by Penny Jordan
‘Why? Have you found another man to replace Carlo before he is even cold in his grave?’ What was that pain slicing and ripping at his guts? He didn’t want her; he had stopped wanting her when she had started her unsuccessful bid for a more permanent role in his life. He could hear her voice now, soft with false emotion as she told him, ‘I love you, Gabriel, and I know that you love me, even if you refuse to say the words.’
‘You know wrong, then,’ he had answered, and had meant it. ‘I do not love anyone. The ability and the desire to love was kicked and beaten out of me by foster parents. The same foster parents who claimed to love me when they discovered that I’d become financially successful. You say you love me, but what you really mean is that you want me to keep you permanently in my life because I am rich and you are poor. What you love is what I give you.’
‘That isn’t true,’ she had protested. But of course he had known better than to believe her.
He looked at her now as she told him fiercely, ‘No. Unlike you, Gabriel, I’ve moved on from my past.’ She lifted her head proudly. ‘I have a degree now, and an MBA. I’m fully qualified to get a job that pays me enough to support myself and my sons.’ She only prayed that would be true.
Gabriel had to fight against the shock of feeling that was gripping him. Why the hell should he be so angry and resentful at the thought of her working to support herself and being independent of him?
‘You can’t deceive me, Sasha, with your pseudo-maternal act,’ he retaliated. ‘Were you the mother you are trying to pretend to be, do you think for one moment that Carlo would have felt it necessary to appoint me as his sons’ guardian? It’s obvious that in the end he recognised exactly what you are, and that he wanted to protect them.’
Sasha had raised her hand before she could rationalise what she was doing, but just as swiftly he reacted to her action, clipping her arms to her sides. Before she could guess what he intended to do he was suddenly dragging her into his arms and kissing her in angry punishment. The pressure of his mouth ground down on her own, bruising the softness of her lips as she fought against his domination. But it was her retaliatory savage nip at his bottom lip that drew the blood she could taste on her tongue. He thrust her away so roughly that she almost fell, his eyes as dark as murder as he wiped the back of his hand across his split lip.
‘Bitch,’ he said brutally, before he turned and strode back down the stairs, leaving her standing watching him whilst her belly churned with ice and fire, fear and need, hatred and... And what? The opposite of hatred was love, and she did not love him. She raised the back of her hand to her eyes, shocked to see that it came away wet with tears.
* * *
PART OF THE charm of the hotel was that it was in many ways still very much a private house, Sasha admitted as she stood in the bedroom of the top-floor private suite that Carlo had always insisted was not to be treated as part of the hotel or occupied by anyone else.
Below this, the next floor contained another large suite and three smaller ones, with the rest of the bedrooms contained in what had once been the stable block of the house. The reception rooms were decorated and furnished as though they were rooms in a private home, and a large conservatory had been added to the rear of the house to provide a dining room that opened out onto a terrace, beyond which was the swimming pool. It would be easy enough for a man with Gabriel’s wealth to turn it back into a private home. And it would certainly be more comfortable than the semi-fortress in the mountains that had been his grandfather’s home.
She and Carlo had occupied separate bedrooms throughout their marriage. Hers looked out to sea, and was decorated in a palette of soft, barely-there blues and aquas and natural fabrics. She needed to speak to Maria about lunch. She picked up the telephone receiver.
Her call completed, she slipped off her linen dress and went into her bathroom to clean the cut on her leg. The time she had spent outside with the boys was giving her body a soft tan that was driving away the pallor caused by so many hours spent at Carlo’s bedside. She barely glanced at her own reflection, though. Her head had begun to ache with the tension and pressure of all the morning had brought.
Why, why had Carlo done this? He must have known what it would do to her. He had always promised her that he would never...
But of course she knew why he had done it. It had been his way of providing for Sam and Nico. And for her? Had he really thought she would allow Gabriel to support her? Had he believed that Gabriel would? Who knew what thoughts might have filled the head of a dying man.
Automatically she cleaned the small cut, but her mind wasn’t really on what she was doing. There was a faint smear of dried blood on her dress, so she went into her dressing room and removed a pair of jeans and a tee shirt from the closet. She would have liked to have a shower before she put them on, but the boys would be hungry.
Downstairs in the kitchen, the boys and Maria, who came in to cook for them when they were in residence, were gathered around a large, well-worn and equally well-scrubbed kitchen table.
‘Look, Mum, Maria is going to make a cake with these eggs from Flossie and Bessie,’ Sam announced proudly.
Flossie and Bessie were the boys’ bantam hens—another cornerstone of Sasha’s determination to bring up her sons in a very specific way. This particular cornerstone involved active participation in becoming aware of what good food was, where it came from, and how it should be cooked.
‘We’re going to make chocolate brownies—but after lunch.’
‘Good choice,’ an unexpected male voice announced easily—unexpected and, far as she was concerned, very definitely unwanted. Involuntarily her gaze flew to his mouth. His lip had stopped bleeding but it was obviously swollen. ‘Chocolate brownies are one of my favourites.’
What was happening to her? Why couldn’t she make herself stop looking at his mouth? If she didn’t, he would notice, and then... Could Maria and the boys feel her tension, and with it the antipathy and distrust with which she and Gabriel were filling the homey room? It appalled her that she should be reacting to him like this. She was twenty-eight now, for heaven’s sake, not seventeen and vulnerable to being totally overwhelmed by his sexuality and her own immaturity.
But there was no mistaking the hot flare of her immediate arousal. It might be hidden within her body, but she could not hide from it. Anger, rejection, panic flowed through her veins like red hot lava. Why was this happening? She had lived ten whole years without him. Years during which she had been happy and secure, years during which she had privately celebrated her own freedom from the destructive emotions and needs that had tied her to him—the hungers she hadn’t been able to control but he had, using them to hold her in thrall to him. There had been nothing she would not have done to please him, no pleasure more intense for her than the pleasure of pleasing him. But this ache in her body now was an unwanted reminder that, just as he had known how to compel and arouse her, he had also known how to please and satisfy her. The sex between them had been all-consuming and almost compulsive. How could one man have the power to affect her like this? It shouldn’t be possible.
She tried to focus on the table in front of her. Good food should be eaten with a good digestion, and that required contentment. Already her appetite was betraying just how anxious and on edge Gabriel’s presence made her feel.
What was he doing down here in the kitchen? She had already telephoned Maria to alert her to the fact that they had an unexpected guest for lunch, only to learn that Gabriel had already been to the kitchen to introduce himself to her and to explain that he would be staying.
The hotel had been officially closed from the date of Carlo’s death and after the subsequent discovery of how close to bankruptcy his finances were. The
Michelin-starred chef, like the imposing maître d’ and the elegant receptionist, had left for a more secure job, and only a skeleton staff which include
d Maria and certain members of her family remained at the hotel.
Sasha spoke swiftly to Maria, switching automatically to the local dialect as she asked her if Gabriel had ordered lunch. Gabriel, who was fluent in several languages, had always spoken with her in English, just as he had done earlier down on the beach. He was doing so again now.
‘Maria offered to serve me my lunch on the terrace, but when I discovered she was alone down here in the kitchen I told her that she need not put herself to so much trouble. She is, after all, no longer young, and the terrace is a good walk away.’
Sasha could hear the curt disapproval in his voice and knew immediately that it was directed at her.
‘Actually, I will be the one serving you lunch, not Maria,’ she corrected him. She wasn’t going to tell him that it would also have fallen to her to make lunch for him as well—not because Maria was incapable of doing so, but because, contrary to what Gabriel seemed to think, she did not need him to point out to her that the elderly woman’s rheumatism made it difficult and uncomfortable for her to take on too many tasks. Maria and her husband, and their extended family, were dependent on the hotel not just for their wages but also for the roof over their heads, and Sasha was already dipping into her own small reserves of cash to ensure that they did not suffer any hardship. Not that she intended to tell Gabriel any of this. Right now, what she wanted more than anything else was to have him out of her life or, failing that, at least out of the kitchen. Unable to risk looking directly at him, she told him dismissively, ‘I’m sure you can find your way back to the terrace.’
‘Where are you going to eat?’
A stomach-churning mixture of rejection and unstoppable, dangerous excitement held her rigid. He wasn’t going to suggest that she ate with him, reprising the night they had met, was he? It was like being picked up and dropped bodily from a great height into a seething cauldron of frighteningly powerful emotions. Emotions that rightfully belonged in the past and had no place here, she tried to remind herself.
‘Mum always eats down here in the kitchen with us,’ Sam answered Gabriel helpfully, his youthful voice a small, still, cool rescuing hand of reality and sanity.
‘As you know, the hotel is closed.’ Of course he knew. He knew everything there was to know about the current state of the business because he now owned it.
She still couldn’t risk looking directly at him. He, of course, was used to the very best of everything, and a chef on standby twenty-four-seven. ‘The boys and I eat very simply. You’d be better off going into Port Cervo. There are plenty of restaurants there.’
‘What are you having to eat?’ Gabriel asked the boys, ignoring her.
‘Fish,’ Sam answered, adding enthusiastically, ‘We chose it ourselves at the market this morning. Mum hates it when they are still flapping, but that is how you can tell they have just been landed. Pietro told us that,’ he informed Gabriel importantly. ‘Sometimes he even lets us go out onto his boat and see them in the net. We can ask him if you can come too if you like,’ he added generously.
Just standing listening to her sons, just watching them, filled Sasha with a fiercely proud aching well of love. Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, but she blinked them away. Boy children did not like ‘soppy’ displays of maternal emotion.
‘Do you suppose there will be enough fish for me?’ she could hear Gabriel asking Sam, treating him as an equal and not as a child—which, of course, was bound to appeal to her sons and make Gabriel instantly acceptable, she acknowledged grimly. And he knew it too. She could see that from the look he was giving her over the boys’ heads. It was one of open triumph.
‘If you prefer meat to fish we have some local lamb. It will take slightly longer to cook,’ she told him woodenly, deliberately looking slightly past him instead of directly at him, ‘but I can recommend it. We serve it in a kebab with locally grown peppers, onions and mushrooms, on a bed of wild rice. It’s a local recipe—’
‘I grew up here,’ Gabriel cut in, and reminded her grimly. ‘As you very well know. I’ll have the fish,’ he told her curtly.
‘Mum is teaching us how to fillet it,’ Nico said gravely.
‘You’re planning to raise two chefs?’ Gabriel asked her softly, in a slightly unkind voice.
‘No, I’m raising two sons to be independent and as aware of their environment and the pleasure of the simple, good things this life provides as they can,’ Sasha corrected him fiercely. ‘My sons—’
‘And my wards,’ he interrupted her softly—and threateningly, Sasha recognised as small shiver ran down her spine.
Her relationship with her sons was not what he had expected, Gabriel admitted as he watched her. She was not what he had expected. He had anticipated a surface show of overdone pseudo-maternal concern, such as he was used to seeing from many of the wives of his peers. Women who used their children as accessories for celebrity photo opportunities and then handed them over to others to do the real hands-on caring the minute the cameras were no longer there. But, no matter how much he might wish to do so, he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t seen the love in her eyes whenever Sasha looked at the twins.
He knew, of course, that the discovery that she was virtually penniless had severely curtailed Sasha’s ability to live the life Carlo had given her, but he had assumed that, while her lifestyle had necessarily changed, she herself wouldn’t have done so. The woman he was watching now, though, seemed perfectly at home in this kitchen environment and perfectly at ease in her role as a hands-on mother.
He looked round the comfortable, homey room, at the confident smiling faces of the two boys who were now his responsibility. He had been scarcely even allowed to enter the kitchen of his foster parents’ farmhouse. It had not possessed the warmth and cleanliness, the security he could see and sense in this room. Like him, it had been dirty and neglected, tainted with the wretchedness of emotional poverty and fear. Because here in this room there was love?
Love? Automatically he lifted his hand to press his fingertips against the dull ache beneath his breastbone. He didn’t believe in love. Love did not exist. And if it didn’t exist then the fact that as a child he had not been given any didn’t matter and couldn’t hurt him. This was his private and unacknowledged inner mantra.
* * *
IN THE END they all had the fish, and all ate together at the kitchen table. Not that Sasha managed to do much eating. Although she had tried to position herself so that she wouldn’t have to see Gabriel, she was still nerve-wrenchingly conscious of him. If he had insisted on eating with them just to torment her, he was certainly succeeding.
She could still remember the first meal they had eaten together. It had been on board his yacht, where he had taken her after he had picked her up in St Tropez. Then she had not had any trouble eating. She hadn’t had a decent meal in days and had been so hungry. He had raised his eyebrows slightly when she had cleaned her plate within seconds, looking from it to her face, and then to her body.
She had thought she had been so very clever. She had been watching him all week, fantasising about him, weaving idiotic daydreams around him consisting of hopelessly implausible Cinderella themes and happy-ever-afters, in the way that only a seventeen-year-old desperately hungry for love could. She had seen him on the waterfront and had naïvely assumed that he was crewing for one of the huge yachts filling the small harbour. Having seen him striding briskly past the cafés dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, it had simply not occurred to her that he might own one. He had been the kind of man a girl like her could only dream about—tall, dark and impossibly handsome, the kind of man who had all it took to sweep a girl off her feet and carry her off with him into his life. The truth was that she had fantasised herself into being more than half in love with him before she had even spoken to him.
And she had been so very desperate for love. Her mother had died giving birth to her, a
nd her father had been advised to have her fostered. She had been four years old when he had remarried, and although he and his new wife had attempted to make her welcome in their lives, her great need for love had led to problems—especially when her stepmother had become pregnant. She had been taken back into care and had remained there until she was sixteen, craving love but too institutionalised to know how to fit into a normal family framework.
Social Services had helped her to find a job and accommodation, but the kindly shop owners she had worked for had understandably been wary and embarrassed when she had tried to push her way into their family, desperately wanting them to be the mother and father to her that she had never had. She had received counselling after that, for her ‘inappropriate attachment issues’, but what good was counselling when all she’d wanted was to be loved?
Her social workers had found her another job—in a supermarket this time—and when she and six other girls had had a small win on the Lottery it had been decided that they would have a holiday in St Tropez.
It had been one of the other girls, well endowed and twenty to Sasha’s seventeen, who had struck up the acquaintanceship with the seedy ‘film director’ who had leeringly suggested that he feature the girls in one of his movies, claiming that he was in Cannes for the Film Festival.
An argument had raged hotly between those girls who’d wanted no truck with what they termed ‘a sleazy porno merchant’ and the smaller number who’d wanted fame at any price, and Sasha had found herself in the position of being pressured by Doreen, the pneumatic blonde, to join her in pornstar fame.
While the girls had been arguing amongst themselves, Sasha had been busy daydreaming about Gabriel, weaving a fantasy life for them both in which he fell head over heels in love with her and they lived happily ever after. Although, of course, she hadn’t even known his name at that stage.