Sins of the Past (22 page)

She just stood there, open-mouthed, shaking her head, too overwhelmed to speak.

‘I—I don’t understand …’ Somehow she found her voice, looking around her in awe of how much he had accomplished in so short a time—which meant he must have been liaising with the studio the whole time they had been in the Seychelles! ‘When did you arrange all this?’

‘At the same time as I arranged with Olivia to grant you extended leave—that day after I’d met you and Benito in the park.’

‘You mean you’d already organised it with her?’ She exhaled, realising that her boss had known she’d be taking time off even before Riva had asked her. And suddenly a few other things became strikingly clear. Like why Olivia had been so keen to know how Riva’s holiday with Ben’s father had gone—because she would obviously have realised it was Damiano—and why the woman had looked so pleased with herself when she’d given her time off to come here this afternoon—because she’d known all about this all along and yet, loyal to her illustrious client, she hadn’t breathed a word! ‘But I thought you weren’t interested in my plans? That there wasn’t even going to be a job …’ Her voice tailed away as she struggled to remember exactly how things had been left. ‘You let me believe you’d given it to someone else.’

‘You let yourself believe that,’ he said, his mouth pulling to one side. ‘As for the rest—you managed to convince yourself of that too. As you were always so ready to think the worst about me, I didn’t see any point in denying it—although I’m not blaming you for that. I’m well aware that respect has to be earned, and that I threw away whatever respect you might have had for me a long time ago.’

What was he saying? Head cocked to one side, she searched his dark inscrutable features, a groove of pained bewilderment between her brows.

‘Well …?’ He was looking over her head at the result of all her hard planning. And perhaps he felt robbed of his Italian pride in admitting what he had just admitted, she thought, because he merely shrugged and said on a strangely laboured breath, ‘Is it to your expectations?’

Emotion welled up inside her. She still couldn’t believe that he had valued her ideas enough to follow them all through—and so quickly. It was a lovely surprise for his grandmother, and an even bigger one for her, but it was what he had just said about her losing respect for him that was making her head whirl with so many hopes.

‘It more than exceeds them,’ she whispered, equally as breathless as he’d seemed a moment ago. ‘There’s only one thing …’ She was looking critically up at the large landscape hanging on the principal wall.

‘What?’ he prompted, frowning.

‘That doesn’t belong there,’ she remarked assuredly. Already she was heading for the door. ‘Could you take it down?’

When she returned she was carrying a very large flat package, wrapped in plain brown paper. It was, Damiano thought, almost too big for her to manage on her own.

‘Here. Let me.’ He took it from her while she tore at the wrapping, unable to take his eyes off her. She was small and seductive and so utterly, utterly desirable. He wanted to toss this painting—or whatever it was—aside, and just take her in his arms and make love to her. But if he so much as made a wrong move it would only drive her away, and he couldn’t let that happen, however hard it was to keep the almost uncontrollable urge in check.

Now, at her request, he hung the large framed picture onto the hook where the landscape had been hanging. He felt the
air being sucked out of his lungs as he stood back to look at it.

It was a hand-stitched tableau depicting a Grecian woman in flowing robes reclining before her weaving loom. In the less distinct background an ancient battle raged. The colours in the foreground were vibrant—the subject was a study in longing and repressed emotion. It was someone’s labour of love, which had obviously cost many painstaking hours to create.

‘The mythical Greek goddess Penelope.’ He moved so that the picture was in the centre of his field of vision. ‘You said you wanted something dramatic for this wall …’ His breathing came deeply from the impact it had made upon him. ‘But this is … phenomenal.’

‘Thank you.’

The almost shy way in which she said it pulled his gaze away from the tableau. His eyes rested on her face with a dark, almost pained intensity.

‘It’s yours, isn’t it?’ His voice seemed to crack as he asked it. ‘This is what you were working on so diligently while we were away. And also that evening when I found out about Benito, though I was too angry that night to take much in.’ His attention turned to the picture again, and he stepped back to take the whole thing in. ‘The goddess Penelope, who weaved all day and every night unpicked what she had done to appear constantly busy to her would-be suitors, simply to remain faithful to her husband for all the years he was away at war.’

‘It belongs to Eloise,’ Riva told him resolutely. ‘She stayed true to your grandfather, even though he broke her heart because he couldn’t love her back in the way she loved him.’

‘And you give her this?’ Waving a hand towards the wall, he was looking at Riva, studying her small and beautiful features, her mesmerising eyes, her petite upturned nose and the sensuous mouth that was set with the familiar determination he knew so well. He couldn’t get over how generous she was.

How caring. And to his grandmother as well as his son. ‘It’s perfect for this room. But it looks like a lifetime’s work. How long did it take you?’

‘Four—’ she gave a dismissive little shrug ‘—four and a half years.’

‘And is it this that kept the suitors from
your
door,
carissima?
Or was it your subconscious desires that kept you faithful to me?’

With her hand coming up, every instinct of self-preservation had her backing away from him. ‘Don’t …’

‘Answer me.’ The command seemed almost torn from his throat. ‘I need to know.’

‘Why?’ Her love for him was an unbearable ache in her chest. She couldn’t trust him. How could she, even if he had done all this? Unconsciously her gaze lifted to the newly refurbished room. Even if he had said something he hadn’t followed up just now—before she’d gone out to her car—about her losing respect for him. ‘Why do you need to know? Why? When I know deep down you probably still think you were right about Mum and me not being good enough for your family—even if you let me think you’d changed your mind about her that night on the beach? When I know you still look down on me, and that I’ll never be good enough for you—even if you do rate me as a designer?’ she tagged on with heart-rending poignancy. ‘I know you wouldn’t even have looked my way in the beginning if you hadn’t wanted to protect Marcello—or now if it weren’t for Ben.’

‘Santo cielo!’
His hands were held outwards as he came towards her, shaking his head in a sort of bewildered disbelief. ‘What more would you have me do? Haven’t I made up for the things you’re accusing me of? Shown you by the very nature of my feeling for you that I’ll regret what I did for the rest of my days? But if my punishment is to be cast adrift and suffer eternal hell without you,
cara,
then I’ll have to take it as my just deserts for hurting you.’ His strong face was ravaged by an emotion so tangible she felt she was drowning in the depths of
his pain. ‘Know only that I love you,
carissima,
and that I’m eternally sorry for what I did to Chelsea. I can’t make it up to her—or Marcello—but if you’ll just give me the chance all I want to do is spend the rest of my life making her daughter happy.’

She couldn’t believe he was saying this. That he was actually laying all his cards on the table with such soul-baring contrition.

‘And as for you not being good enough for me,
amore,
you’re twice the person I’ll ever be. You’re loving and generous and amusing, and my heart wanted you even when my head was being too stubborn and pompous to admit it. When you were innocent and naïve and running around outside, cutting your feet like a little waif because you didn’t have the sense to keep your shoes on.’ His smile indulged her as his hand cupped her face, warm and tender and strong. ‘And I took that away from you.’ He was stroking her hair, his voice self-denigrating, and the arm circling her waist was meeting no resistance now. ‘Even though you were pretending to be like all the other women I always managed to get myself involved with—sophisticated, without a thought in their heads other than which dinner party they would be attending next, or whether they were wearing the right clothes and make-up to be seen in public—you weren’t like them at all. And I was experienced enough to have known better—I should have realised.’

‘Maybe I was just too good an actress,’ she murmured regretfully, ashamed of the part she had played with him five years ago, the web of deception she’d woven around herself to try and win his love.

‘Maybe.’ He laughed softly, running a finger down the curve of her jaw, taking in her softly tousled hair, the striking flecks in her beautiful green eyes, that oh, so kissable mouth, as though he had never really looked at her before. ‘I’m glad you were—otherwise we probably wouldn’t have our son, would we?’

‘You really mean that? You’re actually glad that it happened?’

His dark eyes were incredulous. ‘Are you kidding? More than you’ll ever know. I love you,
carissima.
Why do you think I kept asking you to marry me?’

She couldn’t think straight. The only thing spinning round and round in her head was that this wonderful man she loved actually loved
her!

‘But I thought—’

‘You thought what?’

‘That you only wanted to marry me because of Ben. That you—’

‘It seems you’ve spent too much time thinking instead of looking. Why do you think I went to the lengths I did to get you here in the first place? OK, perhaps I didn’t realise then how much you meant to me, that this feeling I had for you was more than just desire. You had found your way under my skin far more deeply than I wanted to admit, and I wanted you. But I wanted to make you pay for my wanting you, and only found myself getting in deeper and deeper. I was insanely jealous when I thought you were in a relationship with someone else. When I discovered that you had a son—and that he was mine.’

He was shaking his head, the loss he felt because of the years he’d missed out of Ben’s little life sending shafts of love and guilt through Riva in equal measure.

‘I wanted you to know. Believe me I did,’ she stressed, regretting every minute that she had kept the two of them apart. ‘And I especially didn’t want to deprive my little boy of his father.’

‘Then why didn’t you come to me?’ he breathed, his anguish palpable. ‘Oh, I know what I said, but you surely must have realised that I wouldn’t have turned you away?’

‘How could I know?’ she murmured sadly. ‘I’d given my heart to you, but you were so cold and so superior that I could only guess at how you would have reacted if I’d written and
told you I was pregnant—especially after what you said about it all being a plan to trap you.’ The groan that came from deep within him expressed total disgust with himself. ‘On top of that, I hadn’t exactly been too forthcoming with the truth.’

‘The way I was in those days, I can understand why.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘You had it tough, and the least I could have done was try to understand. But to keep something so precious as your virginity from me … and then to sacrifice it to a man who didn’t show you the consideration he would certainly have shown if he’d known …’ His breath shuddered through him from the depth of his remorse. ‘You should have told me,’ he concluded deeply.

‘That I’d never slept with anyone before? That you were the first man I’d ever wanted in that way? You were so experienced and so scary, and I was so in love with you, I was afraid you’d dump me if you found out how green I really was. After we … did it …’ even now she still felt absurdly embarrassed talking about it with him ‘… I couldn’t bear you looking at me so angrily, as though I was stupid and thoroughly irresponsible. I know I was, but it hurt so much knowing you thought it. That’s why I pretended to be on the pill.’

He caught her tenderly to him. ‘Oh,
carissima.’
It was an agonised groan into the wildfire of her hair. ‘I have a lot to make up for, and I want to start doing it as of now. I won’t put any pressure on you to do anything you don’t want to do, but do you think that one day you could find it in your heart to forgive me? To accept me as I am now and try to love me again as you did before? Or is that expecting too much of you,
amore
? If you say it is, then it will be no more than I deserve.’

His words triggered the memory of Eloise asking her if she was still punishing him. And she realised that subconsciously she had been—that one of the reasons for not giving herself to him so completely—as she so dearly longed to do—was because she felt she’d be betraying Chelsea. And yet in not doing so she’d been punishing herself as well.

‘I do still love you,’ she whispered, standing on tiptoe to draw his dark head down to her. ‘Even when I thought I hated you, I think something inside me never actually stopped.’

His mouth moved tenderly over hers, and then more insistently as her lips parted beneath his in an urgent and mutually demanding kiss. For the first time, she thought, she was offering herself to him as an equal, as a loving partner, and her heart seemed to take flight as he pressed her closer to him while their bodies moved sinuously against each other’s for the ultimate fulfilment their love demanded.

It seemed like an age before Damiano reluctantly forced himself to break off their kiss.

‘As much as I’d like to make love to you—here and now—Eloise will be back at any moment. But I promise you, the instant the party’s over it’s going to be a long time before I let you out of my bed again. Your flat’s rather small, so I’m afraid,
carissima,
that until you can get your design skills working again on every room in a boarded-up mansion, it will have to be my apartment in town.’

Riva frowned, searching his face until, seeing the amused satisfaction curling his lips, she darted a glance towards the patio doors.

Through the thick summer foliage she could just make out the old house, standing quietly serene in the afternoon sunlight.