‘I wasn’t trying to reach for any moral high ground.’ Bethany shifted, crablike, against the wall because he was so close to her that she could feel his warm, angry breath on her face. ‘I was just trying to say that I’m not a thief.’
‘Now, I wonder why I’m finding it hard to believe anything you have to say…’
Since there was no arguing with that and trying to plead her innocence on that front was just going to be met with scathing disbelief, she decided that it was time for the cup of coffee. She deserved his anger and she would sit through it with lowered head and genuine repentance. Then he would leave and her life could return to its hollow routine.
‘The coffee…I’ll make you a cup…if…if you want to wait in the sitting room…it’s just through there…’
‘And have you out of my sight? Not a chance. I don’t know whether you’ll do a disappearing act through the back window. You seem to be pretty good at that.’
‘I’m…sorry. I told you that.’ She stared down at the ground but there was no escaping his presence because she could see the dull burnished leather of his shoes. Even when he stepped away to fall in behind her, she was horribly, horribly aware of him and it felt as though she was holding her body in agonising tension just to stop herself from shaking like a leaf in a high wind.
‘Nice house,’ he said conversationally, which didn’t fool her for a minute into thinking that he had dropped his anger in favour of a more reasonable approach to having his questions answered. He was just enjoying the moment, toying with her. ‘Funny, you told me that you lived in London.’
‘I did.’ She had her back to him as she filled the kettle with water and fetched down one of the mugs from the mug tree by the sink. Sadly, she couldn’t take refuge in the task of making his coffee for ever and eventually she was obliged to turn around, albeit reluctantly, to find that he had taken up residence on one of the pine chairs at the kitchen table. It was a reasonably big kitchen, big enough to fit a generously proportioned table, but he still managed to reduce the space to the size of a prison cell.
She shoved the mug of coffee in front of him and sat on the chair furthest away. This cold-eyed stranger staring at her with biting antagonism was as far away from the sexy, amusing, highly intelligent charmer who had swept her off her feet sufficiently for her to extend her one night of fun into a two week, mind-blowingly idyllic trip to paradise as chalk was from cheese.
Playing at the back of her mind was his casual insinuation that she could be prosecuted for impersonation. Was that true? Could that really happen? She couldn’t even begin thinking about that, so she shut the horror of it away and focused instead on the humiliation awaiting her at his hands.
Of course she deserved it. She had meant so many times to confess the truth to him, but every time she’d got to within striking distance of doing so she had pulled back because she hadn’t wanted their affair to end. Instead, she had laughingly sidestepped awkward questions, glazed over the truth and generally done such a good job of dancing round anything remotely incriminating that she could have had a career as an escape artiste. Houdini would have been proud of her.
In the process, he had stolen her heart and if he had asked her to stay on in sunny Barbados for another fortnight she knew she would have jumped at the chance and postponed the inevitable again.
Her punishment was as deadly as it was conclusive. He had taken up residence inside her and not a single day had gone by when she hadn’t thought about him and about the fact that she would never be entitled to have him in her life again. Ever.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she muttered mutinously.
‘Like what? How do you expect me to look at a liar, a cheat and a thief?’
‘I told you I didn’t steal anything from Amelia Doni!’
‘But you certainly managed to rip me off for quite a bit when you count the dinners, the wardrobe, the first class ticket to the other side of the world…’
‘You don’t understand…’
‘Enlighten me.’ He sat forward and Bethany instinctively cringed back, licking her lips nervously, with one eye on the clock behind him over the kitchen door.
‘I meant to tell you the truth…’
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ He intoned the age-old motto with icy grimness. ‘When did the good intentions disappear? When you realised that it would be a hell of a lot more rewarding to hop on the gravy train and take advantage of my generosity? Sex with all expenses paid?’
‘Don’t be crude!’
‘When did you decide to leave London?’
‘Wha…?’ Confused by the abrupt change of subject, Bethany looked at him in bewilderment before her brain clanked back into gear and she caught on to what he was doing. Instead of going for the kill, he was nipping away at her, pulling back before he could draw blood, only to home back in again just when she had managed to recover. He was getting under her defences and making sure that she had no time to rebuild them.
‘London. When did you decide to leave? Ditch the university course? Fly back over here, to the middle of nowhere? Did you think that London was too small for the both of us? Was your conscience acting up too much for you to stay put and risk running into me at some unspecified point in time?’
Bethany paled as his carelessly tossed question found its unintentional target.
‘How…how did you find me, Cristiano?’ She fell back on her original query. ‘And why did you bother?’
Cristiano shrugged elegantly. Even at the height of his anger, when his face was a cold mask of freezing disdain, she couldn’t help but register his magnetic pull. Everything about him was unbearably graceful, unbearably and unfairly masculine, and her memory had not begun to do justice to his shamefully abundant sex appeal. She was ashamed to find that she was lapping it up, shoving it into some storage compartment in her brain from whence she knew she would retrieve it over and over again in the future. The man who had once told her that he had never felt what she made him feel with any other woman now loathed her and still she was helplessly feeding off his beauty like a brainless leech.
‘Why did I bother?’ Cristiano drawled in a voice that sent shivers running up and down her spine. ‘Good question. I didn’t. You might have done a midnight flit but, hell, I’m man enough to cope with a bit of dented pride…’ It felt good to let her know straight off the bat that she had left no lasting impact on him whatsoever. Okay, so the image of her had been annoyingly intrusive, had made him lose concentration in the occasional meeting, but he would have stuck it out and he was sure he would have forgotten about her in a couple of months. And if he had felt no inclination to look at another woman since her, then that made sense. In fact, it pointed to a certain amount of wisdom because only a fool would have jumped back into the water so soon after having been attacked by a shark. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ he additionally pointed out. ‘But now, here’s the thing…There’s a difference between a woman walking out and a woman who’s played me for a fool.’
Bethany greeted this with silence because she had said sorry enough to make her realise that apologies weren’t denting his implacable anger.
Another thought crept into her fevered mind and took root. What if he had come for more than just an explanation? What if he had come to recover all the money he had spent on her? Yes, there were the meals and then the wardrobe. She had taken over her own clothes, claiming to have shoved things into a suitcase at the very last minute because the trip to Barbados had been so unexpected. This had left her in the awkward position of arriving at his spectacular beach house without a swimsuit to her name and when he had offered to go on a shopping trip with her she had guiltily agreed and only half-heartedly offered to pay.
Sex with all expenses paid. His words reverberated in her head like acid and made her feel cheaper than a common tart. Of course she had bagged up all the clothes the minute she had returned to London and given the lot to charity, but she doubted he would believe that and how
could she protest her innocence in that small, insignificant matter when she was so palpably guilty of a much larger fraud? Regret attacked her on all fronts.
Then there was the small matter of those flights. First class. She had no idea how much that ran to but she knew it wouldn’t be hundreds.
She paled at the thought of how much she would owe him. God, she hadn’t even got a job yet. In two weeks’ time she would be starting work at the local school, covering for someone on maternity leave, but that would be nowhere near the kind of money she would need. The cash register in her head pinged with such force that she buried her face in her hands and emitted a soft moan of pure despair.
‘Yes, I know,’ Cristiano said without a trace of sympathy. ‘Our sins usually do end up catching up with us.’
‘I don’t understand how you knew where I lived…’
‘Because you made sure to keep it a secret? I happened to meet the real Amelia Doni at my mother’s house. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that she was a forty-something blonde with an axe to grind about the male sex.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Bethany immediately thought of Amy and her hapless friend who was now on the road to recovery. She looked at him, wide-eyed and nervous.
‘Nothing. Of course. I explain myself to no one. I did manage to find out, however, who should have been house-sitting and it was just a matter of time before I got my people to link the connections and find out the person at the end of the chain.’
‘Your people?’
‘You’d be surprised at how efficient they can be at finding me the answers I need. Like bloodhounds.’
‘Amy asked me to house-sit,’ Bethany told him immediately. ‘Catrina had asked her because she was over in London…’
‘In rehab. Yes, I know.’
‘She didn’t want her godmother to find out. Look, there was no harm in anything we did.’
‘Do you really think I give a damn about some dippy girl with an addiction?’
‘No, but I’m just trying to tell you that…well…’
‘Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? When I showed up at the apartment, why didn’t you tell me immediately who you were…?’
Her subterfuge rose in his head like a mist of red rage as he remembered how conclusively he had been taken in by her, like a gullible teenager falling for the prom queen who told him that he was the centre of her world while fooling around with a hundred other guys.
‘You caught me at a bad time…’ Bethany whispered miserably. ‘I was…I was…’
‘Let me help you here. Playing at being the lady of the manor? In borrowed garb? Faking it?’
‘Don’t!’
‘Don’t what? Oh, yes, I forgot you had a problem with the truth.’
‘I…Okay, I had been out in the sun, I had come back to the apartment and had a really long bath and I thought it might be fun to try on one of the dresses in the wardrobe. I’ve never owned anything expensive. I was tempted. Haven’t you ever been tempted to do something you know you shouldn’t?’
‘Strangely enough, I have some notion of the difference between right and wrong!’
‘It didn’t seem wrong at the time!’
‘No? So tell me…when did it start seeming wrong? Or didn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t expecting anyone to come by,’ Bethany muttered. ‘And then you invited yourself in…’
‘Don’t even think of trying to palm off the blame for your deception onto me!’
‘I wasn’t!’ Bethany backtracked hurriedly. A glance at the kitchen clock told her that although, over the past few months, time had seemed to go by at a numbingly slow pace, it was now speeding past.
‘Going somewhere?’ Cristiano drawled, not missing a thing. ‘Hot new date with some hapless guy who thinks you’re someone you’re not?’
Bethany clasped her dampened hands together and ignored the thickly sarcastic interruption. ‘I was just trying to explain…you came in and I couldn’t very well start babbling about trying on someone else’s clothes. I wasn’t even supposed to be in the apartment in the first place! I didn’t want to land my friend Amy in trouble and I don’t know Catrina, but I gathered that finding out she was in rehab would have blown her relationship with her godmother out of the sky…’
‘So, because you’re such a thoughtful and considerate human being, you thought it wise to keep mum…’
‘I never expected that things would end up where they did,’ Bethany said in a burst of defensiveness. Another five minutes had been gobbled up since she had last looked at the clock. And he’d only taken a couple of sips of the coffee which he had made a point of demanding!
‘You mean…in bed…?’
‘Yes!’
‘By which time, it naturally didn’t occur to you that I might have been entitled to learn the real identity of the woman I was sharing my bed with…’
‘I wasn’t putting on an act when I was with you.’
‘Run that by me again?’
‘I’m really sorry…You were entitled to know everything, but I was scared that…that…’
‘That you might lose out on a real taste of the high life?’
‘No! I’m not like that!’
‘Forgive me if I’m struggling to think otherwise.’
‘I was a…a virgin!’ Bethany whispered shakily.
‘Meaning…? What, exactly?’ It angered him that all his logical thought processes were veering away from the stark black and white attack and shame route he had envisaged. She was a scheming, lying bitch but she was still managing to get under his skin with her wobbly voice and her shaking hands. ‘Is your virginity supposed to be a blanket excuse for the fact that you lied to me for two weeks? Maybe the simple truth is that trading in your virginity for fun and frolics with a wealthy man seemed like a pretty good exchange.’
‘You don’t know me at all if you can say that!’
‘Events would seem to suggest otherwise. Why didn’t you just come clean when the holiday was finished?’ Cristiano demanded. ‘Why do the vanishing act?’
Bethany opened and shut her mouth. How could she tell him that she might have confessed everything if he had been the simple fling that she had anticipated? If she had been capable of walking away and relegating him to the role of some amusing escapade which didn’t have the ability to touch her, she might have come clean because his reaction wouldn’t have mattered to her, not really. But she had fallen in love and his reaction would have mattered. Either way, she would have been walking away but she just hadn’t been able to face walking away with the image of his shock and hatred in her head. How on earth would she ever have been able to rid herself of it?
So instead she had done the midnight flit. Literally. They had returned to Italy and, over their last meal, back to the pizzeria where they had had their first, he had held her hand across the table, playing with her fingers, threatening that he would be looking her up in London and then later, after he had returned to his own place, she had quietly packed up her paltry belongings—she couldn’t really stay as Amy had reluctantly returned to take up her house-sitting duties when Bethany had taken a leaf out of her book and flitted off to Barbados—and she had left. It had been pretty close to midnight, as it happened.
‘I should have left a note,’ Bethany now said miserably. ‘I should have explained everything in a note.’
Cristiano felt a surge of anger. ‘Because, of course, telling me to my face would have been just a little too much like hard work,’ he said scathingly, and she flinched.
‘I knew how you’d react. Like this.’
‘Tell me. I’m curious. How much of your personality did you have to edit to accommodate your charade?’
‘I didn’t edit any of my personality!’
‘You just fine-tuned it to fit in with the deceit.’
‘No!’
‘So you really are…sweet, genuine, easy to laugh…Hmm, finding it a tad tricky to believe that…’
‘Oh, this isn’t g
etting either of us anywhere.’ She stood up and swept her hands across her forehead wearily. The ingredients for the promised dinner lay forgotten on the counter top. ‘It was all a terrible mistake and I can’t say much more than I’m sorry and I understand why you’re angry with me.’ A tear threatened to squeeze itself out and she pressed her fingers against her eyes, sending it right back from whence it was trying to come.
This was a nightmare. She had never expected him to descend on her in the one small corner of the planet where she had taken refuge.
‘Why do you keep looking at the clock?’ Cristiano said suddenly. ‘This is the fourth time in the past fifteen minutes.’ He wondered if his crack earlier on about her having a hot date had been nearer the mark than he had intended. Never one to indulge in wild flights of imagination, and certainly never in connection with a woman, he now found himself gritting his teeth furiously together at the thought of her with a new plaything. Some local village lad who had doubtless been waiting in the wings for her to return. Someone who, at least, had the luxury of knowing the woman he was dealing with, instead of some fictitious person fabricated from a mixture of lies and play acting.
‘Am I? I didn’t think I was.’
‘And who is the food for?’ He jerked his head at the unprepossessing pile of vegetables. ‘Entertaining? Is this why you jacked in the university course and hotfooted it back here? Does he know about us?’
‘What are you talking about?’ But there was a nervous stutter in her voice that sabotaged any attempt at sounding genuinely innocent of a hidden agenda and his eyes narrowed suspiciously on her face.
An ugly, insidious thought crept into his head like poison. Never lacking in the confidence stakes when it came to women, he wondered now whether his eager little virgin hadn’t used him as an unsuspecting trial run for someone else. A rampant flare of jealousy forced aside the nonsensical idiocy of the supposition, leaving him with a series of graphic images of her offering her body for another man’s pleasure.
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child Page 5