by Lynne Graham
What if Rio made her pregnant? The consequences of unprotected sex were not something she wanted to contemplate, particularly when she had a very poor relationship with the potential father. She suppressed a fearful shudder and told herself to be strong. Whatever happened, it would happen and she couldn’t change that. In the meantime it would be best to go on as though nothing had changed.
‘Please take me back to my hotel or call me a taxi or something,’ Ellie muttered in desperation.
‘You still haven’t told me what you’ve done to Beppe—’
‘I haven’t done anything to him!’ Ellie proclaimed in a sudden fury roused by the stabbing of her conscience. After all, if Beppe Sorrentino was troubled, it was her fault because she had told him something that had upset him. She had been selfish and thoughtless, dwelling only on her right to know who her father was without ever considering the cost that that information might inflict on anyone else. Even worse, Rio was Beppe’s godson and Beppe had no idea that Ellie had already met Rio and was currently involved with the younger man. But was she involved with him?
Ellie grimaced at the concept because that word, involved, lent a gravitas to their entanglement that it didn’t deserve. They had engaged in a foolish and irresponsible sexual encounter, nothing more. They weren’t in a relationship, nor were they likely to be. And how did she feel about that reality? And the answer was that that reality saddened and wounded her heart and her pride. With Rio, she was slowly and painfully learning that she was more vulnerable than she had ever appreciated. She had made a mistake with him two years earlier and almost unbelievably had made an even bigger mistake this time around. Sex might be a field that Rio played in but Ellie didn’t play at anything she did. She didn’t do casual either.
‘Ellie…’ Rio breathed impatiently.
Ellie rose from her seat to move back out to the hall. ‘I can’t discuss Beppe with you. I’m sorry but that’s how it is—’
‘What are you hiding from me?’ Glittering dark eyes full of suspicion locked to the pale triangle of Ellie’s face.
Ellie lifted her chin. ‘People have secrets, Rio. Secrets they don’t want to share. Dragging them out into the light of day isn’t always the right thing to do,’ she reasoned uneasily.
‘Beppe has no secrets… He’s not that kind of man,’ Rio argued with sublime assurance. ‘So, if you’re not judging, you’re preaching. Are you so perfect?’
‘No, I know I’m far from perfect and I wasn’t preaching. I was just speaking my thoughts out loud. I’m a little confused right now,’ Ellie admitted tightly, her eyes suddenly stinging while she wondered if her entire trip to Italy had been an outsize blunder. Maybe she should have left the past buried, maybe she should’ve tried harder to suppress her curiosity. All she knew was that she felt very guilty at the knowledge that Beppe had been distressed by her visit. He had dealt with her kindly but perhaps she hadn’t deserved that kindness.
‘I’ll take you back to the hotel,’ Rio murmured without any expression at all. He had reached the conclusion that it would take a hacksaw to extract anything from Ellie that she did not want to share. What secrets was she concealing? What he had read in that investigative report? Or was there more?
‘Yes, thank you. I have a da—’ Ellie bit off the word before it could reach the tip of her tongue but she saw Rio’s dark gaze switch fast to her face and she felt her cheeks burn.
‘You have a date?’ Rio pressed in growling disbelief, staring at her as she stood there in the comparative dimness of the hall, a glowing beauty with a sexily tousled mane of vibrant coppery curls, translucent skin and a mouth that would’ve tempted a saint. And he had never been a saint. Even less was he known as a possessive lover, because he didn’t allow himself to become attached: once bitten, twice shy. So why did the very thought of Ellie becoming intimate with another man infuriate him? Disconcerted by that rush of anger, he tamped it down hard and gritted his teeth.
‘A guy I met in the village invited me out to dinner tonight,’ Ellie confided in a rush.
‘His name?’ Rio demanded.
‘Bruno Nigrelli.’
Rio’s nostrils flared. ‘I think he did some work for Beppe once. Lawyer?’
Ellie nodded uncomfortably.
Rio gritted his teeth even harder in the smouldering silence. Was she expecting him to object? Even waiting for him to do so? Wasn’t that how women sucked a man in, by assigning strings and conditions and making him want and demand more?
‘I’m not much in the mood for dinner now, but I don’t like letting people down—’
Rio’s dark eyes flared golden as the sunset. ‘Then cancel him and spend the night here with me instead.’
Ellie froze in bewilderment, green eyes flying over his lean, darkly handsome features. ‘Spend the night?’ she repeated shakily.
‘It would make more sense—’
Ellie dropped her gaze defensively. ‘Nothing about us makes sense—’
‘We make perfect sense. You decided I was a bastardo two years ago and even if I saved the world you wouldn’t budge an inch from that conviction,’ Rio derided.
‘I think a lot of women would think the same after that night at the wedding, but let’s not get into that,’ Ellie counselled heavily as she yanked open the hefty front door. ‘We have enough differences without raking up the past. I can’t stay, Rio—’
‘Ellie… When will you know?’
Ellie dropped her head as she settled into the passenger seat of his sports car. ‘In ten days to two weeks,’ she framed jaggedly. ‘I’ll do a test as soon as I can.’
In the sunlight, Rio stood very still. What would he do if Ellie conceived his child? He recalled his own sordid origins with an inner shudder of recoil, knowing in that instant that there would be no sacrifice too great were it to mean that his child could look back with pride and contentment on his or her early years. Only when Beppe and Amalia took an interest in him had Rio learned what it was to have self-respect. Being cleverer than everyone around him had only attracted the bullies. Being prettier as a boy had also drawn the abusers. His lean, strong face was stamped by the grim lines and hollows of bitter recollection and experience. As an adult, Rio Benedetti might be as rich as the fabled Croesus but he had never forgotten his humble beginnings in that dumpster.
Ellie glanced up to see what was preventing Rio from joining her in the car and ended up staring, because it was a revelation to see that Rio, all lean, mean and magnificent six-foot-plus of him, could look haunted and almost vulnerable. She scolded herself for that imaginative flight as soon as he started up the car but his rebuke about her tendency to judge was still nagging at the back of her mind. Sometimes she was kind of black-and-white about situations, she acknowledged uneasily, but just as she had learned all her life to follow rules she had learned to compromise and understand what motivated people to do the things they did, as well. She supposed she was still holding the events of two years earlier against Rio because his colourful sex life had shocked her. As someone who had never pushed against conventional boundaries, possibly she was a little too conservative for a passionate free spirit like Rio.
Rio pulled the car to a halt in the hotel car park. He shot Ellie a glance, noting the fineness of her delicate bone structure and how clearly it showed beneath her pale skin. She was exhausted and he could see it and he compressed his mouth on the urge to make another comment about Beppe. He refused to think about the dinner date she had. He refused to admit that the idea annoyed him. After all, he wasn’t possessive and he wasn’t jealous. He didn’t ever get attached to a woman—well, at least he hadn’t in almost ten years.
And when Rio had got attached—to Franca—it had been a disaster, he recalled grimly. Treachery laced with infidelity and a woman’s greed. Rio had learned the hard way that loving could be a one-way ticket to hell.
No, he definitely wasn’t jealous. He already knew that Ellie was a gold-digger, he reminded himself resolutely. He would only care a
bout Ellie Dixon’s future if she became pregnant with his child. In the short term his sole interest in her lay in uncovering her mysterious connection to Beppe.
Rio sprang out of the car and strode round to open the passenger door. Disconcerted by that unexpected attention, Ellie climbed out and as she looked up warily into his glitteringly beautiful dark golden eyes, the sunlight hot on her skin, her conscience screamed like a fire alarm. She had been downright nasty about the sex even though he had been considerate and concerned and, bearing in mind that he had given her two climaxes, she had been unjust. Her skin flushed beet red.
‘Che cosa… What?’ Rio pressed in the strained silence.
‘I shouldn’t have said what I said back at your house,’ Ellie gabbled before she could lose her nerve. ‘It was a train wreck… Us, I mean, and me being…well, you know what. But you were good, I mean—’
Rio wanted to laugh but he fought the urge because she was so embarrassed, so utterly different from him in her attitude to sex. ‘Okay…’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie said curtly. ‘I was… I was upset.’
And with that apology she spun on her heel and walked into the hotel. Her head had a natural tilt, her hips a shapely sway, the skirt dancing above her long slender legs and, that fast, Rio was hard as a rock again, his hands clenching into fists by his sides. She drove him crazy, he reminded himself unnecessarily. But he had had her now and that should be that, game over. Hit it and quit it, he repeated to himself. He didn’t still want her. Of course he didn’t, so walk away, a little voice in his brain instructed.
Rio swung back into his car. The sound of Ellie moaning as he kissed her engulfed him, the surprised look of ecstasy on her face when she came, the exquisite feel of her soft, satiny skin. He swore vehemently, emptied his mind and dug out his phone. He needed a woman, any woman just as long as she wasn’t Ellie.
*
In a daze, Ellie went for a shower. She still ached. There would be no forgetting what she had done. And the incredulous way Rio had looked at her in the car park would stay with her until the day she died. Her face burned afresh. She should have kept quiet, she shouldn’t have said anything, should have left that short-lived intimacy and all memory of it back in his house in the hills where it belonged. A mistaken moment and not an important one in her scheme of things. Only sex. Although it would not be only sex if she fell pregnant, she conceded wretchedly, and refused to think about that angle on the grounds that it was stupid to worry before she knew she actually had something to worry about.
Although for the first time ever, Ellie desperately wanted to confide in someone and she thought about phoning Polly. She didn’t think Polly would tell her husband, Rashad, about that. But how did she know for sure? She covered her face with wet hands, all the stress of the past forty-eight hours piling up on her along with every doubt and insecurity she possessed. She still didn’t know how she had ended up having sex with Rio, but she knew she had wanted it to happen as much as he had. Being unable to put the blame on him stung, as well. He hadn’t sweet-talked her, filled her up with booze or seduced her—my goodness, anything but, she conceded ruefully.
Beppe called her on her mobile and asked her to meet him at a doctor’s surgery on the outskirts of Florence the next day. She refused the lift he offered her and assured him that she had satellite navigation and was happy to drive herself there. He invited her to dine at his home in the evening and she agreed, keen to take the opportunity to get to know him a little better, regardless of how Rio might feel about it. Should she tell Beppe that she knew Rio? Or would it be wiser to remain tactfully silent? She brooded about that while she got dressed to dine with Bruno.
It was a long evening. Bruno might have ticked all the basic boxes in the tally of what made a man attractive but he bored on about his work ambitions while asking little about Ellie. He kissed her on the cheek outside her hotel. He invited her out again and she made a polite excuse and she didn’t linger, speeding indoors, keen to get to bed.
Opening the door of her hotel room, she drew back with a sound of consternation when she saw the light burning beside her bed and the male reclining there. ‘How on earth did you get in here?’ she demanded.
Rio uncoiled fluidly off the bed and stretched with lazy assurance, not one whit perturbed by her attitude. ‘It wasn’t difficult. The staff know we’re…close,’ he selected with precision and the angry flush on her cheeks bloomed hotter still with chagrin. ‘I also own a large stake in the hotel.’
‘We are not close!’ Ellie contradicted, tossing her bag down on the chair in the corner.
Rio shrugged a broad shoulder, gracefully and silently evasive. He was as effortlessly beautiful as a dark angel sent to tempt even with his black hair tousled, his jawline shadowed and his tie missing. Her heartbeat had picked up speed. Her tiredness had taken a mysterious step back and she was already breathing as if she had run up a hill. And there was the craziest melting sensation in that place where she still ached from his sheer sexual energy. Yet she didn’t want that again, did she? It was a badly timed thought to have in Rio’s presence because her entire body quickened as if she had punched a button to switch it on to supersensitivity. Her nipples stung and her thighs pressed together as if to silence the squirming readiness low in her pelvis.
‘Are you planning to tell me what you’re doing here?’ Ellie enquired stiffly, tamping down all those disobedient thoughts and responses.
‘I wanted to be sure you came back alone,’ Rio told her.
‘And how is that your business?’
‘You were with me today,’ Rio murmured.
Ellie tilted her chin, emerald eyes gleaming like chips of ice. ‘Doesn’t mean you own me.’
Rio shrugged again. ‘I’d still have beaten the hell out of him had you brought him upstairs.’
Ellie’s lips parted and then closed again because there really wasn’t much she could say to that. ‘You do a lot of that sort of thing?’ she prompted a split second later, honest curiosity gripping her.
‘Get physical? Once it was a regular activity.’ Dark eyes spilling a glittering gleam of gold from below lush curling black lashes, Rio strode past her to the door. ‘I had to, to protect myself. I grew up in a tough environment.’
‘You’re leaving?’ Ellie framed in disconcertion and then could have bitten her tongue out because she was making it sound as though she wanted him to stay. And she didn’t.
‘Sì…’ Rio treated her to a slow burning appraisal. ‘Somehow I doubt that you’d be up for anything else tonight, principessa.’
Fury splintered through Ellie. Leave it to Rio to tell it as it is. He would stay for sex but not to chat or share a drink or supper or anything more civilised. The claustrophobic silence of the room enclosed her, increasing her nervous tension. The tip of her tongue stole out to moisten her dry lower lip.
‘I love your mouth,’ Rio husked soft and low, his attention locking to the sultry fullness of her pink lips.
Gooseflesh pebbled Ellie’s arms and a wicked little quiver snaked down her taut spinal cord. She was so aware of him that her very skin prickled and tingled with it. For an insane moment she imagined pushing him backwards down on the bed and teaching him that he didn’t know everything about her. And then she blinked, sane Ellie swimming back to the fore, and she spun and opened the door for him so that he would leave more quickly.
‘Sometimes you crack me up, bella mia,’ Rio confided with unholy amusement, recognising her defensiveness in that almost desperate pulling open of the door to hasten his departure. ‘When you’re thinking about me in bed tonight, will you be kissing me or thumping me?’
Ellie breathed in so deep she almost spontaneously combusted while she watched Rio clatter down the stairs without an ounce of discomfiture in his bearing. She had never met anyone quite like Rio Benedetti before and that was probably why he knocked her for six every time she saw him, she told herself soothingly. He was bad, he was brash, he was incredibly sexy and
insolent and he had the kind of charismatic confidence that burned like a solar flare. She was too polite and inhibited to deal with him as he should be dealt with. Her hands clenched into fists.
He embarrassed her too. The staff had seen her going out with Bruno Nigrelli and now knew she had returned to find Rio waiting in her bedroom. Ought she to complain about that invasion? Or, having already been seen in Rio’s company and kissing him, perhaps it was wiser to ignore the situation lest she end up even more embarrassed. Had Rio made her look slutty? Or like a femme fatale? She went to bed on that thought, deciding that Rio’s pursuit, if she could label it with that word, made her look like a much more exciting woman than she actually was. But she still wanted to kill him for being so careless of appearances, so arrogant and incomprehensible.
Why would he have beaten up Bruno had she brought the other man back to her room? Presumably that had been a joke, although she had not seen the humour in it. She could not credit that Rio could be jealous or staking some sort of male claim to her. He wasn’t the type. And instead of finding the sleep she badly needed the riddle of his complex personality ensured that she couldn’t stop her brain running on and actually relax enough to drift off.
*
The following morning she met up with Beppe outside a smart suburban surgery near Florence. The older man looked perfectly calm and collected and there was no sign of strain or distress in either his expression or his friendly, easy manner. Had Rio exaggerated? Overreacted? They went inside the surgery and swabs were taken. Beppe passed over a tiny gold locket, which he quietly admitted contained a lock of his brother’s hair. Ellie flushed and made no comment. After all, her mother, Annabel, had named both brothers as her daughter’s possible father, and to do so, she had presumably been uncertain as to which had fathered her child.
‘We will know within twenty-four hours,’ Beppe assured her with quiet satisfaction. ‘And now that I have you here in my beloved Firenze, I will play tourist with you and show you the sights as they should be seen.’