to hurt her, humiliate her to make himself feel like more of a man? Because she’d been too much of one?

  Her world tilted on its axis. Fractured apart as a seismic shift ripped the ground from beneath her feet and set her adrift. She’d spent the past year torturing herself with ways she could have saved her marriage. Ways she could have changed to keep her husband from straying. Allowed her self-confidence to be completely ripped apart when he’d found her wanting every time. When in reality, maybe her marriage had been destined for failure from the start. Because of the man Julian was. Who they both were.

  One of the chefs came over and grabbed Matteo for the winner’s announcement. Quinn sat there, head buzzing as she watched him walk away. She had always believed that at the heart of her, she was somehow defective. Her disastrous marriage had only underscored it. What if it wasn’t true? What if her inability to please her husband in bed had been more about him than her?

  With her belief about her biggest failure turned upside down, she stood at Thomas Golding’s side as they announced the winner of the chef’s challenge. Paradis, to no one’s surprise, won, François’s lamb dish and outrageously eclectic-green banana pie outclassing the competition by a landslide.

  Catrina James presented François with the winner’s trophy and gave each of the chefs a kiss on the cheek as she posed with them for photographs. Her one for Matteo was extra enthusiastic. Of course.

  Champagne bottles were popped and the night dissolved into a big party. It was impossible not to get caught up in the exuberant celebrations, but as she watched, as the clock slipped closer to midnight, Matteo’s easy smile faded. His face shuttered and the darkness descended. It was like watching a curtain fall and she knew he’d been hiding his pain under that charming, devil-may-care demeanor.

  Tonight was the anniversary of Giancarlo’s death.

  It did not surprise her to turn around sometime after midnight to find Catrina James attached to another male and Matteo gone. She stood at Thomas Golding’s side, the ground feeling unsteady under her feet. She should go back to her room and work. She had enough of it for an army.

  Matteo was a conflict of interest in the most important assignment of her career. She should be running in the opposite direction. But some things in life were more important than work. Funny how she’d realized that now of all moments.

  Quinn looked down at the golden shimmer of the Riesling in her glass, the sparkling liquid reflecting the light of the moon. I know you would blow my mind enough to pull me out of this....

  Her heartbeat picked up into an insistent rhythm that made the blood whish in her ears. How could any deal matter when a person was in agony? She could not leave Matteo alone. She would not.

  She could not spend another minute of her life wondering about the truth of herself.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured to Thomas. “I have some work to do.”

  Cros
sing the terrace, she took the path to the upper level of luxury suites. Saw the light burning in Matteo’s living room. She climbed the steps to the door and was about to rap on it when she heard music. A haunting piano score played so beautifully it froze her in her tracks.

  Matteo.

  Her heart pounded so loud in her chest she thought it might break through. She knew she was invading his privacy. Knew she should walk away. But the melody reached out and wrapped itself around her heart. The blackness of it.

  Quinn walked around to the back of the suite and took the stairs up to the patio. Leaned back against the wall in the shadows and listened to every heartrending note. She did not recognize the piece, but there was no doubt in her mind Matteo had written it for Giancarlo. It was poignant, stunning and full of grief.

  Her knees shook, her eyes burned. She was not someone made of emotion. But this was breaking her heart.

  She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, pressed against the wall, listening to him play. When he finally stopped, she took a deep breath, steadied herself and stepped into the light. He sat at the piano staring at the keys. He looked up as she appeared, as if he wasn’t at all surprised to find her there. His bloodshot eyes were nearly her undoing.

  “I told you last night you can’t help.” His voice was gritty, broken. “This is my personal forty-eight hours of hell, Quinn. Leave me to it.”

  She shook her head. “Whatever this is, whatever happened to Giancarlo, you have to let it go. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

  He looked down at the keys, his back ramrod straight. “You should go.”

  Her stomach convulsed in a long pull. She looked down at the threshold that divided the patio from the inside space. Made her choice.

  He looked up as she walked into the room. “Quinn—”

  She sat down on the stool beside him and took his face in her hands. “You have to make it stop,” she told him huskily. “I know what it’s like to keep your demons inside. To let them torture you. You will destroy yourself.”

  He pulled her hands away, the desperate, hopeless look in his eyes of a man who’d suffered too much. “I can’t. Dammit, I can’t.”