Czytaj książkę: «The Italian's Love-Child»

CHAPTER ONE

EVE saw him across the other side of the room and her world stood still. It was like watching a film, where fantasy took over and made real life fade away and it had never happened to her before.

That click. That buzz. That glance across the room which held and hung on in glorious disbelief as you met the eyes of a man and somehow knew that he was ‘the one’. But of course it was fantasy, it must be—for how on earth could you see someone for a minute or a second and know that this total stranger was the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with?

Except that this man was not a total stranger, though maybe that was fantasy, too. After all, it had been a long time.

She quickly glanced down at her drink and pretended to examine it, before risking another look, only this time he had turned away, and although her heart lurched with disappointment that he obviously didn’t share her fascination, at least it gave her the chance to study him without embarrassment.

She was almost certain he was Luca, but he was certainly Italian; he couldn’t have been anything else. Jet-dark hair framed the head he held so proudly and she drank in his perfect features as if trying to memorise them. Or remember them. The hard, intelligent black eyes, the Roman nose and an autocratic mouth which was both luscious and cruel.

He was striking and innately sexy, with a careless confidence which drew the eye and made it stay. In a room full of rich, successful men he stood out like some beautiful, exotic creature—his golden-olive skin gleaming like softly oiled silk, his body all packed, tight muscle. He looked like the kind of man who would command without even trying—an arrogant aristocrat from another age, yet a man who was essentially modern.

Eve was used to assessing people quickly, but her eyes could have lingered on him all evening. He wore his clothes with elegant assurance—a creamy shirt which hinted at a sinewed body beneath and dark, tapered trousers emphasising legs which were long and hard and muscular. He was very still, but that did not mask some indefinable quality he had, some shimmering vibrancy, which made every other man in the room fade into dull insignificance.

He had slanted his head to one side, listening to a tiny blonde creature in a sparkling dress who was chatting to him with the kind of enthusiasm which suggested that Eve wasn’t alone in feeling a gut-wrenching awareness that she was in the presence of someone out of the ordinary. But why should that surprise her? A woman would have to be made out of stone not to have reacted to that package of unmistakable, simmering sensuality.

‘Eve?’

Her reverie punctured, Eve turned her head to see her host standing beside her, holding a bottle of champagne towards her almost-empty glass. ‘Can I tempt you with another drink?’

She hadn’t been planning to stay long and she had intended her first drink to be her last, but she nodded gratefully, welcoming the diversion. ‘Thanks, Michael.’

The drink fizzed into the flute and she glanced around the room. The blinds had been left open, but with a view like that you would never want to draw them. Moonlight and starlight dipped and dazzled off the lapping water outside and the excited chatter, which had reached fever-pitch, gave all the indications of this being a very successful evening indeed.

She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to birthday parties—your wife is a very lucky woman!’

‘Ah, but not everyone likes surprises,’ he said.

Eve’s eyes strayed once more to Luca. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said slowly as her heart began to bang against her ribcage. ‘Great party, anyway.’

Michael smiled. ‘Yeah. And great you could make it. Not everyone can boast that they have a television personality at their party!’

Eve laughed. ‘Michael Gore! You’ve known me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper! You’ve seen me with grazed knees in my school uniform.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘And I hardly think that presenting the breakfast show on provincial television classifies me as anything as grand-sounding as “television personality”.’

Michael smiled back. ‘Ah, but the girl’s done good,’ he said.

Maybe the girl had, but right then she felt as vulnerable as that schoolgirl with grazed knees. And, to her horror, she realised that she had gulped most of the drink down and that Luca—if indeed it was Luca—was still listening to the animated blonde. And that the last thing she needed in her life was the complication of a charismatic, complicated kind of man who was every woman’s dream. Eve had learnt early in life that it was important to have goals, just so long as you kept them realistic.

‘And the girl needs her sleep,’ she sighed. ‘Getting up at three-thirty every morning tends to have a negative effect on your long-term energy reserves. You won’t mind if I slip away in a while, Michael?’

‘I will mind very much,’ he teased. ‘But not if your legion of fans are going to blame us for deep, dark shadows under your eyes! Go when you like—but why not come back for lunch again tomorrow, when the show’s over? There will be stacks of stuff left and Lizzy and I have hardly had a chance to talk to you all evening.’

Eve smiled. It would give her the opportunity to play with her god-daughter who had been tucked up in the Land of Nod all evening. ‘Love to,’ she murmured. ‘About twelve?’

‘See you at twelve.’ He nodded.

She was tempted to ask him what Luca was doing there, but she was not a guileless teenager now—and what could she say, even if she was being her most casual and sophisticated? Who’s the man talking to the blonde? Or, Who’s the tall, dark, handsome hunk? Or even if she plucked up courage to say, Is that Luca Cardelli, by any chance?—all those would make her sound like a simpering wannabe!

But maybe Michael had seen her eyes straying over to the dark, still figure.

‘You know Luca Cardelli, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Vaguely.’ She gave it just the right amount of consideration and kept her voice casual. ‘He was here one summer, about ten years ago, right?’

‘Right. He sailed on a big white boat,’ said Michael, and sighed. ‘Absolutely beautiful. Wonderful sailor—he put the rest of us to shame.’

Eve nodded. ‘I didn’t know he was a friend of yours?’

Michael shrugged. ‘We were mates that summer and we’ve kept in touch, though I haven’t seen him for years. But he emailed to tell me he was in London on business, and so I invited him down.’

She wondered how long he was staying, but she didn’t ask. It was none of her business and it might send out the wrong message. There would be enough women here tonight fighting to get to know him, if the body language of the blonde was anything to go by.

‘Oh, look—someone’s setting off fireworks!’ she murmured instead as in the distance the sky exploded into fountains of scarlet and blue and golden rain, and luckily Michael went to refuel someone else’s glass, giving her the opportunity to go and stand by the window and watch the display, alone with her thoughts and her memories.

Luca watched her, at the way her bottom swayed against the silky green material of her dress as she walked towards the window. People were covertly watching her and he wondered why. But he had noticed her before that, even before she had started staring at him, and then pretending not to, but then, that was nothing new.

He had grown up used to the lavish attention of women right across the age spectrum ever since he could remember. He didn’t even have to try and sometimes he wondered what it would be like if he did. The most rewarding business deals he had pulled off had been the ones he had really had to fight for—but women weren’t like business deals.

He had been born with something which attracted the opposite sex like bees to honey and, when he had reached the age of noticing women, had quickly discovered that he could have whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted and on whatever terms he wanted. Very early on, he had learned the meaning of the expression, ‘spoiled for choice’.

‘Luca!’

He narrowed his eyes. The tiny blonde was pouting. He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Mmm?’

‘You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying!’

She was right. ‘Sorry.’ He smiled, gave an expansive shrug of his broad shoulders. ‘I feel guilty. I have been monopolising you, when there are so many men here who would wish to speak to you.’

‘You’re the only man I want to talk to!’ she declared shamelessly.

‘But that is unfair,’ he responded softly. ‘Sì?’

The blonde wriggled her shoulders. ‘Oh, I just love it when you speak Italian,’ she confided.

He stared down into the widened blue eyes—deep and blue like a swimming pool and just begging him to dive in. Unconsciously, she snaked the tip of her tongue around her parted lips, so that they gleamed in invitation. It was almost too easy. She could be in his bed within the hour. At twenty-two, he would have been tempted. A decade later and he was simply jaded.

‘Will you excuse me?’ he murmured. ‘I must make a quick telephone call.’

‘To Italy?’

‘No, to New York.’

‘Gosh!’ she exclaimed, as if he had proposed communication with Mars itself.

He smiled again, his mouth quirking a touch wearily at the corners. ‘It was delightful to meet you.’

He made his escape before she asked the inevitable. How long was he staying? Would he like her to show him around? Unless she was bold enough to replicate the incredible time he had met a woman and within two minutes she had asked him to take her to bed!

The woman in green was still gazing out of the window and there was something intriguing about her stillness, the way she stood alone, part of the party and yet apart from it. Like a woman secure in her own skin. He made his way across the room and stood beside her, his eyes taking in the last rainbow spangles of the fireworks, set against the incomparable beauty of the sea.

‘Spectacular, isn’t it?’ he murmured, after a moment.

She didn’t answer straight away. Her heart was beating hard. Very hard. Funny how you could react to someone, even if you told yourself you didn’t want to. ‘Utterly,’ she agreed, but she didn’t move, didn’t turn her head to look at him.

Now he was a little intrigued. ‘You aren’t enjoying the party?’

She did turn then, for it would have been sheer rudeness to have done otherwise, mentally preparing herself for the impact up close of the dark, glittering eyes and the sensual lips and it was as devastating as she remembered, maybe even more so. At seventeen you knew nothing of the world, nor of men—you thought that men like Luca Cardelli might exist in droves. It took a long time to realise that they didn’t, and that maybe that was a blessing in disguise. ‘Why on earth should you think that?’

‘You’re here all on your own,’ he murmured.

‘Not any more,’ she responded drily.

His dark eyes glittered at the unspoken challenge. ‘You want me to go away?’

‘Of course not,’ she said lightly. ‘The view is for free, for everyone to enjoy—I shouldn’t dream of claiming a monopoly on it!’

Now he was very intrigued. ‘You were staring at me, cara,’ he observed softly.

So he had noticed! But of course he had noticed—it was probably as much a part of his life as breathing itself to have women staring at him.

‘Guilty as charged! Why, has that never happened to you before?’ she challenged mockingly.

‘I don’t remember,’ he mocked back.

She opened her mouth to say something spiky in response, and then pulled herself together. He had been sweet and kind to her once, and just because a girl on the brink of womanhood hadn’t found that particularly flattering, you certainly couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault that he was so blindingly gorgeous and that she had cherished a schoolgirl crush on him which hadn’t been reciprocated. And neither was it his fault that he was still so gorgeous that a normally calm and sensible woman had started behaving like a spitting kitten. She smiled. ‘So what do you think of the Hamble?’

‘It isn’t my first visit,’ he mused.

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

He studied her. She was not his type. Tall and narrow-hipped where he liked his women curvy, and soft and small. Her face was not beautiful either, but it was interesting. A strong face—with its intelligent grey-green eyes and a determined mouth and soft shadows cast by her high cheekbones.

It was difficult to tell what colour her hair was, and whether its colour was natural, since she had caught it back severely from her face, and tied it so that it fell into a soft, silken coil on the base of her long neck. Her dress was almost severe too, a simple sheath of green silk which fell to her knees, showing something of the brown toned legs beneath. The only truly decorous thing about her was a pair of sparkly, sequinned sandals which showed toenails painted a surprisingly flirtatious pink, which matched her perfect fingernails.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember you. Should I?’

Of course he shouldn’t. ‘Not really.’

She gave a little shrug and turned her head to the view once more, but he put his hand on her bare arm and sensation shivered over her.

‘Tell me,’ he murmured.

She laughed. ‘But there’s nothing to tell!’

‘Tell me anyway.’

Eve sighed. Why the hell had she even brought it up? Because she liked things straightforward? Because the probing nature of her job made her explore people’s feelings and reactions?

‘You came here one summer, a long time ago. We met then. We hardly knew each other, really.’

Luca frowned for a moment, and then his face cleared. So it had not been a woman he had bedded and forgotten. There had been only one woman during that long, hot summer and she had been the very antithesis of this keen-eyed woman with her scraped-back hair. ‘Unfortunately, cara, I am still none the wiser. Remind me.’

It had been a summer of making money, which had never really been in abundance in Eve’s life. Ever since her father had died, her mother had gone out to work to make sure that Eve never went without, but there had never been any surplus to buy the things that seventeen-year-old girls valued so much in life. Dresses and shoes and music and make-up. Silly, frivolous things.

Eve had been overjoyed to get the summer job as waitress at the prestigious yacht club. She had never been part of the boating set—with their sleek boats and their quietly expensive clothes and all-year tans and glamorous parties. She’d had precisely no experience of waitressing, either, but she’d been known and liked in the village for being a hard-working and studious girl. And she’d suspected that they’d known she’d actually needed the money, as opposed to wanting the job in order to pick up a rich boyfriend.

And then Luca Cardelli had anchored his yacht one day, and set every female pulse in the vicinity racing with disbelieving pleasure.

The men who had sailed had been generally fit and muscular and bronzed and strong, but Luca had been all these things and Italian, too. As a combination, it had been irresistible.

She had been breathlessly starstruck around him, all fingers and thumbs, her normal waitressing skills deserting her, completely dazzled by his careless Italian charm. On one embarrassing occasion, the plate of prawns she had been carrying had slipped so that half a dozen plump shellfish had slithered onto the floor in a pink heap.

Biting back a smile, he had handed her a large, linen napkin.

‘Be quick,’ he murmured. ‘And no one will notice.’

No one except him, of course. Eve wished that the floor could have opened up and swallowed her. But she told herself it was just a phase in her life, of being utterly besotted by a man who saw her as part of the background.

Their conversation was limited to pleasantries about wind conditions and her uttering unmemorable lines such as, ‘Would you like some mayonnaise with your salmon?’ which made his act of generosity so surprising that she read all the wrong things into it.

The end-of-season yacht club ball was the event of the year, with the ticket prices prohibitedly high, unless you got someone to take you, and Eve had no one to take her.

‘You are going dancing on Saturday?’ Luca questioned idly as he sipped a drink at sundown on the terrace one evening.

Eve shook her head as she scooped up the discarded shells from his pistachio nuts. ‘No. No, I’m not.’

He lifted a dark, quizzical eyebrow. ‘Why not? Don’t all young women want to dance?’

She ran her fingers awkwardly down over her apron. ‘Of course they do. It’s just…’

The brilliant black eyes pierced through her. ‘Just what?’

Humiliating to say that she had no one to take her, surely? And not very liberated either. And the tickets cost more than she earned in a month. She wished he wouldn’t look at her that way—though what way could he look for her not to feel so melting inside? Maybe if he put a paper bag over his head she might manage not to turn to jelly every time he was in the vicinity. ‘Oh, the tickets cost far too much for a waitress to be able to afford,’ she said truthfully.

‘Oh.’ And his eyes narrowed.

Nothing more was said, but when Eve went to fetch her coat that evening there was an envelope waiting for her and inside it was a stiff, gold-edged ticket to the dance. And a note from Luca. ‘I want to see you dance,’ it said.

Eve went into a frenzy. She was Cinderella and Rockerfella combined; it was every fairy tale come true. She borrowed a dress from her friend Sally, only Sally was a size bigger and they had to pin it into shape, but even after they had done it still looked like what it was. A borrowed dress.

Eve surveyed herself doubtfully in the mirror. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Nonsense! You look gorgeous,’ said Sally firmly. ‘You definitely need some make-up, though.’

‘Not too much.’

‘Eve,’ sighed Sally. ‘Did or did not Luca Cardelli give you a ticket? Yes? Well, believe me—no man splashes out that much if he isn’t interested. You want to look sophisticated. Mature. You want him to whisk you into his arms and dance the night away, don’t you? Well, don’t you?’

Of course she did.

But Eve felt like a fish out of water when she walked into the glittering room, feeling an outsider and knowing that she was an outsider. Everyone else seemed to be with someone, except for her.

And then Luca arrived, with a woman clinging to his arm like a limpet, a stunning vision in a scarlet dress that was backless and very nearly frontless.

She remembered almost everyone’s eyes being fixed with envious fascination on them as they danced in a way which left absolutely no doubt about how they intended to end the evening and Eve felt sick and watched until she could watch no more. He said hello to her and told her that she looked ‘charming’. It was a curiously unflattering word and she wondered how she could have been so stupid.

She crept home and scrubbed her face bare and carefully took off Sally’s dress and hung it in the wardrobe. Luca left for Italy soon after and she didn’t even see him to say goodbye. She didn’t even get the chance to thank him.

But that experience defined her.

That night she vowed never to make her ambition overreach itself. To capitalise on what she was and not what she would like to have been. And she was no looker—certainly not the kind of woman who would ever attract a man like Luca Cardelli. She had brains and she had determination and she would rely on those instead.

Time shifted and readjusted itself, and it was an altogether different Eve who looked into the dark eyes with their hard, luminous brilliance.

Well, here it came, in a fanfare, with a drum roll! ‘I was a waitress,’ she said baldly, but smiled. ‘At the yacht club.’

He shook his head. ‘Forgive me, but—’

‘You bought me a ticket for a dance.’

Something stirred on the outskirts of his mind. A hazy recollection of a sweet, clumsy girl who was trying to look too old for her age. His eyes widened ever so slightly. How little girls grew up! He nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I remember now.’

‘And I never got the chance to thank you. So thank you.’ She smiled, the brisk, charming smile she used to such great effect in her professional life.

‘You’re welcome,’ he murmured, thinking how time could transform. Was this sleek, confident woman really one and the same person?

His dark eyes gleamed and suddenly Eve felt vulnerable. And tired. She didn’t want to flirt or make small talk with him—for there was still something about him which spelt danger and unobtainability. A gorgeous man who was passing through, that was all, same as last time. Stifling a yawn, she glanced at her watch. ‘Time I was going.’

Luca’s eyes narrowed in surprise. This was usually his line and never, ever had a woman yawned when he had been talking to her—not unless he had spent the previous night making love to her. ‘But it’s only nine o’clock.’ He frowned. ‘Why so early?’

‘Because I have to work in the morning.’

‘I am not sure that I believe you.’

‘That, of course, is your prerogative, Mr Cardelli,’ she returned sweetly

He stilled. ‘So you remember my surname, too?’

‘I have a good memory for names.’

‘Unlike me.’ He glittered her a smile. ‘So you had better remind me of yours.’

‘It’s Eve. Eve Peters.’

Eve. It conjured up a vision of the first woman; the only woman. It was a small, simple and yet powerful name. It spoke of things lush and coiling. Of a fallen woman, driven by lust and the forbidden. He wanted to make a mocking joke about serpents, but something in those intelligent eyes stopped him. ‘So what kind of job gets you up so early, Miss Peters? You’re a nurse?’ he guessed. ‘Either that, or you milk cows?’

Eve laughed in spite of herself. ‘Wrong!’ She didn’t want to be charmed by him, or made to laugh by him. She wanted to get away and she wanted it now. He unsettled her, made her feel like the woman she wasn’t. She liked to be in control. She was calm, and considered and logical, and yet right now she was having the kind of fantasy which was more suited to the naïve adolescent she had abandoned that night along with the borrowed dress. Wondering what it would be like to be in Luca Cardelli’s arms and to be made love to by him.

The filmy cream shirt meant that she could faintly see the whorls of hair which darkened the tight, hard chest and for one wild and crazy moment she imagined herself pressed against him, the strong arms enfolding her in a magic circle from which no woman would ever want to escape.

Luca saw her green-grey eyes momentarily darken and he felt an unexpected answering ache. ‘Don’t go,’ he urged softly. ‘Stay a little while and talk to me.’

His body had tensed and a drift of raw, feral male scent began to intoxicate her. ‘I can’t,’ she said, with a smile she hoped wasn’t weak or uncertain. She put her glass down on the window-ledge. ‘I really must go.’

‘That, of course, is your prerogative,’ he said mockingly.

Her resolve was beginning to fail her. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘It was nice to see you again.’

‘Arrivederci, cara.’ He stood and watched her weave her way through the room, his face giving nothing away. And maybe the blonde had been watching, for she reappeared by his side, looking like a tiny, overstuffed cushion in comparison to Eve’s slender height and suddenly her simpering presence was cloying and not to be endured.

‘I thought you were going to make a phone call, Luca,’ she pouted.

Did she spend her whole life pouting? he wondered with a faint air of irritation.

‘I was distracted,’ he drawled. ‘But thank you for reminding me.’

It hadn’t been what she had meant to happen at all, and the blonde’s mouth fell open in protest, but Luca had gone, pulling his mobile phone out of his pocket, and he went to stand outside, for privacy and for a better signal.

And better to watch the shadowy figure of Eve Peters as she walked down the path with the moonlit water dappling in the soft night air behind her.