He needed that, he acknowledged. Privacy to think with this brand-new clarity of mind he was now experiencing.
Keeping her close to him while he activated the lift, he then spent the time it took to reach their floor in silent communion with the top of her head, thinking, feeling—Dio, feeling more than he could actually believe was possible just because one small suspicion had become hard fact…
God, she felt awful. Sick in the stomach and light in the head. If he didn’t say something she was going to start crying! She just knew she was because, if it wasn’t enough that his silence was killing her, then this gentle, protective way he was treating her was enough to make the tears flow.
Did he have to crowd her into the corner like this? she thought on a sudden bout of breathlessness that had her sinking back further into the lift corner. He was all brawn and bone and familiar scents that were beginning to make her feel really dizzy.
‘Stai bene?’ he enquired, clearly sensing something.
‘What’s happened to your English?’ she snapped at him in an effort to dispel whatever it was that was happening to her.
‘It is here,’ he replied, as calm as anything.
‘Then try using it if you want to be understood,’ she advised, sounding waspish but not even caring any more. The lift doors opened then. Maybe it was timely, because she’d seen the way his chest had lifted and fallen. He was controlling the desire to retaliate in kind.
Aware that she was stupidly treading the fine line to destruction, she slipped out from beneath his overpowering stance and walked quickly out of the lift and across the lobby on legs that were threatening to collapse—
The telephone was ringing. She stopped and frowned as she turned instinctively in the direction of the nearest extension which happened to be in the office.
‘I will get it,’ he said, striding towards the office. She didn’t demur, for it had to be for him. The life of a venture capitalist didn’t recognise time zones.
She was just removing her coat when she heard his voice make its usual deep curt acknowledgement to whoever was trying to contact him.
Silence followed. Something about it made her go still. Then his voice came, hard and tight, and as she stared at him he spun his back to her, his body bristling with tension as he became involved in a question and answer session in thick deep Italian with whoever was on the other end of the phone.
Then the phone was slammed down. Silence hit. For the space of ten excruciating seconds, he just continued to stand there staring at the wall in front of him while she waited with bated breath, somehow knowing that something dreadful had just happened.
When he did move, she found herself taking an unsteady step backwards as he strode towards her. ‘W-what’s wrong?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Nothing,’ he clipped, but he was lying. ‘I have to go out,’ he announced, striding right by her. Then he was gone, disappearing back into the lift and sending it downwards without even offering her a single glance!
Whomever he had been talking to had given him an excuse to get away from here before they had a chance to talk—and, good grief, but he’d taken it with wings on his feet!
It hurt. She couldn’t pretend it didn’t. In a daze filled with bitter new experiences tonight, she walked into the office, draped her coat over a chair, then sat down without really knowing she had done it.
A flickering red light suddenly intruded on the edge of her vision. As she turned towards it, it was purely instinctive to press the play-back button on the answering machine.
Almost immediately a shrill, near-hysterical voice came whipping into the room with her. And even though it spoke in an agitated mix of Italian and English, she got the drift of what it was saying.
‘Where are you, Giancarlo?’ it was demanding urgently. ‘I have been ringing and ringing—’ It was his sister’s voice, Natalia realised as Alegra suddenly switched to Italian. She recognised it because she had spoken to her several times while working with Edward.
Then—‘Edward.’ She picked out his name from the garble. Followed almost instantly by another couple of recognisable words that had her going cold inside.
It was the link between Edward and the name of a famous hospital right here in London that really shook her.
Edward was ill. She knew it without a hint of a doubt in her head!
Natalia got up and ran…
CHAPTER TEN
GIANCARLO felt sick. Standing here with Alegra weeping in his arms and talking wildly, all he could think was—I am going to be sick.
‘He made the confession, Giancarlo,’ Alegra sobbed out in shrill broken English. ‘He starts acting strange. Then he suddenly insists we leave the cruise and fly home. We are almost here when he has the attack. He thinks he is going to die, so he decides to tell all! But what does this confession do for me?’ she choked, so utterly distraught it was wretched. ‘He took another woman to his bed! He made a child with her! He betrayed me and defiled me and now he is going to die on me!’
‘He will not die, cara,’ he murmured, finding the comforting words from somewhere, but he didn’t know where from because his brain had crashed, the sheer scale of the horror unfolding before him just too much for it to take in. ‘Shh,’ he soothed. ‘He will live—he will live.’
And he will, Giancarlo found himself vowing angrily. Because he wanted Edward very much alive so he could personally kill both him and Natalia Deyton!
Natalia. His heart suddenly wrenched, the pain and the anger shooting out in all directions and holding him stock-stone still. Natalia the witch. Natalia the bitch. Natalia the lying, cheating, artful deceiver, who had knowingly and calculatingly lured him into bed with her—so she could foist Edward’s bastard off on him!
‘But then he deserves to die for doing this to me!’ Alegra burst out. ‘A child, Giancarlo! He made a child with another woman! I will never forgive him!’
The Sicilian promise. His bones clenched at the sound of it. Yet he understood it—hell, did he understand!
A sound by the waiting-room door caught his attention. Looking up, he immediately began to burn inside because—there she was, standing in the doorway as if his own wrath had conjured her up, and looking achingly, destructively beautiful in her sparkling black dress, which somehow reminded him of the Fabergé watch.
A watch she’d probably filched out of Edward’s safe along with everything else he’d asked her to get out of there. As her own idea of payment for services rendered—to both Edward and himself?
And now she had the cheek to turn up here, when she must know that the game was up, looking all pale and ethereal and—
Dio! ‘I am going to make you pay for this,’ he hissed at her his own Sicilian promise from between tightly gritted teeth.
She blinked as if he’d slapped her. Yet the very idea of laying another finger on her traitorous flesh had his stomach reeling all over again. At the same dizzying moment his sister broke free from his arms and saw her standing there.
‘It is she!’ Alegra exclaimed shrilly. ‘She is the one, Giancarlo—she is the one! I know the hair, I know the eyes!’
‘Edward…’ Natalia whispered shakily. ‘H-how is he? What—?’
‘Get out!’ Giancarlo blasted at her, losing touch with himself as the sound of Edward’s name quivering on her lips sent a shaft of burning black anguish thrusting its way through him. ‘You are not wanted here. Get out of my sight!’
Now she had gone as white as a sheet, he saw. Her beautiful eyes so dark, it could be anguish colouring them like that. But it was not anguish. It was the look of horror at being found out!
‘I just need to know how he is,’ she insisted. ‘I d-don’t want to make trouble, b-but I must know if he—’
‘You are the trouble!’ his sister fiercely responded, diverting Natalia’s attention away from him…
Natalia saw the other woman start towards her with her eyes spitting out the kind of hatred and venom Edward had always predicted she would
see.
‘Edward would not be in here if it was not for you!’ Alegra cried. ‘You could not leave well alone! You had to seek him out and play on his broken heart!’
‘He loves me,’ Natalia whispered in her own defence. ‘Love doesn’t break hearts, it helps to heal—’
Derision lanced across Giancarlo’s hard face, and his sister almost jumped on her in her rage. ‘How dare you say that when it is you who has poisoned his mind?’ the older woman launched at her shrilly. ‘You put yourself in my dead son’s place and fed on Edward’s grief and pain until he could bear it no longer and made himself ill!’
Alegra lifted up a hand. Thinking she was about to be attacked, Natalia stiffened up warily, her eyes blinking in rapid confusion as another, larger hand appeared in her vision, also raised as if ready to strike. But all Giancarlo did was capture his sister’s hand before it could throw the expected blow.
After that Natalia just stood there shaking with shock and pain, feeling as if she was being bombarded by hatred from two different sources. With Alegra it was with the words that were still spilling from her lips. With Giancarlo it was simply in his expression.
And Edward was right, she realised painfully. These people did not know the meaning of compassion.
Edward. Her heart lurched. ‘Will one of you please tell me how he is?’ she begged anxiously.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Giancarlo jeered at her. ‘So you can make a judgement whether it is worth foisting his baby back on to him now that I know the truth about you?’
The truth? Her mouth went slack in disbelief. Was he saying what she thought he was saying here? Was he actually daring to suggest that any baby she might be carrying belonged to Edward?
Oh, God—the nausea came back with a vengeance when she began to really understand what it was that Giancarlo was thinking here. ‘You believe I was Edward’s mistress.’ She breathed the terrible words out loud. He flinched as if she’d hit him. She wished she had done. ‘You think I was trying to foist his baby onto you!’
‘The truth always sounds shocking when spoken out loud,’ he grated.
‘Your truth, yes,’ she agreed.
‘What are you talking about, Giancarlo?’ his sister put in bewilderedly.
He didn’t even hear her, he was so busy despising Natalia. ‘Oh, stop looking so damned bewildered!’ he bit out in disgust. ‘Edward has already confessed everything in sheer fear of dying with it all still festering on his soul!’
‘Stop it!’ his sister cried. ‘Stop it, the both of you. This is wrong. It is—’
‘The only person with a guilty conscience around here should be you for daring to believe such a filthy thing about either of us!’ Natalia sliced over the top of her.
‘Edward always said you came from crude stock,’ she told him, taking great pleasure from seeing his arrogant face turn to rock. ‘He was right! You couldn’t have a more primitive view of life if you tried!’
‘And trying to foist one man’s child off on his brother-in-law is not crude?’
‘Giancarlo!’ Alegra inserted furiously. ‘This has gone far enough!’
More than far enough, agreed Natalia, and with a final slaying glance at him she turned and walked out to go in search of the one who really mattered here.
Edward, leaving Edward’s wife to put her brother’s vile misconceptions in order. She even smiled in cold satisfaction as she heard the beginning of it before the door closed behind her.
‘She is not the woman Edward betrayed me with!’ Alegra was saying furiously. ‘She is the child his betrayal spawned, you fool…!’
Giancarlo caught up with Natalia just as she was leaning over a distraught Edward and trying to calm him down. ‘Shh,’ she was soothing him—just as Giancarlo had been soothing Alegra not so long ago. ‘Please, darling, don’t do this, you’re going to make yourself worse!’
But Edward wouldn’t be soothed. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere. I tried your house, the office, I even tried Giancarlo! But he said he’d sent you away on a fact-finding mission to Fillens in Manchester, and I believed him!’ he choked out in self-disgust. ‘I actually believed him and put you aside to worry about Alegra and myself instead.’
‘As you should have done,’ Natalia attempted to console him.
‘No, I shouldn’t,’ Edward groaned. ‘I should have smelled a rat from the moment he said it! But it took me two whole weeks before it suddenly hit me—in Nassau of all the places—that there was no way he would send you anywhere like that unless he had an ulterior motive for doing so!’
‘Shh,’ she tried again.
‘So I rang the firm,’ Edward continued hoarsely. ‘Got Howard Fiske who’d apparently not long come back from Milan. The swine was more than happy to tell me that you’d moved in with my brother-in-law within days of him arriving. And that’s when it really hit!’ he gasped out. ‘Why Giancarlo had arranged the cruise and put himself in my place here in London. He must have found out about you and was doing the typical Sicilian thing by taking revenge for my sin out on you!’
‘You mean—he came here to deliberately seduce me?’ Natalia said, while Giancarlo stood there unnoticed, feeling the full weight of his own culpability land squarely upon his own rigid shoulders.
‘Natalia…’ he murmured, unable to remain quiet any longer.
She turned towards him, and for the first time Giancarlo looked into her eyes and saw Edward’s eyes looking accusingly back at him. He looked at her hair and saw the colour Edward’s hair used to be before the silver had overrun the gold. His stomach contracted, for what he was seeing was a terrible truth that had been staring him in the face from the very beginning, but he had been too blinded by prejudice to see it.
Sexual prejudice, he expanded sombrely.
Sex probably covered his blindness very well—in the beginning at any rate. He had wanted Natalia Deyton so badly from the first moment he’d looked into those eyes that to see then what he should have seen would have stopped his plans of seduction dead in their tracks. So he hadn’t let himself see. For how did a Sicilian male seduce the daughter of one of his own family members? He didn’t. It was as simple and neat as that.
And it was quite monstrous to know how low he had trodden in his want for Edward’s beautiful daughter.
‘You stay away from her!’ Edward clearly held the same bitter belief. ‘You’ve had your revenge, now get the hell away from both of us!’
It was the ugly scene in the waiting room playing itself out in reverse, Giancarlo noted. And he quietly tried again. ‘Natalia—’
‘Just go,’ she cut in, having to use both hands to keep her father from getting up off the bed in his weak effort to protect her. ‘You are making him worse.’
Could it get any worse? ‘We need to talk,’ he insisted, and saw by the sudden darkening of her eyes that she would rather slay him than speak to him. His grimace acknowledged her right to think like that—but he didn’t back down. ‘Talk,’ he repeated warningly, and, with a final glance at Edward’s angry struggle, he turned and walked away, taking the sight of Natalia’s tears right along with him…
‘He hurt you, didn’t he?’ Edward had seen the tears too. ‘I’ll never forgive him.’
‘Nor will I,’ Natalia agreed, but had to wonder why that knowledge wounded her so much.
You know why, she then mocked herself. Because you love him, cruel, hard, ruthless man that he is. ‘Please stop fighting me, Edward,’ she pleaded. ‘Do you want me to lose you along with everything else?’
‘I’m all right,’ he snapped out impatiently. ‘It was just a little panic attack during the flight, that was all. Nothing worthy of all this fuss!’
He should have said heart attack but Natalia didn’t correct him, because he was probably half right, and panic was what had helped bring it on in the first place.
‘What did he do to you?’ he muttered, falling back in frustration because he was too weak to even throw off a lightweight like Natalia.
After that she told him everything, quietly and unemotionally because there had been enough of that expended tonight. And also because the truth needed to be told from all angles if this muddled situation was ever to be sorted out.
But, ‘God, I’m going to kill him!’ Edward rasped when she withered to an empty finish, and he started trying to get up again.
‘You will do nothing of the kind, you stupid—stupid man!’ another angry voice commanded. ‘Not when you are the one to blame for all of this!’
It was Alegra. Instantly placed on the wary defensive, Natalia straightened stiffly away from him while Edward sank with a groan back against the pillows.
‘If you’ve come here to continue your family vendetta then you can turn about and leave again,’ Edward grimly informed his wife of twenty-five years.
‘I have not come to do anything,’ Alegra replied haughtily, ‘but be formally introduced to your daughter.’
Looking at her standing there, a diminutive figure dressed in blue, who held herself with a pride which gave her stature, Natalia had to admire just what it must be costing Alegra Knight to say that. And for a moment—just a moment—she saw Alegra’s resemblance to her brother, the same arrogant tilt to her head, the same darkly challenging eyes, the same—
No. She shook the comparison away, not wanting to think about Giancarlo right now.
‘Not if you’re going to start spitting out insults again,’ Edward refused harshly.
The eyes flashed once more, Natalia thought of Giancarlo again—and again she thrust the comparison away. ‘The only person in this room who deserves insulting is you,’ Alegra hit back. ‘So you may climb out of that defensive hole you are trying to hide in and behave like the gentleman I used to think you!’
To Natalia’s surprise, Edward smiled—albeit wryly. ‘You have the silken tongue of a Sicilian asp,’ he dryly informed his wife.
A Sicilian Seduction Page 14