What would he do if he discovered that she was in love with him? Laugh out loud? Run a mile? Both? She was determined that he wouldn’t find out. At least then she would be able to extract herself with some measure of dignity instead of proving Lucia right, proving that she had made the fatal error of thinking that she meant more to Giancarlo than she did.
Unable to contain her agitation, she stood up and paced restlessly towards the window, peering outside in search of inspiration, then she perched on the broad ledge so that she was sitting on her hands. That way, they kept still.
‘I was embarrassed,’ Caroline told him. She swallowed back the tears of self-pity that were vying for prevalence over her self-control. ‘I hadn’t expected to open the door to one of your ex-girlfriends, although it’s not your fault that she showed up here. I realise that. She said some pretty hurtful things and that’s not your fault either.’
Considering that he was being exonerated of all blame from the sound of it, Giancarlo was disturbed to find that he didn’t feel any better. And he didn’t like the remote expression on her face. He preferred it when she had been angry, shouting at him, backing him into a corner.
‘It did make me think, though, that what we’re doing is … Well, we need to stop it.’
‘Work that one through for me. One stupid woman turns up uninvited on my doorstep and suddenly you’ve decided that what we have is a bad idea? We’re adults, Caroline. We’re attracted to one another.’
‘We’re deceiving an old man into thinking that this is something that it isn’t, and I should have listened to my conscience from the start. It’s not just about having fun, never mind the consequences.’
Giancarlo flushed darkly, for once lost for words. If Lucia had been in the room, he would have throttled her. It was unbelievable just how wrong the evening had gone. The worst of it was that he could feel Caroline slipping away from him and there was nothing he could do about it.
‘The fact is, that woman was right. I’m not your type.’ She couldn’t help herself. She left a pause, a heartbeat of silence, something he could fill with a denial. ‘You’re not my type. We’ve been having fun, and in the process leading Alberto into thinking that there’s more to what we have than there actually is.’
‘It’s crazy to come back to the hoary subject of type.’ Even to his own ears he sounded like a man on the back foot, but any talk about the value of ‘having fun’, which seemed to have become dirty words, would land him even further in the quagmire. He raked frustrated fingers through his hair and glowered at her.
‘Maybe if Alberto wasn’t involved things might have been a bit different.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late in the day to start taking the moral high ground?’
‘It’s never too late in the day to do the right thing.’
‘And a woman who meant nothing to me, who was an albatross around my neck after the first week of seeing her, has brought you to this conclusion?’
‘I’ve woken up.’ She felt as though she was swallowing glass and her nerves went into frantic overdrive as he stood up to walk towards her.
Everything about him was achingly familiar, from the smell of him to the supple economy of his movements. Her imagination only had to travel a short distance to picture the feel of his muscular arms under his shirt.
She half-turned but her breathing was fast. More than anything else in the world, she didn’t want him to touch her.
‘I know it’s late, but I really think I’d like to get back to the villa.’
‘This is crazy!’
‘I need to be—’
‘Away from me? Because if you stay too close you’re scared that your body might take over?’ He muttered a low oath in the face of her continuing silence.
‘I don’t mind heading back tonight.’
‘Forget it! You can leave in the morning, and I’ll make sure that I’m not under your feet tonight. I’ll instruct my driver to be here for you at nine. My private helicopter will take you back to the villa.’ He turned away and began striding towards the bedroom. After a second’s hesitation, Caroline followed him, galvanised into action and now terrified of the void opening up at her feet, even though she knew that there was no working her way around it.
‘I know you’re concerned about Alberto getting the wrong impression of you.’
She hovered by the door, desperate to maintain contact, although she knew that she had lost him. He was turning away, stripping off his shirt to hurl it on the antique chair that sat squarely under the window.
‘I’ll tell him that your meetings were so intensive that we thought it better for me to head back to the coast, to get out of the stifling heat in Milan.’
Giancarlo didn’t answer. She found her feet taking her forwards until she was standing in front of him.
‘Giancarlo, please. Don’t be like this.’
He paused and looked at her with a shuttered expression. ‘What do you want me to say, Caroline?’
She shrugged and stared mutely down at her feet.
‘Where are you going to go? I mean, tonight? You said that you’ll make sure that you aren’t under my feet.’ She placed one small hand on his arm and he looked down at it pointedly.
‘If you want to touch, then you have to be prepared for the consequences.’
Caroline whipped her hand away and took a couple of unsteady steps back. He had said that before. Once. And back then, light-years ago, she had reached out and touched because she had wanted to fall into bed with him. Now she wanted to run as fast as she could away from him. How had she managed to breach the space between them? It was as if her body, in his presence, had a mind of its own and was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.
‘This is your apartment. It’s—it’s silly for you to go somewhere else for the night,’ she stammered.
‘What are you suggesting? That I climb into bed next to you and we both go to sleep like chaste babes in the wood?’
‘I could use one of the spare bedrooms.’
‘I wouldn’t trust me if I were you,’ Giancarlo murmured, keen eyes watching her as she went a delicate shade of pink. ‘You might just wake up to find me a little too close for comfort. Now, I’m going to have a shower. Do you want to continue this conversation in the bathroom?’
Her heart was still beating fast twenty minutes later when Giancarlo reappeared in his sitting-room, showered, changed and with a small overnight bag. He looked refreshed, calm and controlled. She, on the other hand, was perched on the edge of the sofa, her back erect, her hands primly resting on her knees. She looked at him warily.
‘You do know,’ he said, dropping his bag on one of the sprawling sofas and strolling towards the kitchen, where he proceeded to pour himself a drink, ‘that I’ll be heading back to the coast once this series of meetings is finished? So I need to know exactly what I’m going to be walking into.’
‘Walking into?’ She was riveted by the sight of him in a pair of faded jeans and a polo shirt in a similar colour, so different from the businessman who had walked through the door, and all over again she agonised as to whether she had made the right decision. Distressed and disconcerted by Lucia’s appearance, had she overreacted? She loved Giancarlo! Had she blown whatever chance she had of somehow getting him to feel the way she felt? If they had continued seeing one another, would love eventually have replaced lust?
As soon as she started thinking like that, another scenario rushed up in her head. It was a scenario in which he became bored and disinterested, in which she became more and more needy and clingy. It was a scenario in which another Lucia clone came along, leggy, blonde and dim-witted, to lure him away from the challenge of someone who spoke too freely. He might find her frankness a novelty now, but it was not a trait he was used to—and did a leopard ever change its spots?
But the way he looked …
She swallowed and told herself just to focus.
‘Now that you’ve seen the light, are you even planning on being there a
t the end of the week?’
‘Of course I am! I told you that I’m prepared to go along with this for a short while longer, but we’re going to have to show your father that we’re drifting apart so that he won’t be upset when we announce that it’s over between us.’
‘And any clues on how we should do that? Maybe we could stage a few arguments? Or you could play with the truth and tell him that you met one of my past girlfriends and you didn’t like what you saw.’
Caroline thought of Lucia and she glanced hesitantly at Giancarlo. ‘Were all your girlfriends like that?’
‘Come again?’
‘All your girlfriends, were they like Lucia?’
Giancarlo frowned, taken aback by the directness of the question and the gentle criticism he could detect underlying it.
‘I know that Lucia might have annoyed you,’ she continued. ‘But were they all like her? Have you ever been out with someone who wasn’t a model? Or an actress? I mean, do you just go out with women because of the way they look?’
‘I don’t see the relevance of the question.’ Nor could he explain how it was that a beautiful, intellectually unchallenging woman could be less of a distraction than the other way around. But that was indeed the case as far as he was concerned. He had not been programmed for distraction. Somewhere along the line, that hard-wiring had just failed.
‘No. It’s not relevant.’ She looked away from him and he was savagely tempted to force himself into her line of vision and bring her back to his presence.
Instead, he slung his holdall over his shoulder and began heading towards the front door.
Caroline forced herself to stay put, but it was hard because her disobedient feet wanted to fly behind him and cling, keep him there with a few more questions. She wanted to ask him what he ever saw in her. She wasn’t beautiful, so was there something else that attracted him? She wanted to prise anything favourable out of him but she bit back the words before they could tumble out of her mouth.
She thought of this so-called distancing that would have to take place and immediately missed the physical contact and the easy camaraderie. And the laughter. And everything else that had hooked her in.
She heard the quiet click of the front door shutting and the apartment suddenly felt very big and very, very empty.
With her mind in complete turmoil, she had no idea how she was ever going to get to sleep, but in actual fact she fell asleep easily and woke to thin grey light filtering through the crack in the heavy curtains. It took her a few seconds for the links in her mind to join up. Giancarlo wasn’t there. The bed was empty. It hadn’t been slept in. He was gone. For a few seconds more, she replayed events of the evening before. She was a spectator at a film, condemned to watch it even though she knew the ending and hated it.
The chauffeur was there promptly at nine, and Caroline was waiting for him, her bags packed. Right up until the last minute, she half-hoped to see Giancarlo appear. She guiltily allowed herself the fantasy of him appearing with a huge bouquet of flowers, red roses, full of apologies and possibly with a ring in a small box.
In the absence of any of that, she spent both the drive and the brief helicopter ride sickeningly scared at the very real possibility that he had left the apartment to seek solace in someone else’s arms.
Would he do that? She didn’t know. But then, how well did she know him, after all?
She had sworn that she had seen the complete man, but she had been living in a bubble. The Giancarlo she had known was not the same Giancarlo who dated supermodels because they were undemanding and because they looked good on his arm.
She felt a pang of agonising emptiness as finally, with both the drive and the helicopter ride behind her, the villa at last approached, cresting the top of the cliff like an imperious master ruling the waves beneath it.
What they had shared was over. She had been so busy dwelling on that that she had given scant thought as to what she would actually say to Alberto when she saw him.
Now, as she stepped out of the taxi which had taken her from the helipad close by to the house, her thoughts shifted into another gear.
They had as left the happy couple. How easy was it going to be to convince Alberto that in the space of only a few hours that had all begun unravelling?
As she frantically grappled with the prospect of yet more half-truths, and before she could slot the spare key which she had been given when they first arrived at the villa into the lock, the front door was pulled open and she was confronted with the sight of a fairly flabbergasted Alberto.
Caroline smiled weakly as he peered around her in search of Giancarlo.
‘What’s going on? Shouldn’t you be in Milan on the roof terraces of the Duomo with the rest of the tourists, making a nuisance of yourself with your camera and your guide book and getting in the way of the locals?’ He frowned keenly at her. ‘Something you want to tell me?’ He stood aside. ‘I was just on my way out for a little stroll in the gardens, to take a breather from the harridan, but from the looks of it we need to talk …’
Giancarlo looked at his watch for the third time. He was battle-hardened when it came to meetings, but this particular one seemed to be dragging its feet. It was now nearly four in the afternoon and they had been at it since six-thirty that morning, a breakfast meeting where strong coffee had made sure all participants were raring to go. There was a hell of a lot to get through.
Unfortunately, his mind was almost entirely preoccupied with the woman he had left the previous evening.
He scowled at the memory and distractedly began tapping his pen on the conference table until all eyes were focused on him in anticipation of something very important being said. This was just the sort of awestruck respect to which he had become accustomed over time and which he now found a little irritating. Didn’t any of these people have minds of their own? Was there a single one present who would dare risk contradicting anything he had to say? Or did he just have to tap a pen inadvertently to have them gape at him and fall silent?
He pushed his papers aside and stood up. Several halfrose and then resumed their seats.
Having spent the day in the grip of indecision, with his mind caught up in the last conversation he’d had with Caroline, Giancarlo had now reached a decision, and was already beginning to regain some of his usual self-assured buoyancy.
Step one was to announce to the assembled crew that he would be leaving, which was met with varying degrees of shock and surprise. Giancarlo walking out of a meeting was unheard of.
‘Roberto.’ He looked at the youngest member of the team, a promising lad who had no fear of long hours. ‘This is your big chance for centre stage. You’re well filled-in on the details of this deal. I will be contactable on my mobile, but I’m trusting you can handle the technicalities. Naturally, nothing will proceed without my final say-so.’
Which made at least one person extremely happy.
Step two involved a call to his secretary. Within minutes he was ready for the trip back to the coast. The helicopter was available but Giancarlo chose instead the longer option of the train. He needed to think.
Once on the train he checked his mobile for messages, stashed his computer bag away, because the last thing he needed was the distraction of work, and then gazed out of the window as the scenery flashed past him in an ever-changing riot of colour.
He was feeling better and better about his decision to leave Milan. Halfway through his trip, he reached the decision that he would start being more proactive in training up people who could stand in for him. Yes, he had a solid, dependable and capable network of employees, but he was still far too much the figurehead of the company, the one they all turned to for direction. Hell, he hadn’t had time out for years!
It was dark by the time he arrived at the villa, and as he stood in front of it he paused to look at its perfect positioning and exquisite architectural detail. As getaways went, it was one that had seldom been used. He had just never seemed to find the down time.
Getaways had been things for other people.
He let himself in and headed straight for the breezy patio at the front of the house. He knew the routine. His father would be outside, enjoying the fresh air, which he claimed to find more invigorating than the stuffiness of the lakes.
‘Must be the salt!’ he had declared authoritatively on day one, and Giancarlo had laughed and asked for medical proof to back up that sweeping statement.
It was a minute or two before Alberto was alerted to Giancarlo’s shadowy figure approaching, and a few more seconds for Caroline to realise that they were no longer alone.
They had not switched on the bank of outside lights, preferring instead the soothing calm of the evening sky as the colours of the day faded into greys, reds and purples before being extinguished by black.
‘Giancarlo!’ Caroline was the first to break the silence. She stood up, shocked to see him silhouetted in front of her, tall and even more dramatically commanding because he was backlit, making it impossible for her to clearly see his face.
‘We weren’t expecting you.’ Alberto looked shrewdly between them and waved Caroline back down. ‘No need to stand, my girl. You’re not in the presence of royalty.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Since when do I need a reason to come to my own house?’
‘I just thought that in the light of what’s happened you would remain in Milan.’
‘In the light of what’s happened?’
‘I’ve told your father everything, Giancarlo. There’s no need to pretend any longer.’
A thick silence greeted this flat statement and it stretched on and on until Caroline could feel herself begin to perspire with nervous tension. She wished he would move out to the patio. Anything but stand there like a sentinel, watching them both with a stillness that sent a shiver through her.
Caroline glanced over to Alberto for some assistance and was relieved when he rose to the occasion.
‘Of course, I was deeply upset by this turn of events,’ Alberto said sadly. ‘I’m an old man with health problems, and perhaps I placed undue pressure on the both of you to feign something just for the purpose of keeping me happy. If that was the case, son, then it was inexcusable.’
The Truth Behind his Touch Page 15