In a Storm of Scandal

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘True.’

  ‘Not bad,’ he decided, angling a last critical look at his handiwork before he rejoined her. ‘Actually the timing of this was pretty good.’

  Poppy shook her head. She’d heard of positive spin, but to suggest having the place fall around their ears was good timing seemed quite a stretch. ‘You think?’

  ‘Nobody was outside. That gutter weighs a ton. It could have come down at any time, not just in a storm. And if anyone had been under it at the time …’

  The colour blenched from Poppy’s face. ‘Gran, you mean,’ she whispered.

  Silently cursing himself for not anticipating her reaction, he shook his head. ‘No, of course not.’

  Poppy shook her head. ‘You’re lying, Luca, that’s exactly what you meant and you’re right.’ Her voice hardened with self-reproach as she added bitterly, ‘God, what were we thinking letting her live here all alone?’

  ‘It is Isabel’s choice.’

  ‘She would be more comfortable living somewhere smaller, more convenient, a cottage in the village with people around if she got sick …’

  ‘It would be much more sensible,’ he agreed. ‘But she’d hate it and you know it.’

  ‘I don’t care. I just want her to be safe.’ She dropped her head into her hands and gritted, ‘I should have carried on searching!’

  ‘Do not be absurd.’

  ‘It’s true! I shouldn’t have come indoors the moment it started drizzling. You said yourself the place is a death trap—she could be lying there now …’

  ‘Poppy …’

  Poppy’s head came up with a jerk, her blazing eyes raking his face. ‘And don’t act like you care. If you were half a man you’d be out there now looking for her … Well, if you won’t …’ her chest heaving with emotion, she struggled for breath as she pulled the half-fastened zip of her padded jacket all the way up to her chin and took a deep defiant breath ‘… I will!’ she announced fiercely.

  ‘No, you won’t!’ he responded with equal decision.

  Holding her eyes, he caught hold of the zipper and tugged until the jacket opened to reveal a soft blue sweater and gentle curves.

  Poppy swung away. ‘You can’t stop me!’

  The hands that came to rest heavily on her shoulders ruined her big exit and illustrated quite clearly that he could stop her. Physically there was no contest.

  With an impatient frown she swung round, tilting her head back to deliver a narrow-eyed glare.

  ‘Stop it!’ she warned. ‘Or I’ll …’

  ‘Scream and yell some more, possibly stamp your little foot?’ he drawled.

  In an embarrassed flash she realised how appallingly she was behaving. ‘I’m behaving like a child, aren’t I? Sorry …’ she added with disarming sincerity.

  ‘You’re upset.’

  There was a lot to be upset about, and until Luca had walked in Poppy had thought she was handling it pretty well. There had been no other option. If she’d lost it there would have been nobody to pick up the pieces—then Luca had arrived and she’d morphed into some needy little girl expecting him to make things better.

  ‘And you’re right, there’s no point assuming the worst—it’s just been …’ When she started speaking her voice was satisfactorily tough and capable; before it faded away to nothing it had become a whisper.

  Her glance locked with Luca’s Latin dark-framed eyes—eyelashes like that were so wasted on a man—and thought, When did I last eat?

  Her clenched fists fell to her sides as she heard his deep voice above the heavy rapid thud of her heart; the rich accented tones seemed to be coming from a long way off.

  Massive blood sugar dip! ‘I feel a bit …’

  Poppy found her chin on her chest.

  ‘You need to take a deep breath.’

  He nodded approval as he felt her shudder beneath his fingers; her shoulders remained rigid. She was wound up tight enough to shatter.

  ‘I don’t faint,’ she protested weakly. ‘I just …’

  ‘Humour me, just do it.’

  Poppy closed her eyes and exhaled, her fractured sigh terminating in a cough.

  ‘Now another.’

  Poppy nodded and responded automatically to the throaty instructions. She was relieved when he let her head up.

  ‘Better now?’

  She blinked and gave a shamefaced nod of assent, shaking her silky hair back from her face. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested with a forced laugh to cover her embarrassment as she dug a half-bar of chocolate from her pocket, ‘it’s time to change the medication …’

  Her joke was met with an unresponsive stare.

  Gianluca watched as she peeled back the foil off the chocolate bar and pushed several squares into her mouth before turning her head to blot a tear running down her cheek against the wool of her soft baby-blue jumper.

  It was as if the years had slipped away and he were standing there, music in the background, the flower from his lapel crushed between his fingers as he breathed through a rampant blast of the most primal sexual hunger he had ever experienced—and not for his bride.

  Dio, he had no idea what ingredient Poppy had that no other women he had met had that affected him this way.

  ‘For the record, I do care what happens to Isabel.’

  She gave a shamefaced grimace. ‘I know that and she’s very fond of you. And for the record I’m not normally this pathetic, I just have a blood-sugar thing. Nothing serious, but it’s not so good if I skip meals.’ She winced as the hands that lay heavily on her shoulders tightened, driving the chill of his fingers through her sweater. ‘You’re freezing!’

  Luca dismissed her comment with a shrug. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You look terrible.’ Her guilt-ridden glance took in the dark flush etched along the ridges of his razor-sharp cheekbones—he was clearly halfway to pneumonia. ‘You need to get warm.’ My prioritising definitely needs work. ‘I’ll see if I can find something upstairs for you. There might be something of Dad’s.’

  She was halfway across the room when he whistled.

  Poppy swung back, her eyes wide, not mistaking the piercing sound as a sign of admiration. ‘Flora!’ She tilted her head in a listening attitude, half expecting to hear the sound of paws on the floor. ‘If she’d been outside she’d have come or barked when I called.’ Her gran’s exuberant border collie was extremely obedient.

  ‘So Flora isn’t here. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does that not suggest that Isabel isn’t here either?’

  Poppy gave a sigh of relief. ‘Flora never leaves her side.’

  ‘For what it’s worth my theory is that your grandmother, knowing that the storm was coming, decided sensibly to leave, taking her dog with her, to sit it out in the village. Think about it,’ he suggested.

  Poppy did, and what he said made sense. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t thought of it herself.

  ‘You really think so, Luca …?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘You might have forgotten but my gran is pretty stubborn.’ Too stubborn to admit a mere storm could get the better of her …?

  ‘True, but Aunt Isabel is also, as I recall, realistic and a Highlander. She has a healthy respect for the forces of nature.’

  Poppy nodded in agreement. ‘She spent most of the really bad snow in the village last year.’

  ‘There you go, then.’

  ‘Do you really think that she’s safe, Luca …?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I want to.’

  Gianluca lowered his gaze because looking at the lines of strain etched into the soft, smooth face was fuelling his growing desire to soothe them away.

  ‘What’s stopping you? You were, as I recall, always an optimist … a regular Pollyanna ready with a positive spin.’ It was a quality he had teased her about but one that had secretly pleased him.

  ‘Thanks, Luca,’ she said gruffly.

  One dark brow lifted to a questioning angle as he met the uncomplicated g
ratitude shining in her eyes. He swallowed and looked away quickly. ‘For what?’

  ‘If you hadn’t been here … it would have been … a lot worse.’ God, now there is a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself say. ‘You should take off the rest of your clothes.’

  The unexpected addition drew a startled growl of laughter from his throat.

  The sexy sound made her blush. Ignoring the gleam in the stare levelled at her burning face and the image forming in her head of him naked, Poppy kept her chin high.

  ‘I was just thinking out loud, not that I was thinking about you with … you’re in wet clothes …’ Stop digging, Poppy. ‘You should take them off,’ she elaborated with shaky dignity. ‘As a precaution.’

  As a precaution Gianluca intended to keep his pants on for the present, though if he moved he doubted they would conceal the level of his arousal. He had not been in this situation since he was a teenager in the grip of rampant hormones.

  ‘It’s probably warmer in the kitchen,’ she mumbled, nodding in the direction of the connecting door. She had been contemplating retreating there when he had arrived. ‘I’ll go and … ah, find …’ Just go, Poppy, before you make even more of a fool of yourself.

  Making her way down the spiral stone staircase a short while later, Poppy was unable to resist the impulse that made her pause and glance at her reflection in the old mirror at the bottom.

  ‘Oh, God!’

  And candlelight was notoriously kind!

  The wild hair and pale face, the only evidence of the make-up she had applied many hours earlier the faint dark smudge rimming her eyes, it was just as well she was not out to impress—she had seen more attractive-looking scarecrows.

  The big room was empty. Presumably Gianluca had followed her advice. The room actually was more welcoming than it had been thanks to the fire that had finally stopped smoking and begun burning cheerily.

  Approaching the door into the kitchen, she paused, put down the stack of clothing she was carrying and began to push back the wispy strands of hair from her face. Midway through manically smoothing down her hair, Poppy stopped, her hand falling back to her sides and a horror-struck expression crossing her face.

  Her frantic efforts to make herself look more presentable—especially considering the married person whose benefit they were for—struck Poppy as pitiable. She gave a snort of disgust and, clenching her jaw, muttered, ‘Good idea, Poppy, because your biggest problem is definitely the state of your hair.’

  Bending forward, she shook her head, digging her fingers into the mesh of almost-dry waves to complete the mussing-up process—childish maybe, and not on the face of it totally in keeping with the ‘modern liberated woman’ persona she had decided to adopt, but it made her feel better.

  When she was satisfied she had undone any minor improvements there might have been she straightened up and scowling at the vanity that made her want to look good for a sexy man, picked up the folded clothes and opened the kitchen door with her elbow, walking down the stone step backwards.

  Gianluca, who turned when the door creaked closed behind her, was standing in front of the ancient range in the kitchen, which up until recently her grandmother had cooked all her food on. These days she had a small electric cooker and even a microwave, but the monster still heated all the water and came in handy when the power failed.

  In her absence he had followed her suggestion and divested himself of more wet garments. They now lay in a sodden heap on the floor. She recognised his innovative outfit as the blanket flung across the saggy sofa under the window and refused to speculate what, if anything, remained under it.

  He had wrapped the rough fabric around his waist then thrown the spare fabric over one shoulder. As far as she could tell the weight of the fabric was the only thing holding it in place. He got full marks for the ingenious use of limited resources.

  On a personal level Poppy would have felt happier if it had looked more … secure, though she had to admit it was not a look many men could have pulled off, but then even his worst enemy would have agreed that Gianluca was not any man.

  With the rough blanket thrown over his shoulder, his strong shadowed jaw and wet, tousled dark hair he made her think of the brooding heroes, men of few words but hidden depths, in one of the old spaghetti westerns her dad was addicted to. Poppy, who had watched them with him when she was a child, retained a definite secret soft spot for cowboy boots or at least the idea of the men who wore them.

  ‘Any luck?’ Gianluca stopped what he was doing and turned around, his attention drawn to her hair, paler now it was dry. Masses of soft honey-brown waves rested on her shoulders and spilled down her narrow back.

  At his side his fingers flexed as he found himself thinking of sinking his hands into the shining strands and letting them fall through his fingers. He pushed away the image of that cloud of hair against paler bare skin and cleared his throat.

  Poppy dumped the clothes she had managed to find upstairs on the scrubbed table that took centre stage in the middle of the room.

  ‘You might not think so.’ Her father’s old kilt was a few billion miles from the designer stuff she assumed he normally wore. ‘But I found these.’ She half turned her head, her glance brushing his face—at least that had been her intention, but her eyes showed a marked disinclination to move on.

  Whoever said knowledge was power, it turned out they were wrong. Poppy knew she was staring and she couldn’t do a damned thing about it!

  Poppy had heard people talk about the ‘X factor’ when talking about the opposite sex; she had never really got it. Now she realised it was something you had to experience before you understood.

  And she was experiencing it, and the accompanying tight knot that went with it in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t just that he was an incredibly good-looking man; actually, she admitted, he was beautiful—how many men could look elegant wrapped in a blanket, for goodness’ sake? But it was the concentrated raw masculinity he radiated that she had a problem with.

  Her chest lifted in a silent sigh as her gaze strayed towards his mouth, his beautiful, sensually moulded lips. Poppy doubted if there were a woman alive who could look at that mouth without wondering a little what it would be like to be kissed by those lips.

  She knew exactly what it felt like.

  The thought was floating through her mind when the sudden shrill whistle of the bubbling kettle on the hob jolted her back to reality.

  She blinked and walked quickly across to the range.

  On the point of reaching for the whistling kettle her hand was abruptly dragged away.

  Gianluca bit out a curse in Italian and raked her face with dark eyes that contained fury.

  Poppy, bewildered by his inexplicable action and the anger that appeared to have materialised out of thin air, responded to the glare and the restraining hand on her wrist with an equally fiery glower of her own.

  ‘Just what exactly do you think you are doing?’ he ground out furiously.

  In the background the kettle continued to shrill spitting out steam as the pressure built. Poppy too was feeling the effects of building pressure. There was no outlet for the mad swirl of confusing emotions that swelled up inside her in a thick choking tide.

  It was as if the trauma of the day had woken up her dormant hormones, and woken them up big time—the event being timed to cause the maximum embarrassment. Still the situation was doable so long as the attraction remained physical, which obviously it would because she was not the same person she had been at eighteen and Luca … she’d had a few glimpses of the young man she had fallen for, but this older Luca was much … harder in every way.

  She held herself rigid and thought, You need to get a grip, girl, as she transferred her gaze from his face to the fingers circling her wrist and back to his face.

  Her eyes slid to his mouth. She wanted to kiss him so badly it hurt.

  She needed more sugar.

  That’s not what you need.

  ‘Yo
u’re hurting me.’

  Gianluca looked down into her face, the expression in his own heavy-lidded eyes giving no clues as to what he was thinking. Without a word he released her, then, holding her eyes, he tipped his head in a jerky motion that might have indicated apology.

  Still holding her gaze, he picked up a folded tea towel and ostentatiously wrapped it around the exposed hot metal of the kettle handle before he lifted it off the hotplate.

  ‘I am assuming that would have hurt more.’

  Her eyes shot wide in realisation.

  He stopped abruptly, his eyes skimming her pale face before he turned away, clenching out a stressed, ‘Madre di Dio!’ Before adding an equally abrupt, ‘I couldn’t find any coffee.’

  ‘Gran doesn’t drink it. She only buys it in for visitors. Thanks for …’ Feeling like a total idiot, she nodded awkwardly towards the kettle and flexed the fingers of her right hand that would have been burnt but for his intervention.

  His tipped his head. ‘You are welcome.’

  The water might have stopped boiling but the same could not be said of the atmosphere that seethed with tension. Poppy tugged at the neck of her sweater and, almost suffocated by the silence, blurted, ‘I got the damned clothes—will you put them on … please …?’

  His dark eyes swivelled her way as he retorted without missing a beat, ‘Why—so that you can take them off?’

  Poppy gave a gasp of outrage, guiltily conscious as she did so of the heat low in her pelvis. ‘Are you flirting with me?’

  ‘Was I not meant to?’

  Unable to meet his knowing gaze, her eyes fell. Did he have a point? Hadn’t she been sending out mixed messages?

  She was uncomfortably conscious that her entire attitude had been and continued to be pretty schizophrenic about Luca. Ever since he’d appeared emotions had been see-sawing dramatically as she struggled against a determination to keep him at arm’s length physically and emotionally and an equally strong inclination to pull him close in every way.

  ‘You’re married and I don’t—’

  ‘Don’t what, Poppy?’ he asked, the normal warm timbre of his voice harsh as he pinned her with a piercing contemptuous stare. ‘Dio, but you used to be a hell of a lot more honest about what you wanted.’ The longer she looked at him as if he were some big bad wolf, the more Gianluca felt the urge to act like one, take her face between his hands and plunder those plump pink lips. Not totally rational, but the heavy dull ache of arousal in his groin was hard to think beyond.