A Clash With Cannavaro (6 page)

A twisted sort of smile touched his mouth. It was clear that he was having as much of a battle as she was to bring his emotions back under control again.

‘How very modern of you,’ he breathed. ‘In which case, you should find my proposition more appealing than I had imagined.’

Shakily she queried, ‘What proposition?’ She didn’t know what he had in mind, but she was certain that she wasn’t going to like it.

‘Simply this,’ he stated. ‘That you allow me to take Daniele away for a month, but with a new condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘That you accompany him.’

He had to be joking!

‘For what reason?’ she prompted, her green eyes narrowing.

‘He knows you.’ His tone was clipped. ‘He will be happier if you are around.’

Lauren looked at him cagily. ‘And what do you get out of it?’

The mere lifting of one masculine eyebrow sent Lauren’s pulses sky-high.

‘Oh, don’t look so affronted, Lauren,’ he said. ‘We could so easily have been having a totally different kind of...intercourse...’ he glanced towards the ceiling ‘...up there if we had not called a halt to what we were doing just now. But it is clear we both still want what we indulged in two years ago, even though—as you say—we do not like each other. And to combine it with my getting to know Daniele—and vice versa—seems to me to be the perfect solution.’

It would, Lauren thought, the idea of what he was proposing sending sensual shivers along her spine. Yet how could she want him so much physically, she wondered, when he still continued to despise her? Because, in spite of what she had said, she didn’t really believe that a woman could give her body so completely to a man without somehow getting herself emotionally involved with that man. She couldn’t, anyway.

‘And if I still won’t agree?’ She couldn’t believe how much her voice was shaking. ‘To let you take Danny, I mean. Either with or without
me
.’

‘You know very well what the answer is to that,’ he said in a voice that was brutally calm. ‘Don’t put me to the test, Lauren.’

The test being that he would fight her for him. That was what he was saying. A fight she was more than just a little afraid she would lose.

‘I do not want to hurt you,’ he said softly. ‘But you will give me no choice if you refuse.’

‘So you’re giving me no choice instead?’ Bitterness tinged her voice as she struggled with his ultimatum.

Another movement of an eyebrow said it all.

As she’d already pointed out, he was rich and powerful. He could tear her heart out if he wanted to. And he probably wanted to! she thought bitterly. Instead, he was offering her ecstasy. Physical ecstasy in return for not taking Danny away from her. Unbelievable physical ecstasy. And a suitcaseful of self-degradation when it was all over.

‘All right. I’ll accompany my nephew,’ she told him with her voice cracking. ‘To look after him and make sure that where he goes and what he does is in his best interest. But if you think that you and I will be picking up from where we left off two years ago, then you’ve got another think coming! I won’t be your plaything, Emiliano. Not now or at any time in the future.’

Which was a ludicrous thing to say, she realised, in the circumstances. Because, as he’d already said, if things had taken their natural course just now, they would have been up there, lying on her single bed, with her allowing him to do all sorts of intimate things with her. Her only redemption lay in the fact that he didn’t point that out to her for a second time.

‘I’ll be in touch in a day or two,’ was all he said, before grabbing his jacket off the back of one of her second-hand chairs and informing her that he would see himself out.

It was only after the front door had closed behind him and she was listening for the growl of the powerful car that Lauren realised she had been so disconcerted by his proposition and by agreeing to accompany him that she hadn’t even thought to ask where they were going.

CHAPTER FOUR

L
OUNGING
ON
THE
canopied terrace of his Caribbean retreat, looking out across the crescent of pink sand to the young woman and toddler paddling at the water’s edge, Emiliano couldn’t believe his luck.

He hadn’t expected Lauren to give in quite so easily when he had insisted that she accompany him here with Daniele—or Danny, as she insisted on calling him. But then, as she had pointed out so bluntly when he had first told her what he was proposing, he hadn’t really given her any choice. If he had, there was no doubt in his mind that she wouldn’t be down there on that beach right now. And after that moment when he had slipped the belt of her robe and he’d realised how much he could still affect her—how much she still affected him—it had suddenly become imperative that she should come.

His hooded eyes moved from the toddler standing with his arm outstretched, to the beautiful redhead in the pale blue bikini, which concealed very little of her perfect hourglass figure.

Her flaming hair was piled up in a way that emphasised her slender neck and back; her skin was already softly tanned because of the time she spent outdoors. He saw her bend down to the little boy and take whatever it was—probably a shell—he was offering her. Then she said something laughingly to him as she gently pushed his wind-blown hair back off his face.

* * *

They both wanted Daniele, Emiliano thought. But they couldn’t both have him—not without it being detrimental to the child’s wellbeing—and he could see Lauren and himself reaching a kind of impasse over it.

When he had gone to see her that first time over two weeks ago, he had thought it would be easy—that she would hand over his nephew with no questions asked if the price was right. What he hadn’t expected to find was a natural-living girl with a fierce set of values, far removed from the vamp he thought he had taken to bed in London, which had made him start to wonder whether he hadn’t been too hasty in judging her.

Her laughter drifted up to him with the toddler’s giggles as she pretended to chase him over the carpet of pink sand. Suddenly she swooped down and picked him up, and he squealed with delight, his dark head nuzzling into her throat, one tiny hand laid innocently against a breast that was almost spilling out of its cup from the energetic game they had been playing. Then she swung back to point out a speedboat on the glittering blue water and the sight of those lovely buttocks—bare, save for the tantalising blue string that separated them—had his throbbing anatomy sending him a loud and clear message. He needed to have her alone!

Minutes later she was chasing the squealing toddler over the beach again, but made a grab for him as they reached the steps to the pool terrace, climbing them with the child in her arms.

Between two huge pots of hibiscus flowers and a powdery scented oleander bush that was growing near the stone balustrade at the top of the steps, she put him down so that he could run to Emiliano.

‘Buongiorno, piccolo.’
It was the first time he had spoken to his nephew this morning, who was clinging to his cut-off jeans, grinning up at him with his baby-toothed smile.

Leaning forward, Emiliano snaked an arm around him and then, with both arms, lifted him laughingly into the air. ‘Has your aunt been making you run all the way up the beach?’ he asked the giggling Daniele. He turned an ear to the child’s face. ‘She has?
Buon cielo!
Shall I spank her or will you?’

‘Perhaps
she
doesn’t want to be spanked,’ Lauren contested, but there was a quiver in her voice, he noted, with that unmistakable flush colouring her cheeks.

‘Since when did punishment ever have anything to do with what one wants?’ he put to her with sensual teasing in his eyes.

‘Is that why you brought me here, Emiliano?’ she asked levelly, though he could sense the tension in her slender body. ‘To punish me?’

‘If it is,’ he murmured, ‘then it is I who is being punished.’

She frowned before her gaze fell—involuntarily he felt—to the khaki fabric that was pulling across his lap.

‘Good,’ she exhaled, understanding, and yet he detected a slight tremor in her voice again and that tension that made her nostrils dilate as she stood, unaware of how provocative she looked, with her slender hands splayed against the gentle curve of her hips and her lovely breasts straining against the bikini.

Or perhaps she was, he thought.

If they had been on their own he would have pulled her down across his lap right there and then and enjoyed her shriek of surprise, and almost certainly excitement too, he decided, at anticipating what he would never have dreamed of actually carrying out. But had he been the old-fashioned type of chauvinist, he fantasised—which he certainly wasn’t and never had been—at least it would have got her into his arms...

Knowing he shouldn’t be entertaining such inappropriate thoughts, especially in Daniele’s company, he set the little boy gently down on his feet again.

A subtle lifting of his hand brought his Afro-Caribbean housekeeper, who had just finished discussing something with one of the groundsmen and was about to go into the house, over to their little gathering.

‘Constance, would you kindly take this little man here away for his well-deserved nap?’ He looked indulgently down at the child, palming his soft baby cheek. ‘
Grazie
,’ he said, the word sliding off his tongue like molten honey.

* * *

The appreciative smile he gave the woman as she swung the toddler up into her generously proportioned arms could have melted her where she stood, Lauren reluctantly decided, if Constance Dowden—as she had been introduced to Lauren the day before—hadn’t been a generation above him.

‘I haven’t seen nearly enough of him,’ Emiliano said, sounding regretful as the boy and the woman disappeared into the air-conditioned comfort of his tropical home.

A white, exclusively designed house, with intricately wrought balconies and bougainvillaea-draped walls, it stood in its own grounds against the lush green vegetation that clothed the hillsides right down to its private palm-fringed beach that was only accessible from the house and the sea. The understated elegance and simplicity of its interior had surprised Lauren when they had arrived here yesterday, coming by private jet from Heathrow to one of the larger islands and then by private launch to this less populated island paradise. She’d imagined Emiliano favouring the more glitzy, celebrity-decked resorts that his brother had.

‘No, you haven’t,’ she agreed, bristling from the way Danny had been effectively whisked away from her as she sank down on the deep floral cushion of the cane chair opposite Emiliano and picked up the tall glass of iced tea from the table beside it that someone had poured for her earlier.

* * *

Emiliano directed a hard and questioning glance at her. Was that disapproval in her voice? he wondered. Or was that just his conscience telling him that he should have pressed his brother harder to have informed him of Danny’s whereabouts, instead of allowing himself to be brushed off with lame answers?

‘I know I sent him gifts, but that was not enough.’

‘You did?’ Lauren’s words were strung with surprise as she sipped her tea. ‘We didn’t receive any gifts.’ From the way her forehead pleated he could tell they had never reached his nephew. ‘What sort of gifts?’

‘Oh...’ He shook his head, lips pursing as he plundered his memory banks. ‘I don’t know...Some sort of baby tractor for him to ride on. A bear...’

She was looking at him as though she couldn’t imagine him doing anything so trivial as picking out gifts for a baby.

‘I gave them to Angelo. He said he would give them to him.’

‘He didn’t.’

Emiliano’s dark brows came together. No maintenance for Daniele. A recent scour through the mess of Angelo’s financial records had shown that no payments at all had been made or even claimed for the little boy. Not even a gift passed on from his only uncle. He couldn’t comprehend what his brother had been thinking of.

‘Why didn’t you tell me Angelo was not providing you with any money for Danny?’ he asked, appalled. ‘Why did you not try to claim?’

‘Because he didn’t want anything to do with his son,’ she said, putting her glass back down. ‘I did invite him to see him sometimes, but he never came. So I decided that if he didn’t want anything to do with us, then we wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Or any of you,’ she tagged on after a moment, as though it had taken a little extra courage to say it.

In other words, she was too grossly independent to ask anyone for anything. He was beginning to see that now. He was also being forced to accept that he had judged her far too readily two years ago when he had bracketed her as the same type of opportunist female as her sister. She was nothing like Vikki Westwood, whose character he had sussed right from the moment Angelo had introduced her to him outside that Rome restaurant where they had met for dinner.

He remembered welcoming her to the family when his brother had said that they were getting engaged; remembered how she had laughed flirtatiously, turning her head so that the brotherly kiss he’d intended for her cheek had landed on her full red lips. He’d known then that Vikki Westwood was going to be trouble.

‘Does this mean you believe me now?’

‘What it means, Lauren, is that I don’t understand how you could have let my brother get away with it. And I repeat...Why didn’t you come to me?’

Above the sighing of the warm wind through the oleander bush he heard an incredulous little sound leave her throat, and knew the answer even before she replied.

‘After you’d accused me of sleeping with you because you thought I was after your money? I’m not a glutton for humiliation, Emiliano. And your wonderful brother would have denied it anyway.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he countered. And when she looked at him as though he were suddenly challenging the truthfulness of all she had been saying, ‘He would have told me simply to mind my own business,’ he clarified. Wasn’t that what Angelo had always said to him when he had quizzed his brother about anything that he wasn’t comfortable with? Not pulling his weight in the company. His drinking habits. The way he treated women. Daniele.

* * *

Wondering at the emotion that seemed to darken those heart-stopping features, Lauren had to force back a sudden dangerous surge of warm feeling towards him.

Instead, in response to that remark he had made about his brother telling him to mind his own business, she suggested a little shakily, ‘Perhaps I should take that stance with you myself.’

‘Oh?’ He looked at her obliquely, the sunlight creeping under the canopy glinting on the rich, healthy sheen of his hair.

‘Just because I’ve agreed to come here with you doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to let anyone else take over looking after Danny,’ she told him, with her gaze automatically straying to where the other woman had taken her nephew.

‘And you think that anything to do with Daniele isn’t my business too?’

He had a point, but right at that moment Lauren had been left feeling too dispensable over not being consulted.

‘He’s still in my care and OK...I’ll let Constance do it this once as she was kind enough to agree to. But in future I intend to bathe and feed him and tuck him up in bed as I’ve always done.’

‘And so you shall, if that is what you want,’ he acceded, surprising her. ‘I merely thought that, for the time being, you might appreciate a break.’

She did, now that he mentioned it. It was just that she felt so protective and possessive of her nephew where Angelo’s older brother was concerned that she realised she’d been guilty of a gross case of overreacting.

‘It’s important even for a full-time aunt to relax sometimes,’ he said. ‘Something which I think you have done very little of over the past year, am I not right?’

‘You are,’ Lauren murmured and, after a moment, in an attempt to redeem herself for her churlish behaviour, tagged on rather sheepishly, ‘Thanks.’

‘In that case...’ He was tugging off his T-shirt and tossing it aside, exposing broad bronzed shoulders and that hair-dusted, beautifully contoured chest. ‘You and I are going to have some fun. Come on!’

Before she had time to gather her wits, he had grabbed her hand and was pulling her up from her chair, and she could only run after him down the steps, trying to match his pace as he urged her onwards over the sand.

‘Hey! Hang on!’ she gasped, breathless more from his actions than from trying to keep up with him. ‘I’m afraid I can’t run anywhere near as fast as you!’

‘Of course not. How silly of me,’ he said, stopping so suddenly that she found herself careering into him.

Swiftly, her hands shot up to steady her, and she sucked in a breath as her fingers met the warm hard musculature of his chest.

‘Touching me, Lauren?’ His voice and his smile mocked. ‘I thought that was against the rules.’

‘Are there any rules?’ Against the sound of the waves breaking over the damp sand, her voice quavered. ‘Other than the ones that you make?’

He didn’t respond, only to click his tongue in laughing disapproval, the sound closer, so close she could feel his warm breath fanning her hair.

‘And if there were, you’d break them,’ she accused.

As he broke people
. Across the years, her younger sister’s words drifted back to her. As he would probably break
her—
and anyone who didn’t submit to his will.

‘Are you afraid of me?’

To Lauren, it was like some sort of déjà vu. Hadn’t he said something along those lines that very same night at that party?

‘No.’ She said it too quickly because she was. Or at least, she thought, afraid of the pain he could cause her if he asserted his claim over his nephew. But it was herself she was afraid of right at that moment. Of her responses to his nearness and his physicality that were making her blood surge like the waves and her heart pulse with an excitement that was totally erotic.

‘Santo cielo!’
It was a swift, sharp utterance under his breath. ‘I think right now,
mia bella,
we both need cooling off.’