His thoughts turned to Caroline, so much a part of the complex tableau.
Acting out of character by asking her to spend the night with him was just part and parcel of his time out.
He could feel her sleepily deliberating his proposal. To help her along with her decision, he curved one big hand over her breast and softly massaged the generous swell. Tired she might very well be, and spent after their urgent, hungry love-making, but still her nipple began to swell and pulse as he gently rolled his thumb over the tip.
‘Not fair,’ Caroline murmured.
‘Since when would you expect me to play fair?’
‘You can’t always get what you want.’
‘Why not? Don’t you want to wake up in the morning with me touching you like this? Or like this?’ He slid his hand down to the damp patch between her legs and slowly stroked her, on and on until she felt her breathing begin to quicken.
Giancarlo watched her face as he continued to pleasure her, enjoyed her heightened colour and then, a whole lot more, enjoyed her as she moved against his fingers, her body gently grinding until she came with a soft, startled gasp.
There seemed to be no end to his enjoyment of her body and he had ceased to question the strange pull she had over him. He just knew that he wanted her here with him in his bed because he wanted to wake up next to her.
‘Okay. You win and I lose.’ Caroline sighed. She shouldn’t. She knew that. She was just adding to the house of cards she had fabricated around herself. She loved him and it was just so easy to overlook the fact that the word love had never crossed his lips. It shamed her to think how glad she was to have him, whatever the price she would have to pay later.
He kissed her eyelids shut; she was so tired.
The next time Caroline opened her eyes, it was to sunshine pouring through the open slats of the wooden shutters. She swam up to full consciousness and to the weight of Giancarlo’s arm sprawled possessively over her breasts. Their tangled nakedness galvanised her into immediate action and she leapt out of the bed as he groggily came to and tried to tug her back down to him.
‘Giancarlo!’ she said with dismay. ‘It’s after seven! I have to go!’
Fully awake, Giancarlo slung his long legs over the side of the bed and killed the instinct to drag her back to him, to hell with the consequences. She was anxiously scouring the ground for her clothes and he sat for a while on the side of the bed to watch her.
‘Are you looking for these, by any chance?’ He held up her bra, a very unsexy cotton contraption which led him to think that he would quite like to buy her an entirely new set of lingerie, stuff that he would personally choose, sexy, lacy stuff that would look great on her fabulously lush body.
Caroline tried to swipe them and missed as he whipped them just out of reach.
‘You’ll have to pay a small penalty charge if you want your bra,’ he chided. Sitting on the edge of the bed with her standing in front of him put her at just the perfect height for him to nuzzle her breast.
‘We haven’t got time!’ She tried to slap him away and grab her bra, but put up next to no struggle when he yanked her on top of him and rolled her back on the bed.
‘I’ll shock you at how fast I can be.’
Fast and just as blissfully, sinfully satisfying. It was past seven-thirty as Caroline quietly opened the bedroom door.
She knew that she was unnecessarily cautious because Giancarlo was right when he had pointed out that his father was a late riser. Very early on in her stay, Alberto had told her that he saw no point in rushing in the morning.
‘Lying in bed for as long as you want in the morning,’ he had chuckled, ‘is the happy prerogative of the teenager and the old man like myself. It’s just about the only time I feel like a boy again!’
So the very last thing she expected as she opened the door and let herself very quietly out of Giancarlo’s bedroom was to hear Alberto say from behind her, ‘And what do we have here, my dear?’
Caroline froze and then turned around. She could feel the hot sting of guilt redden her cheeks. Alberto, walking stick in hand, was looking at her with intense curiosity.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that my son’s bedroom?’
He invested the word bedroom with such heavy significance that Caroline was lost for words.
‘I thought you would still be asleep,’ was all she could manage to dredge from her befuddled mind. He raised his bushy eyebrows inquisitively.
‘Do you mean that you hoped I would still be asleep?’
‘Alberto, I can explain …’
As she racked her brains to try and come up with an explanation, she was not aware of Giancarlo quietly opening the bedroom door she had previously shut behind her.
‘No point. My father wasn’t born yesterday. I’m sure he can jump to all the right conclusions.’
As if to underline his words, Caroline spun round to find that Giancarlo hadn’t even bothered to get dressed. He had stuck on his dressing gown, a black silk affair which was only loosely belted at the waist. Was he wearing anything at all underneath? she wondered, subduing a frantic temptation to laugh like a maniac. Or would some slight shift expose him in all his wonderful naked glory? Surely not.
The temptation to laugh gave way to the temptation to groan out loud and bash her head against the wall.
Alberto was looking between them. ‘I’m not sure how to deal with this shock,’ he said weakly, glancing around him for support and finally settling on the dado rail. ‘This is not what I expected from either of you!’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Caroline’s voice was thin and pleading. She was suddenly very ashamed of herself. She was in her twenties and yet she felt like a teenager being reprimanded.
‘Son, I’ll be honest with you—I’m very disappointed.’ He shook his head sadly on a heavy sigh and Giancarlo and Caroline remained where they were, stunned. Giancarlo, however, was the first to snap out of it. He took two long strides down the corridor, where a balmy early-morning breeze rustled against the louvres and made the pale voile covering them billow provocatively.
‘Papa …’
Alberto, who had turned away, stopped in his unsteady progress back to his wing of the house and tilted his head to one side.
Giancarlo too temporarily paused. It was the first time he had used that word, the first time he had called him ‘Papa’ as opposed to Alberto.
‘Look, I know what you’re probably thinking.’ Giancarlo raked his fingers through his bed-tousled hair and shook his head in frustration.
‘I very much doubt you do, son,’ Alberto said mournfully. ‘I know I’m a little old-fashioned when it comes to these things, and I do realise that this is your house and you are a grown man fully capable of making his own rules under his own roof, but just tell me this—how long? How long has this been going on? Were you two misbehaving while you were in the villa?’
‘Misbehaving is not exactly what I would term it,’ Giancarlo said roughly, his face darkly flushed, but Alberto was looking past him to where Caroline was dithering on legs that felt like jelly by the louvred window.
‘When your parents sent you over to Italy, I very much think that this is not the sort of thing they would have expected,’ he told her heavily, which brought on another tidal wave of excruciating guilt in her. ‘They entrusted your well-being to me, and by that I’m sure they were not simply referring to your nutritional well-being.’
‘Papa, enough.’ Giancarlo plunged his hands into the deep pockets of his dressing gown. ‘Caroline’s well-being is perfectly safe with me. We are both consenting adults and …’
‘Pah!’ Alberto waved his hand impatiently.
‘We’re not idiots who haven’t stopped to consider the consequences.’ Giancarlo’s voice was firm and steady and Alberto narrowed his eyes on his son.
‘Carry on.’
Caroline was mesmerised. She had inched her way forwards, although Giancarlo’s back was still to her, a barrier against th
e full force of Alberto’s disappointment.
‘I may have been guilty in the past of fairly random relationships.’ Just one confidence shared with his father after several drinks. ‘But Caroline and I … er … have something different.’ He glanced over his shoulder towards her. ‘Don’t we?’
‘Um?’
‘In fact, only yesterday we were discussing where we were going with what we have here …’
‘Ah. You mean that you’re serious? Well, that’s a completely different thing. Caroline, I feel I know you well enough to suspect that you’re the marrying kind of girl. I’m taking it that marriage no less is what we’re talking about here?’ He beamed at them, while a few feet away Caroline’s jaw dropped open and she literally goggled like a goldfish.
‘Marriage changes everything. I might be old but I’m not unaware of the fact that young people are, shall we say, a little more experimental before marriage than they were in my day. I can’t believe you two never breathed a word of this to me.’
He chose to give them no scope for interruption. ‘But I have eyes in my head, my boy! Could tell from the way you’re relaxed here, a changed man, not to put too fine a point on it. And, as for Caroline, well, she’s so skittish when she’s around you. All the signs were there. I can’t tell you what this means to me, after my brush with the grim reaper!’
‘Er, Alberto …’
‘You get to my age and you need to have something to hold on to, especially after my heart attack. In fact, I think I might need to rest just now after all this excitement. I wish you’d told me instead of letting me find out for myself, not that the end result isn’t the same!’
‘We didn’t say anything because we didn’t want to unduly excite you.’ Giancarlo strolled back to her and proceeded to sling his arm over her shoulder, dislodging the robe under which he was thankfully decently clad in some silk boxers. ‘It’s been a peculiar time, why muddy the waters unnecessarily?’
‘Yes, I see that!’ Alberto proclaimed with an air of satisfaction. ‘I’m thrilled. You must know by now, Giancarlo, that I think the world of your fiancée. Can I call you that now, my dear?’
Fiancée? Engaged? Getting married? Had she been transported into some kind of freaky parallel universe?
‘We were going to break it to you over dinner tonight,’ Giancarlo announced with such confidence that Caroline could only marvel at his capacity for acting. How much deeper was he going to dig this hole? she wondered.
‘Of course, you two will want to have some time off to do the traditional thing—buy a ring. I could come with you,’ Alberto tacked on hopefully. ‘I know it’s a private and personal thing, but I can’t think of a single thing that would fill me with more of a sense of hope and optimism, a reason for going on.’
‘A reason for going on where?’ Tessa demanded, striding up towards them. ‘You’re worse than a puppy off a leash, Alberto! I told you to wait for me and I would help you down to the breakfast room.’
‘Do I look as though I need help, woman?’ He waggled his cane at her. ‘Another week and I won’t even need this damnable piece of tomfoolery to get around! And, not that it’s part of your job description to be nosing around, but these two love birds are going to be married!’
‘When?’ Tessa asked excitedly, while she did something with Alberto’s shirt, tried to rearrange the collar; predictably he attempted to shoo her away.
‘Good question, my shrewish nurse. Have you two set a date yet?’
Finally, Caroline’s tongue unglued itself from the roof of her mouth. She stepped out of Giancarlo’s embrace and folded her arms. ‘No, we certainly haven’t, Alberto. And I think we should stop talking about this. It’s … um … still in the planning stage.’
‘You’re right. We’ll talk later, perhaps over a dinner, something special.’ Alberto glowered at Tessa, who smiled serenely back at him. ‘Get in a couple of bottles of the finest champagne, woman, and don’t even think of giving me your “demon drink” lecture. Tonight we celebrate and I fully intend to have a glass with something drinkable in it when we make a toast!’
‘Okay,’ Giancarlo said, once his father and Tessa had safely disappeared down the stairs and out towards the stunning patio that overlooked the crystal-clear blue of the sea from its advantageous perch on the side of the hill. ‘So what else was I supposed to do? I feel like I’m meeting my father for the first time. How could I jeopardise his health, ruin his excitement? You heard him, this gives him something to cling to.’
Caroline felt as though she had done several stomach-churning loops on a roller-coaster which had slackened speed, but only temporarily, with the threat of more to come over the horizon.
‘What else were you supposed to do?’ she parroted incredulously. Engagement? Marriage? All the stuff that was so important to her, stuff that she took really seriously, was for Giancarlo no more than a handy way of getting himself out of an awkward situation.
‘My mother slept around,’ Giancarlo told her abruptly, flushing darkly. ‘I knew she wasn’t the most virtuous person on the face of the earth. She was never afraid of introducing her lovers to me but she was single, destroyed after a bad marriage, desperate for love and affection. Little did I know at the time that her capacity for sleeping around had started long before her divorce. She was very beautiful and very flighty. My father refrained from using the word amoral, but I’m guessing that that’s what he thought.
‘Here I am now. The estranged son back on the scene. I’m trying to build something out of nothing because I want a relationship with my father. Finding out that we’re sleeping together, him thinking that it’s nothing but a fly-by-night romance, well, how high do you think his opinion is going to be of me? How soon before he begins drawing parallels between me and my mother?’
‘That’s silly,’ Caroline said gently. ‘Alberto’s not like that.’ But how far had Giancarlo come? It wasn’t that long ago that he had agreed to see Alberto purely for the purpose of revenge. He felt himself on fragile ground now. His plans had unravelled on all sides, truths had been exposed and a past rewritten. She could begin to see why he would do anything within his power not to jeopardise the delicate balance.
But at what price?
She had idiotically flung herself into something that had no future and when she should be doing all she could to redress the situation—when, in short, she should be pulling back—here she now was, even more deeply embedded and through no fault of her own.
The smell of him still clinging to her was a forceful reminder of how dangerous he could prove to be emotionally.
‘If I dragged you into something you didn’t court, then I apologise, but I acted on the spur of the moment.’
‘That’s all well and good, Giancarlo,’ Caroline traded with spirit. ‘But it’s a crazy situation. Alberto believes we’re engaged! What on earth is he going to do when he finds out that it was all a sham? Did you hear what he said about this giving him something to carry on for?’
‘I heard,’ Giancarlo admitted heavily. ‘So the situation is not ideal. I realise it’s a big favour, but I’m asking you to play along with it for a while.’
‘Yes, but for how long?’ A pretend engagement was a mocking, cruel reminder of what she truly wanted—which, shamefully, was a real engagement, excited plans for the future with the man she loved, real plans for a real future.
‘How long is a piece of string? I’m not asking you to put your life on hold, but to just go with the flow for this window in time—after all, many engagements end in nothing.’ Giancarlo propped himself up against the wall and glanced distractedly out towards breathtaking scenery, just snatches of it he could glimpse through the open shutters. ‘In the meantime, anything could happen.’ Why, he marvelled to himself, was this sitting so comfortably with him?
‘You mean Alberto will come to accept that you’re nothing like your mother, even though it’s in your nature to have flings with women and then chuck them when you get bored?’
> ‘Yet again your special talent for getting right to the heart of the matter,’ Giancarlo gritted.
‘But it’s true, isn’t it? Oh, I guess you could soft-soap him with something about us drifting apart, not really being suited to one another.’
‘Breaking news—people do drift apart, people do end up in relationships only to find that they weren’t suited to each other in the first place.’
‘But you’re different.’ Caroline stubbornly stood her ground. ‘You don’t give people a chance. Relationships with you never get to the point where you drift apart because they’re rigged to explode long before then!’
‘Is this your way of telling me that you have no intention of going along with this? That, although we’ve been sleeping together, you don’t approve of me?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying!’
‘Then explain. Because if you want me to tell Alberto the truth, that we’re just having a bit of fun, then I will do that right now and we will both live with the consequences.’
And the consequences would be twofold: the fledgling relationship Giancarlo was building with his father would be damaged—not terminally, although Giancarlo could very well predetermine an outcome he might gloomily predict. And, of course, Alberto would be disappointed in her as well.
‘I feel boxed in,’ Caroline confessed. ‘But I guess it won’t be for long.’ Would she have been able to sail through the pretence if her heart hadn’t been at stake? She would have thought so, but if she felt vulnerable then it was something she would have to put up with, and who else was to blame if not herself? Had she ever thought that what she had with Giancarlo qualified for a happy-ever-after ending? ‘I feel awful about deceiving your father, though.’
‘Everyone deserves the truth, but sometimes a little white lie is a lot less harmful.’
‘But it’s not really little, is it?’
Giancarlo maintained a steady silence. It was beginning to dawn on him that he didn’t know her as well as he had imagined. Or maybe he had arrogantly assumed that their very satisfying physical relationship would have guaranteed her willingness to fall in with what he wanted.
The Truth Behind his Touch Page 12