Czytaj książkę: «A Passionate Reunion In Fiji»

CHAPTER ONE

LIVIA BRIATORE CLIMBED the metal steps to the sleek jet’s cabin, her heart hammering so hard she felt the vibrations in the tips of her hair. The sun was setting, the growing darkness perfectly matching the darkness that had enveloped her these recent months.

The flight crew, the same crew from when she’d first boarded this plane over two years ago, greeted her warmly but with questions ringing from their eyes.

Livia responded with a smile but the effort was such the muscles of her mouth protested. She didn’t think she’d smiled once these past four months.

Sick dread swirled in her stomach. Clamping her teeth together, she straightened her spine and raised her chin, then stepped into the luxurious cabin where she was destined to spend the next twenty-six hours flying to Fiji.

Immediately her senses were assailed by the familiar smell of expensive upholstery mingled with the musky yet citrusy scent of the man on the plush leather seat, a laptop open before him.

She almost doubled over with the strength of the pain that punched through her stomach.

The first time Livia had stepped on this plane her heart had pounded with excitement and anticipation. Her body had run amok with brand-new feelings.

That first time in this plane, taking off from this very same airport in Rome, she had been filled with more happiness than she had known existed. The man whose attention was currently fixed on his laptop had hardly been able to wait for take-off before dragging her into the bedroom to make love to her.

All that was left of the flame of the passion that had seen them married within a month of meeting was ashes.

She blinked the painful memories away and forced her leaden legs forward.

She’d made a promise and she would keep it, however much it hurt.

The plane had four luxury window seats facing each other with the aisle between them. Massimo had raised his partition and when she took the seat diagonal to his, all she could see of him were his shoes. They were as buffed and polished as they always had been, a quirk she had thought adorable. Her husband was the least vain man she had ever met but he always took pride in his footwear.

She fastened her seat belt then laced her fingers tightly together to stop herself giving in to the need to bite her nails. She’d had an expensive gel treatment done on them the day before, masking that they were all bitten to the quick. She didn’t want Massimo to see them like that. She couldn’t bear for him to look at her and see the signs of her broken heart.

Livia had patched her heart back up. She’d licked her wounds and stitched herself back together. That was the only good thing about her childhood. It had taught her how to survive.

She would survive the next four days too. Four days and then she need never see him again.

The captain’s voice came over the tannoy system, informing them they were cleared to take off. His words brought Massimo to life. The partition acting as a barrier came down as he closed his laptop and stored it away, then fastened his seat belt. Not once did he look at her but Livia was aware of every movement he made. Her heart bloomed to see the muscles of his tall, lean body flex beneath the expensive navy shirt with the sleeves carelessly rolled up, the buttons around his strong neck undone. No doubt he’d ripped the tie he would have worn to the conference from his neck the moment he’d left the venue. A maverick even by usual standards, Massimo conformed to rules only when he judged it necessary. She supposed the engineering conference in London he’d been guest of honour at had been an occasion he’d decided was worthy of bothering with an actual suit.

Livia only knew he’d been in London because his PA had casually mentioned it in her email when they’d been making the arrangements for today.

It wasn’t until the plane taxied down the runway that the soulful caramel eyes she had once stared into with wonder finally met her gaze. It was the briefest of glances before he turned his attention to the window beside his head but it was enough for Livia’s stomach to flip over and her throat to tighten.

Massimo’s face was one she’d been familiar with long before they’d met. Employed as his grandfather’s private nurse, she’d stared at the large Briatore family portrait that had hung in his grandfather’s living room too many times to count. Her gaze had always been drawn to the only member whose smile appeared forced. It was a beautiful face. Slightly long with high cheekbones, a strong Roman nose and a wide firm mouth, it was a chameleon of a face, fitting for a construction worker, a banker or a poet. That it belonged to one of the richest self-made billionaires in the world was irrelevant. She would have been drawn to that face no matter who he was.

Seeing him in the flesh for the first time, in the church his sister was getting married in, had been like having all the oxygen sucked out of her.

The first time she’d seen him smile for real her insides had melted as if she’d been injected with liquid sunshine. She had brought that smile out in him. She couldn’t even remember what she’d said, only that after hours of sidelong glances at each other throughout the wedding ceremony and the official photographs, she’d gone to the bar of the hotel the reception was being held in and suddenly the air around her had become electrified. She’d known before even turning her head that he’d come to stand beside her. Her tongue, usually so razor sharp, had tied itself in knots. Whatever she’d said in those first awkward moments had evoked that smile and in that instant all the awkwardness disappeared and it was as if they had known each other for ever.

And now he couldn’t even bring himself to look at her.

She had no idea how they were going to get through a weekend with his family, celebrating his grandfather’s ninetieth birthday, pretending to still be together.

Massimo watched an illuminated Rome disappear beneath the clouds and tried to clear the hot cloud that was the mess in his head.

When he’d agreed to speak at the engineering conference in London, it had made sense to fly to Rome afterwards and collect Livia en route. It had been logical.

He’d assumed that after four months apart, being with her again would be no big deal. He hadn’t missed her in the slightest. Not that there had been time to miss her with all the hours he’d been putting in. Without the burden of a hot-tempered wife demanding his attention, he’d been able to devote himself to his multiple businesses just as he had before she’d collided into his life and torn it inside out. The day she’d left, he’d bought himself the bed for his office which the mere suggestion of had so angered her. He’d slept in it most nights since. It was far more comfortable than the blanket on the sofa he’d used the nights he’d worked late and decided it wasn’t worth driving home.

He hadn’t anticipated that his blood would become hot and sticky and his hands clammy just to land in his home city and be under the same sky as her again.

And now that she was here, in the cabin of his plane, every cell in his body, dormant all this time apart, had awoken.

He could curse his logical mind. Why hadn’t he insisted she fly to Los Angeles, where he was scheduled to refuel, and board his plane there? He couldn’t have her fly all the way to Fiji separately from him—that would defeat the whole purpose of her being there—but he could have engineered things so they only had to spend a minimal amount of time on his plane together, not the full twenty-six hours it would take to travel to the other side of the world.

For the return journey he would fly with her to Australia and charter a plane to fly her back to Italy.

He’d listed all the excuses he could have made to avoid bringing her with him but it had all boiled down to one thing. This was for his grandfather, Jimmy Seibua. His terminally ill grandfather, who’d taken a cruise from Rome to Fiji with his family and an army of medical personnel in attendance and had arrived on the island three days ago. This weekend was all that had been keeping his grandfather alive, this one last visit to the homeland he’d left as a twenty-two-year-old the spark giving him the fight needed to beat the odds. Jimmy would celebrate his ninetieth birthday on the Fijian island of his birth, now owned by Massimo, with the family he loved. His grandfather thought of Livia as part of his family. He loved her as a granddaughter. His only regret at Massimo marrying her was that it meant he lost the private nurse who had tended to him with such care during his first battle with cancer.

And, whatever his own feelings towards his estranged wife, Massimo knew Livia loved Jimmy too.

‘Are you going to spend the entire flight ignoring me?’

Massimo clenched his jaw as Livia’s direct husky tones penetrated his senses, speaking their native Italian.

That was the thing with his wife. She was always direct. If she wasn’t happy about something she made damned sure you knew about it. For a long time the object of her unhappiness had been Massimo. Her declaration that she was leaving him had come as no surprise, only relief. Marriage to Livia had gone from being passionate and invigorating to being like a war zone. And she wondered why he’d spent so much time at work? The nights they had spent together those last few months had been with her cold back firmly turned to him. She’d even started wearing nightshirts.

He swallowed back the lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat and finally allowed his gaze to fall on her properly.

The lump he’d tried to shift grew but he opened his mouth and dragged the words through it. ‘You’ve had your hair cut.’

Her beautiful thick, dark chestnut hair, which had fallen like a sheet down to her lower back, now fell in layers to rest on her shoulders in loose curls. It was lighter too, streaks of honey blonde carefully blending with her natural colour. Livia was not the most beautiful woman in the world but to his eyes she was stunning. It was the whole package. A sexy firecracker with a dirty laugh. He’d heard that laugh echo through the walls of the church while they’d waited for his sister, the bride, to arrive and when he’d spotted the woman behind it he’d felt the fabric of his existence shift. He’d grabbed the first available opportunity to speak to her and had been blown away to discover she had a thirsty, inquisitive mind. He’d been smitten. In Livia he’d found the woman he’d never known he’d been searching for. Or so he’d thought.

Her dark brown eyes, always so expressive, widened before a choked laugh flew from her mouth. ‘That’s all you can think to say?’

She didn’t wait for a response; unbuckling her seat belt and springing to her feet.

She’d lost weight, he noted hazily.

Her kissable plump lips were tight as she stalked past him, the bathroom door closing sharply a moment later.

Massimo rubbed his jaw and struggled to get air into his closed lungs.

He hadn’t expected this to be easy but it was a thousand times harder than he’d envisaged.

Livia sat on the closed toilet seat and hugged her arms across her chest, willing the threatening tears back. She hadn’t expected this tumult of emotions to engulf her or for the ache in her chest to hurt so much.

She had shed enough tears for this man, so many she’d thought herself all cried out.

Massimo had never loved her. That was the truth she needed to keep reminding herself of.

But she had loved him. Truly, madly, deeply.

And in return he’d broken her.

The worst of it was he had no idea. For all his high intelligence, her husband had the emotional depth of an earthworm. She’d just been too blind to see it.

She closed her eyes and took three long inhalations.

There was no point in driving herself crazy with her thoughts. She had loved him once and while echoes of that love still beat in her heart they weren’t real. She didn’t love him any more. She was only there to honour the promise she’d made to him the day he’d let her go without a solitary word of fight to make her stay.

He’d wanted her gone. He’d been relieved. She’d seen it in his eyes.

Three more deep breaths and she got back to her feet and flushed the unused toilet.

She was Livia Briatore, formerly Livia Esposito, daughter of Pietro Esposito, Don Fortunato’s most trusted clan member and henchman until her father’s gangland murder when she’d been only eight. She’d been raised in the Secondigliano surrounded by drugs and brutal violence and she’d learned from an early age to show no fear. To show nothing.

Escaping Naples to study nursing in Rome had been like learning to breathe. Dropping her guard had not been easy—constantly checking over her shoulder when she walked a street was a habit it had taken many years to break—but she had forged a new life for herself and the joy it had given her had been worth the anxiety that had gnawed at her to be separated from her siblings. Life had gone from being a constant knot in her belly to being an adventure. She’d learned to laugh. With Massimo she had learned to love.

But her old protective barrier had never fully gone. It had sat patiently inside her waiting to be slipped back on.

To get through the next four days she needed that barrier. She needed to keep her guard up, not as protection against Massimo but as protection against her own foolish heart.

She took her seat and was not surprised to find Massimo working again on his laptop.

This time he raised his eyes from the screen to look at her. ‘I’ve ordered us coffee. Did you want anything to eat?’

‘I’ve eaten,’ she answered with strained politeness, not adding that all she’d eaten that day had been half a slice of toast. Her stomach had been too tight and cramped to manage anything else. The countdown to seeing Massimo again had wrecked the little equilibrium she’d regained for herself.

It was hardly surprising that there was an awkwardness between them but they had a long flight ahead and she didn’t want to spend it in uncomfortable silence. ‘How have you been?’

He pulled a face and turned his attention back to his laptop. ‘Busy.’

She dug her fake nails into her thighs. How she hated that word. It was the word he’d always used to justify never being there. ‘Are you too busy to stop working for five minutes and talk?’

‘I have data to interpret and an analysis to send.’

Two years ago he would have explained both the data and analysis to her, assuming rightly that she would find it interesting. The truth was she had found everything about Massimo interesting. Enthralling. The workings of his brain had never failed to astonish her. How could they not? This was the man who’d used his downtime from his computer engineering degree to create a web-based platform game that had taken the world by storm and which he’d sold upon his graduation for two hundred million US dollars. That money had been the linchpin for his move to America, where he’d formed his company, Briatore Technologies, whilst simultaneously studying for a PhD in energy physics, followed by a second PhD in applied physics and material sciences. His company, of which he was still the sole owner, now employed thousands worldwide, creating environmentally friendly solutions for many of the world’s greatest carbon-related threats. He was on a one-man mission to save the planet one invention at a time. That he’d earned himself a fortune in the process was almost incidental. Only a month ago he’d been named in the top thirty of the world’s most powerful people and in the top fifty of the world’s richest.

It would have been so easy for him to make her feel stupid but he never had. Anything she didn’t understand—which when it came to his work was most things—he would explain patiently but never patronisingly, his face lighting up when she grasped the finer details of something, like how a lithium ion battery worked and what carbon capture meant on a practical level.

She had been so thrilled that this man, clever, rich, successful and with a face and body to make the gods envious, had been as seemingly enthralled with her as she had been with him that she’d been blind to his emotional failings. Once the first flush of lust had worn off he’d retreated into the all-consuming world he’d created for himself, hiding himself away from the woman he’d married.

She wished she knew what she’d done to make him back away from her but every time she’d tried to get him to open up, the further into his shell he’d retreated.

The silence, filled intermittently by the sounds of Massimo tapping on the laptop’s keyboard, grew more oppressive.

She watched him work. The familiar furrow of concentration was etched on his brow. How could he tune her out so effectively?

But as she watched him she noticed subtle changes. Flecks of white around the temples of his thick black hair that had never been there before. The full beard, as if he’d given up the bother of shaving altogether. Dark rings around his eyes as if he’d given up sleep along with shaving. Not that he had ever slept much. His brain was too busy for sleep.

Livia swallowed back the pang that had crept through her. Massimo was thirty-six years old; old enough to not look after himself if that was what he wanted.

He reached absently for the strong black coffee on the desk beside his laptop and took a large sip. His attention did not stray from the screen before him. He tapped something else onto the keyboard. The sound was akin to nails being dragged down a chalkboard.

Suddenly she could bear it no more. Jumping back to her feet, she took the three steps to him and slammed his laptop lid down.