Italian Deception: The Salvatore Marriage / A Sicilian Seduction / The Passion Bargain

She took a jerky step backwards, shaken to her roots by what he’d said. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered painfully ‘I didn’t know!’

‘I know that,’ he snapped, still frowning blackly as he swung away again. ‘We are both having to deal with an intolerable situation,’ he said tightly. ‘Needs cross, emotions get out of control. It has to be expected that our priorities will clash.’

Wise words, she acknowledged, if she was able to ignore the fact that she had been so wrapped up in her own grievances and distress she’d allowed herself to forget all of his.

And what were her grievances? she asked herself. So, they’d done the unforgivable last night but both had been guilty of falling into that particular dark pit, greedily assuaging one set of emotions, then overwhelming them with a different set.

Because Luca had pulled away from her afterwards did not mean she could shift all the blame onto him. In fact, while she was being brutally honest here—if he hadn’t pulled away, then she probably would have.

The new silence gnawed at the tension in the atmosphere. She wished she could say something to make them both feel better but she couldn’t think what. He was standing there wearing a rod of iron strapped across his broad shoulders, and his fingers were gripping the worktop with enough power to put dents in to the solid black marble.

‘Sit down again,’ he gritted.

Sit down, she repeated to herself, and looked down at the way her bags were standing at her feet like a childish defiance. Without saying a word she picked them up, turned and left the kitchen. Walking down the hall, she went back into the bedroom, put the bags down by the bed then walked back the way she had come. Fingers fluttered momentarily, coinciding with the deep, shaky breath she took before she pushed open the kitchen door and stepped back in.

Luca was still standing where she had left him, long brown fingers still gripping the worktop like a vice. She wanted to go to him, put her arms around him and show him just how badly she felt for forgetting what really mattered. But instead she crossed to the table and sat down.

And the silence pulsed in her eardrums, it throbbed in her stomach and pulled at the flesh covering her face. Move! She wanted to shout at him. Say something—anything! I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ve made the climb down. I don’t know what else to do!

Maybe he tapped into her thought patterns—he’d always been able to do that. He turned, walked towards the table. The predicted rack of toast was set down in front of her.

‘I will organise a hotel suite for you,’ he announced curtly, then left her alone to swallow the unpalatable fact that her climb down had been a complete waste of time.

An hour later and she was at her sister’s bedside, delivered there by Luca who, once he’d checked on Keira, left again, his lean face scored by the grim task that lay ahead of him, one that would to strip his self-control to the bone.

Tears for them all flooded her eyes as she sat gently stroking Keira’s soft brown hair. She and her sister were so unalike in so many ways, she thought fondly. The colour of their hair, for instance, and the differences in character. Where she was bright and independent and naturally self-confident, Keira had always been shy and unsure of herself. Meeting and falling in love with Angelo had put stars in her eyes and an anxious pallor on her soft cheeks. She could never quite believe that a dashingly handsome man like Angelo could fall in love with a timid little mouse like her. So she’d worked hard all her marriage to make herself feel worthy of her man. It had infuriated Shannon to watch it sometimes. ‘You spoil him too much. He’ll start treating you like a doormat if you don’t watch out.’

But Angelo had remained faithfully besotted to his Irish mouse. It was the mouse who’d taken Shannon by surprise by turning into a sly little fox. ‘Idiot,’ she whispered and was suddenly fighting a battle with fresh tears again.

What followed was a long and hard nerve-flaying day in which Shannon divided her time between Keira and the nursery.

By two o’clock she was beginning to feel drained of emotional energy and was actually glad to be given some respite from her bedside vigil when a team of medical staff appeared and she was ushered away.

She needed some air that did not smell of the hospital. So she bought a sandwich in the downstairs cafeteria and took it with her to eat outside. The sun was bright and the air was cool, fresh—clean. Walking through the neatly laid gardens, she found a bench in the sunshine and sat down, unwrapped her sandwich and tried to empty all thoughts from her head so that she could attempt to eat at least.

Luca tracked her down ten minutes later. Her hair was up scrunched into a twist of narrow black ribbon, and the curve of her slender neck looked disturbingly vulnerable to him. The thought made him grimace because he wasn’t thinking of vulnerable as in fragile, he was thinking vulnerable as in ripe for tasting. His tongue even moistened at the prospect, and he wished that he didn’t have to look at her through the eyes of a recent lover.

But he did. Giving in to his baser instincts might have been a stupid mistake but he was now stuck with the results of it. Last night he had gone a little insane. He had lost control of himself. Two years ago she’d left him, taking his manhood with her when she went. Last night she gave it back to him. He should be pleased. He should be feeling the triumph of retribution and be able to walk away free and whole and ready to get on with the rest of his life, but all he felt was …

Need, greed—it had many names but they all came wrapped up in the same package. He wanted more and no amount of self-aimed contempt was going to change that.

Maybe he should go out and find himself a woman. There were certainly a lot out there more than willing to share his bed. Maybe now that Shannon had released him from his sexual prison he could even do both himself and these other woman some of his old macho justice.

But he didn’t want them; he wanted this one. This red-haired, white-skinned, blue eyed betrayer who made his body sing.

A wry smile played with the tired corners of his mouth as he started walking again. The slight tensing in Shannon’s shoulders as she’d sensed his approach gave that smile a different edge. Love each other or hate each other, they could still tune into the others presence like wild cats sniffing territorial scent.

Stepping around the bench, he paused for a moment to study the strain in her face. Her hair might burn like fire in the sunlight but her cheeks were pale, her eyes too dark and there was a telling hint of hurt about the way she was holding her mouth.

On a heavy sigh, he remembered why it was that he had come to find her. Slipping free the single button holding his jacket together, he sat down next to her with a long sigh.

‘I’m sorry there was no one here with you,’ he murmured quietly. ‘It has been a—tough morning for everyone, I’m afraid.’

She turned to look at him, expression guarded as she looked into his face. He was beginning to look haggard, he knew, and did not bother to hide it. ‘I thought it was tough enough five years ago when we had to do this for my father but …’ He stopped, mouth tightening on words he didn’t want to say but knew in the end that he had no choice. ‘My mother collapsed and has had to be sedated. Renata is finding it difficult to cope. Sophia offered to come here to sit with you but she is needed by Mama.’

‘I understand,’ she returned.

‘Do you?’ Luca wished that he did. It felt as if the whole family had been involved in that car crash—himself and Shannon included. ‘It’s a mess,’ he muttered and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees, his throat working on the now-permanent lump stuck in it. ‘I’ve got people dropping like flies all around me. Formalities to deal with. A company that refuses to stop running just because I want it to. The phones keep on ringing. We are sinking beneath a wave of sympathy that, to be honest, I could do without right now.’ His voice was growing husky—he could hear it.

Would she scream abuse at him if he also admitted that he wanted to pick her up and carry her off to the nearest bed to lose himself in her for an hour or two?

‘The thing is, Shannon, I need to ask a big favour …’

She tensed. He grimaced as his mind made a connection with what he’d been thinking and what he’d just said. But, of course, Shannon didn’t know about that.

‘I need to be sure you are OK, you see,’ he went on. ‘Thinking of you alone in some faceless hotel room when you are not here does not make me feel OK.’ He turned his head to look at her. The sunlight was trying its best to put some colour onto her drawn cheeks but it wasn’t succeeding, and her mouth looked so vulnerable he wanted to—

‘So I would like to take back my offer to find you somewhere else to stay. I want you to go on living at my place. I will move out if you prefer,’ he offered, watching her carefully for some kind of reaction, but he wasn’t getting one. ‘But I would rather stay there too. That way I will know you will not be on your own if the—’

‘Don’t say it,’ she said.

‘No,’ he agreed, looking down at his long fingered hands hanging limp between his spread knees.

While Shannon looked at the top of his dark head, watching the sun gloss it with a silken sheen. If the worst happens during the night, was what he had been going to say. Having shared her time between Keira and the baby, she was more than aware that the ‘worst’ wasn’t very far away. As she watched the baby grow stronger with every passing hour she watched the baby’s mama slowly fade.

‘About last night,’ he inserted suddenly.

Shannon sucked in a sharp breath. His hands moved, flexing tensely before pleating together, and she saw a nerve at the edge of his jaw give a jerk.

‘I went a little crazy,’ he admitted. ‘I am ashamed of myself for taking my—feelings out on you.’

‘We both went a little crazy.’ She shifted tensely.

‘It won’t happen again,’ he promised.

‘No,’ she agreed.

‘So will you stay at my apartment?’

She looked down at her lap where the remains of her half-eaten sandwich lay slotted in its triangular casing and watched it blur out of focus on the onset of tears. ‘Keira isn’t ever going to wake up, is she?’ she whispered.

Luca didn’t answer for a moment, then he shook his dark head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he responded huskily.

‘I’ll stay,’ she agreed on a thick swallow.

Luca sat back against the bench suddenly and the air hissed out from between his teeth in a tense, taut act of relief. A moment later something dropped on her lap next to the sandwich carton.

It was a plastic security card. ‘Access,’ he explained. ‘You might need it if I cannot get here to collect you.’

She nodded.

‘If I cannot make it then my driver Fredo will come for you. You remember Fredo?’

‘Yes.’ Another nod while she stared down at the card. Fredo was a wiry little man with amazing patience—he needed it for the hours he tended to hang around waiting for Luca to appear.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I don’t have to worry about you getting into the back of some stranger’s car.’

It was a joke. She hadn’t expected it. It surprised her enough to force a small laugh out of her. Luca laughed too, one of those deep, soft, husky sounds of his that caressed the senses. But it all felt so strange and wrong to be laughing in the circumstances that soon they both fell silent and still.

‘You don’t have to worry about me at all,’ she thrust into that stillness.

‘Worry is not the word that shoots into my head,’ he countered. ‘Someone should be here with you supporting you through this. Here.’ Something else landed on her lap. She stared in surprise at the sight of her own mobile telephone. ‘It was in my overcoat pocket. I found it this morning,’ Luca explained. ‘Here is my private number. Log it in the phone’s memory. Don’t hesitate to call me if you need me, Shannon.’ It was a serious threat more than polite reassurance.

Then he stood up so suddenly that he made her blink. Big and lean and dark and tense, he blocked out her sunlight. She felt cold—bereft. He was going to leave and she wanted to fling herself at him and beg him to stay!

But he had duties to return to and she had a bedside vigil to keep.

‘I have to go.’ He stated the obvious and tension zipped through the air like electric static. ‘Use the phone, do you hear me?’

Shannon pressed her lips hard together and nodded. He turned and strode away without glancing back and she remained sitting there with the sun trying to put back the warmth he had taken with him.

It didn’t.

Luca had never felt so inadequate or useless in his entire life as he did when he walked away from her like that. But he had things to deal with, lousy, throat-locking, soul-stripping things that could not be put off.

But his mind was locked into Shannon—or was it his heart? He didn’t know. What he did know was that Shannon might have betrayed him two years ago but he was betraying her now by not being there when she needed him.

And it had to be him. That was the other part of his inner conflict that was flaying him alive. He did not want someone else to be there with her. He didn’t even want to think about her leaning on someone else.

‘Dio, leave me in peace!’ he rasped when the land-line on the desk began to ring.

It was a reporter wanting him to make a statement. This was not the first insensitive lout he’d had to deal with today and probably would not be the last. As he was replacing the receiver Renata put her head round the door to look him a question. She’d added ten years in twenty-four hours. They all had.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was the press, not the hospital.’

Renata remained hovering in the doorway and he knew she wanted him to hold her. Walking across the room, he took her in his arms and let her weep into his shoulder and wished it could be OK for him to break down and weep.

‘How is Mama?’ he asked when the flood subsided.

‘She’s awake now, and looking a little stronger,’ Renata told him, then added carefully. ‘Luca, about Shannon—’

‘Don’t go there, Renata,’ he warned thinly and was glad of the excuse to move away from her when the phone rang again. His sister hovered for a few seconds longer, silenced by his censure and waiting to find out who was calling before slipping away once she knew the call was business.

He did not want to discuss the rights and wrongs of Shannon staying with him at his apartment. He did not want to discuss Shannon with anyone—period.

His personal assistant was asking him a question that required his full concentration. Luca gave it to him and dealt with the problem as if it were perfectly normal to make corporate decisions while the world lay in rubble at his feet.

It was while he was in the middle of a curt, clipped sentence that his private cell-phone began to beep.

Shannon. He was certain of it. He dropped the other phone as if it were a hot brick.

His fingers shook as he made the connection. All she could manage to say to him was, ‘Please—will you come?’

CHAPTER FIVE

LUCA came to a stop in the doorway, a thick breath labouring in his chest. He was too late. She had called him too late. Now he was having to stand here and witness just how alone she must have felt.

The doctors had advised him to take her away now, but how did you prize those slender white fingers from her beautiful, beautiful sister’s fingers for the last time?

Tears hit his eyes and remained there, burning like acid, though he did not let them fall. It was going to happen soon, he knew that. Soon he was going to give way to all of this hard, aching grief and cry himself empty, he promised himself.

But for now he wanted to hit something again, put his fist through a window or a wall. The pain it would cause had to be more bearable than what he was suffering right now, he thought grimly as he made himself walk forward on legs that felt hollow and slowly went down on his haunches next to Shannon’s chair. She didn’t even notice, but as he gathered up her free hand her eyelashes flickered and she looked at him.

‘It’s over,’ she whispered.

‘Si,’ he murmured unevenly. ‘I know.’

Her eyes drifted back to her sister’s quietly serene face and she forgot he was there again for a while, then the sound of a muffled sob came from somewhere behind them, and glancing round Luca saw that the rest of his family had arrived.

He’d taken off without them with Fredo driving like a madman leaving the others to find their own way here, now they poured forward, crowding the bed to begin this next wave of unbearable grief. As they pressed around the bed he saw Shannon become aware, blinking blank and dazed eyes at the sudden commotion, and he knew by instinct that she was not going to cope with the Italian way of letting feelings pour out like this.

With his jaw set like a closed vice, he reached across for her other hand and with gentle fingers began carefully easing it away from Keira’s hand.

Shannon gasped and looked him a pained protest. But he shook his head. ‘It’s time to let go, cara,’ he told her gently.

For a moment he thought she was going to refuse. She looked back at her sister with glistening tears drawing a film across her eyes and it ripped him apart inside because he knew those tears displayed the beginning of acceptance.

A few seconds after that she allowed him to complete the separation, allowed him to ease his arm around her waist and help her to her feet. The others flooded towards her now, crowding her by reaching out to embrace her and murmuring their tearful phrases of condolence; his mother looking dreadful, his weeping sisters and their sober-faced husbands all taking their turn.

Shannon accepted their embraces from within a cocoon of dazed bewilderment and clung tightly to one of Luca’s hands.

Keira was gone.

Angelo and Keira. Was it all right for her to use their names together like that now? She looked up at Luca standing big and dark like a guard beside her; his handsome face was locked up again, mouth grim, eyes hot. It wasn’t the face to which you asked such a question, she thought, and allowed him to guide her towards the door, leaving her sister surrounded by people who’d always loved her unstintingly.

There was consolation in that somehow.

‘The baby,’ she said as they reached the quietness of the corridor.

‘Not now,’ Luca said and kept her moving—away towards the lifts, then down and across the ground floor foyer out into the late afternoon sunlight. It was cold and she shivered. She saw Fredo was there looking solemn as he held open the rear door to a big silver car. Luca guided her inside, then followed. Almost as soon as the door closed behind him he was reaching for her and drawing her into his arms.

They stayed like that for the time it took Fredo to deliver them to the apartment, Shannon leaning limply against him, lost somewhere inside the mists of shock while he gave her what he instinctively knew she needed—his silent strength.

He continued to hold her close as they walked across the main foyer of the apartment block; he kept her wrapped in his arms as they rode the lift. When they reached the apartment she suddenly broke free and headed straight for her bedroom. Luca needed to use a few moments to put a clamp on what was threatening to break loose from inside him, then he followed with the intention of making sure she was all right before he left her alone to her grief.

But it did not work out like that. One glance at her lying curled on her side in the middle of the bed and he was kicking off his shoes, dragging off his jacket and tie, then joining her.

It was really quite pathetic the way she accepted his arms as they drew her in, and near impossible not to shed tears with her when she began to weep quietly.

When she eventually went silent he reached beneath and tugged out the duvet, then covered them both.

‘I don’t—’ she went to protest.

‘You are so cold you’re shivering,’ he cut in huskily. ‘Stay here with me like this for a little while,’ he encouraged. ‘Once you warm up a bit I will go and leave you in peace.’

‘I don’t want you to go.’ It was so soft and weak he almost missed it. But he didn’t miss the way her fingers drifted across his shirt front and settled in a tremulous curl around his nape. Her breath feathered along his jawline, her breasts felt soft against his ribs and a slender leg slid across his thighs as she pressed herself closer as if it was the only place she wanted to be. He closed his eyes and wished it did not feel so good to be needed by her like this.

That need continued through the ensuing dark days when Shannon was aware of very little if Luca was not there to make her.

‘Eat,’ he’d say and she would eat. ‘Sleep,’ and she would curl up in her bed like a child and close her eyes obediently.

In the mornings they would share breakfast, then Luca would drive her to the hospital to be with the baby while he went off to attend to—other things. In the afternoon he would arrive back at the hospital to spend a little time in the nursery before taking Shannon back to his apartment to ply her with more food and make her talk about work, her life in London, Keira and Angelo—about anything so long as she was made to use her brain.

She moved around as if surrounded by a fog, though she didn’t mind. It might be cold but it was oddly comforting—she liked it. The Salvatore family were being kind to her. They had managed to put their resentments aside in these days of a shared grief. Mrs Salvatore invited her to come and stay with her, but Shannon declined. ‘I want to stay with Luca,’ she explained, too lost in her fog to see that the invitation had been issued to get her away from Luca. But it would not have mattered if she had been aware of it because Luca himself happened to overhear the invitation, and turned it down.

The only time the fog cleared was when she was with the baby. In fact her world began to revolve around the tiny and sweet, tragically orphaned daughter of Angelo and Keira.

Having had personal experience, Shannon knew exactly how it felt to be orphaned at birth. She and Keira had been brought up by a spinster aunt who’d come to Dublin and carried the two girls off to live with her in England. Shannon knew all of this because Keira had told her. Only three years older than herself, yet Keira had remembered it all so vividly. Maybe it was Aunt Merrill’s no-nonsense efficiency at that time that had turned the frightened and bewildered Keira, who was missing her mother, into such a timid mouse, whereas Shannon had never known anything else but Aunt Merrill’s no-nonsense, ‘I don’t have time to deal with this’ attitude, so she’d learned to be independent very young.

Aunt Merrill shocked everyone by marrying and moving to live with her new husband in South America only weeks after Keira’s wedding and while Shannon was in her first term at university. It had not occurred to either sister that the woman they’d sort of relied upon had been chafing at the bit waiting for the moment when her responsibility towards them would finish so that she could get on with her own life. Neither of them had resented their aunt for doing that, but with Keira living in Florence and busy building her marriage, Shannon had been left alone to fend for herself while she’d finished her education. What emerged from those years of self-sufficiency was a bright and super-confident young woman brimming with a zest for life.

Her aunt knew what had happened to Keira and Angelo because Shannon had rung her up to break the news. Merrill offered her sympathy but said she would not be able to attend the funerals because she had too many commitments. When Aunt Merrill had fulfilled her commitments to her sister’s children she’d well and truly cut them out of her life.