‘Now, I wonder what your local sweetheart would say about a woman who spends two weeks in another man’s company and at another man’s bidding…before hightailing it back home to him…? Hmm…? Not many men would be forgiving on that score. In fact, I would say roughly none. So have you told him about your overseas romp? Or were you using me so that you could take your newly found sexual experience into his bed?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Bethany spluttered, her face scarlet as much from his far-fetched accusations as from the evocative pictures he was unwittingly creating in her head. Pictures of them together on their overseas romp. She had gone to him a virgin, but at the end of two weeks she had become a recklessly wanton woman who had had every inch of her body slowly and meticulously explored and had tasted the delight of exploring every inch of his body. In fact, there had not been a night since when she hadn’t recreated those memories in her head.
‘Am I being ridiculous? Why else would you have come back here? Left London and your university degree? If not for a man?’
The silence that greeted this question stretched between them like a piece of elastic being pulled to its absolute limit. ‘Not everything a woman does is because of a man.’ Bethany struggled to sound as normal and natural as she could, which was not very as her voice was a weak croak.
‘But most of the time it is. At least, that’s always been my experience.’
She resisted looking at the clock. Again. Although it was difficult.
‘Okay, if you must know, I promised I’d cook something for my parents. They’ve gone to the village hall…some sort of do to raise money for an orphanage in Africa. They’ll be back soon. I’m sure you don’t want to be here when they arrive…’
He didn’t leap from his seat. She didn’t even know if he believed a word of what she had said. In any case, it didn’t matter because the sound of the front door opening impacted like a bullet through her panicky thoughts and she heard her mother’s familiar voice calling, ‘Honey? Bethany? We’re home!’
Chapter Four
FOR the space of a few desperate seconds Bethany wondered if she could reasonably hide Cristiano, who had risen to his feet and was adding to her feeling of suffocation. Stuff him away in a cupboard somewhere or else shove him into the back garden and lock the door on his harsh, beautiful face, now alive with curiosity.
The only upside was that at least she had proved him wrong on his fanciful idea that she was inviting some man back to the house.
She raced out to intercept her parents and found them in the act of removing their coats and making noises about the weather, which had apparently taken a turn for the worse. Snow predicted.
‘But the fund-raiser was an enormous success.’ Eileen Maguire smiled at her daughter. ‘Raised well over five hundred euro. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but every little helps. There was a very interesting chap there, Bethany. Gave a talk about where the money would be going. Wasn’t he interesting, John? I was tempted to ask him back here for supper; poor man is having to make do with sandwiches at the B&B because Maura’s gone to visit her daught…’
Her mother stopped in mid-sentence, which was a phenomenon that seldom occurred, and Bethany didn’t have to look around to know why. She could feel Cristiano’s presence in the hall behind her. Why on earth couldn’t he have stayed in the kitchen just a tiny bit longer? Given her time to warn her parents of the unexpected arrival?
‘Mum…Dad…’ She turned round reluctantly as Cristiano moved smoothly towards her. So she hadn’t been lying. There was no man hovering on the scene, as he had mistakenly suspected. At least not at this moment in time. He just couldn’t figure out why all the drama when she could just have told him that her parents would be heading back. Would that have been his cue to leave? He wasn’t sure. Having been reeled in by an expert liar, he might have been curious to meet her parents. As it stood, he could not have been in the company of two more normal people. Both appeared to be in their late fifties, possibly a bit older.
‘I’m…’
‘We know who you are, son, and I’m just glad we’ve finally met you. Aren’t we, Eileen? She’s glad too,’ John Maguire said, smiling with his hand outstretched, ‘and will tell you so herself just as soon as she stops gaping like a goldfish. Mind you…’ he shook Cristiano’s hand warmly and winked at his daughter, who was standing to one side, her face ablaze with hot colour ‘…perhaps we should relish seeing her lost for words. As Beth probably told you, it’s a rare sight.’
Not, Bethany thought with an agonising sense of doom, as rare a sight as it was to witness Cristiano lost for words, which he clearly was and she couldn’t blame him. Nor could she begin to imagine what was going through his head, although he seemed to gather his wits with insufferable speed, returning her father’s handshake before moving on to, of all things, raise her mother’s hand to his lips in a purely Italian gesture of chivalry, which had her mother blushing like a teenager.
‘Oh, my,’ she said, glancing over to Bethany. ‘You said that he was dashing, darling, but you didn’t let on just how much of the gentleman he was!’
‘Dashing?’ Cristiano slanted a look across at her that might have seemed innocent enough to her gullible parents but was loaded with questions of a highly uncomfortable nature as far as Bethany was concerned.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite get round to making that meal…’ Bethany changed the subject to a general chorus of Never mind and We understand perfectly from her parents.
‘You should have called us, darling!’ Eileen was smoothing down her grey skirt, moving forward to warmly take both of Cristiano’s hands in hers. ‘We would have hurried back! No. That wouldn’t have been such a good idea, would it, John?’ She glanced at her husband as though he had been the one to make the silly suggestion and he raised both his shoulders with an air of indulgent resignation. ‘I guess you two young things had so much to catch up on! Now, Bethany, you stay here with Cristiano…such a lovely name…no, better still, why don’t you take Cristiano into the sitting room…John, darling, will you get the fire going…? And…’
‘Good idea, Mum!’ No. There was no way that she could bear to face Cristiano.
‘And don’t you worry about the food, Beth…’ John turned to the other man and grinned. ‘I’ve told this young lady a thousand times that…’
‘Dad! Please. I’m sure Cristiano doesn’t want to hear all sorts of boring stuff…’
‘Boring stuff? If there’s one thing I’ve discovered about your daughter, John, it’s that the word boring can never be applied to her. Can it, Bethany?’ His voice was silky smooth and was it her imagination but did it also sound as menacing as the slash of a knife ripping through paper? Or maybe, she thought with a sick feeling in her stomach, flesh. Hers.
‘We’ll just take ourselves off to the sitting room now and why don’t you and Mum…er…go and change…and then we can…’
‘Get to know one another!’ Her father was beaming and Bethany smiled back weakly.
‘And I’ll just rustle up something for us all to eat. It’ll have to be simple fare, mind…’ She looked at Cristiano, who scored another few Brownie points by immediately offering to take them all out to dinner. Snow, he was told, was on the way. Best stay put.
‘In that case, I couldn’t want for anything nicer than a simple meal. Your daughter must have told you that I’m a man of uncomplicated tastes.’
That earned him a friendly pat on the shoulder from the older man who said, to Bethany’s horror, although how much more horrible could the situation get? ‘Guess that’s the way it plays with the kind of risks you take on with what you do, eh?’
Cristiano greeted this bewildering statement with a noncommittal smile and said nothing. His life, until he had met the woman hovering slightly behind him, had been an ordered affair. Work. Women. Everything in its place. He was a man who had always believed that by wielding firm control he could successfully limit unpleasant surprises and thus far he had never had o
ccasion to doubt the philosophy. So he was ill prepared for the sensation of walking on quicksand, which was what he felt he was doing now. Risks? Sure, he took risks in his line of work, but somehow he had got the impression that the risks to which Bethany’s father had referred did not apply to those associated with high finance, mergers and acquisitions. So what the hell had the man been talking about? And how, for that matter, had they known his identity before the usual round of introductions?
Behind him, Bethany cleared her throat and he spun around to face her as her parents disappeared up the stairs, talking in low, excited voices.
It grated on his nerves, but even in her own territory, a modest thatched cottage a million miles away from glamorous designer shops and sexy wine bars, she still had the look of a woman who could reel in any unsuspecting man with the pretence of being born to privilege. She didn’t have the air of someone who looked down on anyone they considered their inferior, which was just one of the things he found so insanely irritating about many of the women he had dated in the past. Bethany, instead, just looked refined. Something about the way she was put together. Maybe the vibrant, rich colour of her hair tumbling down past her shoulders. Or the perfect clarity of her eyes. Or maybe it was the silky smoothness of her skin with its dusting of freckles, untouched by the make-up mask so many women used to camouflage less than flawless complexions. Or perhaps the manner in which she held herself. Poised, proud and assertive but in a very muted way.
Angry with himself for even bothering to register her as anything more than a woman who had had the temerity to play games with him, Cristiano looked at her with grim, unsmiling menace. As always, silence proved to be his ally and Bethany stumbled into speech, her eyes shifting away from his as she led him towards the sitting room. He listened without saying a word as she rambled on about her parents, apparently pillars of the community, involved in all sorts of charitable causes, virtual saints if her eulogy was anything to go by.
As he listened, he took in everything around him, from the profusion of family photos to the gleaming ornaments collected over a lifetime and obviously cherished. Although just a cottage, it was an extremely spacious one and the downstairs was comprised of a honeycomb of little rooms which quaintly interconnected with one another. On one of the chairs in a room which had been kitted out as a study, a fat, contented tabby cat was snoozing. This couldn’t be further removed from the ancestral manor she had given him to believe was her family home and Cristiano hung on to the thought, which provided just the right spur for the aggression with which he had earlier confronted her.
‘So,’ he said conversationally, once they were in the sitting room and he was installed on one of the sprawling comfy chairs, ‘what a charming place your parents have. So different from the turreted mansion you described…’
Bethany blushed. She hadn’t been treated to Cristiano’s brutally cold side, although she had known it was there because men of power were invariably ruthless, and she was finding it hard to marry the two personas. The gorgeous, sexy man who had whisked her away to a tropical idyll and the icy stranger looking at her with shuttered eyes and a cruel curl on his lips. She had to remind herself that she would never have glimpsed the gorgeous, sexy man if he had met her as Bethany Maguire. She might not have met the icy stranger, but she would bet her limited savings that Mr Indifferent would have been in ample supply.
‘I never said that the turreted mansion belonged to my parents,’ she told him. ‘I only said that there was certainly one in my home town and there is.’
‘I’m afraid I find it hard to appreciate the fine line of distinction between an outright lie and an economical use of the truth.’
‘You’re only finding it hard because you don’t even want to try.’
‘And why should I? But you were right when you said that there was no point going over old ground. It’s not going to get either of us anywhere. So let’s move on to another topic, shall we?’ He delivered an icy smile that sent flutters of real fear racing through her body. Cristiano, seeing that, broadened his smile and relaxed. He had wondered why he had bothered to make the trip but now he knew. Yes, he had needed to see her face to face so that he could exorcise some of his built up fury with her for lying to him and with himself for being taken in by her deception. He had also, he now realised, felt the urge to close what he considered unfinished business because what they had was unfinished.
The two weeks they had spent in Barbados had been tantamount to a complete, reckless breakdown of his self-control. He had been like a straight A student who had decided to play truant. Naturally, she had been blissfully unaware of that, had not known that that was the first time in his life when he had breached his own rigidly self-imposed boundaries. Cristiano wasn’t quite sure how she had managed to achieve that feat but achieve it she had and, by the time they had returned to Italy, he was by no means ready for her to vanish from his life. Seeing her again here had had the negative effect of reminding him why he was still so damned hot for her. He had expected to feel nothing for her but derision and contempt. And sure, she was little more than a cheap liar, but the knowledge hadn’t gone very far to extinguishing the flare of attraction he had neither sought nor courted but which was, it seemed, still there and very firmly alight.
Even looking at her now across the width of the sitting room, folded into the chair like a kid with the long sleeves of her oversized jumper pulled right down so that she could catch the ends between her slender fingers, was alternately rousing and enraging him.
Like a mathematician addressing a convoluted problem, Cristiano brought his finely tuned and coolly logical brain to bear on the illogical situation. How better to put an end to his anger and frustration than by just taking what had been summarily denied him? Could he pretend to overlook the little matter of her outrageous deception until he got her into bed and sated his hunger for her, which was still running through his veins and sabotaging all his efforts to get his life back on track?
He’d have to think about that one but he relaxed for the first time since he had set foot in the house. Just having a solution to hand, even if he decided not to put it to use, went some way to reestablishing his control over proceedings which, with the appearance of her parents, had taken a definite knock.
Also, he quite liked the nature of his solution. He hadn’t been able to shake the memory of her face from his head, or the memory of her moaning under him, on top of him, in the massive circular bath at his house in Barbados, in the pool, in various parts of the house and several times on his private stretch of beach where only the moon and the stars had witnessed their inexhaustible passion. It would be sweet revenge, not that he applied such a primitive description to his wandering thoughts, to take her again and then leave her, but when the time was right and at his say-so.
He surfaced from his unexpectedly pleasant thoughts to see her perched forward on the edge of her chair, staring at him intently.
‘Did you hear me?’
Cristiano frowned. ‘Repeat,’ he commanded. ‘My mind was elsewhere.’
Bethany could only assume that having given her the full force of his fury he was already thinking about leaving, getting back to his wonderful, privileged life—the same wonderful, privileged life he had mistakenly assumed she knew all about.
And, God, she was so tempted to let him walk out of the door but then…how would she explain that to her parents? The web of deceit which she had begun weaving the minute she had accepted his dinner invitation all those months ago wrapped a little tighter around her.
She was also discovering that the thought of seeing him for the last time again was already beginning to dig its claws in. She mentally stuck that inappropriate reaction into a box in her head and firmly taped it down.
‘I was saying that there are one or two things that I need to tell you before Mum and Dad come back down.’
Cristiano’s antennae immediately went onto red alert.
‘You mean aside from explaining h
ow it is that your parents seemed to know who I was without any introductions having to be made?’
‘I…um…told them about you.’
‘Really. And what exactly did you say? I’m keen to know, considering your amazing capacity for stretching the truth.’ His eyes drifted lazily from her flushed face down to her breasts—breasts which he had known intimately, had tasted and luxuriated in. It made no difference that they were well hidden under the capacious jumper. His memory was more than up to supplying an image of the luscious body beneath it.
Bethany’s brain threatened to shut down. ‘I told them…you know…that we met while I was out in Italy…’
‘Oh, so they knew that you were in Italy. That’s a promising start. Did they know that you were house-sitting for a random stranger whom you had decided to impersonate?’
‘Yes, they knew that I was house-sitting!’
‘Lose the pious tone, Bethany. It doesn’t suit you. And I take it that you didn’t breathe a word about your charade of being one Ms Amelia Doni…? Hmm…?’
Bethany could feel the slight dampness of perspiration on the palms of her hands, but she kept them well covered in the sleeves of her jumper. ‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Didn’t think so. Your parents didn’t strike me as the sort of people who would find it an amusing anecdote. So what exactly did you tell them about me?’
‘Right. Okay.’ Bethany cleared her throat and braced herself. ‘I know you probably think it a bit peculiar that I would even mention you, considering things didn’t exactly end well.’
‘Understatement of the year, don’t you think?’
‘But they’re very moral people. Great believers in the sanctity of relationships…’
‘Obviously a trait that they didn’t pass on to you, then.’
‘You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?’
‘Any reason why I should?’
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child Page 6