The Good, the Bad and the Wild (13 page)

The last thing he wanted was to drag any of that guilt up again. Fine, he could admit to mild curiosity about the duca and the man who had impregnated his mother. But he had no intention of playing happy families.

And if that meant he had some unresolved anger, well then maybe he did. But he could live with it just fine. ‘Listen, Eva I’m all grown up now, and I couldn’t care less about what happened a generation ago between De Rossi and my mother.’

‘Okay,’ she said, nodding carefully. ‘I just thought you might be interested in—’

‘I’m much more interested in talking about you,’ he cut in, the sudden desire to change the subject almost as acute as the need to wrestle back control of the conversation—and her.

He didn’t want to talk about the duca, or his son, or his own past. He was much more fascinated by the woman sitting beside him. And the unprecedented effect she still had on him.
Which seemed to have become more acute since their first night. Instead of less.

Even while she’d been asking those intrusive questions, he’d felt the residual hum of arousal at the provocative tilt of her chin, and the softening in her gaze. The small patch of skin where her fingers had touched his arm still sizzled. He’d never been this aware of a woman before.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asked warily.

Reaching towards her, he drew his thumb across the little indent under her bottom lip, heard her sharp intake of breath. ‘Let’s start with how you got that tiny scar on your belly?’

As expected the intimate enquiry had hot colour firing across her cheekbones, but her gaze didn’t falter. ‘It’s an appendix scar,’ she said, both direct and delightfully flustered.

He leaned close, whispered: ‘Want me to kiss it better?’

She didn’t reply, but stunned arousal darkened her irises to a rich cobalt as her eyes flew wide.

He closed the gap, caught that full bottom lip between his teeth and gave a soft nip before sliding his tongue across it.

She jerked back, thudding against the aeroplane wall. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said, more breathless than outraged.

‘That’s a shame.’ He chuckled, noting the frantic rise and fall of her breathing, the pink
flush on her neck. She fascinated him all right. And what fascinated him most of all was the way she responded to him. And how much her instant, untutored response turned him on.

Even when she was trying really hard not to.

He kissed me. Why did he kiss me?

Eva rubbed her hand over her mouth, unable to relinquish her fixed stare out of the window.

And why did I let him?

She pressed her lips together where the tiny bite still tingled. The jet taxied down the runway, forcing her body into the seat as it tilted into its ascent.

It hadn’t been much more than a playful little nip, followed by a quick brush of his mouth against hers. It wasn’t a case of letting him or not letting him. It wasn’t that big a deal. She mustn’t overreact. This was all part of the game he was playing.

But why wouldn’t her lips stop buzzing?

This was worse than she thought, she realised as she heard the ping of the seat-belt sign switching off and her fingers white-knuckled on the arm rest.

Not only did she not have a clue
what
game Nick Delisantro was playing, but she had an awful feeling that whatever game it was, he planned to win.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE
chauffeur-driven car wound through the carefully manicured hedgerows of the Alegria estate, the red geraniums splashing vibrant colour into the intense green. The duca must have a small army of gardeners, Eva calculated, to keep the flowers blooming in this heat. She slipped open another button on her blouse, careful to keep her body turned to the window and away from her fellow passenger, who’d folded his long body into the seat next to her over two hours ago and promptly fallen asleep.

She’d lost her jacket as soon as she’d been positive Nick wasn’t faking sleep to lull her into a false sense of security. Despite the air-conditioning, the sun glaring off the tinted windows, and the overwhelming presence of the man sleeping next to her, had made the interior of the limo stifling. She glanced down at her cleavage, glad to see only the smallest glimpse of flesh and the slight glow of perspiration. She wanted to look as professional as possible when they arrived,
and she also didn’t want to give Nick any ideas. He’d taken more than enough liberties already on that score. Although quite why he had, she still hadn’t figured out.

She risked a look over her shoulder. With his chin tucked into his chest, his arms folded and his long legs crossed at the ankle and stretched out in front of him in the limo’s spacious seat well, he’d hardly budged during the journey.

But how could he have fallen asleep so easily?

How could he be so apparently uninterested about meeting his grandfather for the first time? He hadn’t asked a single question on the plane about the duca, or her research—or even the estate. In fact, apart from that moment of teasing and the kiss—she pressed her lips together—which she refused to think about again, he’d hardly spoken at all. Instead, he’d opened an expensive laptop not long after take-off and typed at a steady pace, pausing only to order a tomato juice.

When she thought of how absorbing she found tracing the ancestry of people who had been long dead and who she had no connection with whatsoever, she was even more astonished by his attitude. How could he be so calm and composed about meeting a man he was actually related to?

But even as the question echoed in her head she recalled his flat refusal to read Leonardo’s journal. To even discuss the man. And the brittle
anger in his voice. Maybe he wasn’t indifferent about his past and his heritage at all. Maybe he was simply defensive about it. Because discussing the affair between his mother and Leonardo De Rossi brought back painful memories?

She watched him, the vulnerability of sleep making his harsh dominant features look almost boyish, and felt the little blip in her heartbeat at the thought of what he might have suffered when he discovered that Carmine Delisantro was not his father.

The crunch of the car wheels on gravel had Eva blinking back the sentimental thought.

Stop it—you promised yourself you wouldn’t do this
.

Romanticising Nick’s reactions, and reading an emotional response into this visit that almost certainly wasn’t even there, would only get her into trouble. She should never have probed about his relationship with his mother, but curiosity, and a stupid desire to soothe the anger she’d seen flash in his eyes, had got the better of her. Nick wasn’t a little boy, as he had already pointed out, he was all grown up now. And the secrets of his past were none of her business.

The car swept out of the hedged driveway and rolled to a stop in front of the Alegria Palazzo. Eva sucked in an awed breath, craning her neck to get a better view. She’d seen photographs of the duca’s estate, but nothing could have prepared her for the size and grandeur of the structure
up close. Wide terraces separated the front of the building from the waterfront. The lake lapped against a wooden dock, where a couple of small sailboats were dwarfed by a muscular scarlet power cruiser.

Multicoloured formal gardens surrounded the mansion itself and stretched towards the forests that rimmed the property. In the distance the Dolomite Mountains created a dramatic natural backdrop to all the man-made splendour, towering over the northern tip of the Lake. She’d done her research on the Ducal Palazzo. Had discovered that it was originally a summer house built on the shores of the lake in the eighteenth-century to take advantage of Garda’s pleasant micro-climate and provide the De Rossi family with an escape from the gruelling summer heat of their Tuscan olive plantations. But she hadn’t expected anything quite this grand. Obviously a summer house to a duca was a little different in size and magnificence from an ordinary summer house.

Two women in stylish dark-purple uniforms and a man in a matching dark purple suit came out of the palazzo and hurried down the limestone steps that led to the driveway.

Nick hadn’t stirred, and she debated whether to wake him, when the chauffeur whisked open her door and bowed.
‘Noi siamo arrivati, signora.’

‘Grazie, Paolo,’
she said in her rudimentary Italian.

She turned to wake Nick only to find him watching her out of hooded eyes.

‘We’ve arrived at the palazzo,’ she said, a bit inanely.

He stretched and then flicked a brief glance out of the window. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured. If he was as blown away by the duca’s estate as she was, there was no trace of it as he climbed out of the car.

The staff had lined up to greet them, the butler standing so stiff and erect, Eva was half expecting him to salute as she and Nick approached. The man cleared his throat and rattled off a stream of Italian, only some of which Eva understood. Nick replied in the perfectly accented Italian she’d heard him use at the airport, then shook the man’s hand and nodded at the two female staff, apparently unperturbed by the way all three of them were gaping at him as if they’d seen a ghost. She would hazard a guess the staff must all have worked for the duca when Leonardo was still alive.

She muddled her way through the introductions with Nick interpreting in short, staccato sentences. For a moment she thought he might be nervous. But he didn’t look nervous as he strolled into the house beside her and they were directed to a drawing room just off the entrance hall. The room smelled of lemon polish and old
wood, the elegant furnishings as ornate and luxurious as the palazzo’s terracotta façade. Floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with musty leather-bound volumes marked the room out as some kind of library, the partially closed shutters on the casement windows cast long shadows on the tiled flooring. The air felt cool and pleasantly dry after the muggy heat of the outdoors.

A slim middle-aged man in a perfectly tailored suit stood as soon as they entered and walked towards them. He was a few inches shorter than Nick, his clean-shaven jaw and sleek designer clothing in sharp contrast to Nick’s worn jeans and day-old stubble. The man spoke in rapid Italian.

Instead of replying in Italian as he had done outside, Nick held up his palm to halt the flow of information. ‘You’ll have to speak English,’ he said firmly. ‘Or get a translator. My Italian’s not that good.’

Eva blinked, taken aback by the statement. Hadn’t he told her he was fluent on the plane? He certainly hadn’t had any difficulty conversing with anyone else.

‘I understand, Signor Delisantro,’ the man switched neatly into lightly accented English, pronouncing the words with the crisp, clear diction of a natural linguist. ‘My name is Luca DiNapoli, I am the head of Duca D’Alegria’s legal team. Firstly I must inform you that you are very welcome in Don Vincenzo’s home as
his guest. But that your invitation here in no way obligates—’

‘Silenzio, Luca.’

The gruff words came from behind them. And it was only then that Eva noticed the elderly man sitting at a desk in the far corner of the room. He walked into a stream of sunlight, his patrician bearing as regal and dignified as one would expect from a high-ranking member of the Italian aristocracy.

The familiar golden gaze that Nick had inherited flickered over her face. ‘We meet again, Signorina Redmond. A pleasure,’ he said, the musical lilt of his accent adding an old-fashioned charm to the greeting. He took her hand, lifted it and then bowed slightly to buzz a gallant kiss onto the knuckles.

But during the whole exchange, his eyes remained fixed on Nick. The mechanical ticks of a carriage clock on the mantelpiece chanted the passing seconds with the deafening crack of rifle fire as the Duca D’Alegria took his time studying his grandson. Slowly, the intelligent, astute, assessing gaze softened, until the rich gold shone with tears.

‘Leo.’ The old man whispered the name like a prayer, his body trembling.

Eva stepped forward and touched his elbow. ‘Are you all right, Your Excellency?’ He looked every one of his eighty-eight years all of a sudden, and nothing like the forceful, indomitable
and naturally poised man she had met two months ago at Roots Registry’s offices.

The duca gave his head a slight shake, then sent Eva a brief, unbearably sad smile. ‘Yes, I am well. Thanks to you, Signorina Redmond.’

Before she had a chance to process his meaning, he collected himself, the moment of fragility vanishing as he addressed his solicitor. ‘You may go, Luca.’

The man tried to protest in Italian.

The duca raised his hand. ‘We speak in English, Luca, for the benefit of our guests. And don’t be foolish. You have only to look at Niccolo to know there is no need for any of that now.’ His gaze settled on Nick as he continued to address the other man. ‘Leave us, I am tired of your talk. I will contact you tomorrow.’

The solicitor said his farewells. If he was annoyed by the abrupt dismissal, he was well trained in hiding his displeasure.

The same couldn’t be said of Nick though.