The Truth About De Campo

by Jennifer Hayward

  “So we come back then?”

  “We have a big storm rolling in.” Raymond gestured toward the darkening sky. “I don’t advise you driving back to Paradis under those conditions, not on these roads.”

  Quinn gave the sky an uncertain look. “It won’t be that bad, do you think?”

  The manager lifted his shoulders. “It’s going to be a proper tropical storm. I wouldn’t chance it.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Are they finished with the floors on any of the suites?”

  “The Dolphin Suite, yes. I had them finish it in case you wanted to stay.”

  “That’s it?”

  He nodded. “Everything else is still being polished. That one has three bedrooms in it though.”

  Quinn caught her lip between her teeth. Matteo could have saved them all the breath and suggested that, no, staying here in a suite with Quinn with the electricity that raged between them was a distinctly bad idea. However, even he, a lover of windy roads and tricky driving, didn’t relish the thought of traversing the narrow, hair-raising St. Lucian highways in a tropical downpour.

  Quinn glanced at him. “Okay if we stay?”

  “Of course.” He could make it through one night with a single wall between them. Couldn’t he? He’d managed to get through an entire week without putting his hands on her. Had kept things straight as a board between them. This was definitely doable.

  “All right then, thank you,” Quinn accepted. “We’ll stay.”

  They raided the hotel boutique for a change of clothes while Raymond got them a key. Quinn held up a tangerine-colored bikini. “I need a swim,” she said with a grimace. “Get yourself some trunks.”

  He stared at the curtain of the changing room as it flapped shut behind her. Was she crazy? What planet was she on? Sharing a hotel suite was bad enough. Getting naked with her was insanity.

  Not happening.

  Except he was severely hot and tired. He needed to unwind from the pressure cooker that was Quinn, and a beer in the plunge pool or hot tub was an irresistible siren’s call. Mouth tightening, he grabbed a pair of trunks, an extra shirt and a pair of khakis. He could swim while she was working. God knew she did it 24/7.

  * * *

  Showered and changed into casual pants and a polo shirt, Matteo emerged from his bedroom into the main living area of the luxury oceanfront suite destined to house heads of state and rock stars, to find Quinn pacing the space, phone pressed to her ear, her gait agitated, voice sharp.

  Not something he needed to be present for, he decided, walking out onto the terrace. He took in the forbiddingly dark sky, its ominous gray-black clouds that seemed to hang suspended over the island. Raymond had been right. It was going to be a proper tropical storm, hard and heavy, any minute now. There was nothing like an island rainstorm to relieve the tension and humidity in the air, and right now they both needed it. Badly.

  He fought the urge to strip down and dive into the ocean and stay there. No swimming allowed until Quinn, in that sapphire-blue dress of hers, which made the most of her voluptuous figure, was safely immersed in work and the sweats he now knew she preferred to do it in.

  Focus. Get the job done, Matteo.

  Quinn’s voice floated out onto the terrace, hard, determined. “No, Warren, I do not need you to fly down here. It’s coming together.”

  A pause. “You don’t trust me.”

  Another pause. “I’m fine. Focus on the U.S. hotels. The reopening will go off without a hitch, I promise you.”

  If everything fell into place. He winced as he thought about how much there was still left to do in five short days.

  The rest of the conversation was short, abrupt. The ping-pong back-and-forth of two intensely driven, strong wills ended in a defiant silence. It was a good five minutes before Quinn joined him on the terrace, her green eyes glimmering with frustration, full mouth drooping with fatigue.

  “Where is the wine?”

  He poured her a glass of the sparkling white chilling in the ice bucket. “When,” he asked quietly, handing it to her, “are you going to admit you’re human like the rest of us?”

  The tigerlike fierceness he’d come to know so well sparked in her eyes. “It’s not that,” she growled, taking the glass from him. “He never fully trusts me with anything. He says he does, then he undercuts me. He has to put his stamp on everything. Point out where I’m lacking...”

  Matteo shrugged. “It sounded to me like he was offering help.”

  Her mouth twisted. “He only offers it when he thinks you’re about to screw up.”

  “Maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way,” he suggested. “The most successful people in the world don’t do it on their own. They surround themselves with good people.”

  She lifted her chin as if she hadn’t even heard him. “Once, just once, I’d like to do it on my own. Prove that I am not successful just because I am Warren’s daughter, but because of my damned impressive abilities.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s doubting that.”

  “Yes, they do. All the time the other vice presidents take shots at me. I’ve heard them behind my back.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “So you’re going to spend the rest of your career worrying about what everyone else thinks?”

  She pointed her glass at him, antagonism darkening her eyes. “Do you know that after I made the top thirty under thirty list, Warren did not say a word of congratulations to me? Not a word. He said, and I quote, ‘It’s too bad you weren’t the first woman on it.’”

  Matteo blinked. “Perhaps it’s not his thing to give compliments then, but I’m sure he was proud of you. He had to have been. That list is brutally hard to get on to.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Quinn came back bitterly. “Warren’s standards are so high you can’t be human. You have to be a machine.”

  “How’s that going for you?” he asked softly. “You seem to be doing a pretty good impersonation of one and it’s still not making you or him happy.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I just need to do better.”

  “No, you don’t.” He took a step closer. “Dammit, Quinn, you need to believe in yourself. You are working miracles here but you need help.”

  “I just need to get through the next few weeks and I’ll be fine.”

  He sighed. “There are too many issues with too many properties.”

  “I will manage.”

  “You will self-destruct.”

  She looked him dead in the eye. “I didn’t ask for your commentary.”

  He hissed in a breath. She could be a cold bitch sometimes. He’d been busting his butt for a week trying to help her and this was what he got? But even as he thought it, he knew better. Knew the puzzle that was Quinn had grown a hard shell to protect herself from getting hurt.

  Let it go, Matteo. The voice of sanity echoed in his head. Drop it now before you get more emotionally involved with a woman who is mortally off-limits to you.

  They ate at the candlelit table for two that overlooked the ocean, protected by a canopy as a crackling thunderstorm descended. It lit up the night with outrageously beautiful white light that arced across the sky and stole their breath. The small talk made him crazy. The need to hold her made his hands curl at his sides. He gritted his teeth and went through the key points to review with the sommelier in the morning. Forced the salmon down his throat. Did not acknowledge how she bit her lip against the electricity that raged between them every time their gazes collided, just as strong as the storm around them.

  One more taste of her, he knew, and he was a dead man.

  Matteo did not do relationships with women. Didn’t even know if he was capable of one with his checkered past. With his parents’ business merger as his prime example of what one could encompass. Quinn
needed someone she could believe in. Someone who could restore her faith in men. Not him.

  She offered him a liqueur after dinner. Coffee. He turned them both down flat. Watched the disappointment slacken her lower lip. “I have work to do,” he murmured, getting to his feet and throwing his napkin on the table. “Thank you for dinner.”

  Then he escaped to his room.

  * * *

  Quinn poured herself another glass of wine and paced. She was out of control with her stress, no doubt about it. Matteo did not deserve her ire, not when he’d just spent the entire week bailing her behind out of an impossible situation they might actually pull off if they were very, very lucky.

  It’s just that he was so damn perfect sometimes. So calm and in control and able to see the big picture. Her fingers curled around her wineglass, absorbing its icy chill. That was, when he wasn’t falling apart over a death he wouldn’t talk about....

  She stopped in front of the incomparable view of the sparkling sea that stretched for miles in front of her. And admitted it. Wasn’t the real problem what a good job he was doing ignoring her?

  She wanted to kill him. How rational was that?

  Quinn stalked inside and changed into the bikini she’d raided from the boutique. Who cared if the sides were cut so high you could see her butt? Or if the triangles of fabric on the top didn’t do a great a job of covering her chest? Matteo had damn well walked away from her again. Without a backward glance. Which was absolutely their deal. It was. She just didn’t know how he could so completely turn off his feelings. Forget how unbelievable that night they’d shared had been. Because she’d tried. She’d really tried. And it wasn’t working.

  She went back outside and sat on the edge of the plunge pool. The storm had moved off, silvery moonlight slanting across the smooth surface of the water, reflecting her confusion back at her. One night was supposed to have been all it was, yet she felt changed somehow. Matteo’s hands on her skin, his passion for her, had replaced the fear and inadequacy Julian had implanted in her with the alternate reality that she was beautiful and desirable. Worthy of being treasured.

  It had shattered a perception of herself carved over a roller-coaster year of marriage. She wasn’t home enough, Julian had said. She wasn’t warm enough to the wives of his business associates. Which had degenerated into the fact she wasn’t warm enough in general. She didn’t treat him like the man of the house.

  She downed another gulp of the wine with a jerky movement. Her inexperience in bed had been a major disappointment to Julian. But now that that night with Matteo had proven she wasn’t a cold fish, now that she’d sampled her ability to feel, to want, she was struck by the disturbing thought that she would never experience it again. That no man would ever know her as instinctively as Matteo did. Had from day one.

  She sank her toes into the water. Lifted them out and watched the droplets fall like big fat tears from her skin. Hot moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want to be that person anymore. The woman who had written off a part of herself as unrecoverable. Who had never believed herself capable of more. A lump formed in her throat, swift and hard. Julian had taken away her desire to feel. Matteo had given it back to her. But he was just a playboy doing his thing. He would move on now, win this deal. Focus on what was important to him. And Quinn would be left with the empty shell of who she’d always been.

  The tears slid silently down her cheeks, shocking and unbidden. She hadn’t cried like this since Sile had died. When she had finally lost the fight she had so valiantly waged against the cancer that had been too strong even for her adopted mother, who had been the most courageous woman she’d known. Now it felt like a fissure had opened up inside her and exposed everything. Every part of her. Made it painful to breathe.

  The silvery moon dipped behind the clouds. Everything became blindingly clear in that moment. So blindingly clear that she didn’t care anymore. She wanted more. She wanted her life to be more. The problem was, she thought, swiping the tears away from her cheeks with the back of her hand, she didn’t know any other way to be. This was all she’d ever been. Quinn, who got the job done.

  She blinked hard as the tears flew faster down her face. Matteo was damn right she didn’t want to be human. Being human sucked.

  * * *

  Sometime around midnight Matteo, hot and unable to sleep, emerged from his bedroom and headed for the pool. The rhythmical song of the tree frogs filled the otherwise silent air with a deafening symphony he was surprised anyone could sleep through, yet he had slept through it these past couple of weeks, finding it exceptionally soothing white noise.

  But not tonight. He’d emptied his email in-box, read every last report and talked to Gabe who was presently wildly excited over a new wine. And he was still wide-awake with no sign his head wanted to join his body in its state of complete exhaustion.

  He grabbed a towel from the rack and turned toward the pool. Then he froze as he saw Quinn sitting with her legs dangling in the water. Her gaze was fixed on the dark mass of the Caribbean Sea, her profile so exquisitely drawn he couldn’t tear his eyes from it. He had never met a woman whose beauty was so all-encompassing—so layered. Just when you thought you’d reached the end of it, she revealed more of herself that made you fall deeper under her spell.

  If he had continued on with his sensible behavior of late, he would have turned on his heel and gone back inside. Instead he focused on the spare amount of material in the tangerine-colored bikini that did little to cover her mouthwatering curves. Her upswept ponytail revealed the long, graceful curve of her neck that he wanted to sink his teeth into. Dammit. He should never have shared this space with her.

  She sensed his presence as if a whisper of air had carried him to her. Looked up at him, the bright glimmer in her eyes wrapping itself around his heart and tugging. She’d been crying. Quinn, who took everything on the chin like a prizefighter and just kept on going, had finally showed a chink in her armor.

  Run, a voice inside him warned. Run before this all comes falling down around you. Except he didn’t. He stepped closer, lowered himself down beside her and dunked his feet in the bathtub-warm water.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know.”

  He pushed a wayward chunk of her hair behind her ear so he could see her face. “You’re too hard on yourself. You need to back off and accept help before you break.”

  “It’s not that.”

  Just as Quinn had crossed the threshold into his room that night, Matteo knew what he was about to ask was the verbal equivalent of doing the same. But the words tumbled out of his mouth anyway. “Then tell me what it is.”

  She looked down at her hands. Twisted them together in her lap. “You made me feel alive the night we were together. Like for the first time in my life I could feel like everyone else. That I wasn’t a machine programmed to churn out profit numbers...”

  His heart stalled. “You aren’t unfeeling, Quinn. You just don’t know how to express yourself.”

  “I’m scared to.” She lifted her gaze to his. “Being like this,” she said, waving a hand at herself, “is the only way I know how to be.”

  “You can do it,” he growled. “I’ve watched you command a room of fifty workmen with your pinky, Quinn. A little self-honesty is not that hard.”

  “All right then.” She turned to face him, amber fire burning in her eyes. “You want me to face my feelings? Speak my mind? You said a man would have to be crazy to walk away from me and yet you’ve had no problem doing that.... Actions speak louder than words, Matteo.”

  “You know why I walked away from you,” he said harshly. “You know why we both walked away.”

  She balled her hands into fists. “And so now you move on. Yo
u go your merry way, chalk me up as another of Matteo De Campo’s conquests while I—” She stared down at her fists. “I am...conflicted.”

  Matteo felt as if someone should read him his rights. Tell him anything he said could or would be used in a court of law against him. Except his particular court of law was a ten-million-dollar deal that had become his personal hell.

  “You see?” She sliced a hand through the air at him. “It’s easy for you. You probably have a dozen names in your smartphone you’re just dying to call when you get home.”

  “That is ridiculous,” he muttered. “We are negotiating a deal that will make the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Quinn. This is not about our hormones.”

  “I know that.” She slammed her mouth shut, wrapped her arms around her chest and did an impression of a statue. Saliva pooled in his mouth at the sight of her plush flesh fighting for freedom over her bikini top. God, he wanted to touch her.

  Her eyes grew brighter, the delicate muscles of her throat convulsing. “Tell me what’s really bothering you,” he said roughly. “Despite what women think, we men are actually not mind readers.”

  “I’m afraid,” she threw at him, aggravation lacing her tone. “I am scared that I’m never going to feel what I felt for you the other night for anyone else. That what we had was some one-night aberration and I’m going to go back to being cold old Quinn who can’t have an orgasm because she can’t let go long enough to let it happen.”

  His heart plummeted to somewhere beneath the concrete. “That’s crazy. Of course you will.”

  She shook her head, lips trembling. “I’m scared I’m never going to feel that alive again, Matteo. It terrifies me.”

  “You will,” he said hoarsely. “You just need to find the right man.”

  “The right man?” She looked at him as if he had cotton batting for a brain. “Am I the only one who thought what we shared the other night was inordinately special? Please tell me I’m not that big a fool.”

  He pressed his lips shut.

  “Goddamn you, Matteo.” She planted her hands on the ground to roll to her feet. “You could at least tell me the truth.”