by Lucy Monroe
Salvatore studied her in a way that made her feel exposed.
‘Are you willing to risk putting his heart under further stress?” A sense of impotency filled her. Despite the fact they were not exactly close she loved her father very much. And he hadn’t looked well the last time she’d seen him. ‘No.”
‘Then I stay.”
With a tremendous effort of will, she stepped back, away from that insidious touch.
‘No. If Papa is that worried, ‘I’ll agree to a bodyguard, but not you.”
‘lt is too important an assignment for me to put it in the hands of another.”
‘Me, important?” She couldn’t help deriding.
His jaw went taut and fire rained down on her from those dark chocolate eyes. Up
‘Don’t keep pushing, Elisa.”
His tone implied that, for her own sake, she had better do anything but. Only she couldn’t make herself stop. There was too much pain inside her to govern everything that came out of her mouth when she was with him.
He’d hurt her and there was a terrible part of her that wanted to hurt him back, even if it was just with digs that did no more than annoy his sense of masculine pride.
‘Get me a different bodyguard.”
‘That’s not going to happen.”
‘I will call Papa and tell him I don’t want you around me.”
‘And will you tell him why?” Salvatore’s smooth question stopped her progress toward the phone on the small table beside the one armchair in her apartment.
‘I don’t have to tell him why.”
‘He wants the best for you and I’m the best. He will expect an explanation.”
The problem was she knew he was right. Even though several of the Vitale Security operatives were ex-military, none of them had been trained as thoroughly as Salvatore. His father and grandfather had seen to that going so far as sending him to spend his formative years’ schooling and training in an elite academy that taught a form of hand-to-hand combat second to none in the world.
It had been followed by a technical education at the university level that put him on a par with coordinators in the government’s secret service.
‘Then I shall tell him.”
‘And prompt a full-on heart attack? Does he mean so little to you?” Her hands curled into fists at her sides.
‘Why are you doing this to me?” She spun to face him, her body vibrating with emotions she would give anything not to feel.
‘Haven’t you hurt me enough?” There it was.
The truth laid bare between them. He had the power to hurt her and he had exercised it.
His face looked set in stone.
‘I am not doing this to hurt you. You need my protection.”
‘Just being around you hurts” she cried, not able to hide that from him any longer. Perhaps if she was honest, told him just how hard it was to be with him, he would withdraw from the fray and assign someone else to guard her. His Sicilian guilt should be good for something to her.
‘can’t stand the memories Salvatore. Can’t you see that? Not seeing you is the only way I can even begin to cope.”
Pain shot through his expression, but then it was gone.
‘Pretending it did not happen is not coping.”
Suddenly she knew. He wanted to force a confrontation. The man who found talking about his feelings right up there with Chinese water torture wanted to talk things out. She could see it in his eyes, in the stubborn set of his jaw.
She couldn’t bear it. Rehashing the past would only hurt more, not heal.
He didn’t realize that of course. Because he was not hampered by the soul-destroying pain of a betrayed love. He had never felt anything more for her than sexual lust.
Desperate to avoid the confrontation she sensed was coming, she took the lesser of two evils.
‘you said you’d take me to dinner.”
‘We need to talk, Elisa.”
She ignored that.
‘l’m really tired. I’d prefer not to cook tonight.”
His frown expressed his irritation with her refusal to talk, but in the end, and to her undying shock, he nodded.
‘AII right. If you do not need to change clothes, we can go.”
‘Just let me fix my hair and put on some lipstick.”
Again he agreed giving her a much needed reprieve from his presence as she closed herself into the tiny cubicle that served as her bathroom.
Salvatore swore with frustration. He had believed it would be difficult to overcome her aversion to him but had not been prepared for it to be almost impossible.
Elisa was not just angry with him. She hated him.
She had lost her baby because of him. She’d never said so, but their final argument, the stress of that confrontation had no doubt precipitated the miscarriage. It was a guilt he’d learned to live with, but he would not live with the knowledge he had done nothing to make it right.
However, it was patently obvious she was not prepared for talk of marriage yet.
He had to woo her. His mouth twisted cynically. He knew how he wanted to woo her. In bed.
Seducing her would be far easier than talking the stubborn woman round to his way of seeing things.
He would enjoy it more too.
She might not like it, but her body still reacted to him almost helplessly. Her pulse had increased with the barest touch of his hand on her neck. Given enough time and close proximity, it would simply be a matter of when they made it back into each other’s arms.
No matter what had gone before back in her bed was a place he definitely wanted to be. Even marriage was not too high a price to pay to know that all her passion all her fire would belong to him.
Elisa came out of the bathroom looking fragile, but lovely. She’d brushed out her hair and pulled it back with a clip. Her face had more color than it had earlier, but that was probably due to makeup rather than an improvement in her feelings. Not that her green eyes revealed anything. Their usually animated depths were blank of any emotion.
‘Are you ready?” she asked her voice as flat as her expression.
He detested that flatness wanted to experience Elisa as she had been a year ago, not this buttoned-down stranger. But he had won one victory’, he would consolidate his position before demanding more.
‘l’m ready ” Just those two words and her eyelids flinched. He wanted to curse. He’d been a stupid bastard a year ago. Even if she was like her mother as her father had said she’d been different in one key way.
She’d wanted to marry him when she discovered she was pregnant.
He still wasn’t sure the baby was his. They’d only been together a month when she told him she was pregnant. .
.What were the chances? But even so he had decided to risk them because he had wanted her in his bed and in his life on a permanent basis. He’d made that decision too late and lived to regret his tardiness and stupidity.
‘Let’s go.” He took her hand to lead her from the apartment.
She tried to pull away from him the way she did from every single touch since they’d seen each other that morning in the jeweler’s. And just as before, he didn’t let go. She had to get used to his touch again. The prospect that she wouldn’t was not a circumstance he wanted to contemplate.
‘Where are we going?”
‘does it matter?”
‘No Idid not think so.”
Two hours later they were back in the apartment dinner having been nothing short of a disaster.
She’d avoided looking at him, touching him and talking to him if she could.
The strain of it was showing on bOth of them.
She yawned.
you need to go to bed.”
She nodded .
He looked around the small apartment. The cozy and inviting undersized sofa didn’t look so cozy as a possible bed. It was several feet too short for his over-six-foot frame. The pull-down bed would have been a slight improvement, but he had no doubt she w
ould refuse to share it with him.
He looked at the floor with even less pleasure.
‘I suppose you’ll expect me to bed down on the carpet ” Her eyes grew wide and a flush suffused her face.
‘I don’t expect you to sleep here at aII.”
‘I thought we settled this before we left.” It was a blatant untruth. He’d known she would balk at him spending the night.
She stiffened in pure, independent female outrage.
‘You’re not sleeping in my apartment.”
‘I am until the auction is over.” His voice was as grim as his mood after dinner as the undesirable pariah. It was not an experience he was used to. Usually women fawned over him even ex-girlfriends-but not this woman.
The look of horror that came over her made no improvement on his deteriorating mood.
‘l’m not going to attack you,” he ground out.
‘l’m here to protect you.”
‘lt’s impossible.”
‘Do you have a better solution? I’m not leaving you alone ” he added before she could open her mouth to answer.
She gnawed at her lower lip in a gesture he remembered from before. It indicated she was in serious thought.
The look of horror turned to one of disgust.
‘lf you insist on being my bodyguard you can spring for a suite with two bedrooms at a hotel or sleep in the hall. You pick.”
He stared at her. It couldn’t be this easy.
‘A hotel.”
‘Fine. Give me a minute to pack.”
Elisa threw clothes into a suitcase with little consideration for what she was packing. He’d looked shocked when she suggested the hotel, but she knew how intractable he could be. He would spend the night with her no matter what she wanted. Her apartment was out of the question. Just the thought of sharing such small living space with him made her cringe. She needed a door to shut between them a room to call her own a bed that would hold no memories.
Not that he’d ever shared her bed in this new apartment, but somehow, if he stayed, she knew it would feel tainted by his presence. She would have to move again.
She refused to consider why he had such a strong impact on her emotions still or why hate sometimes felt like the other side of a bruised and bleeding love.
CHAPTER THREE
LYING in bed in the luxurious hotel suite later memories she was too exhausted to fight washed over her.
Seeing him had brought it all back.
The debilitating pain. The sense of betrayal. The grief of loss but also the glory of possession.
For a short while, it had been the most glorious time of her life. She had belonged to someone, had a place in his life. Not a grudging place as she had with her mother. Not an inconvenient place as she had with her father.
Salvatore had accepted and desired her for herself.
Or so she had believed.
If it were possible to go back in time she would go back, not to the point where she had met Salvatore in an effort to make a different choice with him. But she would go back to those four short weeks when she had believed herself loved as she loved and if she could she would stay there forever.
She would never know the misery of his defection, the humiliation of his hurtful beliefs about her, the desolation of his lack of commitment to her. AII of that would be in a future she would not have to live… if it could be so. Nor would she know the pain of losing the one being she had been certain to belong to forever who she would have spent a lifetime giving a mother’s love she had only ever dreamed of.
Her mind took her back to the moment when she had realized Salvatore was interested in her.
She’d been in Milan attending an estate sale for a woman who was known for her jewelry collection. She remembered that her hotel room had felt stuffy because the air-conditioning unit was broken. The phone had rung just as she stepped out of a cooling shower. She’d considered letting the front desk just take a message, but in the end had traipsed across the room to pick it up, dripping and naked but for a thin towel wrapped around her.
‘HeIIo?” Elisa. Salvatore here.”
Salvatore? ‘My father’s friend?” she squeaked, unable to believe he was calling her in her hotel room in Milan.
‘I hope your friend as well cara.”
Oh, he was smooth. yes, of course.
‘Is something the matter with him?”
‘Him?”
‘My f-father.” She stumbled over the words, tongue-tied in a way she hadn’t been since adolescence .
‘Why should you think that?” his voice purred down the line at her.
‘you’re calling me.”
‘And a man cannot call a beautiful single woman with any other reason than to discuss her father?” The gentle mockery had her knees going weak and she plopped down to sit on the edge of the bed.
‘of course I just… ”
‘Cara. Surely you realized I was interested in you.”
Funnily enough she hadn’t.
‘You mean because you flirted with me?” she asked feeling gauche for saying it. But still,I thought you flirted with every woman.”
‘Do I?’
‘I don’t know.” He was practically a stranger to her. She had grown up with her mother in America and as close as her father and Salvatore’s father were she and Salvatore had met only infrequently over the years when she visited her father in Sicily.
‘lt seemed like it to me.”
He’d certainly flirted with her from the moment he found her on the sun lounger by her father’s pool her second day in Sicily the summer before.
She could still remember the smooth joke about mermaids and the sexy glint in his eyes. Italian men took female appreciation to whole new levels but she’d found Sicilians in a class all by themselves. And Salvatore was the most impressive of the lot.
He had proceeded to flirt with her on and off over the next two weeks whenever he and his family were guests in her father’s home or vice versa. Which considering how close the two families were was quite frequent.
She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks.
It had never once occurred to her the feeling might be mutual.
‘You will have to get to know me better,” he was speaking again,
‘To see that I am not a flirt, rara, far from it.”
‘I wiII?” She liked the sound of that.
‘Si’
‘AII right.”
‘I’ll pick you up in forty minutes.”
‘What?” Now? He wanted her to get to know him now?
‘To dinner;
” you want to have dinner with me?” He made an impatient, but amused sound.
‘What do you think I am saying here?”
‘That you want to have dinner with me?”
She might have been born to one of the most notorious and glamorous stars in Hollywood but she lived a very quiet life and did not play man-woman games. She’d seen too much from a very early age and vowed never to be like her mother or the sycophants who populated Shawna’s life. She would never cheapen intimacy as she’d seen it cheapened around her.
Only her lack of experience was making her sound like she was stupid. It would serve her right if he withdrew his dinner invitation, she thought in frustration.
‘I want to have dinner with you and now you have thirty-five minutes in which to ready yourself.”
He arrived thirty minutes later.
She was ready.
He took her to an elegant restaurant where the food and the wine were delicious. They danced after dinner.
He pulled her into his arms, his hold intimate, and she did not complain.
It felt too good.
Sensations she had never experienced overwhelmed her as he swayed with her to the music.
It was sexual desire as she’d never believed it could be. Instantaneous. Hot. Unstoppable.
Pressing her even closer he said you feel good ‘dolcezza.”
‘so do you.” Her
voice was husky and low.
She’d never spoken that way in her life. It sounded sexy though.
‘I am glad ” She tipped her head back to look at him and encountered eyes so intense they burned right through her to the very core of her feminine sexuality.
‘Sweet.” His head lowered toward hers. you are going to taste so sweet.”
The kiss shattered every sense of who she believed herself to be.
She went up like a candle burning with a heat she’d never even dreamed existed.
Unconscious of her surroundings, she twisted her hips against him seeking some unsatiable thing, some sort of relief from the conflagration of her senses. The caress only made it worse and he groaned his lips taking on a hard sensuality that gave no quarter.
She desired none and responded with all the latent sensuality in her being.
Tearing his mouth from hers he said ‘We’ve got to get out of here or I’m going to make love to you and get us b0th arrested for indecent exposure.”
Shockingly she heard herself teasing him. ‘l’ve heard the police are quite understanding about that sort of thing.”
He shook his head. ‘Do not joke. I am in agony. I want a bed with you on it. Now.”
Suddenly she realized where all this passionate intensity was heading and she froze. Literally.
Stopping his rapid progress to the table.
He turned to her, his eyes black with desire, his mouth set in a grim line that she found slightly frightening.
‘What is it?” you expect to go to bed? Right now?”
His glare singed the edges of her heart.
‘What kind of game are you playing? If that kiss wasn’t a prelude to bed, what the hell was it?”
She didn’t play games, but he didn’t know that. His accusation made her take quick stock, however. She couldn’t very well tell him she’d never kissed like that in her life so had no experience of what it was a prelude to. Instinct told her that admitting her lack of experience to Salvatore would turn him right off. He was used to dating the most sophisticated sort of women.
‘This is our first date.”
‘We did the mating dance for two solid weeks in Sicily. I would have taken you to bed then, but to do so while you were under your father’s roof would have been disrespectful to your family.”