The Italian's Love-Child (4 page)

‘Luca!’

It was a strangled little cry. A pleading. A prayer. A need which matched his. He had thought that she might try to resist him and he was taken aback by her eagerness. With an effort he dragged his lips from the pure temptation of hers, his breathing ragged, his normal sang-froid briefly deserting him. For this was wild and sweet and instant and unexpected. Like being driven by a terrible aching hunger and stumbling upon a feast.

He captured her face between his hands, his eyes burning into her. ‘Your bed?’ he demanded. ‘Take me there—now.’

Dear Lord! Her blood was on fire—any minute now and she would go up in flames. She felt strength and weakness in equal measures, overwhelmed by a desire which banished everything other than the need to have him close to her, as close as it was possible for a man and woman to be.

But it was not right. It could not possibly be. How did he see her—as one of those women driven only
by some kind of carnal hunger? And, more importantly, how would this make her feel about herself?

With an effort she tore herself away from the temptation of his arms. ‘No. Stop it. I mean it. I can’t.’

He stilled, his eyes narrowing in question, feeling the deep, dark throb of frustration. He steadied his breathing. ‘What?’ The word came out as hard and clipped as gunfire.

‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry, Luca. I got carried away.’ His face was like stone, but she guessed she couldn’t blame him. She had behaved like the worst kind of woman—she had led him on and left him wanting, and left herself aching into the bargain.

‘You certainly did.’

‘It’s just…hopeless, isn’t it?’

He arched her a look of imperious query. ‘Hopeless?’

She shrugged her shoulders as if in a silent request that the sudden icy set of his features might melt, but she met no answering response. ‘Of course it’s hopeless—you live in Rome, I live in England.’

His laugh was sardonic. ‘I thought we were going to spend the afternoon in bed,’ he drawled. ‘I wasn’t planning to link up our diaries for all eternity!’

She stared at him. ‘How very opportunistic of you!’

‘Only a fool doesn’t seize opportunity when he is presented with it.’

And only a fool would give him house-room after a statement like that.

‘I think you’d better leave, don’t you?’ she said, in a low voice.

‘I think perhaps I had.’ The black eyes were lit now, sparking with angry fire. ‘But perhaps I could give you a word of advice for the future,
cara
.’ He drew a deep, unsteady breath. ‘Don’t you think it unwise to lead a man on to such a point if you then change your mind so abruptly? Not every man would be as accepting of it as I am.’

She stared at him incredulously. ‘What are you saying?’ she demanded. ‘That I have no right to change my mind? That “no” sometimes means “yes”?’

‘That is not what I am saying at all,’ he ground out heatedly. ‘I mean that a lot of men might have attempted to
persuade
you to change your mind.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have succeeded!’

‘Oh, really?’ The black eyes mocked her, challenged her. ‘I think you delude yourself, Eve. I think we both know that if I had continued to kiss you, then your submission would have been inevitable.’

‘Submission?’ she demanded incredulously. ‘
Submission?
Tell me, just which century do you think you’re living in?’ She stared at him furiously. ‘Words like that imply some kind of gross inequality. When I make love with a man, I don’t
submit
, and neither does he! It’s equal. It’s soft. It’s gentle—’

He gave a short laugh. ‘You make it sound like knitting a sweater!’

Her cheeks flamed as she instantly understood the implication behind his words. That it would
not
be soft and gentle with
him
, and her pulses leapt even as she steeled her heart against him. ‘Just go. Go. Please.’

‘I am going,’ he said, in a voice which was coiled like a snake with tension, though not nearly as tense
as his aching body. ‘But something like this cannot be left unfinished.’

Oh, but it could!

His eyes glittered. ‘Goodbye,
cara
,’ he said softly.

She watched him go with a terrible yearning regret, standing as motionless as a statue as she heard his footsteps echoing over the flagstones in the hall, her body stiff and tense like a statue’s—and when she heard the front door slam behind him she should have felt an overwhelming sense of relief.

So why the hell did she feel like kicking her foot very hard against the wall?

A
LTHOUGH
he wasn’t due to fly back until the following morning, Luca changed his ticket and returned to Rome early that evening and remonstrated with himself for the whole two-hour journey. What in the name of God had come over him? What had he been playing at? Coming onto her with all the finesse of some boy just out of high school, acting like some hormonally crazed adolescent.

He stared out of the window, the dull ache in his groin still nagging at him, perplexed by the intensity of need she had aroused in him.

He could have clicked his fingers and had any number of beautiful women and—far more importantly—she was most definitely
not
his type. So why her?

Because she had at first been chilly and offhand with him—studying him calmly with those intelligent grey-green eyes? Because she had answered him back? And then resisted him? Had all these combined to make Eve Peters into a woman he had never before encountered?

Unobtainable.

He was home in time to shower and change, and on impulse he took Chiara out. He hadn’t seen her in a long while and she was eager to tell him about her new film. It was late, but she agreed instantly to have dinner with him, and yet her suppressed excitement acted like a cold shower to his senses and he
began to regret the invitation the moment he had made it.

Her black hair fell like a sultry night to a waist encased in silver sequins and he thought of Eve in her paint-spattered T-shirt, and glowered at his menu. She flirted outrageously with him all night and laughed at all his jokes and gazed at him as if he were the reason that man had been invented.

The paparazzi were waiting when they left the restaurant and in the darkened light of the taxi Luca narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously.

‘Did you tell them where we were eating?’ he demanded.

She shook her head. ‘No,
caro
—I promise you!’

He didn’t believe her. Women said one thing and meant another. They plotted and they schemed to get what they wanted. She tried to drape her arms around his neck. He could smell expensive scent and he found it cloying.

Gently, he pushed her away.

‘I will drop you off at your apartment,’ he said tersely.

‘Oh,
Luca
!’ Her voice was sulky. ‘
Must
you?’

He thought of Eve. Of the melting taste of her lips and the way she had exploded into life in his arms. The cool, composed exterior masking the surprisingly hot and sensual nature which lay beneath, of which he had seen only a tantalising glimpse. He sighed as he stared out at the bright lights of night-time Rome and realised that he must have her.

Should he send flowers? Few women could resist flowers. But then her job probably provided her with plenty of bouquets, so that they would be nothing out of the ordinary.

No, definitely not flowers.

‘Goodnight, Chiara,’ he said gently.

The car drew to a halt, and the actress flounced out.

‘Take me home—and quickly!’ he shot out, and the car pulled away again.

Eve tried not to think about Luca at all, though it took a bit of effort.

She never underestimated the cruelly dissecting power of the camera for it picked up on just about everything and then magnified it tenfold. A kilo gained made you look like a candidate for the fat camp and a spot seemed to dominate your face like a planet. And not just the external stuff, either. Doubt and insecurities became glaringly obvious under the lens. If you lost your nerve and your confidence, the audience stopped believing in you and started switching off, and once that happened, you didn’t have a job for long.

So she tried to put Luca Cardelli out of her mind by analysing it and putting it into context. It wasn’t as if it was anything major, after all. She had simply met a man she had once been mad about, and she was mad about him still. It just happened that he was living in another country, was the wrong kind of man to fall for, and had made a pass at her, clearly expecting her to fall into bed with him at the drop of a hat.

Thank heavens she hadn’t.

She decided that she needed to get out more. Meet more people. Spread her wings a little.

She signed up for an afternoon course in French and decided that the next time the crew went out for
lunch on Friday, she would join them. And she would take Kesi out for the day on Sunday.

But when she arrived home from work a few days later there was a postcard sitting on the mat, its glossy colour photo providing welcome relief in between all the boring bills and circulars. She liked postcards, though people never seemed to send them much any more—she guessed that was the legacy of travel becoming so much more accessible and unremarkable, and the advent of the email, of course. But there was a magic about postcards which electronic stuff somehow lacked.

She sucked in a sharp, instinctive breath of excitement when she saw where the postcard was from.

Roma.

The photo was unusual and bizarre—it showed a sculpture of two boys and a rather threatening and grotesque animal.

She didn’t need to turn it over to know who it was from; she knew only one person who was there. And she didn’t need to see his name signed at the bottom to recognise the writing, because somehow she had guessed that he would write like that.

Like a schoolgirl with a crush, she let her gaze drift longingly over his handwriting, like someone discovering a lover’s body for the first time. In black ink, it curved sensuously across the card, like a snake.

It said: ‘I expect you know the cherished legend that Rome was founded by Romulus—here is a photo of him with his twin brother Remus, suckling on a she-wolf! Any time you’re in Rome, then please look me up. It was good to see you. Luca.’

And his phone number.

Eve read it and re-read it, her heart beating fast, feeling ridiculously and excessively pleased while trying to tell herself she shouldn’t. It was only a postcard, for heaven’s sake! And there was no way she would ever ring him.

But she propped the card against the kitchen window, with the backdrop of the sea behind it, and she looked at it, and smiled, because that simple and civilised communication made her able to put that whole passionate yet unsatisfactory scene out of her mind.

But Luca couldn’t get her out of his mind, though he did his level best to—that was when he wasn’t incredulously checking his phone messages.

She hadn’t rung him!

He shook his head in slight disbelief. Did she not realise the intense honour…? He frowned. No. Honour would be too strong a word, and so would privilege—but he wondered just what Miss Eve Peters would say if she realised that he
never
gave his phone number out to a woman he had only just met!

He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower, standing beneath the punishing jets of water with a grim kind of anticipation. Maybe she was playing hard to get. He smiled as he reached for the shampoo. Give her until the end of the week, and she would be bound to ring.

Eve was just setting off for her car when one of the production assistants stopped her. ‘Eve—a man rang for you.’

‘Did he say who he was?’

The production assistant assumed the expression of someone who had been dieting successfully all week, only to be offered a large cream cake minutes
before she was due to be weighed. She was getting married in a month, Eve remembered. ‘No.’

‘Oh, well—thanks, anyway. If it was important, I expect he’ll ring again.’

‘He was…’ the assistant gulped ‘…
foreign
.’

Annoyingly, Eve’s heart went pat-a-pat, then missed a beat completely. ‘Oh?’ she said, with just the right amount of studied casualness.

‘Italian, I think,’ the assistant continued. ‘He sounded absolutely
gorgeous
! All deep and accented and sexy. You know what they say about a come-to-bed voice? Well, he must have been the man who invented it! Who
is
he?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ replied Eve airily, feeling a brief pang of sympathy for the girl’s fiancé. ‘And it irritates the hell out of me, when someone doesn’t bother to leave their name!’

Which wasn’t quite true. What was irritating the hell out of her was her irrational response to the fact that it had undoubtedly been Luca. What was he doing, ringing her? Ringing her at work, too!

And would he ring again? At home? Until she reminded herself that he didn’t have her number. But she was in no doubt that someone like Luca could always get hold of a woman’s number…

It had been many years since Eve had made excuses to hang around the house, hoping that someone might call her, and she hated it almost as much as she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing it. Every time the phone rang she jumped like a startled rabbit, but it was never him.

Finally, frustrated with herself—and with
him
, though she wasn’t quite sure why—she went round
to see Kesi and ended up staying for afternoon tea. And it was predictably typical that when she arrived home the red light on her answering machine was winking at her provocatively.

With trembling fingers, she clicked the button and his deep, dark, rich Italian voice began to speak. Just like him, she thought as she listened. Deep and dark and rich.

‘Eve? I find that business brings me to London next week. How would you like to meet for dinner?’ A tinge of amusement entered the voice. ‘An early dinner, of course—leaving you plenty of time to get home for your allotted hours of sleep. Ring me.’

She was appalled to find herself replaying it four times, while silently wondering whether or not to return his call, even while, deep down, she knew with unerring certainty that she would be unable to resist.

But she left it for three days, even though the self-restraint it took nearly killed her. And when she finally got round to it, she had to field her way past a very aloof-sounding secretary who, once she had switched from Italian to perfect, seamless English, sounded very doubtful as to whether Signor Cardelli would wish to be disturbed.

Clearly Signor Cardelli would.

‘Luca?’ said Eve tentatively, wishing that she could rewind the time clock and never have dialled the wretched number.

Luca felt his body instinctively tense. So the
strega
had made him wait, had she? He couldn’t remember ever having had to wait for anything in his life.

‘Eve?’

‘Yes, it’s me! I got your message.’

‘Good.’ He waited. Now let her see how it felt.

Eve clutched the telephone tightly. Damn him! ‘About dinner.’

‘Mmm.’

She felt like slamming the phone down, and realised that might be overacting by just a tad. Did she want to have dinner with him, or not? Well, yes and no.

Luca’s eyes narrowed. Did she always make it this difficult for men? And then he remembered the way she had been in his arms. They had been so close to going up to her bedroom, and… The tension increased. ‘Would you like to have dinner with me, Eve?’ he questioned silkily.

Yet another defining moment. Her life seemed to be full of them, and Luca Cardelli always seemed to have something to do with them. Eve swallowed. Pretend you’re live on camera. Give him a briskly pleasant, take-it-or-leave-it attitude. It would be so much easier if she
could
just leave it, if the thought of not seeing him again didn’t seem as if her world would then take on a rather dull and monochrome appearance.

‘That would be lovely. When?’

She was making it sound as though she had been invited to tea with a maiden aunt!

‘I arrive on Friday evening,’ he said coolly. ‘So how about Saturday?’

She supposed that she could pretend to be busy—but what would be the point in playing games if the outcome would only make her miserable?

‘Saturday sounds good,’ she said evenly, but her heart had started racing.

‘Excellent. I’ll ring you when I’m in England.
Ciao, bella.
’

Eve found herself staring at the handset, to realise that he had hung up. Her mouth had dried with pure excitement, which quickly changed into another emotion she didn’t quite recognise and wasn’t up to analysing because there was only one thought dominating her mind right then.

Dinner on Saturday. An early dinner so that she could get back in plenty of time for the early night necessary for her early start.

But she didn’t work on Sundays. She knew that and he knew that.

Sunday was her lie-in day.