Modern Romance - The Best of the Year

Then Rafaele got up to address the room. There were about thirteen people and, predictably, you could have heard a pin drop as his charismatic effect held everyone in thrall. He’d finally moved his gaze from Sam and she felt as if she could breathe again, albeit painfully. Her heart was racing and she took in nothing of what he said, trying to wrap her sluggish brain around the ramifications of this shocking development.

‘Samantha...’

Sam looked up, dazed, to see her boss was now addressing her, and that Rafaele had sat down. She hadn’t noticed, nor heard a word.

‘I’m sorry, Bill, what did you say?’ She was amazed she’d managed to speak.

‘I said,’ he repeated with exaggerated patience, clearly disgruntled that she appeared to be on another planet while in such illustrious company, ‘that as of next week you will be working from the Falcone factory. You’re to oversee setting up a research facility there which will work in tandem with the one here in the university.’

He directed himself to the others again while this bomb detonated within Sam’s solar plexus.

‘I don’t think I need to point out the significance of being allowed to conduct this research within a functioning factory, and especially one as prestigious as Falcone Motors. It’ll put us streets ahead of other research in this area and, being assured of Falcone funding for at least five years, we’re practically guaranteed success.’

Sam couldn’t take any more. She rose up in a blind panic, managed to mumble something vague about needing air and fled the room.

* * *

Rafaele watched Sam leave dispassionately. Since the other evening he’d been in shock. Functioning, but in shock. His anger and rage was too volcanic to release, fearsome in its intensity. And fearsome for Rafaele if he contemplated for a second why his emotions were so deep and hot.

Sam’s boss beside him emitted a grunt of displeasure at her hasty departure, but Rafaele felt nothing but satisfaction to be causing her a modicum of the turbulence in his own gut. Through his shock Rafaele had felt a visceral need to push Sam off her axis as much as she’d pushed him off his.

He recalled bitterly how reluctant she’d been to talk to him in the first place about the job he was offering, all the while knowing her secret. Harbouring his son. With one phone call to his team Rafaele had put in motion this audacious plan to take over the research programme at her university and had relished this meeting.

While Sam’s boss continued his speech Rafaele retreated inwardly, but anyone looking at him would have seen only fierce concentration.

He breathed in and realised that he hadn’t taken a proper breath since he’d seen Sam looking at him with that stricken expression on her face in the doorway of her house the other evening. The initial punch to his gut he’d received when he’d first thought that Sam was married, with someone else’s child, was galling to remember—and more exposing than he liked to admit.

Nothing excused her from withholding his son from him for more than three years. Rafaele had been about Milo’s age when his world had imploded. When he’d witnessed his father, on his knees, sobbing, prostrating himself at Rafaele’s mother’s feet, begging her not to leave him.

‘I love you. What am I if you leave? I am nothing. I have nothing...’

‘Get up, Umberto,’ she’d said. ‘You shame yourself in front of our son. What kind of a man will he be with a crying, snivelling wretch for a father?’

What kind of a man would he be?

Rafaele felt tight inside. The kind of man who knew that the most important things in life were building a solid foundation. Security. Success. He’d vowed never to allow anything to reduce him to nothing, as his father had been reduced, with not even his pride to keep him standing. Emotions were dangerous. They had the power to derail you completely. He knew how fickle women were, how easily they could walk away. Or keep you from your child.

Rafaele had driven back to Sam’s house on Sunday, fired up, ready to confront her again, but just as he’d pulled up he’d seen them leaving the house. Milo had been pushing a scooter. He’d followed them to a small local park and watched like a fugitive as they played. Dark emotions had twisted inside him as he’d watched Sam’s effortless long-legged grace and ease. He’d known that if he hadn’t reappeared in their lives this would have just been another banal Sunday morning routine trip to the park.

Seeing his son’s small sturdy body, watching him running around, laughing gleefully, something alien inside him had swelled. It was...pride. And something else that he couldn’t name. But it had reminded him of that day again—the darkest in his memory—when his mother had gripped his hand painfully tight and pulled him in her wake out of their family palazzo outside Milan, leaving his father sobbing uncontrollably on the ground. A pathetic, broken man.

That was one of the reasons Rafaele had never wanted to have children. Knowing how vulnerable they were had always felt like too huge a responsibility to bear. No one knew better than he how events even at that young age could shape your life. And so he’d never expected that, when faced with his son, there would be such a torrent of feelings within him, each one binding him invisibly and indelibly to this person he didn’t even know properly yet. Or that when he’d watched him running around the other day there would be a surge of something so primal and protective that he just knew without question, instantly, that he would do anything to prevent his son from coming into harm’s way.

From far too early an age Rafaele had been made aware that the absence of a father corroded at your insides like an acid.

Resolve firmed like a ball of concrete inside him. There was no way on this earth that he was going to walk away from his son now and give him a taste of what he’d suffered.

Cutting off Sam’s boss curtly, Rafaele stood up and muttered an excuse, and left the room. There was only one person he wanted to hear talk right now.

* * *

Sam’s stomach felt raw after she’d lost her breakfast, minute as it had been, into a toilet in the ladies’ room. She felt shaky, weak, and looked as pale as death in the reflection of the cracked mirror. She splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth out, knowing that she had to go back out there and face—

The door suddenly swung open and Sam stood up straight, hands gripping the side of the sink. For once she prayed it might be Gertie, even though she knew it wasn’t when every tiny hair seemed to prickle on her skin.

She turned around and saw Rafaele, looking very tall and very dark as he leant back against the door, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Even now her body sang, recognising the man who had introduced her to her own sensuality, and she clamped down on the rogue response, bitterly aware that not even the harsh fluorescent lighting could strip away his sheer good looks.

Welcome anger rose up and Sam seized on it, crossing her arms over her chest. Her voice felt rough, raw. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Rafaele? How dare you come in here and use your might to get back at me? These are people you’re playing with—people who have invested long years of study into their area—and suddenly you sweep in and promise them a glimpse of future success when we both know—’

‘Enough.’

Rafaele’s voice sounded harsh in the echoing silence of the cavernous tiled ladies’ bathroom.

‘I am fully committed to following through on my promise of funding and support to this university.’ His mouth tightened. ‘Unless you’ve already forgotten, I had contacted you initially to ask you to work for me. I had every intention of using your expertise to further this very research for my own ends.’

He shrugged minutely. ‘There’s nothing new in that—any motor company worth its salt is on the lookout for new research and ways of beating the competition with new technology. You have single-handedly elevated this research to a far more advanced level than any other facility, in a university or otherwise.’

His words sent Sam no sense of professional satisfaction. She was still in shock. ‘That may be the case,’ she bit out tightly, ‘but now that you know about Milo you’re seeking to get back at me personally.’

She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.

‘It just so happens that you have the means to be able to come in and take over the entire department to do your bidding.’

Fresh panic gripped her when she recalled her boss saying something about Sam herself going to work from his factory. Her arms grew tighter over her chest when she recalled the hothouse environment of working in Rafaele’s Milan factory four years ago and how easily he’d seduced her. The thought of going back into a similar environment, even if Rafaele would prefer to throttle her than sleep with her, made her clammy.

‘I will not be going to work for you. I will remain here at the university.’

Rafaele took a few paces forward and Sam saw the light of something like steel in his eyes and his expression. Her belly sank even as her skin tightened with betraying awareness.

‘You will be coming to work for me—or I will pull out of this agreement and all of your colleagues are back to square one. Your boss has informed me that if I hadn’t come along with the promise of funding he was going to have to let some people go. He can’t keep everyone on the payroll due to reduced projected funding this year. You would have been informed of that at this very meeting.’

Vaguely Sam was aware of the veracity of what he said. It had been rumoured for weeks. Once again she was struck by how little she’d appreciated how ruthless Rafaele was. ‘You bastard,’ she breathed.

Rafaele looked supremely unperturbed. ‘Hardly, when I’m saving jobs. It’s very simple if you do the right thing and accede to my wishes. And this is just the start of it, Samantha.’

Ice invaded her bloodstream. ‘Start of what?’

To her shock she realised belatedly how close Rafaele had come when he reached out a hand and cupped her jaw. She felt the strength of that hand, the faint calluses which reminded her of how he loved tinkering with engines despite his status. It was one of the things that had endeared him to her from the start.

In an instant an awful physical yearning rose up within her. Every cell in her body was reacting joyously to a touch she’d never thought she’d experience again. She was melting, getting hot. Damp.

Softly, he sliced open the wound in her heart. ‘The start of payback, Samantha. You owe me for depriving me of my son for more than three years and I will never let you forget it.’

* * *

For a moment Rafaele almost forgot where he was, who he was talking to. The feel of Sam’s skin under his hand was like silk, her jaw as delicate as the finest spun Murano glass. He had an almost overwhelming urge to keep sliding his hand around to the back of her neck, to tug her towards him so that he could feel her pressed against him and crush that pink rosebud mouth under his— Suddenly Rafaele realised what he was doing.

With a guttural curse he took his hand away and stepped back. Sam was looking at him with huge grey eyes, her face as pale as parchment with two pink spots in each cheek.

She blinked, almost as if she’d been caught in a similar spell, and then something in her eyes cleared. The anger was gone.

She changed tack, entreated him. She held out a hand and her voice was husky. ‘Please, Rafaele, we need to talk about this—’

‘No.’ The word was harsh, abrupt, and it cut her off effectively. Everything within Rafaele had seized at her attempt to try and take advantage of a moment when she might have perceived weakness on his part. To play on his conscience. With the shadows under her eyes making her look fragile and vulnerable.

He’d witnessed his mother for years, using her wiles to fool men into thinking she was vulnerable, fragile. Only to see how her expression would harden again once they were no longer looking and she’d got what she wanted. She’d been so cold the day she’d left his father, showing not an ounce of remorse.

Once, he mightn’t have believed Sam was like that, but that was before she’d kept his son from him, demonstrating equal, if not worse, callousness.

Rafaele took another step back and hated that he felt the need to do so. That volcanic anger was well and truly erupting now. He gritted out, ‘If you were a man...’

Sam tensed and her chin lifted. Gone was the soft look of before, the husky entreaty.

‘If I were a man...what? You’d thrash me? Well, what’s stopping you?’

Rafaele could see where her hands had clenched to fists by her side. He looked at her disgustedly. ‘Because I don’t raise my hands to women—or anyone, for that matter. But I felt like it for the first time when I realised that boy was my son.’

He couldn’t stop the words spilling out. That initial shock was infusing him all over again.

‘My son, Sam, my flesh and blood. He’s a Falcone. Dio. How could you have played God like that? What gave you the right to believe you had the answer? That you alone could decide to just cut me out of his life?’

Sam seemed to tense even more, her chin going higher. Those spots of red deepened, highlighting her delicate bone structure. ‘Do I need to remind you again that you practically tripped over your feet in your hurry to get out of the clinic that day? You could barely disguise your relief when you thought there was nothing to worry about. You just assumed the worst. It didn’t even occur to you to question whether or not I’d actually had a miscarriage, because you didn’t want a baby.’

Rafaele coloured, his conscience pricked by the reminder of how eager he’d been to get away from those huge bruised eyes, the raw emotion. The shock. The awareness that Sam had strayed too far under his skin.

Tightly he admitted, ‘I never had any intention of having children. But you gave me no reason to doubt the inevitable conclusion of what we’d both believed to be a miscarriage.’

Sam choked out, ‘You were quite happy to wash your hands of me, so don’t blame me now if I felt the best course was to leave you out of my decision-making process.’

Rafaele looked at Sam across the few feet that separated them and all he could see was her eyes. Huge, and as grey as the rolling English clouds. She was sucking him in again but he wouldn’t let her. She’d wilfully misdirected him into believing she’d miscarried when all the while she’d held the knowledge of their baby, living, in her belly.

He shook his head. ‘That’s just not good enough.’

Sam’s voice took on a defensive edge. ‘I was hardly encouraged to get in touch and tell you the truth when I saw you with another woman only a week after that day.’

She was breathing heavily under her shirt and he could see her breasts rise and fall. A flash of heat went straight to his groin and Rafaele crushed it ruthlessly. He focused on her face and tried to forget that he actually hadn’t slept with another woman for about a year after Sam had left, despite appearances and despite his best efforts. Every time he’d come close something inside him had shut down. And since then...? His experiences with women had been anything but satisfactory. To be reminded of this now was galling.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t you dare try to put this on me now, just to deflect your own guilt.’

But the guilt that had struck Rafaele wouldn’t be banished, much as he wanted it to be. Damn her! He wouldn’t let her do this to him now. She’d borne his child. His son. And said nothing.

Sam’s voice was bitter. ‘God forbid that I would forget what our relationship was about. Sex. That was pretty much it, wasn’t it? Forget conversation, or anything more intimate than being naked in bed. It wasn’t as if you didn’t make that abundantly clear, Rafaele, telling me over and over again not to fall for you because you weren’t about that.’

‘But you did anyway, didn’t you?’ Rafaele couldn’t keep the accusing note out of his voice and he saw Sam blanch.

‘I thought I loved you.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘After all, you were my first lover, and isn’t it normal for a virgin to develop an attachment to her first? Isn’t that one of the helpful warnings you gave me?’

Rafaele saw nothing right then but a memory of Sam’s naked and flushed body as she’d lain on his bed before him, her breasts high and round, her narrow waist, long legs. Skin so pure and white it had reminded him of alabaster—except she’d been living, breathing, so passionate. And she’d been innocent. He’d never forget how it had felt to sink into that slick, tight heat for the first time. It was his most erotic memory. Her gasp of shock turning to pleasure.

She continued, ‘But don’t worry. I soon got over it and realised how shallow those feelings were. Once I was faced with the reality of pregnancy and a baby.’

‘A reality,’ Rafaele gritted out, angry at that memory and at how easily it had slipped past his guard, ‘that you decided to face alone.’

Reacting against her ability to scramble his thought-processes, Rafaele changed tack.

‘Was it a punishment, Sam? Hmm?’ He answered himself. ‘Punishment for my being finished with you? For not wanting more? For letting you go? For not wanting to have a baby because that’s not what our relationship was about?’

Rafaele couldn’t stop the demon inside him.

‘I think the problem is that you fell for me and you were angry because I didn’t fall for you, so you decided to punish me. It’s so obvious...’

CHAPTER THREE

SAM CLOSED the distance between them, her hand lifted and she hit Rafaele across the face before she even registered the impulse to do so. She realised in the sickeningly taut silence afterwards that she’d reacted because he’d spoken her worst fears out loud. Here in this awful, stark, echoey room.

With a guttural curse, and his cheek flaring red where Sam had hit him, Rafaele hauled her into his arms and his mouth was on hers. He was kissing her angrily, roughly.

It took a second for Sam to get over the shock, but what happened next wasn’t the reaction she would have chosen if she’d had half a brain cell still working. Her reaction came from her treacherous body and overrode her brain completely.

She started kissing him back, matching his anger with her own. For exposing her. For saying those words out loud. For making her feel even more ashamed and confused. For being here. For making her want him. For making her remember. For kissing her just to dominate her and prove how much she still wanted him.

Her hands were clutching Rafaele’s jacket. She tasted blood and yet it wasn’t pain that registered. It was passion, and it sent her senses spiralling out of all control. Rafaele’s hands were bruisingly hard on her arms and tears pricked behind Sam’s eyelids at the tumult of desire mixed with frustration.

She opened her eyes to see swirling green oceans. Rafaele pulled away jerkily and Sam could hear nothing but the thunder of her own heartbeat and her ragged breathing. She was still clutching his jacket and she let go, her hands shaking.

‘You’re bleeding...’

The fact that Rafaele’s voice was rough was no comfort. He was just angry, not overcome with passion.

Sam reached up and touched her lip and winced when it stung slightly. Her mouth felt swollen. She knew she had to get out of there before he saw something. Before he saw that very close behind her anger in that exchange had been an awful yearning for something else.

‘I have to go. They’ll be wondering where we are.’ Her insides were heaving, roiling. She was terrified she might be sick again, and this time all over Rafaele’s immaculate shoes. She couldn’t look at him.

‘Sam—’

‘No.’ She cut him off and looked at him. ‘Not here.’

His jaw tightened. ‘Fine. I’ll send a car for you this evening. We’ll talk at my place.’

Sam was too much in shock to argue. Too much had happened—too much physicality. Too much of a reminder that he aroused more passion in her just by looking at him than she’d ever felt in her life with anyone else. She simply didn’t have it in her right then to say anything other than a very reluctant, ‘Fine.’ She needed to get away from this man before he exposed her completely.

* * *

That evening, Sam waited for Rafaele in an exclusive townhouse in the middle of Mayfair, demesne of the rich and famous. Anger and an awful sense of futility had simmered in her belly all day as she’d had to put up with her colleagues excitedly discussing the great opportunity Rafaele Falcone had presented them with while knowing that it was only to ensure he gained as much control of her life as he could.

She was afraid of the volatility of her emotions after what had happened in that bathroom earlier and, worse, at the thought of working for him again. She forced herself to take deep breaths and focused on her surroundings. Luxurious sofas and chairs, dressed in shades of grey and white and cream. Low coffee tables and sleek furnishings. Seriously intimidating.

She felt very scruffy as she was still in her work uniform of narrow black trousers, white shirt and black jacket. Flat shoes. Hair pulled back. No make-up. These surroundings were made for a much more sensual woman. A woman who would drape herself seductively on a couch in a beautiful silk dress and wait for her lover.

It reminded Sam painfully of Rafaele’s palazzo on the outskirts of Milan, where sometimes she had fooled herself into believing nothing existed beyond those four walls. And that she was one of those beautiful seductive women.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

Sam whirled around so abruptly when she heard his voice that she felt dizzy. She realised she was clutching her leather bag to her chest like a shield and lowered it.

She really wasn’t prepared to see Rafaele again so soon, and that swirling cauldron of emotions within her was spiked with a mix of anger and ever-present shame. And the memory of that angry kiss. Her lips were still sensitive. He looked like the Devil himself, emerging from the shadows of the doorway. Tall, broad, hard, muscled. And mean. His face was harsh, his mouth unsmiling. Making a mockery of his apology for keeping her waiting.

Nothing had changed from earlier. But despite her anger Sam’s conscience stung. Tightly, she said, ‘I’m sorry...for hitting you earlier. I don’t know what came over me...but what you said...it was wrong.’

Liar. She burned inside. She might as well have held her tongue. She was lying to herself as much as to him.

Rafaele came further in. Grim. ‘I deserved it. I provoked you.’

Sam blanched and looked at him. She hadn’t expected that, and somewhere treacherous a part of her melted.

He walked past her and over to a drinks board, helping himself to something amber that swirled in the bottom of a bulbous glass. He looked at her over his shoulder, making heat flood her cheeks. She hadn’t even realised that she’d been making a thorough inspection of his broad back, tapering down to lean hips and firm buttocks.

‘Drink?’

She shook her head hurriedly and got out a choked, ‘No. Thank you.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He gestured to a nearby couch. ‘Sit down, Sam—and you can put down your bag. You look as if your fingers might break.’

She looked down stupidly to see white knuckles through the skin of her fingers where they gripped the leather. Forcing herself to take a breath, she moved jerkily over to the couch and perched on the edge, resisting the design of it, which wanted to seduce her into a more relaxed pose.

Rafaele came and sat down opposite her, clearly far more relaxed than her as he sank back into the couch, resting one arm across the top. Sam fought the desire to look and see how his shirt must be stretched across his chest.

‘What kind of a name is Milo anyway? Irish?’

Sam blinked. It took a minute for his words to sink in because they were so unexpected. ‘It’s...it was my grandfather’s name.’