He glanced across, registered her presence and snapped shut his phone to lounge indolently against the car as she walked towards him.
‘So,’ he drawled, staring down at her when she was finally in front of him. ‘I’m apparently here on a one-week vacation.’ He removed the sunglasses to dangle them idly between his fingers while he continued to look at her until she felt herself blush to the roots of her hair.
‘Yes, well …’
‘Maybe you could tell me how I had this week planned out? Bearing in mind that you seemed to have arranged it.’
‘You could make just a little polite conversation before you start laying into me.’
‘Was I doing that?’ He pushed himself off the car and swung round to open the door for her, slamming it shut as she clambered into the passenger seat. ‘I distinctly recall having told you that the most I would be staying would be a matter of two days. Tell me how you saw fit to extend that into a week?’ He had bent down, propping himself against the car with both hands so that he could question her through her open window. He felt so close up and personal that she found herself taking deep breaths and gasping for air.
‘Yes, I realise that,’ Caroline muttered mutinously when he showed no signs of backing off. ‘But you made me mad.’
‘I—made—you—mad?’
Caroline nodded mutely and stared straight ahead, keenly aware of his hawk-like eyes boring into her averted profile. She visibly sagged when he strode round to get into the car.
‘And how,’ he asked softly, ‘do you think I felt when you backed me into a corner?’
‘Yes, well, you deserved it!’
‘Do you know, I can’t believe you.’ He exited the gravelled courtyard with a screeching of angry tyres and she clenched her fists so tightly that she could feel her nails biting into the palms of her hands. ‘I didn’t come here for relaxation!’
‘I know! Don’t you think you made that pretty obvious last night?’
‘I gave you my word that I wouldn’t introduce the contentious issue of money on day one. I kept my word.’
‘Just about. You didn’t make the slightest effort with Alberto. You just sat there sneering, and okay, so maybe I was wrong to imply that you were staying a tiny bit longer than you had planned.’
‘You are the master of understatement!’
‘But when you mentioned your mother, well, I just wanted to avert an argument, so possibly I said the first thing that came into my head. Look, I’m sorry. I guess you could always tell Alberto that I made a mistake, that I got the dates wrong. I know you have lots of important things to do and probably can’t spare a week off, whatever the reason, but just then I didn’t think I had a choice. I had to take the sting out of the evening, give Alberto something to hang on to.’
‘What a shame you couldn’t use your brain and think things through before you jumped in feet first! I take it the little chat you had in mind last night has now been covered?’
‘It was an awkward evening. Alberto really tried to make conversation. Do you know, after you disappeared to work he actually seemed to understand? It was almost as though he wasn’t prepared to see anything wrong in his son coming to see him for the first time in years, barely making an effort and then vanishing to work!’
Giancarlo flushed darkly. The evening had not gone quite as he had envisaged, and now he wasn’t entirely sure what he had envisaged. He just knew that the argumentative man—the one who had loomed larger than life in his head thanks to Adriana’s continuing bitterness; the one who would have made it so easy for him to treat with the patronising contempt he had always assumed would be richly deserved—had not lived up to expectations.
For starters, it was clear that Alberto’s ill health was every bit as grave as Caroline had stated, and even more surprising, instead of a conversation spiked with the sort of malice and bitterness to which he had become accustomed with his mother over the years, there had been no mention made of a regrettable past and a miserable marriage. Alberto had been so wildly different from the picture in his head that Giancarlo had spent the time when he should have been working trying to figure out the discrepancies.
Naturally, the question of money, the raison dêtre for his presence at the villa, would rear its ugly head in due course. He might have been weirdly taken aback at the man he had found, but sooner or later the inevitable begging bowl would emerge. However, not even that certainty could still the uneasy doubt that had crept stealthily through him after he had vacated the sitting-room.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, glancing around at scenery that felt more familiar with every passing second, ‘a few days away from Milan might not be such a terrible idea.’ The very second he said it, Giancarlo knew that he had made the right decision.
‘Sorry?’
‘I wouldn’t call it a holiday, but it is certainly more restful here than it is in Milan.’ He looked sideways at Caroline. Through the open window, the breeze was wreaking havoc with her attempts at a neat, sensible hair-style, flinging it into disarray.
‘I guess you don’t really do holidays,’ she said tentatively. Even if his intention was still to consume his father’s house and company, a few days spent with Alberto might render him a little less black and white in his judgement, might invest him with sufficient tact so that Alberto wasn’t humiliated.
‘Time is money.’
‘There’s more to life than money.’
‘Agreed. Unfortunately, it usually takes money to enjoy those things.’
‘Why have you decided to stay on? Just a short while ago you were really angry that I had put you in a difficult position.’
‘But put me in it you did, and I’m a man who thinks on his feet and adjusts to situations. So I might be here for a bit longer than I had anticipated. It could only work to my advantage when it comes to constructing the sort of business proposal my father will understand. I’ll confess that Alberto isn’t the man I had expected. I initially thought that talk of his ill health might have been exaggerated.’
His eyes slid across to her face. Predictably, her expression was one of tight-lipped anger. ‘Now I see for myself that he is not a well man, which would no doubt explain his unnaturally docile manner. I am not a monster. I had intended to confront him with his financial predicament without bothering with the tedious process of beating around the bush. Now I accept that I might have to tiptoe towards the conclusion I want.’
The scenery rushing past him, the feeling of open space and translucent light, was breathtaking. He was behind the wheel of a car, he was driving through clear open spaces with a view of glittering blue water ahead, and for the first time in years he felt light-headed with a rushing sense of freedom.
‘Besides,’ he mused lazily, ‘I haven’t been to this part of the world for a long time.’
He was following signs to one of the many sailing jetties scattered around the lake and now he swerved off the main road, heading down towards the glittering water.
Caroline forgot all her misgivings about Giancarlo’s mission. She forgot how angry and upset she was at the thought of Alberto being on the receiving end of a son who had only agreed to see him out of a misplaced desire for revenge.
‘I don’t think I can go through with this,’ she muttered as the car slowed to a stop.
Giancarlo killed the engine and turned to face her. ‘Wasn’t this whole sailing trip your idea?’
‘It was supposed to be your sailing trip.’ There were tourists milling around and the sailing boats bobbed like colourful playthings on the calm water. Out on the lake many more of them skirted over the aquamarine surface. At any given moment, one might very well sink, and where would that leave those happy, smiling tourists on board? She blanched and licked her lips nervously.
‘You’re white as a sheet.’
‘Yes, well …’
‘You’re seriously scared of water?’
‘Of open water. Anything could happen. Especially on something as flimsy as a sailboa
t.’
‘Anything could happen to anyone, anywhere. Driving here was probably more of a risk than that boat out there.’ He opened his door and swung his long body out, moving round to open the passenger door for her. ‘You were right when you said that you can’t kill an irrational fear unless you confront it.’ He held out one hand and, heart beating fast, Caroline took it. The feel of his fingers as they curled around hers was warm and comforting.
‘How would you know?’ she asked in a shaky voice as she eased herself out of the car and half-eyed the lake the way a minnow might eye a patch of shark-infested water. ‘I bet you’ve never been scared of anything in your life.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’ He kept his fingers interlinked with hers as he led her down towards the jetty.
Hell, he never thought he’d live to see the day when there were no thoughts of work, deals to be done or lawyers to meet impinging on his mind. His mother’s uncertain finances—the details of which he had never been spared, even when he had been too young to fully understand them—had bred a man to whom the acquisition of money was akin to a primal urge. The fact that he was very, very good at it had only served to strengthen his rampant ambition. Women had come and gone, and would continue to come and go, for his parents were a sad indictment of the institution of marriage, but the challenge of work would always be a constant.
Except, now, it appeared to have taken a back seat.
And he barely recognised the boyish feeling inside him as her fingers tightly squeezed his the closer they got to the jetty.
‘Hey, trust me,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be worth it. There’s nothing like the freedom of being out on the lake and it’s not like being on the sea. The edge of the lake is always visible. You’ll always be able to orienteer yourself by the horizon.’
‘How deep is it?’
‘Don’t think about that. Tell me why you’re so scared.’
Caroline hesitated. She disapproved of everything about this man and yet his invitation to confide was irresistible. And her fingers were still entwined with his. Suddenly conscious of that, she wriggled them, which encouraged him to grasp them slightly harder.
‘Well?’
‘I fell in a river when I was a child.’ She sighed and glanced up at him sheepishly. ‘I must have been about seven, just learning how to swim. There were four of us and it was the summer holidays. Our parents had all arranged this picnic in the woods.’
‘Sounds idyllic.’
‘It was, until the four of us kids went off to do a bit of exploring. We were crossing a bridge, just messing around. Looking back now, the river must not have been more than a metre deep and the bridge was just a low, rickety thing. We were playing that game, the one where you send a twig from one side of the bridge and race to the other side to see it float out. Anyway, I fell, headlong into the river. It was terrifying. Although I could swim enough to get out, it was as though my mind had blanked that out. All I could taste was the water and I could feel floating weeds on my face. I thought I was going to drown. Everyone was screaming. The adults were with us within seconds and there was no harm done, but ever since then I’ve hated the thought of open water.’
‘And when I was fourteen, I tried my hand at horse riding and came off at the first hurdle. Ever since then I’ve had an irrational fear of horses.’
‘No, you haven’t.’ But she grinned up at him, shading her eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand.
‘You’re right. I haven’t. But it’s a possibility. I’ve never been near a horse in my life. I can ski down any black run but I suspect a horse would have me crying with terror.’
Caroline laughed. She was relaxing, barely noticing that the sailboat was being rented, because Giancarlo had continued to talk to her in the soothing voice of someone intent on calming a skittish animal, describing silly scenarios that made her smile. He was certain that he would have a fear of horses. Spiders brought him out in a sweat. Birds brought to mind certain horror movies. He knew that he would definitely have had a phobia of small aircraft had he not managed to successfully bypass that by owning his own helicopter.
Giancarlo hadn’t put this much effort into a woman in a long time. It was baffling, because had someone told him a week ago that he would be held to account by a woman who didn’t know the meaning of tact, he would have laughed out loud. And had that someone then said that he would find himself holed up at his father’s villa for a week, courtesy of the same woman who didn’t know the meaning of tact, he would have called out the little men with strait-jackets because the idea was beyond ridiculous.
Yet here he was: reaching out to help a woman with unruly brown hair streaked with caramel, who didn’t seem to give a damn about all the other nonsense other women cared about, onto a sailboat. And enjoying the fact that he had managed to distract her from her fear of water by making her laugh.
Obeying an instinctive need to rationalise his actions, Giancarlo easily justified his uncharacteristic behaviour by assuming that this was simply his creative way of dealing with a situation. So what would have been the point in tearing her off a strip for having coerced him into staying at the villa longer than he had planned? He would still do what he had come to do, and anyway it made a relaxing change to interact with a woman in whom he had no sexual interest. He went for tall, thin blondes with a penchant for highend designer clothes. So take away the sometimes-tedious game of chase and catch with a woman and it seemed that he was left with something really quite enjoyable.
Caroline was on the sailboat before she really realised what had happened. One minute she was laughing, enjoying his silly remarks with the sun on her face and the breeze running its balmy fingers through her hair and gradually undoing her loose plait—the next minute, terra firma was no longer beneath her feet and the swaying of the boat was forcibly reminding her of everything she feared about being out at sea, or in this case out on the lake.
Did he even know how to handle this thing? Wasn’t he supposed to have had a little pep talk from the guys in charge of the rentals—a refresher course in how to make sure this insignificant piece of plywood with a bit of cloth didn’t blow over when they were in the middle of the lake?
Giancarlo saw her stricken face, the panicked way she looked over her shoulder at the safety of a shoreline from which they were drifting.
He reacted on pure gut impulse.
He kissed her. He curled his long fingers into her tangle of dark hair and with one hand pulled her towards him. The taste of her full lips was like nectar. He felt her soft, lush body curve into him, felt her full breasts squash softly against his chest. He had taken her utterly by surprise and there was no resistance as the kiss grew deeper and more intimately exploring, tasting every part of her sweet mouth. God, he wanted to do more! His arousal was fast and hard and his fabled self-control disappeared so quickly that he was at the mercy of his senses for the first time in his life.
He wanted to strip off her shirt, tear off her bra, which wouldn’t be one of those lacy slips of nothing the women he dated wore but something plainly, resolutely and impossibly sexy. He wanted to lose himself in her generous breasts until he stopped thinking altogether.
Caroline was in the grip of something so intensely powerful that she could barely breathe.
She had never felt like this in her life before. She could feel her body melting, could feel her nipples tightening and straining against her bra, knew that she was hot and wet between her legs.
Her body was behaving in a way it had never behaved before and it thrilled and terrified her at the same time.
When he eventually broke free, she literally felt lost.
‘You kissed me,’ she breathed, still clutching him by the shirt and looking up at him with huge, searching eyes. She wanted to know why. She knew why she had responded! Underneath her disapproval for everything he had done and said, there was a strong, irresistible current of pure physical attraction. She had been swept along by it and nothing she had
ever experienced in her life before had prepared her for its ferocity. Lust was just something she had read about. Now she knew, firsthand, how powerful it could be. Was he feeling the same thing? Did he want to carry on kissing her as much as she wanted him to?
She gradually became aware of their surroundings and of the fact that, with one hand, he had expertly guided the small sailboat away from shore and out into the open lake. They had become one of the small bright toys she had glimpsed from land.
‘You kissed me. Was that to distract me from the fact that we were heading away from land?’
Hell, how did he know? He just knew that he had been blown away, had lost all shreds of self-control. It was not something of which he was proud, nor could he understand it. Rallying quickly, he recovered his shattered equilibrium and took a couple of steps back, but then had to look away briefly because her flushed cheeks and parted mouth were continuing to play havoc with his libido.
‘It worked, didn’t it?’ He nodded towards the shore, still not trusting himself to look at her properly. ‘You’re on the water now and, face it, you’re no longer scared.’
CHAPTER FIVE
CAROLINE remained positioned in the centre of the small boat for the next hour. She made sure not to look out to the water, which made her instantly conjure up drowning scenarios in her head. Instead, she looked at Giancarlo. It was blissfully easy to devote all her attention to him. He might not have sailed for a long time but whatever he had learnt as a boy had returned to him with ease.
‘It’s like riding a bike,’ he explained, doing something clever with the rudder. ‘Once learnt, never forgotten.’
Caroline found herself staring at his muscular brown legs, sprinkled with dark hair. Having brought just enough clothes to cover a one-night stay, he had, he had admitted when asked, pulled strings and arranged for one of the local shops to open up early for him. At eight that morning, he had taken his car to the nearest small town and bought himself a collection of everyday wear. The khaki shorts and loose-fitting shirt, virtually unbuttoned all the way down, were part of that wardrobe and they offered her an incredible view of his highly toned body. Every time he moved, she could see the ripple of his muscles.
The Truth Behind his Touch Page 7