by Kim Lawrence
‘That’s lovely of you, but actually I can’t stay so this trip—it’s just the airport for me. I’ll deliver Jas to you and then have to fly straight back to the UK. I’ve got an interview on Thursday.’ She had intended to tell Cesare that today, and secretly she had hoped he would—what? Beg her not to go? Suggest they stay in touch? Look mildly unhappy? God, how had she let this happen? How had she been so stupid?
‘Oh, no, why didn’t you say? Forget I asked. I’ll sort something else. I had hoped not to get Cesare involved but—no problem. So tell me about the job.’
‘The school has an excellent reputation,’ Anna said, trying to inject the enthusiasm she knew she should be feeling into her voice. ‘But there’s no reason I can’t bring Jas out. I want to help, really.’
‘You can’t fly out here, turn around and fly back. Definitely not,’ Angel protested. ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’
‘You’re not asking. I’m offering to chaperone Jasmine.’
‘It would be good to keep Cesare out of this until it’s sorted,’ Angel admitted. ‘Obviously I’ll let him know once Jas is here.’
‘Obviously.’ Actually there was nothing obvious about any of this to Anna.
‘It’s just Cesare...he can be a bit overprotective.’
Not of me, Anna thought bitterly.
‘You really wouldn’t mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘You’re a star,’ Angel enthused. ‘And you haven’t even asked why I want you to bring Jas out here. I was going to say don’t ask, but it’s not a secret, or it won’t be soon. The fact is, I want Jas to meet her father.’
‘Wow!’
A nervous laugh came down the line and a breathless, ‘Pretty wow, but don’t say anything to Jas.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Or, of course, Cesare.’
‘Don’t worry.’
* * *
Leaking patience from every pore by the time he had made a rapid tour of the castle and immediate grounds, Cesare was in a dangerous mood. He had left the glittering party midway through, abandoned his beautiful partner, probably offending one of his best friends in the process. He rather doubted he would still be best man at their wedding that summer. He’d driven up from London.
Had he been a man in a desert seeking life-sustaining water the urgency that held him in its grip during that journey could not have been greater.
Cesare stared at his housekeeper in disbelief. ‘What do you mean gone? Where has she gone to?’
‘To the airport with Ja—’
‘Airport!’ Cesare launched his stinging attack before the woman had time to deliver her explanation. Stabbing his fingers into his hair in a gesture of extreme frustration, he began to pace the floor like a caged panther.
He paused and flung the woman another scathing look. ‘You let her go to the airport?’
‘It was hardly my place to stop her.’
He stopped pacing and thought, No, it was mine.
And had he been able or willing to say what she wanted to hear, say what he had been too stubborn to admit he wanted to, he would have been here to prevent her running away.
All she had said was—‘I miss you so much when you’re not here.’ And he had panicked.
He made a conscious effort to slow his breathing, recognising this situation was one of his own making. This was the result of his inability to accept that in a few short weeks she had become a part of his life. As he had searched for Anna, his home, the place he felt an almost physical connection with and which, like his ancestors, he would have done anything to preserve, had felt like a series of empty rooms. The reason had not hit him until Mrs Mack had delivered her killing blow—Anna was not in them—and it wasn’t just the house her absence affected. He was empty without her.
But of course he would bring her back.
He had sent her away with his talk of just sex. She had given him herself totally, held nothing back and he had said it was just sex. He had seen he was killing her with his coldness and then he had crowned the insult with the damned bracelet, which she had thrown back in his face. The muscles in his face relaxed enough to allow the corners of his mouth to lift as he recalled her fiery reaction.
Anna was the least avaricious person he had ever met. He loved that about her. Had he ever really thought she would do anything but throw it at him? Had he unconsciously been trying to push her away, make her reject him?
He’d been trying to put barriers between them from the moment they met, and why? Because he knew she was different, he knew she was not someone he could eject from his bed in the middle of the night, not someone he could walk away from. She made him feel everything he had never wanted to feel, everything he thought would make him weak.
Cesare’s mouth twisted in a sneer of self-disgust before he took a deep calming breath and tipped his head, offering a stiff smile of apology to his housekeeper. ‘Where was she flying to?’
‘Miss Angel arranged that side of things. I believe she is meeting them at the airport.’
He had not been expecting that! ‘Angel?’ When had his little sister got involved? ‘Anna doesn’t even like sunbathing!’ he yelled, thinking of her lying on a white-sanded tropical beach being lusted after by a bunch of lecherous creeps who were fascinated by her creamy skin.
He closed his eyes and swore at length, only remembering his audience when he opened them again and saw the tight-lipped disapproval on the face of the woman who had known him since he was a boy.
‘I’m quite sure that Miss Henderson will use sun block. She is extremely capable.’
Cesare was already pulling out his mobile phone and punching in numbers.
* * *
Anna felt her throat tighten as Jas, her nose pressed to the window of the Jeep her mother drove, waved goodbye. She stayed where she was until the Jeep vanished, then, blinking away emotional tears, walked back towards the terminal building and its air conditioning.
The heat had hit her the moment she stepped onto the tarmac. It had felt like walking into a solid wall. Jas, on the other hand, had revived the moment she disembarked. In seconds she had gone from looking like a wan little ghost to literally bouncing good health.
Anna envied her her youthful powers of recovery. She felt a hundred! When Angel had said Jas was not a good traveller, in her naivety Anna had felt quite confident about coping with a nauseous and possibly fretful child. How wrong had she been!
It had broken her heart to see the little girl so distressed and the journey had taken on a nightmare quality, not least because of the dirty looks they had received from a certain section of passengers. Now, after standing out in the sun for a few minutes, she felt like a wilted flower. Given time she might acclimatise to this sort of environment, but Anna knew she would never acquire a golden glowing tan like Angel.
Besides she liked the variety of living somewhere where you could experience every weather known to man in the space of twenty-four hours. Her smile faded as it hit her, the finality of it. She wasn’t going back to Scotland. Her return ticket was for the far more temperate capital.
Absently, she thought of home. She had spent a long time getting her flat just as she wanted, decorating it on a shoestring and furnishing it with recycled quirky items that she had personalised. Being back home should have felt like a good thing, but it didn’t. Loving Cesare had changed so much. A place no longer made her feel centred and at home, but a person—the wrong person.
Would anywhere ever feel like home again? Even if it meant she carried this awful black stone around in her chest for the rest of her life she would never regret loving him. The sad acknowledgement was tinged with defiance, which enabled her to close off her feelings behind a brittle shell.
Inside the terminal building she wandered towards the duty-free outlets
. Not because she felt the need of retail therapy, but because she had a three-hour wait before her return flight boarded and she was already awash with coffee.
She spotted an outlet that sold handmade baby clothes in brightly coloured ethnic prints. Knowing that the quirky items would appeal to Rosie, she’d actually spent half an hour selecting some of the cute but overpriced sleepsuits in several sizes after she realised how quickly babies grew.
Paying for her purchases, she walked out of the door and straight into a tall man who was striding past. She might have fallen if hands had not shot out to steady her.
Pre-programmed to apologise, she stuttered a shaken, ‘S-sorry.’ Then felt a stab of exasperation. The great oaf was the one at fault; he was the one who hadn’t been looking where he was going.
‘It’s going to take a lot more than a sorry.’
The grim comment shattered her protective shell into a million pieces. ‘Cesare, what are you...?’ Blinking up at the tall figure towering over her, she shook her head, seriously considering the possibility that she had lost her mind.
‘We need to talk.’
Her initial hastily formed impression had been that he was furious, but now Anna realised this was not the case. Emotions of a strong nature were rolling off him, but it was not anger that was causing the corded muscles of his neck to stand out, or that pulled the muscles of his face taut. Like an addict coming face to face with the drug of her choice, she couldn’t stop shaking, or looking.
She cleared her throat. ‘She’s not here,’ Anna prefaced and received a blank look. ‘Angel has already picked her up.’
His dark brows knitted into a frown over his slate-grey eyes. ‘Jas is here?’
‘I assumed...’ She shook her head and thought, Never a good idea with Cesare. ‘I don’t understand.’ Leaving aside the why, there was a massive how? ‘You were in London. I saw you on the television. The princess is very beautiful.’ She bit her quivering lower lip.
‘Olivia, a nice woman but boring. All she did was witter on endlessly about Rafe.’
‘Who is Rafe?’
‘The man she is going to marry.’ He studied her face, then grinned. ‘You were jealous.’ He seemed to take a lot of pleasure from the discovery.
She set her mouth. Had there been a cat in hell’s chance of her carrying it off she’d have lied. As there wasn’t she simply toughed it out. ‘I’ll get over it,’ she promised grimly.
His smile suddenly died. ‘Well, I won’t. If I saw you with another man I’d...’
This dog-in-the-manger attitude ignited the smouldering embers of Anna’s resentment. Talk about mixed messages! He was the one who sent her away and now he was here saying stuff that had her fighting the urge to announce there was no other man for her and there never would be.
‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’ she asked him, struggling to maintain her uncaring façade. ‘Take a vow of celibacy because you don’t want me but you don’t want anyone else to have me either?’
‘I do want you,’ he gritted. ‘I need you, Anna.’
Wanting was good, needing was even better. The look of desperation etched on his lean face appeared genuine, but she couldn’t lay herself open to that hurt, not again.
She was worn down by fatigue and unhappiness and the mask slipped as she raised her swimming blue eyes to him. ‘You didn’t want me there when you came back,’ she wailed, unable to hold back the tears any longer. They spilled unchecked down her cheeks. It had been a total shock. She had always known that at some point the novelty of having her in his bed would pall, but the rejection had come totally out of the blue and hurt all the more because of it.
‘I can’t tell you how many times I almost turned the car around and came back, but I was just too gutless to admit I wanted to even to myself.’
‘So why are you here, Cesare?’
He loosed a hoarse laugh. ‘Why the hell do you think I’m here? I arrived back at Killaran to find you had run away.’ With eyes that shone like the beaten silver bracelet she wore he pinned her with a fierce, hungry, soul-searing stare.
‘I came to bring you back.’
Aware that her interpretation was coloured by her deep longing, against all her screaming instincts she adopted a breathless ‘wait and see’ policy and didn’t react to this raw pronouncement. It did not mean that she had any control over the surge of tingling heat that washed over her skin, or the butterflies that were rioting in her stomach.
The man had followed her—that had to mean something, right?
Cesare clenched his teeth in frustration when his words had no visible effect on her. He refused to acknowledge the doom-laden voice in his head that was telling him he’d blown it. Instead he took her wrist and pulled it against his chest. ‘Come home with me.’
‘This isn’t the way home,’ she gasped as she struggled to keep up with him while he virtually dragged her out through the revolving glass doors of the terminal building.
‘This is the way to the company jet. How did you think I got here, cara?’ he asked in response to her wide-eyed stare. ‘We cannot have a conversation in that glass bowl.’
Anna squeezed her eyes half closed to cut down on the glare. She rubbed her skin where his fingers had cut into the flesh. A spasm of pain crossed his features as he watched her.
‘I hurt you.’ With pain in his eyes he lifted her hand and pressed her wrist to his lips.
Anna pulled her hand back, but not before that light contact had sent a surge like lightning along her receptive nerve endings.
‘You come out fighting. I sometimes forget what a delicate little thing you are.’ This time she followed of her own volition, lengthening her stride to stay by his side as he walked towards the shade of a palm tree. Even under it the heat rising from the paved area beneath her feet was stifling. ‘I came here to bring you home and I am not leaving without you. If making that happen means I have to crawl and grovel, I will.’
The solemn declaration brought tears to her eyes. ‘I don’t want you to crawl or grovel, Cesare. I just want you to...’ She shook her head, aware that she wanted the impossible. Cesare might have discovered he still wanted her in his bed and once that would have been enough, but not now. She shouldn’t settle; she deserved more.
‘Love you?’ he supplied gently when her voice faded.
She nodded, looking at him through her tears. ‘I thought sex would be enough but it isn’t. I want more.’
‘So do I.’ He expelled a long gusty sigh. With the sense of release came a bemusement. It was easy to say. Why had he made it such a massive thing?
Anna’s mouth opened and stayed that way until he nudged her jaw closed with his thumb. ‘The past leaves its mark on us all.’ He raised an interrogative brow, inviting her comment.
Anna nodded.
‘I have always had a warped view of relationships,’ he admitted, with a frankness he would have struggled with in the not so distant past. ‘My parents’ marriage was a disaster. I despised my father for loving my mother even after she left him. Love destroyed him and in my mind I equated love with weakness, and my mother...!’ His shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug as he vented a hard laugh. ‘What can you say about her, except all that glitters is not gold? I think she has something missing. Do you know what I mean?’ He angled an enquiring look down at her.
‘I think so.’ Her heart bursting with empathic tenderness she was wary of expressing, Anna reached a tentative hand to touch his arm, half expecting him to shrug her off. Her throat tightened when he smiled down at her.
‘She never fails to disappoint. She lacks a conscience and even a basic sense of morality. Combined with her charm and an utterly hedonistic, selfish outlook on life, she leaves a trail of disaster in her wake.’
‘I think you’re allowed a few trust issues.’
The comment drew a laugh from Cesare.
‘I trust you with my life, Anna.’
Anna went totally still.
‘The question is do you trust me?’
Anna looked at the hand he held out to her and without hesitation put her own hand in it.
Cesare smiled and dug his free hand into his pocket. Anna glimpsed red velvet and shook her head. ‘I don’t want the bracelet.’
‘This is not a bracelet.’
It was a ring, a beautiful circle of diamonds surrounding a fabulous sapphire. Anna stared at it in awe. ‘Is this what I think it is?’
‘If you think it’s a commitment to spend our lives together then, yes, you’re right.’ He took her hand and slid the ring on her finger. ‘This is a proposal. Anna, marry me? I’m an idiot but I love you.’
Anna stood frozen for a moment before she slowly lifted her glowing eyes to the tall man beside her. ‘My idiot. Yes, please.’
With a wild whoop he swept her off her feet. ‘Thank God. For a moment there I really thought I’d blown it...’
EPILOGUE
AS THE SUN slowly sank below the horizon and the pink tinge faded from the ocean Anna lifted her gaze to the sails flapping overhead in the strong breeze that had sprung up after dinner.
‘This is perfect,’ she sighed, leaning back into the strong, hard body of her husband. His arms came around her and she rubbed her cheek against the hard muscle of his upper arm.
‘How did you know?’ Anna couldn’t recall having confided her lifelong fascination for tall ships to Cesare.
She had dreamed of one day taking a cruise on one of those supremely elegant vessels, but never in her wildest dreams had she imagined owning one.
Teacher’s Pet, a three-masted schooner complete with crew, had been her astonishing wedding present. Cesare claimed it was a ‘buy one get one free’ deal—a wedding gift and honeymoon in one. There hadn’t been time for a honeymoon after the wedding, just a weekend in Paris where it rained every day but the newlyweds didn’t notice. One day, Cesare promised, he’d show her the sights of Paris, a city he knew well, and not just the inside of their hotel-suite bedroom!