In a Storm of Scandal

by Kim Lawrence

  The noise of the storm raging outside immediately lowered by several decibels. It was quiet enough now for Poppy to hear the click of the grandfather clock and the steady drip of the water gathering in a pool on the stone flagstones around the feet of Gianluca Ranieri.

  She was here alone with Luca. Somewhere in her chest a bubble of terror burst … I can’t do this! Poppy yanked herself back from the brink of outright panic and hid her confused feelings behind a tight controlled smile.

  ‘I barely recognised you,’ she lied, averting her gaze from the perfect symmetry of a bronzed face bisected by a masterful nose and slashing cheekbones. ‘You’ve changed, Luca.’

  This at least was not a lie. He was still the best-looking man imaginable—it was really nice to be able to make the observation with total objectivity, not soppy, misty-eyed foolishness, but the aura of power that hung around him like a second skin made him seem more aloof. And his heavy-lidded eyes, dark and fringed by incredibly long, spiky lashes—they had not in the past held a cynical gleam that suggested their owner expected the worst from the world and was rarely disappointed.

  ‘You haven’t.’ It was hard to tell from his abrupt delivery if this was a criticism or a compliment. ‘I did not expect you to be here.’

  He didn’t add or wild horses would not have dragged me here to his vaguely accusatory statement, but he didn’t have to. He looked about as happy to see her as he had two years earlier, the night she had almost literally bumped into him as she was emerging with a group of friends from a popular West End show.

  He had cut her dead.

  Poppy had been left standing on the pavement, the awkward half-smile of polite acknowledgement still on her face. The public slight had not gone unnoticed.

  ‘Someone you know?’ one of the men in the group had asked.

  Poppy had shrugged off the hurt inflicted by the chilling indifference in the dark eyes that had moved with the barest hint of recognition over her face.

  ‘Not really.’

  Shaking some of the excess moisture from his hair, Luca moved forward into the room. Poppy responded with several backwards steps, reminding him of a jittery thoroughbred.

  ‘I am not, to my knowledge, infectious.’

  She had no smart response to the mild sarcasm and no easy answer for why she felt the need to keep him at several arms’ lengths.

  ‘This is …’ she expelled a gusty sigh, her expression reflecting her dismay, and tore off her cap, tossing it on top of a pile of newspapers on a nearby armchair ‘… a total nightmare.’ There seemed very little point putting a brave face on what was an awful situation. A dangerous stranger she could have legitimately clonked on the head with a poker … what was she meant to do with Luca?

  Her glance slid to the stern outline of his beautiful—it really was—mouth … A tiny sigh escaped her parted lips. She had once had a lot of ideas about what to do with and to Luca, but few, actually none, were any longer appropriate.

  He tilted his head in acknowledgement. ‘The storm is bad.’

  Poppy gave herself a mental shake and let his misinterpretation remain uncorrected as she struggled to make her fuzzy brain work … How … why was Luca here? ‘Was Gran expecting you?’

  ‘No.’

  Gianluca’s eyes followed the golden brown waves as they continued to bounce, settling in a silky messy halo around her shoulders. It slid down her back, falling below shoulder-blade level, longer than she had used to wear it. The shaggy fringe was gone too, revealing the purity of her delicate heart-shaped face. A face still dominated, but not overwhelmed, by slanted hazel-green eyes.

  ‘So you don’t know where she is?’ Poppy pressed.

  The furrow between his brows deepened as he registered the anxiety behind her question. ‘Don’t you?’ He struggled to focus on the situation and not on every tiny detail of her face.

  Poppy bit her lip and shook her head. ‘I’ve looked everywhere and there’s no sign of her.’ She had scoured the surrounding area yelling until her throat was raw.

  ‘Did you look for a note?’

  His glance moved in an assessing sweep around the rapidly darkening room that, though not in the grand part of the building, still had twice the square footage of an average semi.

  ‘Of course I looked for a note.’

  ‘I’m assuming the candles are not for atmosphere.’ Even as he spoke Luca realised that it was a mistake to assume anything; for all he knew Poppy might be here with a boyfriend. ‘The power’s out?’ On every visit he suggested that the electrics needed an overhaul; his suggestion was inevitably met with a point-blank refusal from his frugal godmother, who was fond of saying she did not believe in change for change’s sake.

  Poppy nodded and glanced at her watch, her eyes widening when she read the time. ‘Nearly two hours ago.’ Just after she had arrived.

  ‘Did you check the fuses?’

  There was an edge in her voice as Poppy replied, ‘Of course I checked the fuses.’

  ‘Isn’t there still a back-up generator?’

  Poppy struggled against impatience. ‘Yes, but it’s not working.’

  He arched a brow. ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘I tried to start it.’ Though it was notoriously temperamental, the second kick generally did the trick, but not today.

  She saw something flicker at the back of his dark eyes. ‘You kicked it?’

  Poppy killed the beginning of a grin that tugged at the corners of her mouth and experienced a moment of panic before her instincts of self-preservation kicked in. It had taken her a very long time to put the memories they shared into cold storage; she wasn’t about to thaw out even at the most innocent of them, not now, not ever.

  ‘As a last resort.’

  Frustrated in his attempts to read past her cool mask, he felt a stab of dissatisfaction. She might have changed remarkably little to look at—Poppy could still have passed for a teenager—but clearly she had changed.

  And you expected she wouldn’t, Luca? You expected that having her heart broken would not have made her toughen up, develop a few defences?

  ‘And Isabel, you saw her last … when?’

  Poppy responded to the question literally. ‘April.’

  His dark brows drew together above the bridge of his hawkish nose. ‘I meant …’

  Intercepting the impatient look, she flushed and, resenting the fact he had made her feel foolish, inserted quickly, ‘I know what you meant, and, no, I haven’t seen Gran, but I spoke to her … last night.’ Had it really only been a few hours earlier?

  ‘This isn’t a case of miscommunication—perhaps she went to the village to meet you?’

  ‘No, I said I’d catch the ferry and I’d ring when I arrived.’

  ‘There was no reply?’

  ‘The phone lines are down and I couldn’t get a signal on my mobile. Where can she be, Luca? The only way out of here is by boat, and don’t,’ she pleaded, ‘suggest she might have walked out, because after the rock fall last winter even a four-wheel drive can’t make it up the track.’

  ‘I was not going to suggest she walked out. Your gran’s fit for an eighty-year-old but even she is not going to trek out along the mountain track.’

  ‘I have a bad feeling, Luca.’ It was just a name and what was she meant to call him—Mr Ranieri? ‘Admittedly my feelings are not infallible.’

  Her feelings about Luca had been all good, they had told her that Luca was the one, that he was totally trustworthy. Annoyed with herself for allowing ancient history to divert her, Poppy gave her head a tiny negative shake of irritation. She should be focusing on Gran. She was, and realistically she couldn’t exactly ignore Luca, she just had to keep her response … proportionate.

  ‘There’s probably a simple explanation.’

  ‘Like Gran is lying out there hurt, unable to call for help … or worse? That sort of simple?’ She swallowed and pushed away the image and sucked in a steadying breath through flared nostrils. ‘Maybe I am overt
hinking it …? Maybe there is a simple explanation?’ She shot him a look of appeal, willing him to convince her.

  Luca did not offer comfort and support, but then it wasn’t his job. Instead he gave a non-committal grunt. ‘I am assuming you are here because of the issue with the council?’

  Her emerald eyes flew to his face, wide with surprise. ‘You know about that? Gran asked for your help?’ Of course she had.

  And why not?

  It was utterly insane to feel a sense of betrayal—there was no reason that Gran shouldn’t turn to Luca. He was her godson. Poppy knew they still had contact and she was fine with that; she didn’t want to know the details, but she was fine with it—totally.

  Her gran appreciated she didn’t want to know about Luca’s life—hard not to after her response to a conversation that had opened with, ‘When Luca was here last month …’

  Up until that memorable moment—memorable for all the wrong reasons—Poppy had considered herself totally over it … him … It turned out that eighteen months hadn’t been long enough.

  Luca tipped his dark head in acknowledgement. ‘The bare bones, no details—my grandmother contacted me. She was concerned.’

  Poppy’s tense expression was momentarily lightened as an image of a slight figure who still retained a strong Highland accent even though she had lived the last fifty years of her life in Italy flashed into her head.

  ‘Aunt Fiona?’ The title was honorary, the only connection being a friendship between the older women that had survived despite the disparate paths their lives had taken since their schooldays. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Well.’

  His eyes drifted slowly over the smooth curve of her cheeks; reaching the full curve of her lush wide mouth, he had zero control over the lustful reaction of his body.

  ‘She was always k-kind to me.’

  The kindness had been a stark contrast to the attitude of his parents, who had acted as though she had a contagious disease when she had attended a birthday tea in a posh London hotel for Luca’s grandmother.

  It had been Luca who found her crying in the cloakroom.

  ‘So my mum gets married a lot and is sometimes photographed without many clothes—she’s never killed anyone! I think your family are mean and horrible!’

  ‘Did I ever tell you about the time that my mum came out of the ladies’ room with her skirt tucked into her knickers? Or the dinner where my father thought the host was the wine waiter and told him the wine was corked?’

  He had continued to tell her scandalous and probably untrue stories that made his parents look ridiculous until she had laughed.

  ‘Poppy …?’ Concern roughened the edges of his velvet voice.

  Poppy’s eyes lifted. She blinked twice to clear her swimming vision and reminded herself she was a competent twenty-first-century woman, not some wimpy heroine in a Victorian melodrama, and even if she had needed a masculine chest to bury her face in Luca’s was already spoken for.

  ‘This doesn’t look good, does it?’ she said, directing a ‘give it to me straight I can take it’ look at his dark lean face.

  She could hide a lot, but not the fear in her luminous eyes. Gianluca studied the emerald stare directed his way and felt something twist hard in his gut.

  ‘Do not jump to conclusions,’ he cautioned. ‘You always did have a tendency to be over-emotional.’ And outspoken, sentimental, not to mention extremely stubborn, but most of all Poppy had always been herself more so than any person he had ever met.

  ‘We all move on, Luca.’ She didn’t bother trying to make the message subtle. ‘But cross my heart I’ll do my level best not to have hysterics,’ she promised. ‘So what next?’

  ‘Next I dry off.’

  ‘You’re wet …?’ As Poppy made the belated observation her gaze travelled upwards from his feet. Hard …

  the word popped into her head and stayed there; greyhound lean and tough, there was no vestige of anything approaching softness in Luca.

  ‘Top marks for observation.’

  Poppy dragged her eyes to his face. ‘But what I don’t understand … How did you get out here, with the storm …?’ Her voice trailed away as her glance shifted to the mullioned window that was being battered by a shower of freakishly large hailstones.

  The ferry wasn’t running and the only person willing to ferry her here from Ullapool had refused to wait a moment after she disembarked, so anxious—with good reason as it turned out—had he been not to get caught out in open sea when the storm hit.

  ‘I bought a boat.’

  Poppy stared. He said it the same way someone might say, ‘I bought a bar of chocolate.’ He obviously didn’t have a clue that he had said anything out of the ordinary.

  ‘Of course you did.’

  There were plus sides to his extravagance: at least they were no longer stranded when the storm abated; at least they had an exit route that did not involve SOS signals or swimming.

  ‘I can’t believe you made it here in this,’ she mused, watching, her stomach performing helpless flips of appreciation, as he walked long-legged and effortlessly elegant like some jungle cat towards the fire.

  ‘I did. The boat didn’t.’

  Poppy, her thoughts still very much involved with thoughts of his feral grace, was still joining the mental dots when he added, ‘It sank.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘SANK!’ The images crowding into her head made her feel physically sick.

  As Poppy estimated her chances of getting to the bathroom before she threw up Luca calmly threw a log on the smouldering fire and tossed an almost absent look over his shoulder before he reached for the poker she had dropped.

  ‘Not my finest moment. I almost made it.’ The almost continued to irritate. ‘But the undertow and the rocks …’ He shrugged his magnificent shoulders and began to prod the reluctant flames.

  She regarded him incredulously. Could anyone sane be this casual about a near-death experience?

  ‘The boat smashed on the rocks?’ she said tightly.

  He nodded.

  ‘You could have drowned.’ And Luca was acting as if the possibility had not even occurred to him. Her indignation grew. It was nothing to her if he decided to kill himself but he had a wife and family responsibilities.

  And I once found his reckless streak exciting!

  It was reassuring to recognise how much she had changed. There was nothing exciting about the graphic images playing in her head that involved the grey waves closing over a dark head, sucking him down.

  The look Luca slung over his shoulder was tinged with impatience. ‘But I did not.’ It was not his habit to expend energy on what if scenarios, in theory at least.

  There were exceptions to this rule.

  What if he had not chosen duty ahead of personal happiness? What if he hadn’t caved into parental pressure? Seven years and that question had never completely gone away.

  He accepted that no choice came without a price, what he could not accept or forgive himself for was others paying the price for his choices.

  And for what?

  He had kept the family name clear of scandal, he had discovered a talent for making money and found out that he did not have a talent for being a husband.

  If he had learnt anything he now knew that marriage was not for him—he was simply not husband material; he was never again going to take on the responsibility for another human being’s happiness.

  Poppy, though she hadn’t known it at the time, had actually had a lucky escape.

  His meditative stare lingered on her face. And now here she was, in this place where they had met, and he was free. Was Poppy alone or in a relationship … maybe long term—the man he had seen her emerge from the theatre with? His eyes brushed her bare fingers—or maybe it was all new and exciting with a new lover?

  ‘I am a very good swimmer.’

  Poppy’s eyes glazed when without warning his words caused a less traumatic but equally disturbing picture to form in
her head—Luca, his sleek brown streamlined body cutting through the blue water before he stopped and, treading water, gestured for her to join him.

  She rejected the random memory the same way she had rejected his invitation.

  He had nearly died and he was acting as if it didn’t matter. Was he too cool to care or just plain stupid?

  ‘You know I feel sorry for the people that care about you.’ Her eyes flashed wide as a previously unconsidered possibility occurred to her. ‘I’m assuming that you were alone in the boat?’

  ‘I’m alone and, as you see, alive.’

  Her nose wrinkled. ‘Barely.’ Actually despite his brush with death, or maybe because of it, Luca radiated an aura of restless vitality.

  His edgy glance slid her way. ‘Can we end the postmortem?’ That she considered it possible that he’d leave a fellow traveller to their watery fate while he made himself comfortable spoke volumes on her opinion of him. ‘Though obviously it’s good to know someone cares.’

  Missing entirely the sarcasm in his voice, Poppy tightened her soft lips as she injected a note of studied boredom into her voice and drawled, ‘Been there done that.’ Spurred by the flash of reaction she glimpsed in his dramatically dark eyes, she added with a smile that left her own eyes cold, ‘So don’t worry, Luca, you’re safe. I won’t be trying to seduce you any time soon.’

  His dark lashes swept downwards then lifted. Two thirds of his brain knew it was a bad thing to say but the reckless, self-indulgent last third—blame it on a near-death experience—appeared to have temporary control of his vocal chords as he slurred. ‘Am I meant to think that’s a good thing?’

  Poppy met his eyes, saw the dark dangerous unspoken message, sensed the tension rolling off him in waves and felt her insides dissolve.

  After several breathless seconds of mind-numbing, heart-racing excitement the shame and disgust kicked in.