by Penny Jordan
Her arms went around his shoulders again, her mouth already searching out his, and she moved her hips against him until she caught the thrust of his erection just where she wanted it, her quiver of pleasure making him gasp, the firm clasp of his hands to her slender ribcage there to support her so she could set her own sensual pace.
And she rode the road of pleasure without a single care that she groaned and gasped and even laughed, it was so glorious. She strung out the sweet agony for so long it almost hurt when she finally fell over the edge.
‘If you ever drink rum in the company of others I will shoot you,’ Luc muttered into her hair as he held her limp body against him.
But all Lizzy could do was whimper because, ‘I want you again already.’
Passion was everything in paradise, Lizzy concluded much later when she lay stretched out on her stomach with her eyes closed and feeling as if there wasn’t a cell in her body that hadn’t been rejuvenated.
Luc came out of the bathroom—she picked up the clean scent of his recent shower. When he came to stretch out beside her and ran his fingertips up the length of her spine she smiled. ‘I think you’re gorgeous and sexy and a fabulous lover,’ she told him.
‘And I think you are still intoxicated,’ he countered dryly, ‘which means that later, when you recall saying all of that to me, you are going to hate yourself.’
‘Not good for your ego,’ Lizzy agreed—then, ‘Oh,’ she breathed, ‘do that again—it felt just wonderful.’
But he didn’t. Instead Luc rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, his mood suddenly sombre again. ‘Elizabeth,’ he said quietly, ‘I need you to concentrate for a moment because I have something I have to tell you…’
When she made no response he turned his head to look at her, his mouth easing into a grimace when he realised that she was asleep. The alcohol-induced sensuality he had been enjoying for the last few hours having now dropped her like a stone into a deep, restful stupor.
He sighed, and went back to staring at the ceiling. The news he’d picked up on the internet this morning and put off telling her all day was going to have to wait a little longer.
A little longer, however, was swallowed up by the speed of events.
Lizzy came awake to find herself alone in the bed—if she didn’t count the heavy thump taking place in her head. Rum, she recalled, the tender ache of her muscles as she dragged herself into the shower reminding her of how her afternoon had been spent.
The moment she went to look out of the window while she combed the damp tangles out of her hair she knew something was different. She could see two men pacing the sugar-soft sand on the beach and it only took a second for her to realise that they weren’t just pacing, they were patrolling.
Losing the comb, she turned and walked out of the bedroom. Two harried looking maids passed her on her way down the stairs. They murmured hurried greetings as they continued upwards and their normal smiles were missing.
Puzzled and curious, she continued down into the hallway, following the sound of Luc’s voice sounding grim and terse. She found him in the small dining room, standing by the table pouring coffee into a cup while he talked on his mobile phone.
He was dressed in the same shorts and tee shirt he’d stripped off so hastily earlier, but other than that everything else about him had changed. The stern look on his face, the sharp clip to his voice, even the way he moved was sharper, as if he’d switched on a fourth setting—that of grimly focused, fully charged, alpha tycoon.
‘What?’ she demanded the moment he turned to look at her, catching her first step into the room.
The mobile phone snapped shut, he tossed it onto the table. ‘Our hideout has been discovered,’ he told her without bothering to dress it up at all. ‘Elena Romano decided it would be good fun to publish it on the internet, with a charmingly acid piece about the softer side of Luciano De Santis.’ He grimaced. ‘Your pink hat put in an appearance, via a photograph she must have taken as we walked away from her that day.’
‘But—why would she want to do that now, almost two weeks later?’ Lizzy frowned as she walked forward.
‘Fabio has thrown her out,’ Luc enlightened her. ‘He caught her in a—comprising situation, apparently, with one of his deckhands. I presume she decided to use her meeting with us to divert media attention away from herself.’
‘And has she?’ Lizzy had reached the table.
‘Yes.’ Luc handed her the cup of coffee he’d just poured. ‘The media mob is piling onto the island as we speak, which means that we are going to cut our stay here short.’
When he said short, he meant short, Lizzy realised a few seconds later when a helicopter swung over the top of the house and landed on the lawn by the pool. Walking across to the window to watch it settle, Lizzy saw just how efficiently Luc had thrown a ring of security around the property—tough-looking men had been stationed everywhere her eyes drifted.
‘Is all of this really necessary?’ she said with a cold little shiver.
‘Yes,’ he responded, his voice deep and tight. ‘I have other news,’ he said then, and waited for her to look at him before he added, ‘The runaway lovers have re-emerged. Bianca is at Vito Moreno’s home in Sydney, your brother is back in England.’ There was a pause in which Lizzy held her breath because she could tell from the gravity of his expression that something bad was coming. ‘He was arrested at Gatwick airport and is currently being interviewed by the police.’
She went pale. ‘But I thought you said you had—’
‘He confessed, cara,’ Luc cut in grimly. ‘He made a voluntary confession about taking the money from Hadley’s and blew my cover-up to bits. Now I am expected in Milan to explain myself. We leave here in ten minutes.’
Ten minutes to get ready to leave was nothing to the nine long hours it took to fly back to Milan. Luc wasn’t talking. He’d withdrawn behind a wall of icy courtesy, and Lizzy couldn’t blame him. His pride had been hit, his integrity. Lizzy didn’t think he was ever going to forgive any of them for it.
And the only slither of comfort she could glean from it all was that Matthew’s arrest had not leaked out into the public arena. Luc spent most of the flight on the telephone working to ensure that it remained that way.
They arrived at Linate airport early in the morning to dark clouds and heavy rain. A limousine with blackened windows picked them up and transported them into Milan.
Luc remained on the phone throughout that journey too, the monotone flow of his voice never tiring, though Lizzy had switched off from it hours ago.
Half an hour later they were in his Milan apartment. Luc was checking his mail. Lizzy moved off, looking around her, aware that he was watching her, his eyes flicking her glances between reading the envelopes. He knew as well as she did that this was it—the hard reality of their marriage kicked in right here.
And as if to punctuate that he was wearing a suit, the first suit she’d seen him wear in two whole weeks. It was a smooth and elegant dark suit that enhanced just about everything about him from the breadth of his shoulders to the length of his long legs and even the sleek-styled darkness of his hair.
‘I will show you around in a minute,’ he murmured.
Lizzy turned to offer a fleeting smile. ‘I’ve been here before.’
Then she turned away again. Even his voice sounded different, quiet and level and—cool.
The one time she’d been here—to a party he’d given the first week she’d been in Milan—his voice had sounded like that. And he’d worn a suit, something designer-cut to look casual. He’d moved through his guests with the smooth, silent grace of a satellite circling outer space. He’d barely noticed her in the crush—though he did pause to speak to her once, she remembered. Ciao, how are you? Having a good time?
Did he even remember her name?
Then she smiled because of course he’d remembered it. He was the man with a million languages logged in his brain, so one small name wasn’t going to escape
him.
‘We will be spending most of our time here, so feel free to change anything you don’t like.’
Lizzy nodded and moved through a wide opening into the vast cutthroat stylishness of the lounge. What was there to change? she mused as she wandered over to the window to check out the view. The pure silk grey curtains with that dramatically simple dark brown line threaded through them, or the matching cushions tossed so perfectly casually against scrumptious brown leather?
She could throw chintz at it all, she supposed—just to irritate his very good taste—or change a painting or two and put up some of her own rough sketches done in bold strokes of charcoal during one of her crazy moods that had used to erupt without warning when being quiet and placid had got on her nerves.
She turned away from the window, to find him standing in the opening through to the hallway. His expression was—unreadable, she decided described it best. Gorgeous, she allowed, as in gorgeously handsome and gorgeously tanned and even gorgeously unreadable.
‘Can I have my own room?’ Lizzy didn’t even know she was going to say it until the words left her tongue.
‘Own room as in what kind of room?’ he came back smoothly.
Own room as in I don’t want to sleep with you any more, she thought, but was so shocked by the discovery she didn’t say it out loud. Instead she shrugged. ‘My own bit of space.’ She hedged for a compromise because she was going to have to seriously think about the other thing before she dropped that kind of bombshell. ‘Somewhere I can put all my junk when I get it delivered.’
‘You like junk?’ He raised a curious eyebrow, but it wasn’t really curious—it knew what it was she was hedging around.
So she nodded, pressing her lips together because they’d started to tremble and she could feel the threat of tears stinging the back of her throat. There was a great yawning gap opening up between them, which had nothing to do with the length of the room. And she was suddenly intensely aware of the age difference between them, the twelve long years that gave him the control to stand there and look beautifully at ease with what he was about to face, while she—
Lizzy swallowed. Her heart was pumping oddly, heavy and thick, because she knew that the yawning gap had started to widen the moment the helicopter had landed on the lawn in the Caribbean.
It had stretched even wider during the long, grim journey and then wider again when he’d come out of the bedroom on the plane just before they had landed dressed like that, and quietly suggested that she might like to change.
So here she was, standing in a neat pale grey suit that had somehow appeared without her knowing how on a hanger behind the bedroom door. And she felt like a stranger—to herself—a person carefully fashioned to suit his image when really she was—
‘What’s wrong, cara?’ he prompted huskily and the tears in her throat almost beat her up in their rush to reach her eyes.
‘Nothing,’ she managed, though she didn’t know how she managed it. ‘I just feel strange here—out of place.’
‘You will get used to it.’
Reassurance or an order?
‘It’s the—’
The telephone began to ring then, sounding so shockingly shrill after weeks without hearing one that both of them started in surprise. Luc went to answer it, striding back through the opening and across the hallway. Lizzy tried to pull herself together and followed him. He was standing in what looked like his study with the door swinging open wide. She diverted towards the back of the apartment where she remembered the kitchen was situated and made herself busy hunting down the necessary things needed to make a pot of coffee.
When she heard him come in the room, she didn’t turn to look at him. ‘I have to go out now,’ he told her.
She nodded, pressing her lips together again because she wanted to say something about Matthew and the whole wretched mess her family had placed him in, but she just couldn’t seem to find the right words.
‘I don’t know when I will be back, but I have arranged for an employee of mine—Abriana Tristano—to come here to—advise you as to how to respond to any fallout that may occur.’
‘Like a PA?’ she turned to ask him.
He nodded. ‘She’s good. Let her take care of everything. She has my mobile number to liaise with me if she needs to—clarify anything.’
I don’t like this, Lizzy thought, standing there looking at him. ‘I w-would prefer to come with you,’ she said. ‘Be seen at your side.’
He smiled for the first time in hours and hours, one of those sensually amused, very intimate smiles that softened the harshness out of his face, and it swam through her blood as potent as Martha’s home-made rum.
‘Amore, having you by my side will be too much of a distraction—as will coming over there and kissing you for suggesting it.’
Lizzy moved, she just had to do. ‘Then I’m coming to you,’ and she covered the space between them, lifting her slender arms around his neck so she could give him the distracting kiss whether he wanted it or not.
He tasted warm like the man of the Caribbean, and smelled expensive like the man of Milan. When he didn’t pull away and even slid his hands beneath her jacket to mould her against him, the silly uncertainties she’d brought with her into this apartment melted away.
‘Don’t let them bully you,’ she murmured as their lips reluctantly separated.
‘You see this happening, with me?’
No, she was just delaying the moment when he walked away from her and her liquid grey eyes told him so. ‘I’m just scared,’ she confessed on a husky whisper.
‘Don’t be.’ He touched his lips to hers again. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
The doorbell pealed then, and he moved away from her. As she watched him stride down the hallway she saw the change take place in his whole mood and manner as the man from the Caribbean was cleared away.
Abriana was nice, though Lizzy had been ready to dislike her. She arrived wearing jeans and trainers and armed with fresh pastries from the local patisserie. Her warm, friendly nature kept Lizzy’s anxieties damped down to a minimum. And she dealt firmly with every phone call and visitor that tried to gain entrance into the apartment.
It took twenty-four hours for Lizzy to realise that she’d been carefully isolated again, much as she’d been at the Lake Como villa. And she was being carefully protected from this new wave of media interest that had hitched its wagon onto their lives.
No phone calls, no newspapers for her to read what was being said, but even Luc couldn’t stop the television from reporting on the burning question—had Luciano De Santis, President of the De Santis Bank, misused his position of power in connection with a loan given to his father-in-law?
‘Luc advised you not to watch this,’ Abriana said worriedly when she saw Lizzy turn pale. ‘He did not do anything wrong. He used his own money, not the bank’s money, and he has clear proof of that.’
‘Yes,’ Lizzy said, trying—trying to believe what Abriana was saying, but she knew more than Abriana did, just as she knew that Luc would not be called to answer questions if it were as neat and tidy as Abriana said.
She hardly saw him during the next long week. Although he came home to the apartment each night it was late, and he was tired and uncommunicative. As the days crawled by she watched the strain of it all inch tension lines into his face.
And he didn’t sleep in her bed. He said it was because he didn’t want to disturb her when he retired very late and got up so early the next day, and she understood that—she did.
But she missed him, meanly and selfishly she missed him and almost welcomed the miserable fact that she did.
Then, one week after they arrived back from the Caribbean, the feel of the mattress moving beside her brought her swimming up from a fitful sleep. By then a familiar pair of hands was taking hold of her and turning her into the burning heat of his hungry kiss.
The moment he let her up for air she searched his face through the semi-darkness. He looked
different, relaxed, the strain and the tough self-control had gone.
‘It’s over?’ she asked.
He nodded, levering himself up on his side so he could look down at her. ‘Your brother is off the hook because the bank has decided not to press charges since the money went missing for only twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘And your father simply told the truth and maintained he knew nothing about any of it.’
‘And you?’ she asked.
‘I talked my way out of it,’ he answered, ‘By deciding on my story and sticking to it. So long as I continued to insist I knew nothing about the five and a half million your brother took, they could prove no wrongdoing on my part.’
Lizzy lifted a hand to touch her fingers to the rueful twist at the corner of his mouth. ‘But what you did was—wrong?’
He didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes dark on her anxious expression. Then he took hold of her fingers and kissed them.
‘Morally, yes,’ he said.
Tears spread like a film across her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, then, that you felt you had to do something wrong for my benefit, but—thank you,’ she added. Then, because she knew she just had to say it, in fact she’d been burning to say it throughout the long, hard week, ‘I love you, Luc,’ she whispered to him.
It was the first time she had allowed herself to say it and even hearing it fall from her lips set her heart pounding in her chest because she knew she couldn’t lay herself more open to him.
Yet he said nothing—nothing for ages, just continued to kiss the tips of her fingers and look down at her through those dark golden, utterly unreadable eyes of his.
Then he smiled. ‘Loving gratitude from my worst critic,’ he mocked lightly. ‘It was almost worth it.’
It was like receiving a kick in the teeth. Lizzy tried to get up, but he stopped her.
‘No,’ he husked, ‘forget I said that. I’m still stinging from being forced to explain myself and that was unbelievably generous of you.’
Was he trying to make her feel better? Because he wasn’t succeeding. She felt broken in two.
‘And I love you too, bella mia,’ he added huskily. ‘Of course I do. Why else would I put my reputation at such risk if not for the woman I love?’