In a Storm of Scandal

by Kim Lawrence

  The sound of Poppy’s laugh was drowned out by the romantic aria. She blamed the sudden sting of tears she blinked back on the romantic crescendo of suffering—it always made her cry.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  NORMAL flow of traffic resumed on the outskirts of the town. Gianluca expected Poppy to renew her objections but she remained silent beside him. The reason for this uncharacteristic reticence was revealed when he flashed a glance her way.

  Head a little to one side, her eyes were closed, her dark lashes fanned out across the curve of her smooth cheeks.

  Lowering the volume of the music to a background hum, he turned off the main road and onto a lane that skirted a loch. He drove on a few miles before drawing onto a gravelled parking area beside a scenic viewing point.

  It was deserted apart from a motorbike. The young couple it belonged to were standing at the viewing point taking photos of the dramatic mountain panorama. He could hear their shared laughter.

  Gianluca studied Poppy’s sleeping profile for a moment before switching off the engine. Sleep made her look incredibly vulnerable.

  She stirred but did not immediately wake, and he did not wake her, but continued to watch her, the soft regular rise and fall of her breasts, the fluttering of her dark lashes against her lightly flushed cheeks.

  A strand of hair had fallen across her face. Drifting near her lips, it stirred when she breathed. He reached out and pushed it away, his fingertips grazing the downy softness of her cheek.

  She opened her eyes and blinked in sleepy confusion.

  ‘Nice nap?’

  Poppy’s eyes connected with a pair of dark eyes.

  Suddenly wide awake, she stiffened and shot bolt upright in her seat.

  ‘What … how …?’ She looked beyond Gianluca, registering the mountain vista. ‘I wasn’t asleep, I was just—’

  ‘Resting your eyes?’

  The sardonic suggestion drew a scowl. Scrubbing the eyes in question with her fist, she stifled a yawn. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night.’

  An expression her sleepy brain struggled to interpret moved across Gianluca’s lean face. ‘Neither, as a matter of fact, did I. Would you like to look at the view?’

  Poppy exhaled a long shaky breath and turned her head fixing him with a narrow-eyed glittering stare. ‘If I were you I’d avoid being near any steep drops with me.’

  He raised his brows. ‘You are annoyed with me?’

  ‘Are you totally mad, Luca?’

  His lips quivered into a smile that held more than a hint of self-mockery as he considered his actions. ‘It is, I think, a possibility.’ Some might say probability. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘So you kidnapped me … sure, that makes sense,’ she drawled. ‘If you’re some egotistical power-mad lunatic who thinks normal rules don’t apply to him.’

  During this breathless speech Gianluca’s eyes had slid from her face to the large daisy emblazoned across the chest of her black tee shirt. The daisy was moving in time with her agitated breathing. His eyes lifted to her mouth. Her full parted lips were coloured appropriately poppy red; the colour was echoed in the length of velvet ribbon that confined her hair on the crown of her head.

  Poppy folded her arms across her chest, biting back a wince as the actions squashed her shamelessly engorged nipples. ‘So what was so important that you deemed it necessary to kidnap me?’

  ‘I want to talk and as you show a marked inclination to run away …’

  She crossed one booted ankle over the other. ‘So you wanted to talk … go ahead?’

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls, Poppy?’

  Her eyes flickered sideways. ‘There was nothing to say.’

  ‘We agreed—’

  With an angry little gasp she twisted in her seat, remembering the crushing sense of rejection she had felt when he walked away from her without an explanation. ‘There is no we. You don’t walk away from someone without a word when there is a we!’ she yelled.

  ‘That!’ His face cleared. ‘I had to walk away—someone tipped off a news crew that I was on the beach. Can you imagine what it would have been like if you had been there? I wanted to protect you from that.’

  ‘Protect your family name, you mean!’

  He shook his head in confusion. ‘You have lost me.’

  ‘My mum is notorious and your family is—’

  ‘Bloody irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.’

  Poppy blinked at the force behind his pronouncement. ‘I don’t give a damn who your mother is or your father or the colour of your damned cat. We had great sex. I wanted more—I wanted you, but I didn’t want to expose you to the sort of media scrutiny women I sleep with attract. It would make your email debacle look like a walk in the park.’

  ‘Oh …’

  He gave a pleased smile. ‘Exactly. Oh.’

  Poppy did not immediately register that he had turned the ignition. Her thoughts were elsewhere as she struggled to get her head around the facts he had given her, struggling to think at all when her brain was clouded by a constant fog of sexual awareness … Any future discussion with Luca should not be made in an enclosed space.

  Future—was there a future?

  She shook her head. ‘No!’

  Luca turned his head. ‘No what?’

  Belatedly she became aware of the softly purring engine. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘I have a lodge outside Stirling.’

  Poppy shook her head. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you, Luca.’ The indecision gone, she suddenly felt extremely calm.

  The note of finality in her soft voice brought a wary furrow to Luca’s brow; with a sigh he switched off the engine. ‘So what now?’

  ‘I don’t want to be your one-night stand.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘So what do you want me to be?’

  ‘We can continue to—’

  Poppy shook her head firmly and held up her hands in a defensive gesture as he leaned in towards her. ‘You want a mistress, Luca … Do you even want to be exclusive?’

  ‘You leave me no energy for other women, cara.’

  Her laugh was painful for him to hear.

  ‘A good answer, but not to my question. Have you actually thought this thing through, Luca? Am I to have other lovers too?’

  ‘No!’

  She lifted her brows at his outraged response and added quietly, ‘I wouldn’t want any. I wouldn’t want any man but you, Luca, because the fact is I have always loved you. Yes, I know I’m not meant to say that.’

  Luca sat beside her, his chin on his chest, not moving, not saying a word. Unable to read his opaque mask, she took a deep breath and plunged on.

  ‘But I want to be with you so much that I thought I could do it on your terms, but I know now I was wrong. I want more … much more … I want a man who is prepared to be open to the possibility of love. I want the possibility of marriage and children.

  ‘The big question is what do you want, Luca? What are you prepared to give? What are you prepared to sacrifice?’

  Luca continued to stare at his hands as he had done the entire time she had been speaking.

  ‘I need time.’

  It was more, much more, than she had expected. ‘Take your time, but remember, I’m not sure how long I’m prepared to wait … I’ve already waited most of my life.’

  She took a deep shuddering breath and felt a mixture of exhilaration and fear. She had taken a gamble and only time would tell if it would pay off.

  Without a word he pressed the ignition.

  ‘The station?’

  ‘Please.’ She was a well-brought-up girl; her manners were beautiful even when her heart was breaking … no, not breaking, just cracked and severely bruised … All he needed was time.

  The return journey to the station was made in total silence.

  As he pulled into a parking space, legitimately this time, he turned his head her way. ‘Poppy …?’ He stopped and shook his head as t
hough he had changed his mind about whatever he had been going to say.

  It was only when she unbuckled her seat belt that he leaned towards her, his eyes not leaving hers as he reached out and pulled the red ribbon from her hair. His eyes left hers then to follow the movement of her hair as it tumbled around her shoulders.

  He gave a sigh of pleasure low in his throat and slid one hand into her hair, tangling his fingers into the silky tendrils.

  Poppy, unable to move, unable to blink, stared into his dark eyes and felt dizzy, her throat ached, every muscle in her body tensed in anticipation of what was coming next—it had to come next or she might die of sheer wanting. Her racing heart climbed into her aching throat as his free hand slid down the curve of her back.

  When he bent his head and moved his lips softly over the surface of her mouth she whimpered and clutched at his front. He pulled back and looked directly into her eyes. Whatever he saw there caused his own eyes to darken. A low growl vibrated in his throat as he reclaimed her lips. This time the kiss was not soft, but hard and demanding, his tongue sinking deep between her lips, probing the warm recesses of her mouth.

  They broke apart and sat there, both breathing hard as though they had just sprinted for the finishing line.

  Poppy pushed the door open, warning huskily, ‘I’m not sure how long I can wait, Luca.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  POPPY smiled through the volley of flashes as previously instructed and held onto the dramatic sweeping skirt of her scarlet dress that blended seamlessly into the carpet her spiky heels sank into.

  ‘Is it always this mad?’ she whispered to the man beside her through her fixed smile.

  He flashed a smile over the top of her glossy head. ‘I don’t know—I usually avoid these things like the plague.’

  Poppy stopped dead in the middle of the red carpet, one of the artful tendrils left out of the simple twist secured with several hundred hairgrips on top of her head wafting across her face as she directed a startled stare up at her escort, who looked handsome and distinguished in his dinner jacket, his silver hair coaxed into a semblance of order for the occasion.

  ‘But George said that you—’ She blew at the determined tendril as it tickled her nose.

  ‘George said, did he? And what did my dear son say?’ Charles Semple caught Poppy’s elbow, murmuring, ‘If we stop I think it’s possible we get trampled over. They just keep coming—’

  ‘George said—’

  ‘No, don’t tell me, let me guess—George said please go with Dad because he’ll look like a sad loser walking down the red carpet alone when his ex is going to be there with her new younger-model lover.’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Poppy admitted. ‘He also said you lived for these occasions.’

  ‘Dear George,’ his fond parent murmured. ‘He said you were heartbroken and in danger of becoming a recluse and also sinking into deep depression if your friends didn’t show you that there was life outside your flat.’

  ‘I’ll kill him!’ Poppy exclaimed, thinking that in her case George had pretty much got it right, though, as far as she was concerned, recluses got a bad press.

  There were major pluses to working from home. Since word got out she was available she was snowed under—she had refused Phil’s offer, though, partly because two weeks after she had returned home Poppy had discovered why her boobs were feeling so sore and the smell of coffee made her rush for the bathroom.

  Nobody knew her news, though she had been tempted to tell her half-brother, holding back only because she had this crazy idea that the father should be the first to know.

  Of Luca there had been no word.

  It looked very much as if her gamble had not paid off and Poppy was wishing she had remembered sooner the old adage don’t gamble what you’re not prepared to lose.

  It really did look as if she had lost … but she still had his baby. It was the knowledge of the life growing inside her that had kept her going during the past few weeks.

  If he didn’t contact her soon she knew she was going to have to make the first move, the man needed to know he was going to be a father.

  ‘In a slow and painful fashion,’ George’s loving parent agreed. ‘The hell of it is he means well.’

  ‘I know.’ Poppy’s fixed fake smile melded into a genuine grin as she met the eyes of her half-brother’s dad and laughed.

  It was the shot that appeared on the pages of numerous newspapers the next day with captions that identified the beautiful girl with the famous director as his infamous first wife’s daughter.

  It was the image that Gianluca saw as he stepped onto the red carpet.

  A wave of white-hot rage washed over him so intense and consuming that he found himself inside the building without having any memory of how he had got there.

  The film being premiered was being spoken of as a contender for Oscars. At the end of the screening he didn’t have a clue what it was about but he did know how many times the man with Poppy had bent his head and whispered something in her ear, how many times he had touched her shoulder or arm. He also knew how many times she had smiled at something he said and how many times her soft husky laughter had drawn curious eyes.

  She was clearly having a great time, while he had been going through hell and she had been hooking up with some guy who was quite frankly old … The age gap was to his mind obscene.

  And the irony was presumably he had facilitated this. He had slept with her and awoken a dormant sensuality she was now sharing with, for all he knew, half the male population of the City. The hell of it was she looked happy and relaxed with the old guy.

  As the credits rolled at his side his starry-eyed niece gave a sigh.

  ‘That was incredible! So sad and James Litton is so hot. Thank you for bringing me, Uncle Gianluca.’

  ‘I’m glad you enjoyed …’ he responded mechanically while still staring three rows ahead where Poppy, her shoulders smooth and bare above a sexy red number that appeared to have been painted on her body, sat. ‘That man over there, Dina—do you know who he is?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one with the silver hair sitting in the—’

  ‘That’s Charlie Semple,’ she said immediately.

  ‘And who,’ Gianluca said, struggling for patience and wondering how in a moment of weakness he had succumbed to the blatant moral blackmail of his sister and brought Dina here as a birthday treat, ‘is Charlie Semple?’

  ‘You’re kidding? You don’t know who—’

  ‘Clearly I do not.’

  ‘He’s a film director.’

  Gianluca shook his head.

  ‘God, you’re clueless.’ The teenager seemed amused by his ignorance, and eager to display her superior knowledge. ‘He’s got three Oscars and everyone said he should for certain have had one last year for My Beloved.’ She went on to list the other films he directed, displaying an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject that made Gianluca wonder when she actually did any work at the expensive school his sister and her banker husband had chosen to send her when they had settled in London the previous summer. Dina had not lost her American accent.

  Gianluca tuned out her youthful chatter. He had previously thought teenage girls sulked—this one talked, incessantly. He knew all he needed—the only question was what was he going to do about it?

  He was hindered in his plans by the necessity of delivering his chatty niece safely home first.

  When Charlie suggested they put in an appearance at a famous jazz club where the after-premiere party was being held Poppy at first said she’d pass.

  His ‘Why not?’ made her think, Why not? Life went on, Gianluca clearly had gone wherever and with whoever … She didn’t care—it was about time she got out there and one of the most glamorous parties on the social calendar was as good a time as any.

  ‘It’s a shame to waste the dress.’ She glanced down. She had spotted the vintage fifties dress in a window twelve months earlier and had walked in and bought it�
�this was the first, which made one more than she had expected, opportunity she had had to wear it. Who knew? It might never fit her post-baby figure. Hard to think post baby when her waistline was still slim and her belly flat.

  ‘Excellent, and we can use the occasion to plan our revenge on George.’

  Despite her initial nervousness about what a big glitzy showbiz party would be like—actually a lot of fun—she surprised herself by enjoying it in a starstruck way.

  It helped that Charlie, who was a lot more famous than she had ever realised, was undemanding company, and as the evening progressed Poppy found herself feeling more relaxed than she had in weeks—right up to the moment when he walked in.

  She felt his presence in a tingly-sensation-down-her-back sort of way that was hard to describe several seconds before she actually caught sight of him. Even with the warning nothing could have prepared her for the numbing shock that coursed through her body when she turned her head and saw him standing there.

  There were any number of handsome men attending the party tonight but to her, admittedly less than objective, mind Luca made every other man in the room fade into insignificance. As she watched he flicked his cuff to reveal the face of his watch and frowned. He looked up, his dark smouldering glance connecting with her own, and Poppy stopped breathing as a jolt of lustful longing stabbed hard directly through her defenceless heart.

  In his formal dinner jacket, his white shirt affording a dramatic contrast to his bronzed skin, he looked supremely elegant, sleek, expensive and jaw-droppingly gorgeous and also totally furious.

  She stood there, her paralysed nervous system not up to functioning beyond the basic breathe-do-not-fall-down mode as he walked straight across to her, not looking to right or left and blanking the several people who greeted him, the entire time his black stare trained like a heat-seeking missile directly on her face.

  ‘This is a surprise,’ she said brightly as he approached.

  All the things he had planned on saying went out of his head the moment he heard her voice. Instead of the dignified but blighting comment he had intended to make he heard himself growl.

  ‘Dio, the man is old enough to be your father. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’