The Truth Behind his Touch (9 page)

Caroline was on the sailboat before she really realised what had happened. One minute she was laughing, enjoying his silly remarks with the sun on her face and the breeze
running its balmy fingers through her hair and gradually undoing her loose plait—the next minute, terra firma was no longer beneath her feet and the swaying of the boat was forcibly reminding her of everything she feared about being out at sea, or in this case out on the lake.

Did he even know how to handle this thing? Wasn’t he supposed to have had a little pep talk from the guys in charge of the rentals—a refresher course in how to make sure this insignificant piece of plywood with a bit of cloth didn’t blow over when they were in the middle of the lake?

Giancarlo saw her stricken face, the panicked way she looked over her shoulder at the safety of a shoreline from which they were drifting.

He reacted on pure gut impulse.

He kissed her. He curled his long fingers into her tangle of dark hair and with one hand pulled her towards him. The taste of her full lips was like nectar. He felt her soft, lush body curve into him, felt her full breasts squash softly against his chest. He had taken her utterly by surprise and there was no resistance as the kiss grew deeper and more intimately exploring, tasting every part of her sweet mouth. God, he wanted to do more! His arousal was fast and hard and his fabled self-control disappeared so quickly that he was at the mercy of his senses for the first time in his life.

He wanted to strip off her shirt, tear off her bra, which wouldn’t be one of those lacy slips of nothing the women he dated wore but something plainly, resolutely and impossibly sexy. He wanted to lose himself in her generous breasts until he stopped thinking altogether.

Caroline was in the grip of something so intensely powerful that she could barely breathe.

She had never felt like this in her life before. She could feel her body melting, could feel her nipples tightening and
straining against her bra, knew that she was hot and wet between her legs.

Her body was behaving in a way it had never behaved before and it thrilled and terrified her at the same time.

When he eventually broke free, she literally felt lost.

‘You kissed me,’ she breathed, still clutching him by the shirt and looking up at him with huge, searching eyes. She wanted to know
why
. She knew why
she
had responded! Underneath her disapproval for everything he had done and said, there was a strong, irresistible current of pure physical attraction. She had been swept along by it and nothing she had ever experienced in her life before had prepared her for its ferocity. Lust was just something she had read about. Now she knew, firsthand, how powerful it could be. Was he feeling the same thing? Did he want to carry on kissing her as much as she wanted him to?

She gradually became aware of their surroundings and of the fact that, with one hand, he had expertly guided the small sailboat away from shore and out into the open lake. They had become one of the small bright toys she had glimpsed from land.

‘You kissed me. Was that to distract me from the fact that we were heading away from land?’

Hell, how did
he
know? He just knew that he had been blown away, had lost all shreds of self-control. It was not something of which he was proud, nor could he understand it. Rallying quickly, he recovered his shattered equilibrium and took a couple of steps back, but then had to look away briefly because her flushed cheeks and parted mouth were continuing to play havoc with his libido.

‘It worked, didn’t it?’ He nodded towards the shore, still not trusting himself to look at her properly. ‘You’re on the water now and, face it, you’re no longer scared.’

C
AROLINE
remained positioned in the centre of the small boat for the next hour. She made sure not to look out to the water, which made her instantly conjure up drowning scenarios in her head. Instead, she looked at Giancarlo. It was blissfully easy to devote all her attention to him. He might not have sailed for a long time but whatever he had learnt as a boy had returned to him with ease.

‘It’s like riding a bike,’ he explained, doing something clever with the rudder. ‘Once learnt, never forgotten.’

Caroline found herself staring at his muscular brown legs, sprinkled with dark hair. Having brought just enough clothes to cover a one-night stay, he had, he had admitted when asked, pulled strings and arranged for one of the local shops to open up early for him. At eight that morning, he had taken his car to the nearest small town and bought himself a collection of everyday wear. The khaki shorts and loose-fitting shirt, virtually unbuttoned all the way down, were part of that wardrobe and they offered her an incredible view of his highly toned body. Every time he moved, she could see the ripple of his muscles.

Now he was explaining to her how he had managed to acquire his expertise in a boat. He had always been drawn to the water. He had had his first sailing lesson at the age of five and by the age of ten had been adept enough to sail
on his own, although he had not been allowed. By the time he had left the lake for good, he could have crewed his own sailboat, had he been of legal age.

Caroline nodded, murmured and thought about
that kiss
. She had been kissed before but never like that. Neither of the two boyfriends she’d had had ever made her feel as though the ground was spinning and freewheeling under her feet; neither had ever made her feel as if the rules of time and space had altered, throwing her into a wildly different dimension. With an eye for detail she never knew she possessed, she marvelled at how a face so coldly, exquisitely beautiful could inspire such craven weakness deep inside her when she had never previously been drawn to men because of how they looked. She wondered at the way she had fallen headlong into that kiss, never wanting it to stop when she barely liked the guy she had been kissing.

‘Hello? Calling Planet Earth …’

‘Huh?’ Caroline blinked and realised that the sailboat was now practically at a standstill. The sound of the water lapping gently against the sides was mesmeric.

‘If you stay in that position any longer, your joints will seize up,’ Giancarlo informed her drily. ‘Stand up. Walk about.’

‘What if I topple the boat over and fall in?’

‘Then I’ll rescue you. But you’ll be easier to rescue if you stripped off to your swimsuit. You
are
wearing a swimsuit underneath those clothes, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am!’

‘Then, off you go.’ To show the way, he dispensed with his shirt, which was damp from his exertions, and laid it flat to dry.

Caroline felt her breath catch painfully in her throat as all her misbehaving senses went into immediate overdrive. Her lips felt swollen and her breasts were tender. She wanted to
tell him to look away but knew that that would have been childish. She gave herself a stern little lecture—how many times had she worn this swimsuit? Hundreds! In summer, she would often go down to the beach with her friends. She never went in the water but she lazed and tanned and had never, not once, felt remotely self-conscious.

With a mental shrug, she quickly peeled off her clothes, folding them neatly and accepting the soft towel which Giancarlo had packed in a waterproof bag, then she stood up and took a few tentative steps towards the side of the boat. In truth, she felt much, much calmer than when she had first stepped on the small vessel. There were far too many other things on her mind to focus on her fears.

Watching her, Giancarlo felt a sudden, unexpected rush of pure sexual awareness. She was staring out to sea, her profile to him, offering him a view of the most voluptuous body he had ever laid eyes on, even though her one-piece black swimsuit was the last word in old-fashioned and strove to conceal as much as possible. She had the perfect hourglass figure that would drive most men mad. With the breeze making a nonsense of her plait, she had finally unravelled it and her hair fell in curls almost to her waist. He found that his breathing had become shallow, and his arousal was so prominent and painful that he inhaled sharply and began busying himself with the other towel which he had packed.

A youth spent on water had primed him for certain necessities: towels, drinks, something to snack on and, of course, sun-tan lotion.

He had taken up a safer position, sitting on his towel, when she turned to him with a little frown. He was tempted to tell her to cover herself up as he looked through half-closed eyes at her luscious breasts, which not even her sensible swimsuit could downplay.

‘I never even asked,’ Caroline said abruptly. ‘Are you married?’ Proud of herself for having ventured into the unknown and terrifying realms of standing at the side of the boat, she now made her way to where he was sitting and spread her towel alongside his to sit.

‘Do I look like a married man?’

Caroline considered her father. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘And I know that you’re not wearing a wedding ring, but lots of married men don’t like jewellery of any kind. My dad doesn’t.’

‘Not married. No intention of ever getting married. You’re staring at me as though I’ve just announced a ban on Christmas Day. Have I shocked you?’

‘I just don’t understand how you can be so certain of something.’

Giancarlo remained silent for such a long time that she wondered whether he was going to answer. He was now lying down on the towel, his hands folded behind his head, a brooding, dangerous Adonis in repose.

‘I don’t talk about my private life.’

‘I’m not asking you to bare your soul. I was just curious.’ She hitched her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. ‘You’re so … uptight.’

‘Me—
uptight
?’ Giancarlo looked at her with incredulity.

‘It’s as though you’re scared of ever really letting go.’

‘Scared?
Uptight?
‘

‘I don’t mean to be offensive.’

‘I never knew I had such a boundless capacity for patience,’ Giancarlo confessed in a staggered voice. ‘Do you ever think before you speak?’

‘I wouldn’t have said those things if you had just answered my question but it doesn’t matter now.’

Giancarlo sighed heavily and raked his fingers through
his hair in sheer frustration as Caroline stubbornly lay down, closed her eyes and enjoyed the sunshine.

‘I’ve seen firsthand how unreliable the institution of marriage is,’ he admitted gruffly. ‘And I’m not just talking about the wonderful example set by my parents. The statistics prove conclusively that only an idiot would fall for that fairy-tale nonsense.’

Caroline opened her eyes, propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him with disbelief.

‘I’m one of those so-called idiots.’

‘Now, I wonder why I’m not entirely surprised?’

‘What right do you have to say that?’

Giancarlo held both hands up in surrender. ‘I don’t want to get into an argument with you, Caroline. The weather’s glorious, I haven’t been out on a sailboat for the longest while. In fact, this is pretty much the first unscheduled vacation I’ve had in years. I don’t want to spoil it.’ He waited for a few seconds and then raised his eyebrows with amusement. ‘You mean you aren’t going to argue with me?’ He shot her a crooked grin that made her go bright red.

‘I hate arguing.’

‘You could have fooled me.’

But he was still grinning lazily at her. She felt all hot and flustered just looking at him, although she couldn’t drag her eyes away. It was impossibly still out here, with just the sound of gentle water and the far-away laughter of people on the nearest sailboat, which was still a good distance away. Suddenly, and for no reason, Caroline felt as though they were a million miles from civilisation, caged in their own intensely private moment. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to be kissed by him again, and that decadent yearning was so shocking that her mouth fell half-open and she found that she was holding her breath.

‘Okay, but you have to admit that you give me lots to argue about.’

‘I absolutely have to admit that, do I?’

The soft, teasing amusement in his voice made her blush even harder. Suddenly it seemed very important that she remind herself of all the various reasons she had for disliking Giancarlo. She loathed arguing and had never been very good at it, but right now arguing seemed the safest solution to the slow, burning, treacly feeling threatening to send her mind and body off on some weird, scary tangent.

‘So, what about girlfriends?’ she threw recklessly at him.

‘What about
girlfriends
?’ Giancarlo couldn’t quite believe that she was continuing a conversation which he had deemed to be already closed. She had propped herself up on one elbow so that she was now lying on her side, like a figure from some kind of crazily erotic masterpiece. The most tantalizing thing about her was that he was absolutely convinced that she had no idea of her sensational pulling power.

‘Well, I mean, is there someone special in your life at the moment?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I … I just don’t want to talk about Alberto …’ Caroline clutched at that explanation. In truth, the murky business between Giancarlo and his father seemed a very distant problem as they bobbed on the sailboat, surrounded by the azure blue of the placid lake.

‘And nosing where you don’t belong is the next best thing?’ He should have been outraged at the cavalier way with which she was overstepping his boundaries, but he didn’t appear to be. He shrugged. ‘No. There’s no one special in my life, as you call it, at the moment. The last special woman in my life was two months ago.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Compliant and undemanding for the first two months. Less so until I called it a day two months later. It happens.’

‘I guess most women want more than just a casual fling. Most women like to imagine that things are going to go somewhere after a while.’

‘I know. It’s a critical mistake.’ Giancarlo never made it a habit to enquire about women’s pasts. The present was all that interested him. The past was another country, the future a place in which the less interest shown, the better.

Breaking all his own self-imposed restrictions, he asked, with idle curiosity, ‘And what about you? Now that we’ve decided to shelve our arguments over Alberto for a while, you never told me how it is that someone of your age could be tempted to while away an indefinite amount of time in the middle of nowhere with only an old man for company. And forget all that nonsense about enjoying walks in the garden and burying yourself in old books. Did you come to Italy because you were running away from something?’

‘Running away from what?’ Caroline asked in genuine bewilderment.

‘Who knows? Maybe the country idyll proved too much, maybe you got involved with someone who didn’t quite fit the image, was that it? Was there some guy lurking in paradise who broke your heart? Was that why you escaped to Italy? Why you’re content to hide away in a big, decaying villa? Makes sense. Only child … lots of expectations there … doting parents. Did you decide to rebel? Find yourself the wrong type of man?’

‘That’s crazy.’ She flushed and looked away from those too-penetrating, fabulous bitter-chocolate eyes.

‘Is it? Why am I getting a different impression here?’

‘I didn’t get involved with the wrong type of guy.’ Caroline scoffed nervously. ‘I’m not attracted to … This is a silly conversation.’

‘Okay, maybe you weren’t escaping an ill-judged, torrid affair with a married man, but what then? Were the chickens and the sheep and the village-hall dances every Friday night all a little too much?’

Caroline looked at him resentfully from under her lashes and then hurriedly looked away. How had he managed to turn this conversation on its head?

‘Well?’ Giancarlo asked softly, intrigued. ‘You can’t make the rules to only suit yourself. Two can play at this little game of going where you don’t belong …’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! I
may
have become just a little bored, but so what?’ She fidgeted with the edge of the towel and glared at him, because she felt like a traitor to her parents with that admission, and it was
his
fault. ‘Italy seemed like a brilliant idea,’ she admitted, sliding a sideways look at him, realising that he wasn’t smirking as she might have expected. ‘London was just too expensive. You need to have a well-paid job to go there and actually be able to afford somewhere to rent, and I didn’t want to go to any of the other big cities. When Dad suggested that he get in touch with Alberto, that brushing up on my Italian would be a helpful addition to my CV, I guess I jumped at the chance. And, once I got here, Alberto and I just seemed to click.’

‘So why the guilty look when I asked?’

‘I think Mum and Dad always expected that I’d stay in the country, live the rural idyll just round the corner from them, maybe get married to one of the local lads …’

‘They said so?’

‘No, but …’

‘They would have wanted you to fly the nest.’

‘They wouldn’t. We’re very close.’

‘If they wanted to keep you tied to them, they would never have suggested a move as dramatic as Italy,’ Giancarlo
told her drily. ‘Trust me, they aren’t fools. This would have been their gentle way of helping you to find your own space. Shame, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was really beginning to warm to the idea of the unsuitable lover.’

Caroline’s breath caught sharply in her throat because she was registering how close they were to one another, and lying on her side, she felt even more vulnerable to his watchful dark eyes. Conscious of her every movement, she awkwardly sat up and half-wrapped the towel over her legs.

‘I … I’m not attracted to unsuitable men,’ she croaked, because he appeared to be waiting for a reply to his murmured statement, head slightly inclined.