The Good, the Bad and the Wild (10 page)

‘I slept with Nick Delisantro that night,’ she announced, pleased with the firm tone and her refusal to relinquish eye contact when Crenshawe’s eyebrows shot up to his receding hairline. ‘And he misconstrued my motives the following morning.’

‘You did
what?
’ Crenshawe yelped, the sheen of sweat on his forehead glistening. ‘You…
You…’ His double chin wobbled with fury, the mottled colour in his cheeks turning scarlet. ‘You stupid little tart.’

He was going to fire her. She could see it in the vindictive light that came into his beady eyes as he stomped around the office, gesticulating wildly and throwing out a series of increasingly personal insults about her and her work.

Her fingers released on the seat cushion and she kept her chin thrust out, more than ready to take the blow, an odd sense of calm and detachment settling over her.

Well, what d’you know? Mr Crenshawe has noticed me at last
.

Nick tapped the parting line of dialogue into the template on his computer. Then paused to reread the scene he’d spent all morning sweating blood over. And groaned.

His detective hero sounded like someone with a borderline personality disorder. He ran his fingers through his hair, then stabbed the mouse to close the script window on the laptop.

Getting up from the desk, he crossed to the window, glared down at the street below which was all but deserted in the middle of the afternoon on a workday. Maybe if he got out of the apartment for a few hours, took a ride on his bike and blew the cobwebs out of his head. But as soon as the thought registered he dismissed it.

The bike was out. He’d gone for a ride yesterday,
and somehow ended up on the Marin Headland, the memory of Eva Redmond’s lush body plastered against his back and the high-pitched whoop of her laughter as they’d crossed the bridge reverberating through his subconscious every inch of the way.

Why couldn’t he get her out of his head? It had been a full week since that night. The woman was an operator, had investigated him and his origins and then had the gall to sleep with him without telling him the truth about who she was. That should have been more than enough to end his fascination.

He swore softly, slung a hand into the pocket of the sweatpants he wore when writing. How had she got her hooks into him so deep?

He squinted against the afternoon sun shining through the study window and pictured her face the last time he’d seen it. The pallor of her skin, her lips trembling and those wide translucent blue eyes, the pupils dilated with shock.

Instead of the resentment, the cleansing anger that had sustained him for the last seven days, he finally acknowledged the trickle of guilt.

‘Hell!’ The expletive cut the quiet like a knife.

Eva Redmond might not have been one hundred per cent forthcoming about who she was, but there was no getting around the fact that he had seduced her. Not the other way around.

As soon as he’d spotted her in the Union Square gallery, her glorious curves displayed to
perfection in red velvet, her shy but direct gaze locked with his, he’d wanted her. And while he’d become a lot more cautious in the last decade or so, a lot more discerning about who he pursued, one thing hadn’t changed. When he saw a woman he wanted, he went after her.

The only difference with Eva was that he had been more relentless, more eager and more determined in his pursuit. There had been numerous signs of how innocent, how out-of-her-depth she was, long before he’d taken her virginity, and he’d chosen to ignore every one of them to have her. So whose fault was it really that he’d ended up getting burned? Plus when he replayed all the conversations they’d had during their evening together—something he’d done with alarming regularity in the last seven days—he could see she’d tried to tell him who she was. And he’d stopped her elaborating, because he hadn’t wanted to hear anything that might stop him getting her into bed.

He braced his hand on the window sill, forced himself to confront the truth. He’d done a lot of crummy things in his life. None of which he was proud of. But some of them had been necessary to survive. When you ran away from home at sixteen with just the clothes on your back and a belly full of anger, you ended up doing a lot of things that you would later regret. And he’d done more than his fair share.

He was enough of a pragmatist, though, to
realise that he couldn’t go back and undo those things now. And in many ways, he wouldn’t want to. He wasn’t a hypocrite and he knew that what he’d managed to make of his life had been largely due to that feral survival instinct—and the burning anger that had kept him strong and resilient in the face of often impossible odds. You couldn’t go back, you had to go forward. But that didn’t mean he could keep repeating those mistakes over and over again.

The only way he was going to be able to put this episode behind him was to see Eva Redmond again—and wipe that vision of her eyes bright with unshed tears out of his head.

Unfortunately, seeing Eva had the potential to open up a whole other can of worms.

He huffed out a harsh laugh, felt the hum of heat pulse through his system as he recalled the sight of Eva reflected in the glass, her nipples large and distended, and her soft sighs of pleasure spurring him on. He’d woken in a hot sweat every night since that night. His sex hard and erect, and throbbing with the urge to bury himself deep inside the tight clasp of her body. He’d got so damn wound up by the erotic memories he hadn’t been sleeping properly, had barely been able to write—and everything he had written was terrible.

So the urge to see Eva again wasn’t entirely altruistic. Given the shoddy way he’d treated her the morning after, he doubted she was going to
be all that amenable to jumping back into bed with him—but that didn’t seem to bother his libido.

The bright trill of his phone had him jerking upright. He turned to stare at it flashing on his desk. Probably his agent Jim wanting to know how the script was going. Not a conversation he really wanted to be having, seeing as the damn thing was going nowhere fast. But even so, he picked up the handset. Better to be lying to Jim than wrestling pointlessly with the apparently insolvable problem of Eva Redmond.

‘Hi,’ he said, struggling to inject some enthusiasm into the greeting.

‘Hello, may I speak to Niccolo Delisantro?’ replied a male voice with crisp and efficient British diction.

‘Speaking, although the name’s Nick,’ he corrected, curious even though he didn’t want to be. The only people who had called him Niccolo in recent memory were Eva and her friend Tess.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Delisantro. Nick,’ came the effusive and fawning reply.

‘Who is this?’ Nick said, feeling less curious and more annoyed by the second.

‘My name is Henry Crenshawe, I’m the managing director of Roots Registry. We’re based in the UK. We do genealogical research for high-profile clients who wish to discover the—’

‘Cut to the chase, Henry,’ Nick interrupted the flow of unnecessary information as the short
hairs on the back of his neck tingled. Roots Registry? Wasn’t that the name of Eva’s employer?

He heard a slight pause on the other end of the line, then Crenshawe’s voice came back, the tone oily and obsequious. ‘This is a very delicate situation, Mr Delisantro. I’m calling to offer my sincere apologies for the reprehensible conduct of our former employee Miss Eva Redmond. I can’t stress enough our absolute—’

‘What do you mean your
former
employee?’ Nick asked as his heartbeat kicked up a notch.

‘We fired her, of course,’ the man replied, in an officious voice, and the trickle of guilt turned into a torrent.

‘As soon as we discovered her grossly inappropriate behaviour during her visit to San Francisco,’ Crenshawe continued in the same pompous tone. But Nick couldn’t really hear what the guy was pontificating about.

Eva had lost her job over their night together
.

‘And I’d like to assure you she will never get another job in the genealogical research industry again after this incident—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Nick cut in, his temper finally putting in an appearance. ‘How did you find out we slept together?’ Was he being watched by these people?

He thought he heard a slight choking sound, then a supercilious little laugh. ‘Um, well, Miss Redmond admitted to the indiscretion, Mr Delisantro, this afternoon.’

He raked his fingers through his hair.

Damn it, why had she told them? But even as he asked himself the question he could see the guilty flush on her cheeks when she’d admitted to being a virgin—as if she’d tricked him or something—and he knew the answer. Because she was an honest and forthright and hopelessly trusting person. Unlike him.

And to think he’d accused her of being an operator. What a joke. Eva Redmond was about as devious as Snow White.

‘Here at Roots Registry we couldn’t possibly condone that kind of behaviour,’ Crenshawe continued with the same self-righteous indignation. ‘We’re a reputable company in every respect and we value our reputation above all else.’

‘But not your employees,’ Nick remarked coldly, his anger at the man rising.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Delisantro?’

‘You heard me—how long did Eva work for you?’

‘Approximately three years,’ Crenshawe replied with affronted dignity. Nick could almost see him puffing up his chest.

‘And during that time, did she ever do anything like this before?’

‘Well, no, of course not. She was a quiet and, we thought, demure employee—we never had any reason to suspect she would—’

‘But even so you didn’t think she was worthy
of a second chance?’ Nick interrupted again. The creep had sacked Eva without a moment’s notice and by the sounds of it was intending to blacklist her too—and all because she’d succumbed to the explosive physical chemistry between them that even Nick, with all his sexual experience and cynicism, hadn’t been able to resist.

‘Some things simply aren’t excusable,’ the man said, but he’d lost a lot of his bluster and sounded more confused than self-righteous.

‘Yeah, right,’ Nick sneered, but even as his scorn for the bureaucratic jerk curdled his stomach he knew he had to take a large share of the blame for Eva’s predicament.

‘So I take it you won’t be making a complaint?’ the man said tentatively.

‘Of course not,’ Nick barked, thoroughly sick of the whole situation now.

He hadn’t felt this guilty about anything since he’d refused to return to the UK seven years ago and see Carmine Delisantro one last time, despite his sister Ruby’s tearful pleas.

He’d done the same thing then that he’d done a week ago. Put himself and his feelings, his wants and desires first, above everyone else’s. He hadn’t wanted to see Carmine again, because he’d been so bitterly ashamed of how he’d behaved as a teenager towards the man who had raised him. He’d thought at the time it had been the right thing to do, not to risk digging
up all that anger and unhappiness and resentment about the miserable circumstances of his birth all over again. But as the years had passed, and he’d never been able to forget Ruby’s phone calls, and the funeral invitation that he’d thrown into the trash as soon as he’d received it, he’d finally had to admit the truth. That he’d taken the easy way out. He hadn’t done the right thing—he’d just done the right thing for him.

‘Well, that being the case, Mr Delisantro,’ Crenshawe’s voice buzzed in his ear, distracting him from the unpleasant memories, ‘I’m eager to talk to you on another matter entirely,’

‘What other matter?’

‘As I believe Miss Redmond informed you, she was working on the Alegria account.’

Here it comes
, Nick thought bitterly.
The real reason for Crenshawe’s call
. ‘Yeah, what about it?’

‘We have reason to believe that Vincenzo Palatino Vittorio Savargo De Rossi, the fifteenth Duca D’Alegria, is your paternal grandfather.’ The eagerness in Crenshawe’s voice sickened Nick, but he listened.

Maybe he could work this to his advantage. Crenshawe wanted something from him, and he wanted something for Eva.

‘I already told Eva, I couldn’t give a flying—’ He paused, bit back the swear word that wanted to come out. ‘I couldn’t care less about this duc or his relationship to me.’

‘I understand, Mr Delisantro. But I thought you should know that your connection to De Rossi, if it’s confirmed, could possibly make you the sole heir to a substantial fortune in Italian real estate and assets. Not to mention the Alegria Palazzo on the banks of Lake Garda.’

‘So what? I don’t need it,’ Nick said, and meant it.

Money had been the driving force of his existence at the lowest point of his life. How to get it had become an obsession that had consumed him every second of every day, so that he could eat, stay clean, stay healthy, find shelter. When you’d been at the very bottom, when the pursuit of a few pennies meant the difference between eating or going hungry, between curling up over a tube grate or having a hostel bed for the night, you discovered just how important money was. And you’d do anything you had to do to get hold of it.