Because his blond hair was slicked back by the water, I’d completely failed to recognise Ryan.
But he’d recognised me in an instant.
After that, there was no way I was going back downstairs. Instead I locked my door, shoved cotton wool in my ears and went to bed. If anyone knocked, I didn’t hear it.
When I woke it was morning and the villa was finally silent. I went down for breakfast, feeling fairly confident I wouldn’t meet anyone, only to find Gina and her father in the breakfast room.
‘Megan!’ cried Stefano, sweeping me into his usual bear hug. ‘Why do you not come and visit us anymore?’
‘I’ve been very busy with my new book—’
‘And you have a new boyfriend? Where is he?’
‘There’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘I came on my own.’
‘Poor Megan!’ Stefano took one of my hands in his and squeezed hard. I tried not to wince. ‘I find another one for you.’
‘I’m only here to have a holiday!’
‘Sì,’ he beamed. ‘You have a lovely holiday and find a boyfriend too.’
He was as bad as Gina!
Stefano began forking up bacon, eggs and mushrooms and piled them onto a plate for me. ‘English breakfast,’ he said. ‘Especially for you.’
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I took the plate and murmured my thanks, only to turn around and find Gina glaring at me.
‘Where did you get to last night?’ she said.
‘Why, was there someone you wanted me to meet?’
She ignored that and said instead, ‘What would you like to do today? I thought we could take it easy; perhaps do some shopping before it gets too hot, and then laze around the pool?’
In other words, hang around the villa until Ryan deigned to wake up.
‘Not a chance,’ I said.
‘You don’t want to sleep by a pool all day, Megan,’ Stefano agreed. ‘You must see the sights.’
‘Megan doesn’t need to see the sights, Papà,’ Gina said. ‘She’s been here before, many times. Amalfi, Vesuvius, Pompeii – she’s done them all.’
‘You can visit Pompeii a hundred times and still not see it all!’
‘Why don’t we go to Capri?’ I suggested quickly. ‘They have shops there too.’
Gina nodded her acquiescence, but I could see she wasn’t very happy about it. Presumably she thought Ryan would be long gone by the time we returned, which was certainly what I was hoping for.
Wasn’t it?
I managed to restrain my temper for most of the trip to Capri, but on the hydrofoil coming back I couldn’t contain myself any longer.
‘You knew Ryan was going to be here, didn’t you, Gina?’
She shrugged. ‘The band are recording a TV show in Rome next week. I knew Luca was coming to visit my father, so I suggested he might like to bring Ryan with him.’
‘You’re supposed to be my friend!’
‘You weren’t happy, Megan! I hated seeing you like that. This problem with Ryan is all in your head. He had his photo taken with a pretty girl at an award ceremony. It’s called having a good time. Something you seem to have forgotten how to do.’
‘It’s not just the photograph, she wrote a song about him!’
‘If that poor girl slept with every man she’s ever written about, she would never have the energy to write those damned songs!’
I watched the rugged coastline of Sorrento draw nearer. ‘You think I’ve made a mistake.’
‘I think you are like one of those hotels,’ she said, pointing to the line of huge luxury hotels perched high upon the cliffs. Some had even been built directly into the rock face.
‘Big and old?’ I ventured dubiously.
‘High in the air, looking down on poor Ryan.’
I snorted. ‘Seriously?’
‘It sounds better in Italian,’ she protested. ‘What I’m trying to say is that maybe you’ve been a little hasty in judging him. My brother would never be friends with the kind of man you seem to think Ryan is. You should at least let Ryan have the chance to explain, and then decide what you want to do.’
So he could humiliate me in person?
I thought not.
By the time we got back, most of the other guests had left.
Unfortunately Ryan hadn’t.
The villa might have been big enough to avoid him, but that evening Stefano announced he was treating us to a meal at his favourite restaurant. To refuse would have been rude. So I wrangled a seat in the car Ryan wasn’t travelling in and, when we arrived at the restaurant, I picked the chair furthest away from him. I’m not sure why I bothered. He didn’t look in my direction once.
The restaurant was located in one of the beautiful old Renaissance houses. We were given a table in the garden surrounded by lemon trees. The tables were even decorated with lemons. There were six of us in all. Stefano, Gina, Ryan, Luca and Luca’s girlfriend Portia, who didn’t say very much, just looked at him adoringly.
No one talked to me. Gina had found a handsome waiter to flirt with. The way Portia was giggling, she and Luca were talking about something completely unsuited to the dinner table. Ryan had made the mistake of mentioning the lemon trees to Stefano, and now knew far more than he ever wanted to know about Sorrento lemons being superior to Sicilian ones.
‘Sixty per cent of the local lemons are made into Limoncello,’ Stefano was telling him. ‘And they use only the peel – soaking it in alcohol until the oil is released.’
My eyes accidentally met Ryan’s and he winked at me. I forgot myself and grinned back, and for a moment it was as though the last five months had never happened.
Stefano beamed at us. ‘Ryan, why did you not marry this lovely girl?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ryan said, and his green eyes turned all sultry. ‘Why did we break up, Megan?’
‘You went off with someone else!’
‘Did I?’ he returned blithely. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘During the Grammys?’ If I hadn’t been watching him closely, I might have missed seeing him wince. ‘Ah, you remember the Grammys?’
‘Hell, yeah!’ Luca grinned, before Ryan could answer. ‘We had a great time.’
‘I could tell from the photos!’
Ryan’s sultry look turned frosty. ‘I do hope the reason you dropped me wasn’t because you saw my photo with Destiny in one of those vile magazines?’ he said. ‘Because that would be very sad.’
‘It wasn’t the one magazine,’ I protested. ‘It was in every magazine – and the tabloids too.’
‘Destiny and I had our photo taken together,’ Ryan said. ‘That was all.’
‘We were all there,’ agreed Luca. ‘But they cut our ugly faces out of the shot.’
‘That’s how it works,’ Ryan said. ‘I thought you knew that.’
If he hadn’t been so patronising, I wouldn’t have become so angry.
‘I didn’t drop you because of the photo with Destiny,’ I said. ‘I dropped you because you had her name tattooed on your arse.’
Gina, dragging her attention away from the pretty-boy waiter, was hugely entertained. ‘Ryan! You have a tattoo on your bottom?’
‘I do not have Destiny’s name tattooed on my arse!’ growled Ryan.
‘He doesn’t,’ agreed Luca.
‘How would you know?’ Gina asked him.
Luca grinned. ‘Sadly, our band doesn’t always get the five-star accommodation it deserves. I’ve seen everyone’s arse!’
‘More to the point,’ Ryan interrupted, ‘why would you think I’d do that?’
Because I’d read it in a magazine. And yes, I knew I shouldn’t believe everything I read, but there had been an interview with the tattooist, a photograph of the studio – everything. It was pretty conclusive.
But I could hardly tell him that.
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even think you liked tattoos.’
‘Luca has some lovely tattoos, all the
way up his arms,’ said Portia, picking a fine time to become sociable. ‘Don’t you have any at all, Ryan?’
Ryan hesitated.
And that was all the answer I needed.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, as casually as I could manage, and I headed straight for the rest room before I burst into tears.
I’d hardly left the garden before I heard footsteps on the flagstones behind me. It was not the light tap of a woman’s heels, so I knew it wasn’t Gina. I walked faster, turned it into a sprint, and arrived at the rest rooms in time to shut the door in Ryan’s face.
‘Megan!’ he bellowed, thumping on the door. ‘Come here and talk to me, you coward!’ And when that bit of soft-talking didn’t entice me out, ‘You can’t stay in there forever!’
Really? I double-checked I’d locked the door, but as he didn’t appear to want to exert himself by knocking it down, I was probably safe.
I spent as long as possible repairing my make-up. At least twenty minutes must have passed, and I did think Gina could have come to see why I was taking so long, but she didn’t. What I hadn’t considered was that when I finally did leave the rest room, everyone at our table would have gone.
Everyone except Ryan, who was leaning against the wall waiting for me.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ he said, seeing my hurt expression. ‘They think we need to talk.’
‘I would have thought me avoiding you all day was pretty much a signal that I don’t want to talk,’ I retorted, and abruptly headed for the exit. I would get a taxi back to the villa, and then I could tell Gina exactly what I thought of her plan to get me back with Ryan.
How could she abandon me like this?
Ryan caught me up. ‘Please, Megan? Walk around the old town with me. You used to like doing that.’
‘In these shoes?’
‘That’s your best excuse?’
I glared at him.
‘Okay, just give me twenty minutes of your time,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re dying to tell me what a bastard I am and, when you’re finished, I’ll buy you an ice cream at Gelateria Davide.’
‘Trust me; it’ll take longer than twenty minutes!’
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he said, and gave me the full Ryan March rock star smile.
I glanced nervously about, but no one seemed to have recognised him. He was wearing the same kind of clothes he wore on stage – nondescript jeans and t-shirt – but he blended right in with the tourists.
Although it was late, the streets were busy and the bars, restaurants and shops were all open. Ryan bought me an ice cream and we wandered around the medieval streets, admiring the ceramics and marquetry in the gift shops and sampling the free Limoncello. Being a musician, Ryan could drink practically anything.
‘You’ve got to hand it to the Italians,’ he said. ‘God gave them lemons, and they made Limoncello.’
The liqueur was a little too strong for me but it certainly made me feel mellow enough to say, ‘Tell me about your tattoo.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘There’s nothing to tell. I went to the Grammys, I got drunk and I called in at a tattoo studio on the way home.’
‘What kind of a tattoo is it?’
‘Pretty curling letters.’ He put his arm around me.
‘What do they say?’
‘What would you like them to say?’
My name, I thought, but I wasn’t brave enough to say it out loud.
He was standing so close I thought he might bend his head and kiss me. Some small treacherous part of me was practically willing it.
‘What happened to us?’ he sighed.
I pulled away from him. ‘You left me to conquer America.’
‘You were supposed to wait for me!’
‘I did!’
‘You blocked my number and refused to take my calls. You didn’t trust me.’
‘Don’t you realise how hard you made it for me? I was stuck in the UK and you were touring America. Every time I opened a magazine, you’d be pictured with another girl at a party – a singer or a model. Everyone I know saw those photos and they’d be so damned pitying.’
Except Gina. She’d just told me to get a grip.
‘That’s what my life is like,’ he said. ‘You knew that. Those girls don’t mean anything. They wouldn’t look at me twice if I wasn’t famous.’
With his looks? I sincerely doubted that.
‘In a few years’ time, or less if the next album flops,’ he was saying, ‘they’ll move on to someone else. I don’t want a girl like that. I only wanted you. Why could you never see that?’
Ryan wanted me? Did that mean—
‘First you need to get it out of your head that musicians spend all their time shagging groupies,’ he said. ‘Seriously, I don’t have the time. It’s all rehearsals and sound checks and gigs and interviews, and any spare moment is spent writing songs for the next album. I’d love to wake up in a hotel room and think ‘It’s Tuesday, it must be Ohio.’ But lately the only places I get to sleep are on a tour bus, or a plane on the way to the next gig. Until now, the last time I slept in an actual bed was the Grammys – and, before you ask, I was alone! I’m not complaining – well, yes, I am complaining – but I’m doing what I love so I’d only change one thing. That the girl I loved was there with me.’
I stared at him. Was he saying … had he actually said—
But before I could form a reply, he began speaking again and I’d missed the moment.
‘It’s got to be your choice, Megan. I know you love your work, and I would never ask you to give it up and follow me around the world – some of those places we perform in are truly dire. But I did think…well, your work is portable. You can write anywhere. You could come with me?’
Again, he paused, and I knew this was where I was supposed to say ‘yes please!’ but I was so utterly gobsmacked all I could do was stare at him. The last five months, which I’d spent crying over some silly magazine, flipped completely on their head. I’d been an idiot!
‘Ryan…’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, I know, it was too much to ask.’ Before I could protest, he raised his hand in the air. One of Stefano’s cars appeared out of nowhere, gliding to a halt beside us.
I was far too uptight to declare undying love for a rock star in front of a chauffeur, so I let Ryan kiss me on the forehead and help me into the car. At which point he slammed the door, banged on the roof and the car drove back to the villa without him.
What had I done?
Or not done, as it turned out.
Infuriatingly, at the precise moment I decided to forgive Ryan, he inconveniently disappeared. I spent the night sat on the balcony, waiting for another car to make the journey up from the town, but for this one to have Ryan in it. I eventually fell asleep, my head resting on the balustrade. When I staggered down to breakfast the next morning, the imprint of the balustrade still on my cheek, the housekeeper assured me Ryan had returned at some time during the night, because his suitcase was now neatly packed and waiting in the hall.
‘Signor March is not staying long this time,’ she said, giving me a dark look. ‘He is not happy.’
Even the staff were ganging up on me.
By mid-afternoon Ryan had not reappeared, so I changed into my bikini and made my way downstairs to the pool.
I passed Stefano heading inside for his afternoon nap. ‘Don’t sit under the lemon tree,’ he told me. ‘It is a true Sorrento lemon. Huge. If one fell out of the tree it could kill you.’
Killer lemons? He had to be kidding!
I went into the garden. Although there were palm trees surrounding the pool, they didn’t give as much shade as the lemon tree. I stood beneath it and looked up. Considering it had been planted in pride of place, it appeared a bit sorry for itself. Some of the leaves had died and there were not many lemons growing on it.
Deciding to risk it, I draped my towel over one of the sunloungers and dragged it beneath the tree. I arranged the sunlounger so I would ha
ve my back to the villa and a beautiful view across the bay of Naples, towards the lavender smudge that was Vesuvius.
I laid back on the sunlounger and stared warily through the foliage of the lemon tree. Those lemons truly were huge. I was wondering whether I should move away and sit in the garden instead, but the heat was making me feel indolent. Before I knew it, I was asleep.
I was woken, sometime later, by a gentle thud. When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was one very large lemon, rocking gently on the paving slab beside me. Maybe Stefano was right about his killer lemons!
I rolled over, with the intention of getting up, only to find Ryan on the neighbouring sunlounger, fast asleep.
Desire twisted my stomach. He was stretched out, his arms above his head, his tawny skin glistening in the sunlight. My gaze slid further down, following the ridges of his stomach muscles and the faint dusting of golden hair disappearing into the waistband of his shorts. I sighed; although to be honest it might have been more of a moan.
It was then I saw the inky black lettering curling over his right hip, emerging from the top of his shorts. If he had not been stretched out like that, I’d never have seen it.
So that was the famous tattoo.
I couldn’t resist it. Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached out, took a slice of the material between my fingers and gently tugged, pulling his shorts down, millimetre by millimetre, until I could see the first letter.
Which was ‘M’.
My name began with ‘M’!
I gave the shorts another gentle tug, revealing the next letter, but it was written in such tiny script I could hardly make it out. Was that an ‘a’?’
A hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
‘Uh uh,’ said Ryan, his green eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘No free samples.’
I shrieked and fell off the sunbed, landing right onto Ryan’s stomach. Instinctively he tensed those beautiful muscles – but not quickly enough. The grin turned into a grimace.
‘It serves you right,’ I said, albeit breathlessly.
Ryan was still grimacing. ‘Apology accepted,’ he said. At least he hadn’t lost his sense of humour.
As I was now sprawled inelegantly across him, I quickly sat up. ‘I thought you were asleep. You made me jump.’
Sunlounger - the Ultimate Beach Read (Sunlounger Stories Book 1) Page 36