In a Storm of Scandal

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘I don’t want you!’

  Before she knew it he was beside her. Without saying a word he planted one hand in the small of her back, the other on the curve of her hip, and with negligent ease dragged her to him.

  She was too startled by his actions to resist—that was her story and she was sticking to it!

  He arched an expressive brow and lowered his mouth to hers, his dark eyes glittering with insolent challenge. ‘No …?’

  A whimper caught in Poppy’s throat as he parted her lips and slid his tongue inside her mouth with erotic precision.

  ‘Luca …’ The pent-up longing in her cry was lost in his mouth as he deepened the penetration possessively, tasting her like a starving man with a hot passion that she found both intoxicating and terrifying.

  As fire licked along her nerve endings she kissed him back, pressing closer to the lean, hard length of him, not even trying to pretend she didn’t want this … didn’t want it a lot.

  She was shaking and burning up from the inside out when he finally pulled back, growling low in his throat, then moving back to the tea preparation acting as if nothing had happened. Only the exaggerated rise and fall of his chest and the slight tremor in his hands any indication anything out of the ordinary had just occurred—maybe it was ordinary for Luca these days.

  ‘If I made you think I wanted you to do that … I’m sorry. But for the record I don’t—’

  ‘No, let me guess.’ He turned his head, his dark insolent glance skimming across her face as he made the pretence of thinking hard. ‘You don’t kiss married men.’

  Poppy made her face like stone, not wanting him to see how much he was hurting her. ‘No, I don’t,’ she concurred, not about to apologise.

  If he reacted with this sort of derision to something she didn’t think many people would view as either a problem or a shortcoming Poppy could only imagine how he’d react if he knew about her intimacy issues!

  She smiled wryly to herself. Even in the privacy of her own thoughts she couldn’t come right out and say it—I’m Poppy and I’m a twenty-five-year-old virgin. In the words of the only friend she had ever confided in on the subject, she was a girl who bolted at the final fence.

  Luca gave an unpleasant laugh.

  ‘God, Luca, you really have changed,’ she exclaimed, wondering sadly if she had ever really known him at all.

  She had never put Luca on a pedestal when they were together, so it made no sense at all for her to feel so utterly disillusioned now, when she wasn’t even the injured party, Aurelia was. Poppy felt desperately ashamed that she’d sent out the sort of messages that had made him think she’d be up for some light-hearted flirtation and maybe more … The kiss, she recalled with a shudder, had not felt light-hearted and neither had her response—her body was still quivering with lustful aftershocks.

  ‘There’s no need to sleep with married men because generally I find there’s no shortage of unmarried ones.’ She didn’t add they all had limited patience with someone who was not willing to put out—not all phrased it that way but even the nicest got less understanding when several dates gave back little beyond a goodnight kiss.

  ‘I’m not married.’

  This stopped her cold.

  ‘You’re divorced?’ Now that had never occurred to her. Poppy was not sure what she felt about this revelation … not immediate joy.

  ‘No, not divorced.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Aurelia is dead.’

  The shock of his bald statement drew a raw gasp from Poppy. ‘I’m so s-sorry,’ she stuttered, wincing inwardly at the sheer inadequacy of her words. Her legs, the consistency of cotton wool, gave and her bottom hit the seat of the wooden chair hard enough to send it skating backwards across the flagged floor. Grabbing the seat with both hands, she shuffled it back to the table.

  ‘How …? Was it sudden?’

  He poured tea into a mug and dug a spoon into a bowl of sugar. ‘I killed her … Sugar? No, you don’t, do you?’

  Poppy stared at him, incredulity nailing her to her seat … Had she heard right? Had he really said what she thought he had …?

  ‘Yes … no … you can’t just say that and … drink tea!’

  ‘There is no coffee.’

  The word play did not impress Poppy, who watched him unloop the swathe of fabric from his shoulders and pull the heavy sweater from the top of the pile on the table.

  ‘Come on, Luca, you can’t drop something like that on me and leave it at that.’ It did not even cross her mind to believe that he might be guilty of the crime he suggested.

  ‘What is there to say?’

  Struggling not to yell in response to his nihilistic shrug, she said firmly, ‘You didn’t kill anyone.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘If you had you wouldn’t be walking around, you’d be in jail.’

  ‘Your faith in the justice system is charming, but somewhat misguided.’

  ‘Not the justice system—you … I know you, Luca …’

  She saw something flash in his expressive eyes before his lashes came down in a luxuriant screen. ‘I am responsible for Aurelia’s death, end of story, but if it helps you the coroner called it suicide.’ But he knew different.

  They could talk of the balance of her mind and discuss her long history of mental health problems, so severe that she had once been sectioned, but Luca knew that if he had not married her Aurelia would still be alive today … not happy, maybe, but alive.

  ‘Aurelia killed herself!’ The shock of discovery left a conflicted Poppy feeling disorientated. Tears sprang to her eyes as an image of the beautiful brunette on her wedding day drifted across her vision. ‘Oh, Luca, that must have been awful for you.’

  Luca dragged out a chair and sat down heavily, resting his chin on steepled fingers. The sympathy glowing in Poppy’s luminous eyes made him respond harshly. ‘It was a great deal more awful for Aurelia.’

  In such cases it had often seemed to Poppy that it was the people left behind who suffered most, but she kept this reflection to herself. ‘When did this happen?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Eighteen months ago.’

  His father had come up to him after the funeral and, unusually for a physically undemonstrative man, had hugged him.

  ‘Sad, so sad … she was a troubled spirit. You have to believe me, Luca, that I had no idea about the breakdown she had while she was at finishing school, or I would never have encouraged the marriage. The family kept it quiet. Alessandro told everyone she was attending a cordon bleu course in Paris … said she’d graduated top of her class … If I had had any idea … but no matter—at least you’re still young. There’s plenty of time left for you to find someone else, to have a family.’

  It had been the sentiment underlying much of the words of sympathy that day–he was young; he would move on.

  Luca fully intended to move on but not in the same direction.

  He had left his father in no doubt that there would be no wife, no children. There would be nobody in his life he could hurt or let down—of this Luca was positive.

  Poppy felt a wave of helplessness as she watched him. It was clear that Luca was not in this room, he was far away, and whatever thoughts going through his head clearly dark.

  She sat and waited. The tea in her mug was lukewarm when he finally broke the lengthening silence. ‘I should have known.’

  ‘How could you have known?’ Poppy protested.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time.’

  Poppy pressed a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, Luca!’

  ‘That,’ he explained, ‘happened after she miscarried the first time, a plea for help … attention, they said, she wasn’t serious. I was away … I was always away.’

  Poppy, reluctant to interrupt him, bit back the protest that rose to her lips in response to the self-loathing in his voice.

  ‘On the day it happened I was meant to arrive home that afternoon.’ His face was dark as he relived the events. ‘If I
had they could have washed out her stomach again and everything would have been all right, but I didn’t get home. I didn’t want to,’ he admitted heavily. ‘I wanted to avoid another inevitable discussion about babies.

  ‘She desperately wanted a baby but she couldn’t carry them to term and the doctors said the repeat pregnancies were affecting her health–not, as it turned out, as badly as a bottle of antidepressants and wine but …’ His head fell back, exposing the long strong column of his brown neck as he dragged a hand through his dark hair.

  ‘You know the crazy thing …?’

  Poppy, longing to banish that bleakness from his eyes, shook her head, feeling powerless. What could she say that would not sound clichéd?

  ‘She never even liked babies … children.’

  Not sure if she was meant to rebut this claim, Poppy remained silent.

  ‘But she knew I did and she felt it was her duty.’ He turned his head, screening his expression from her, but Poppy could hear the pain in his voice as he added, ‘Aurelia always tried to please … please everyone.’

  She was horrified by the picture he painted. It was clear that Aurelia, the poor woman, had had some serious mental health issues and she and Luca had not enjoyed the sort of fairy-tale marriage that Poppy had always imagined. She had envied them their perfect lives.

  ‘It was a tragic accident, Luca, but not your fault—you must see that.’

  Everyone had said that and everyone was wrong. ‘Whose fault is it, then?’

  ‘Does it have to be anyone’s fault?’

  ‘Yes! I was a terrible husband!’ His fierce expression dared Poppy to disagree. ‘Some men should stay single and I am one of them.’

  As she watched he blinked and blinked again, his dark eyes focusing on her face as if he were realising for the first time who he was talking to. He looked startled to see anyone there, let alone her.

  She could almost see him pulling back, withdrawing. ‘You don’t want to know any of this.’ He frowned, passed a hand across his eyes and added almost angrily, ‘I’ve no idea why I told you.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s therapeutic to talk,’ she offered gently.

  Had he talked to anyone or had he just been walking around with all that guilt? It made her heart break just thinking about it.

  ‘And sometimes it is self-indulgent,’ he countered grimly.

  Poppy took up the mug on the table and nursed it between her hands, looking at him over the rim. ‘So you think if you ignore stuff it will just—’ she pursed her lips and mouthed softly ‘—poof, vanish. It doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘We all have our own way of dealing. Not everyone wants to share their feelings—’ his lips thinned in scornful distaste ‘—or pay a shrink to hear them vent.’

  ‘So what has been your way of dealing, Luca? Besides just sucking it up?’ The trouble with men like Luca, Poppy brooded darkly, was they equated silence with strength.

  ‘Sex. I have discovered the joy of one-night stands.’ What could be better than satisfying a basic human need with someone who wanted nothing from you? The gratification was brief and left a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction but Luca was philosophical—a man could not have everything.

  From where Poppy was sitting she could see precious little evidence of joy!

  Dark head tilted to one side, he studied her face. ‘You look shocked.’ It was preferable to her looking at him as if he were a charity case.

  ‘I am.’

  His lips thinned. ‘I never had you down as a prude.’

  ‘I just never thought it was your … style, Luca, to act as though sex is some sort of game or treat women as toys.’

  Of course, she knew he had a high sex drive—Luca had admitted freely to her when they began dating that he had been sexually active at an early age, but when he’d said he had never been promiscuous she had believed him.

  Being a highly sexed man didn’t make him callous or inconsiderate.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘I AM sorry I have not lived up to your high expectations, cara.’

  ‘Maybe it’s your own expectations you haven’t lived up to, Luca …?’

  It had been a stab in the dark but his expression suggested Poppy had come closer to the truth than Luca liked. She was not surprised; she couldn’t imagine the Luca she had once known turning into a man who was satisfied with a series of shallow relationships.

  ‘I think we have exhausted the topic of my personal life.’

  Poppy had the impression they had only just scratched the surface, but then with Luca there had always been more below the surface than was visible … Her eyes drifted over his face and she sighed. He was a very complex man.

  Luca gave a twisted smile. ‘And anyway we should perhaps leave some sordid details for tomorrow in case we run out of conversation.’

  Shock flashed across Poppy’s face as she shot upright in her chair. ‘Tomorrow! You think we’ll still be here then?’

  Luca took a certain savage satisfaction in her horrified reaction. ‘What weather forecast did you tune into?’ He got to his feet and went back to the stove, dropping a tea bag into his mug before adding water from the kettle. ‘They were forecasting this weather would last several days.’ Through half-closed eyelids he watched the last vestige of colour fade from her face.

  ‘But we won’t be stuck here that long!’ As she spoke, keeping her voice carefully level, Poppy could feel the panic snapping at her heels.

  ‘It is a distinct, a very distinct possibility.’ His eyes dropped to her heaving bosom and he felt the hunger in his belly tighten. ‘I can see the prospect fills you with joy.’

  ‘It fills me with horror and unless you’re totally insane it would you too!’ She gave a fractured little sigh and forced a determined smile. ‘Weather reports are notoriously inaccurate—we might wake up tomorrow morning and find ourselves in the middle of a heatwave.’

  Which left the night … which Poppy was more nervous about than she cared to admit.

  ‘It might …’ A fresh squall of hailstones hit the west-facing window and he added, ‘Or maybe not.’

  She squeezed her eyes closed and pleaded, ‘Can we talk about something other than the weather?’

  The request drew a sardonic smile from Luca. ‘That is extremely un-British of you,’ he reproached with mock shock. ‘But fine, so what about you, Poppy? Are you in a committed relationship?’ he asked, his tone mocking the final words.

  Not the change of subject she had had in mind!

  ‘Me …?’ She gave an uncomfortable shrug. ‘Not exactly …’

  It gave Luca a certain sense of redress to see that Poppy was less comfortable with discussing her personal life than she had been his. He resented the way she had tricked him into opening up and saying things that he had not said to anyone.

  ‘I was with someone … sort of.’

  In light of what he had just revealed the recent traumatic events in her personal life seemed pretty mild.

  It had not seemed that way at the time—to find out, along with the rest of the building, that your possible virginity was the subject of a wager was bad. But when you also learnt that the really nice man you had been dating had nominated himself as the person to find out was beyond humiliating!

  Rupert had seemed so nice and, not guessing his sordid ulterior motive, she had been flattered and even wondered if this time she might …? Clearly he had thought so too, according to the email that had been intended for the group of creepy friends who risked money on his findings.

  Tonight was the night, Rupert had announced triumphantly, and it, or rather she, was a sure thing, Poppy had read along with the entire building. Rupert’s crude boast via email had inadvertently reached a lot more than his target audience.

  Rupert had lost his bet and she had become an object of pity. On the surface people were sympathetic and even indignant on her behalf but underneath she knew they were all wondering if it was true and if it was—why?

  On more than one oc
casion Poppy had found herself fighting the need to justify herself and it infuriated her. The situation with her sex life or rather lack of it had never previously unduly concerned her. She had always assumed that it would happen at the right time with the right person, but what if the right time and person had been and gone and her chance was missed …?

  She realised that her teenage experience with Luca had made her cautious about following her instincts, which was maybe why she always bolted when things began to get serious. Yet at the same time part of her had longed to experience that magical moment when she Luca had stepped off the ferry looking tanned and fit and his smile had felt like a stomach punch—she was in love.

  She had never felt the stomach punch again and her caution had meant she had never gone looking for it—that, she decided, had been her mistake.

  She had to be more proactive and less picky—nothing desperate like throwing herself at the first man who came her way, obviously, but she was going to put herself out there.

  God, but she hated that phrase!

  One thing was certain: she was never going to be in a position like the recent one that had resulted in her handing in her notice rather than continue to be the subject of sniggers and speculation.

  She was going to rid herself of her wretched virginity; it had become a burden.

  All she needed now was a man.

  Luca patted the stack of garments on the table. ‘So what happened?’

  Poppy tilted her head to return the stare of her interrogator. ‘It just didn’t work out.’ Luca was a man.

  ‘So have you ever been engaged …?’

  Shocked and excited by the idea taking hold in her feverish brain, Poppy shook her head.

  ‘If you want something doing,’ her dad always said, ‘go to the best!’ If you applied the same principle to sex … Her heavy-lidded stare slid to the sensual curve of his strong mouth … Poppy’s own lips tingled. Luca had to be in the running for that title.