Kitabı oku: «Italian Deception»

About the Author

MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. Now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

Italian Deception
The Salvatore
Marriage
A Sicilian Seduction
The Passion Bargain
Michelle Reid

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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The Salvatore Marriage

CHAPTER ONE

THE storm raging outside was killing the signal. Shannon uttered a soft, tense little curse as trembling fingers reset her cell-phone then hit ‘redial’ before pushing the phone back to her ear.

Fear was crawling over her skin like a swarm of invading spiders. She couldn’t stop shivering—or was she trembling? She didn’t know, didn’t care, she just needed—needed to make this connection.

‘Come on …’ she prayed with teeth-gritting tension when still nothing happened.

Five minutes ago she had been dashing from a taxi to her apartment block with no other concern than to get out of the driving rain. She’d had a hell of a day from the moment she’d overslept that morning. In her haste to catch her flight to Paris, she’d rushed out of her flat forgetting to pick up her cell-phone as she left and had felt lost without it all day.

On top of that, her meeting had not been worth the time she had wasted on it. Temperamental supermodels and gifted graphic designers just did not mix, she’d discovered, especially when the supermodel in question took one look at the graphic designer’s slender, long-legged figure and regarded her as an instant threat. Why the heck the idiot had conjured up the idea that a five-foot-eight redhead could compete with a six-foot-tall sylph-slim blonde with cheekbones to die for was anyone’s guess. But all hope that the model was going to let Shannon design her self-promoting website went out of the window then and there.

Since then Shannon had flown back to London through the worst weather imaginable, struggled to get a taxi, then had got soaked getting from it to here. The first thing she saw on stepping through her front door was her cell-phone lying on the hall table, innocently telling her that she’d received a dozen missed calls—most of which were from her business partner Joshua demanding to know why the hell she wasn’t answering her phone.

But it was another message awaiting her that had sent her mind into a complete meltdown. ‘Shannon,’ it said. ‘Call me back on this number as soon as you can. There has been an—accident.’

An accident—Her throat closed on her effort to swallow. The relater of the message had not left his name but through the static his deep, smooth, accented voice had been familiar enough to put her into this state of raw panic. She guessed that the call was from her sister’s husband Angelo—and if Angelo had left such a message then it could only be because the accident involved Keira.

‘Damn,’ she muttered when still nothing happened, and was hitting redial again when the doorbell gave a short, sharp ring.

Distracted, she turned to walk down the hallway, barely noticing that she had to step over the bag she’d left dumped in the middle of the floor as she made her way to the front door. A set of harried fingers made a wild scrape through the silk straight weight of her rain-dampened hair before continuing on to grasp the door latch. The phone still wasn’t connecting. She tugged the door open, too preoccupied to wonder who might be standing on the other side of it so it came as a shock—a cold, hard, breath catching shock to find the last person on earth she ever expected to see standing there.

He stood over six feet two inches tall and was wearing a long black overcoat. The width of his shoulders almost spanned the doorway. For a few awful moments Shannon actually felt dizzy enough to clutch at the door while he stood there filling the opening like some dark, chilling force.

‘Luca.’ Dear God, she thought as her lips framed his name on a stunned whisper.

He didn’t utter a single word but just reached out with a hand to ease the phone from her numbed fingers, then began ushering her backwards by the economical means of taking a step forwards.

Her breath feathered against her ribcage, the fact that she wasn’t yelling at him to get the hell away from her said a lot about her state of near complete shutdown—though she did manage to register that both of them moved without touching anywhere. Like a dance between two opposing magnets, they made the manoeuvre into her hall without breaching each other’s defensive space until she was standing with her back pressed against a wall, eyes wide and fixed unblinkingly on him as he turned his back on her and in grim, grim silence closed the door.

The size of her hall suddenly shrank to nothing, she felt strange suddenly, as if she too were shrinking into herself in an effort to get away from what she was being faced with here.

This man, this larger-than-life figurehead of the vast Salvatore empire. Luca Salvatore, of Florence, a man of power and of unrivalled passion. Ex-lover to Shannon Gilbraith, woman of sin and sister to his brother’s wife.

He was also the man she had been going to marry. The man she had lived with like a wife for six wonderful months before it had all come crashing in. She’d loved him passionately; now she could barely have him look at her without feeling her heart wither in his presence.

He turned slowly to face her, shedding raindrops from his wide shoulders as he did so and filling the confined space with the smell of cold air and rain on wool. His long lashed gaze flicked her a glance then slid away to take in the bag dumped on the floor.

‘You’ve been away,’ he murmured levelly. His English was perfect, smooth and deep with the kind of accent that played across her senses like the brush of a lover’s—

Don’t go there, she told herself. ‘P-Paris,’ she said.

He nodded his dark head as if she’d just confirmed something for him, though for the life of her she couldn’t work out what. She was shaking all over, racked by too many confusing conflicts, aware that she should be thinking about her sister but able to think only about him.

Keira … Her throat convulsed on a wave of anguish, the flat of her palms pressed into the wall. Lifting anxious blue eyes to the hard, tight lines of his profile, she parted her lips to demand he tell her what had happened to Keira, but Luca spoke first.

‘Are we alone here?’ he questioned, and when she just gaped at him, unable to believe he had dared to ask that question, he decided to find out for himself. Stepping over her bag, he began opening doors.

Shock was replaced by burning dismay when she realised what he was doing. Two years ago Luca had arrived at his apartment in Florence to find her making a hurried attempt to cover up the evidence of what she had been doing while he’d been out of the way. What followed had been a gruesome demonstration of what came to pass when you played a Salvatore for a fool.

That time he had dragged her from room to room with him as he’d checked all the places in which she could have hidden a lover. This time he was prepared to make the search on his own—not that he had any right to do so.

‘You bastard,’ she breathed, and found the strength to push herself away from the wall and walk on trembling legs into her sitting room.

She hadn’t had a chance to come in here, she realised, staring blankly into the room’s chilly darkness that was softened only by the halogen glow from an outside street lamp filtering in through the window. It was automatic to reach for the nearest switch and flood the room with proper light—automatic to cross to the window to tug the cream curtains over the rain-soaked glass.

When she turned she found him standing in the doorway staring at her through narrowed dark brown, gold-flecked eyes set in a face that wore the proud stamp of his Florentine lineage. He was handsome but hard; handsome but cold; forge a statue in his image and you would have yourself a reflection of a modern-day god.

But this man was no god, she reminded herself quickly. He might have the face and the body of one, might possess the kind of power and arrogance the old gods liked to wield, but inside he was as mortal as anyone. Flawed and fickle, she concluded as she waited for the shock to ease so that the old bitter emotions could come flooding in.

Emotions like pain and anger, and the miserable ache of a love cruelly ripped away from her—a passionately professed, returned love that she’d learned the hard way had never gone more than skin-deep for him.

It didn’t happen. Standing here white-faced and tensed in readiness for it all to surge up and grab her, Shannon discovered that she continued to feel absolutely nothing, not even a slight twinge of that old sense of desperation with which mere thoughts of him used to fill her. Those eyes that used to turn her heart inside out were leaving her cold now, as did the slender mouth that used to act like a magnet to her own hungry lips. The slashing high cheek-bones, the dark golden skin, the magnificent body hidden beneath the heavy coat; she used to worship all of them with every touch, every breath or sensual homage she could find. The man in his whole god-like entirety was doing nothing for her any more.

It came as such a relief, because it had to mean that she was over him.

Over him at last and for ever.

‘Satisfied with your search?’ she asked with acid-tipped sarcasm. ‘Or would you like to check behind the curtains too?’

There was a hint of a frown before he acknowledged the comment with a small grimace.

‘No,’ was all he said and he shifted his gaze to take in the décor with its soft pastel shades and neat modern furniture that was such a contrast to the antique luxury he’d furnished his own home with. Her small twin sofas were covered with cream linen, her floor was of pale polished wood. His floors displayed priceless rugs thrown over intricate inlaid wood parquetry and his sofas were made of rich brown leather that were big and deep enough to stretch out upon two at a time to canoodle and kiss in exquisite—

Once again she was forced to bring her wandering thoughts up short. Why recall all of that when it no longer meant anything? she asked herself crossly, and moved across the room to flick another switch, which sent flames leaping up over designer logs resting on a bed of pale pebbles in her open hearth.

This time when she turned she found that his attention had switched back to her again, his hooded gaze moving over her pencil-slim skirt with its natty little kick pleat at the back, which gave her long legs a rather sexy shape. Did he like her legs? Of course he liked her legs; he used to worship them with his hands and his mouth and the teasing lick from his tongue as it trailed upwards on its way to—

Oh, stop it! she told herself. He looked up suddenly, as if she’d said the words out loud. Their eyes connected. Tension erupted to rush screaming round the room on the back of a mutual, intimate knowledge that would never go away no matter how much they both might want it to.

They’d been lovers, gorgeous, greedy, sensually indulgent lovers. They knew every inch of each other, what made the other sigh with pleasure and what would send them toppling over the edge. But those thoughts did not belong here—he didn’t belong here!

Say something, damn you! she wanted to scream at him. But he’d always been good at using silence to whittle down people’s nerves, and he continued to stand there looking at her as if he was waiting for her to say something. Say what? she wondered. Was he expecting her to invite him to sit down?

The phrase about burning in hell first whipped through her head.

Maybe he heard it. Maybe he was still able to tune himself in to what was going on inside her head because the black silk lashes flickered slightly as he shifted his gaze yet again and fixed it on something over her right shoulder.

Shannon didn’t need to look to know what it was that had now caught his attention. It had to be the framed wedding photograph standing alone on a shelf that showed the sweet face of her sister Keira smiling adoringly up at his handsome brother Angelo.

Behind the blissful couple and fortunately out of focus stood Luca, playing the dauntingly sophisticated best man to the groom and herself as the young and self-conscious chief bridesmaid. Luca had been all of twenty-eight years old to her own meagre eighteen at the time, but they’d enjoyed each other’s company that day.

Odd, she thought, that she should remember that now when there were so many bad things about Luca she could be remembering instead.

‘I think it might be best if you sit down.’

Muscles all over her body jerked suddenly, bringing her chin up sharply as her senses leapt in alarm. When someone told you to sit down it could only mean they were about to tell you something that was guaranteed to take the legs from under you, and the only way this man could do that to her was by bringing her bad news about—

‘What’s wrong with Keira?’ she shot at him sharply.

A hand came out; long-fingered and lean, it indicated to one of the sofas. ‘When you sit down,’ he countered, then watched calmly as if he was expecting it as she sparked like a firework.

‘Oh, stop being so bloody sensitive to my feelings, Luca, and tell me what’s happened to my sister!’ she cried. ‘All I got was some static-splashed message telling me that there had been an accident and would I ring a stupid mobile phone number that did not exist!’

‘It exists,’ he murmured.

And like a lightning strike Shannon suddenly realised what a terrible—terrible—mistake she had made. ‘It was your mobile number, wasn’t it?’ she bit out accusingly, struggling to believe that she could ever have mistaken the deep, terse tones of his voice for the warmer tones of his brother Angelo. ‘Poor Luca,’ she mocked with sudden bitterness, ‘being forced to give the wicked witch his new number and risk a second flood of unwanted calls.’

His half-grimace acknowledged her right to toss that remark at him. Two years ago she’d tried every which way she could use to get him to talk to her. She’d called him on his cell-phone night and day until suddenly the number had been no longer obtainable. He’d cut off her main source of contact—just as she’d been ruthlessly cut off from everything else that had been important to her.

‘Just speak, damn you,’ she prompted huskily.

With a grim pressing-together of his lips, Luca looked ready to continue holding out until she sat down. Then she saw his eyes make a flickering inventory of the way she was standing there, fine-boned and slender enough that the tremors now shaking her body almost forced her down. Stubbornness held her upright; stubbornness and a defiance that had always been one of her most besetting sins in his eyes—though not her worst sin.

Then—no, she slammed a door shut on that kind of thinking. Stop going there! she told herself angrily. Don’t think about anything. Don’t even bother to notice the way he’s looking at you again with a contempt he believes you deserve. So he hates and despises you. Let him, she invited. I don’t care—I don’t.

He moved then, and on a thick, inner quiver of fear she saw his expression alter from hard to grave. His eyes flicked away. He heaved in a deep breath. The fine hairs on her body started to tingle as he parted his mouth to speak.

Then the words came. ‘There has been an accident—a car crash this morning,’ he told her. ‘People are hurt—badly hurt,’ he then extended grimly.

‘Keira—?’ Her sister’s name arrived as a fragile whisper.

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘And I need you to be strong here, Shannon,’ he warned then, ‘because the prognosis is not good and we need to—Oh, hell—you mad, stubborn idiota!’

Shannon didn’t know she’d swayed until his hands arrived hard on her shoulders and forcibly manoeuvred her into the nearest sofa. She landed with a bump, eyes wide and staring.

‘Why can you never take good advice when it is offered to you?’ he ground out as he came down on his haunches and took a strong grasp on her ice-cold hands. ‘It was a simple request—a wise request. You almost collapsed as I knew you would. You are your own worst enemy, do you know that? I cannot believe you are still such a—’

She tugged her hands free. The action silenced his angry tongue, snapped his lips together and tightened the muscles in his face. In the new silence that developed Shannon struggled to get a hold of what was trampling through her. Her heart was palpitating wildly, her breathing reduced to tight and shallow catches of air. Keira was the only person left in this world that she truly cared about.

Keira, her beautiful Keira, whom everyone loved and wanted a piece of.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she whispered unevenly.

His mouth had developed a white ring of tension around it. She had to look away because she couldn’t bear to see him while he said what he had to say. ‘They were in the fast lane on the main autostradale into Florence when they ran into a heavy downpour of rain,’ he explained. ‘An articulated lorry skidded on the wet surface. It criccoaccoltellato—jackknifed directly in front of them, swerving right across the road. They did not stand a chance,’ he uttered in a voice like thick gravel. ‘With no room or time to take avoiding action they hit head-on and—’

The words stopped when he was forced to swallow. Silence returned, crawling all over the two of them while Shannon sat staring over the top of Luca’s dark head as the whole wretched thing played itself like a macabre action movie in front of her eyes.

‘Is she—?’

‘No,’ he cut in quickly—roughly.

Relief feathered through her, then she tensed again as the next dreaded thought flipped into her head.

‘They. You said they,’ she prompted shakily, and looked at him then, really looked at him and saw for the first time the strain etched into the fabric of his lean, hard features—and the pain burning in the deep, dark depths of his eyes. Realisation dawned, the muscles in her own face began to collapse, tears of a desperate, desperate understanding flooding into her eyes.

‘Oh, no, Luca—no,’ she choked out unevenly. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘not Angelo …’

But the answer she wanted to hear didn’t come, and as a set of her cold fingers jerked up to cover her trembling mouth Luca muttered something thick in Italian, then lowered his head to bury his face in his hands.

Dark mists of shock and grief wrapped around them. For what could have been an age Shannon couldn’t move or think or even feel. Angelo and Keira—Keira and Angelo—the two precious names spun in her head on an ever dizzying spiral while the rain lashed wildly at the window and Luca remained squatting in front of her with his face covered and his wide shoulders taut as he fought his own battle with shock and grief.

Luca and his brother were close. They worked together, played together, laughed and talked together all the time. To think of one without thinking about the other was—

‘Oh Luca …’ Lifting her hand with its trembling fingers, Shannon gently touched them to his rain-dampened hair. ‘I’m so s—’

It came without warning. At the first light brush of her fingers he was thrusting away from her with a violence that left her stunned and shaken as he climbed to his feet, turned his back on her and strode away several paces to then stand still and rigid while he fought a battle with his moment of complete collapse.

When he turned to face her he was back in control again, or as controlled as a man could be who’d just lost the brother he loved. Shannon hadn’t moved, and as his gaze lashed over her she saw the ice, the cold hatred, and knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he did not deserve to lose his brother and she did not deserve to have her sister still.

Yes, she thought, he hated her enough to think like that.

Bitterness returned, and with it came a welcome sense of foggy calmness. Shannon climbed to her feet, wished with all her aching heart that she could just walk away from him, but there were still things she needed to know.

‘Y-you said the prognosis for Keira isn’t good,’ she prompted, feeling the shake in her voice as well as in the fingers she used to smooth down the rucked fabric of her slender skirt. ‘Why isn’t it good?’

The tense shape of his mouth slackened slightly as he parted his lips to speak. ‘Her injuries were extensive. She had to be cut out of the car—’

Shannon flinched and lowered her eyes from him, painfully aware that the they had now changed to she. Did that mean that Angelo had been beyond help? She didn’t ask, didn’t dare, didn’t think she could cope with the answer.

‘By the time they freed her, Keira had lost a lot of blood,’ Luca continued in a low voice like rough sandpaper. ‘Thankfully she was unconscious throughout so was aware of—nothing …’

The nothing broke into uneven fragments, and as her heavy lungs tried their best to breathe for her Shannon wondered if Angelo had been aware of nothing.

Angelo. An ache hit low in her stomach. Never to see his lazy grin again or the teasing gleam in his beautiful eyes—’Oh,’ she choked and her legs went hollow, forcing her to sit down again and cover her face with her hands.

‘There were problems,’ Luca pushed on relentlessly, obviously deciding to get the whole wretched thing said now he had begun. ‘Some of which the doctors could fix, some they—could not …’

It was during this next thick pause Luca allowed to develop—presumably to give her time to absorb what he’d said—Shannon suddenly remembered something she should not have forgotten: there was still yet another being involved in this awful tragedy.

A sudden rush of nausea forced her to swallow thickly. Sliding her hand away from her face, she looked up at Luca, her eyes dark and haunted. ‘Oh, God, Luca,’ she whispered frailly. ‘What about the baby?’

Her sister was seven and a half months pregnant—the longest period Keira had managed to carry a baby, one of her many, many attempts to bear Angelo a child. His eyelashes flickered, lowering over dark brown irises to hide his own feelings about what he was about to say. ‘They had to do a Caesarean section,’ he informed her briefly. ‘Keira was haemorrhaging badly and it became a matter of urgency that they deliver the baby as quickly as they could—’

The abruptly spoken words came to a stop again. It seemed that he could only give information in short bursts before he had to pause to gather himself. It was all so dark and utterly wretched, shock piling upon shock upon horror and grief and blood-curdling dread.

‘And …?’ It took a tight clutching at her courage to prompt him to continue.

‘A girl,’ he announced. ‘She is quite small and needs the aid of an incubator to breathe, but otherwise the doctors assure us that she is fully formed and perfectly healthy. It—it is her mama that gives grave cause for concern. Keira now lies in a coma and I’m afraid the final outcome does not look good.’

In the cold, dark silence that followed, Shannon knew she was slipping into deep shock. Angelo was dead, her sister was dying, their baby daughter needed help to breathe. It couldn’t get any worse.

It could, she discovered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly.

But he wasn’t sorry, not for her at any rate. It was too late for him to murmur polite words of sympathy when he’d looked at her the way he’d done a few minutes ago. He resented bitterly the fact that he had lost his beloved brother while she, the undeserving one, could still cling to a small thread of hope.

‘Excuse me,’ she said thickly, ‘but I’m going to be sick,’ and, dragging herself up from the sofa, she made a dash for the bathroom.

He didn’t follow and Shannon did not expect him to—though he had to hear her retching because she hadn’t had time to close the door. But she could feel his presence like a scar on her heaving body because this was a scene they had played before, though under very different circumstances.

And remembering that ugly moment made her feel suddenly very bitter that it had to be him of all people to bring her bad news and then witness this.

Trembling too badly to stand unaided, she sank down on the toilet seat lid and tried to think. She had to plan, she had to deal with Luca on a calm and sane footing, because if she was sure about anything in this sudden dizzying nightmare she had been tossed into, then it was that he would have pre-empted her immediate needs and have had travel arrangements put into place before he had even knocked on her door.

It was the way of the man—of the Salvatore family as a whole. Incisive efficiency under pressure was their trade mark. They were rich, they were powerful, they dealt with their enemies in the same way that they dealt with tragedy, by closing ranks and, with shields in place, dealing with the situation as one dynamic force.

All for one, one for all, she mused bleakly. Then she thought about Keira lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and even as the family grieved for Angelo she knew that her sister would still be surrounded by their tight ring of protection. The image should have comforted her but instead she found herself having to make another lurching dive for the washbasin.

Why? Because she was not included. She was the outcast sent into exile for her so-called sins. And the prospect of having to break her way through the Salvatore guard to be with her own sister caused the same nauseating distress that had kept her out of Florence for the last two years.

‘Oh, Keira …’ she groaned on a sob of anguish. Then she thought of poor Angelo and knew that one constrained sob was not going to be enough, so she switched on the taps and wept with the rush of water drowning out the sound.

Luca wasn’t in the sitting room when eventually she went back to face him. The all too familiar scent of him lingered, though, catching at her nostrils and relaying messages to certain senses she did not want disturbed. Strange how she had not picked up on that scent earlier.

Even stranger that she’d dared to tell herself that she was over him.

Well, not any longer, she was forced to accept as she turned to go and find him and spied his overcoat lying across the back of one of the chairs in the old familiar way that brought weak tears springing back to her eyes.

Something had happened to her back there in the bathroom. A door inside her had opened and allowed too many suppressed memories to come flooding out. Memories of love and passion and a promise of perfect happiness turning to dust at her feet. And other memories of a sister she had loved more than anyone. Yet when she’d left Luca she had also turned her back on Keira.

Guilt thudded at her conscience, but it fought with resentment and a deep, deep sense of betrayal that still hurt two years on. There were many ways to break someone’s heart for them, she mused bleakly. Luca and Keira both had broken her heart in different ways.

She found him standing in her kitchen by one of the modern white units, his six-foot-two-inch frame dwarfing the room as it did most things—including her more diminutive size. He was in the process of pouring boiling water into her smart glass and steel coffee pot but on hearing her step he turned his dark head. For a brief moment she saw him as she had last seen him two years ago, angry, naked, the natural colour washed out of his skin by disgust and contempt and an appalling knowledge of what he had just done.

Then the image faded and now she saw a tired man living with the strain of grief locked up inside him and a knowledge that life had to go on just as duty must still be done.

He offered her a brief smile before turning away again. ‘I thought we both needed this,’ he explained levelly, drawing her attention to the freshly made pot of coffee he had prepared. ‘I have also made you some toast to help to settle your stomach.’

Following the indication of his dark head she saw a plate sitting on the breakfast counter bearing two slices of lightly toasted wholemeal bread. Her stomach lurched again—not at the thought of receiving anything in its tender state, but because the whole scenario was resurrecting yet more memories of the old times. Times when this wealthy, very sophisticated and utterly spoiled man had surprised her with domestic moments like this.

He owned homes in many prestigious places, owned aeroplanes and helicopters and a beautiful yacht that could take one’s breath away. He ran a huge multinational finance company that employed thousands of people right across the globe but he didn’t like servants intruding on his privacy, suffered their services as a necessity in his busy life so long as they did their work when he wasn’t there. He could cook, he could clean and he made the best cup of coffee she had ever tasted.

But here in her kitchen—acting as if he actually cared about her well-being?

Fresh bitterness welled at his damned hypocrisy. ‘I’d rather be going,’ she replied with as much composure as she could muster. ‘That is presuming you’ve made arrangements for me to travel to Florence?’

‘Of course,’ he confirmed. ‘But we do not have to leave for another hour. My plane needs to refuel and perform the usual checks then wait for a vacant slot before it can take off again.’

‘You mean you’ve flown here from Florence—today?’ Shannon was stunned and it showed in the stifled gasp she released.

‘Someone had to break the news to you.’ The way he shrugged a broad shoulder was meant to convey indifference to the task but they both knew it was a lie. His brother had just died in tragic circumstances. His sister-in-law lay gravely ill. His mother and his two sisters must need him desperately, yet here he was standing in her small kitchen making coffee and toast for her?

‘Wouldn’t a message to my answering service have been simpler?’

‘Would it?’ he said and only had to glance at her for Shannon to know what he was getting at. He had come in person because he knew her. He’d expected her to fall apart just exactly as she had done.

Turning with the coffee pot, he went to place it on the counter next to the plate of toast, then glanced at his watch with its thick gold strap that nestled into a bed of dark hair on a wrist built to lift heavy weights if required to do so. Everything about him was built that way. The formation of his muscular structure showed the power in him yet in some unfathomable way he still managed to appear contradictorily lean and sleek.

His suit was dark, his shirt sky-blue, his tie a slender strip of navy blue silk. Wide shoulders tapered down a long lithe back to narrow hip-bones, the power in his legs and arms lay hidden beneath the expensive cut of his clothes. He could pick her up with one hand—she knew this because he had done it once when she’d challenged him. Then they’d tumbled onto the bed in a fit of laughter because one recently bathed, slippery wet and wriggling naked female was not easy to balance by her seat.

There wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t have heart flutters when Luca was near them. She had done more than flutter; she’d positively vibrated. He’d personified Man in her estimation and no man since him had come close to equalling him.

‘Come and eat your toast.’

The dark tones in his voice made her flesh quiver. Glancing at the plate of toast, she felt a sudden desire to tell him where to go with his demonstration of concern. She didn’t need him standing about her kitchen pretending that there was nothing between them but a very loose sister-brother-in-law relationship. They’d sank into each other’s bodies for goodness’ sake! He was passionately Italian and she was passionately Irish. Both stubborn, hot tempered and as temperamental as hell. Standing here watching him stroll about her kitchen was enough to ignite her temper. But common sense was telling her to just shut up and put up if she didn’t want full-scale war to break out, because she knew Luca. When his mind was made up about something nothing could budge it. She had learned that the hard way.

Bitterness welled, once more she crushed it down and wondered yet again where she’d got the stupid idea from that she was over him when here she was flailing in the middle of a stomach-curdling crisis and all she seemed able to do was think about him.

Or maybe that was it, she then consoled herself as she used a trembling hand to pull out one of the two high stools that sat in front of her white laminate breakfast bar and hitched herself up onto it. Maybe obsessing about Luca was her mind’s way of distracting her from what was really threatening to tear her apart.

‘How are your mother and your sisters coping?’ she asked as she pulled the plate of toast towards her.

‘They’re not,’ he replied with a blunt economy that turned her stomach inside out. Then he relented slightly, sighed and added, ‘They are keeping themselves occupied at the hospital, taking turns to sit with Keira and the baby. It—helps them to be there.’

‘Yes.’ Shannon acknowledged her acceptance of that.

Luca used that moment to pull out the other stool and sit down beside her. His thigh accidentally brushed against hers as he reached over to pour coffee into her mug. Shannon’s mind went blank—although blank was nowhere near the right word to describe the sudden burning sensation that sprang to life low in her abdomen. Nor did the word suit the sudden fire-burst of images that went chasing through her head. Images of what that thigh felt like naked when brushing against her naked thigh, images of her hand stroking along its muscle-packed length and of his hand making the same sensual journey along the silken length of hers.

The old vibrations started up, running riot round her system and warming the sensitive place at her core. In an effort to pretend it just wasn’t happening, she reached for a slice of toast and lifted it to her mouth. She bit but didn’t taste, tried chewing though she knew she would struggle to swallow. Her mouth was too dry and she needed that coffee.

She needed him to move away so she didn’t have to feel like this. She needed to remember why he was here! Oh, God, she thought wretchedly. She was ashamed of herself—she could smell him, feel him, she could even taste him! What was it with her that she couldn’t keep her stupid, rotten appalling thoughts under control?

Her throat closed as she tried to swallow—hot, bright tears burned in her eyes. She despised herself; she despised him for coming here and doing this to her—for showing her up for the weak-willed, shallow person she had to be to be letting him get to her at a time like this when—

‘Milk?’ he asked.

Shannon looked at the two mugs of steaming black coffee and recalled how little it had always taken for them to want to fall upon each other. A look, a word, an accidental touch like the light brushing of thighs and they could lose themselves quite appallingly in the pleasures of the flesh. Making love with Luca had been passionate and daring and uninhibited. He had shown her pleasure she’d never known existed, lowered her so deep into her own senses that sometimes she’d struggled to float back out again.

Only twice had he actually hurt her: the first time they’d made love and the last time they’d made love. The first time Luca hadn’t understood what kind of woman he’d been dealing with and she hadn’t bothered to tell him that he would be her first lover so she’d accepted all the blame. When she’d cried a little afterwards he’d wrapped her in his arms and shown her a different kind of loving with the power of comfort and a need to put right what he saw as his own failure. He had done so, of course, many times and in many, many ways.

‘No,’ she managed to offer in answer to his question—while her mind rocketed off to recall the second time he had hurt her.

He had been blinded by fury, lost inside a frighteningly jealous rage. He had called her everything from slut to harlot and she had been so appalled that he could see her that way that she’d riled him on with biting sarcasm until he had snapped.

And it had not been the compulsive roar of sex that followed that hurt her, but the contempt with which he’d cast her aside afterwards that had ground her emotions to dust. Since then—nothing. No word, no contact—not even an acknowledgement to say that he had received back his ring.

Therefore—yes, she reiterated very grimly, she was over Luca Salvatore. The simple act of remembering those dark times was enough to kill anything she’d ever felt for him. Even if the truth came up and hit him in the face right now as they sat here pretending to be civilised and he got down on his knees to beg her forgiveness, she would not forgive.

So let her senses respond to his closeness, she invited. Let her foolish pulse quicken and her weak flesh vibrate and her shameful head try recalling the good times if it felt it had to do. But the bad times would always overshadow those good times.

‘I’m going to pack a bag.’ Getting up with an abruptness that startled him, she walked away without sparing his over-still, over-watchful frame a single fleeting glance.

CHAPTER TWO

LEFT alone in the kitchen, Luca stared into his mug of coffee and wondered grimly if she had actually seen him at all through that glaze of shock that covered her eyes.

Did he really care? he then questioned in outright rejection of what was rumbling around inside him. He already knew the inner Shannon too well to want to make contact again.

Been there, done that, he thought with a cold lack of any humour, then hunched forward and folded his hands around his coffee mug wishing to hell he hadn’t come here. In the way he’d always believed that these things worked, life should have drawn a story on her beautiful face by now. She should look distinctly jaded but instead she was more stunningly beautiful than ever.

Lies, all lies, he contended tightly. Those too-blue eyes had turned lying into a fine art. The same with her lush, soft, kissable mouth and the way she held her chin so high whenever she allowed herself to look at him.

Challenge and contempt. He’d seen both in her face before he’d felled her with the news. What did she think gave her the right to look at him like that when she had been the one who had taken another lover into his bed?

His bed. ‘Dio.’

Letting go of his cup, he sprang to his feet on an explosion of anger and disgust, versus a strange, unwanted, stomach-clutching fight with regret.

She had been his woman. In every way he had ever looked at it he had been her man—her love, her for ever after. It had been in her eyes, in her smile, in the way she’d taken him inside her, so why—why had she thrown it all away?

A harsh sigh sent him to stand by the kitchen window. The rain was still lashing down outside, the night so stormy it promised to be a rough flight out of England.

Irritation shot down his backbone. Why had he come here?

He wished he knew. He wished he knew what it was that was driving him. Had he really believed that he was man enough to bury the past in this time of tragedy and deal with this situation with understanding and compassion? Or had his motives been driven by something much more basic than that—like a need to assuage this thick bloody grief churning around inside him by witnessing some sign of remorse or regret for what she had thrown away?

Well, so much for the compassion scenario because one look at her standing there at her door, one glance at the way she cowered back against the wall, and his stupid head took him back to the last time he’d seen her cower like that. So he’d pulled the lousy trick with the doors and deserved the contempt she’d thrown back at him for doing it.

And as for signs of remorse?

‘Dio,’ he grated.

He was a fool for coming here in person. He was a fool for expecting to see remorse from a woman who had shown none when she’d been caught cheating on him. He should have stayed where he belonged in Florence with his mother and sisters. He should have left a message on her cell-phone as she’d suggested—There’s been a car accident, your sister is dying and my brother is dead.

‘Hell,’ he cursed. ‘Hell!’ as his own brutal words ground his body into a clutch of agony.

Angelo—dead.

His heart began to pound like the rain on the window. He caught sight of his own iron hard reflection washed by tears he knew he could not shed.

He turned his back on it, grabbing at his neck with tense fingers as the violence within him built like a great balloon making him want to hit something—anything to offset this black pain!

Keira and the baby—he reminded himself forcefully. Think only about them because with them there was still life and where there was life there had to be hope.

On that stern lecture he tugged his cell-phone out of his jacket pocket and stabbed in a set of numbers. Discovering the storm was ruining his signal did not improve his mood. Pocketing the phone, he went back to the sitting room to use Shannon’s land-line, hoping that they wouldn’t get grounded here until the storm blew over. The sooner they got to Florence, the sooner he could walk away from her.

He was amazed at how badly he needed to do that.

He heard Shannon moving about in the hall while he was still on the telephone. He kept his back to the door as he listened to what his mother was saying and kept his own voice dipped to low-toned Italian as he asked questions, received answers, and felt Shannon’s stillness in the doorway like an electric charge to his spine.

The call ended, he turned. She had managed to snatch a quick shower and a change of clothes, he noticed. Gone was the sexy skirt she had been wearing, replaced by faded denims and a sweater that almost blended with her creamy skin. Her hair was up, caught in a neat knot that dowsed most of the flames. But what the prim style took away it then gave back by enhancing the delicate shape of her small oval face, her incredible blue eyes and soft little mouth, which could look Madonna-like but were really weapons of sin.

‘No change,’ was all he said in answer to the question he could see hovering on her lips.

No change, Shannon repeated to herself. Was that good or bad? No change said that Keira was still hanging in there. But no change also meant that she was still in a coma, which was no reassurance at all. She wanted to know more—needed to know more and even opened her mouth to demand Luca tell her more. Then changed her mind when she was forced to accept that knowing would probably make her fall apart again and she had to keep herself together if she wanted to get through the long hours of travelling that lay ahead.

So she made her voice sound composed when she said, ‘I need to use the phone if you’ve finished with it. I have to let some people know that I won’t be around for a while.’

A nod of his dark head and Luca took a step sideways. Dark clothes, dark eyes, dark everything, he seemed to cast a heavy shadow across her light and airy room. Picking up the receiver, she felt the heat from his grasp still lingering. For some stupid reason, feeling the intimacy that heat evoked made her throat ache all the more as she tapped in the number of her co-partner at the busy graphic design company she and Joshua Soames had built together.

As she murmured huskily, ‘Hi, Josh, it’s me …’ Luca turned and walked out of the room. His shadow remained, though, casting a pall over everything. Taking a deep breath in preparation for a shower of sympathy and concern she just didn’t want to have to deal with right now, she began to explain.

Luca reappeared while she was making her second call to confirm that her neighbour still had the spare key to her flat so she could keep an eye on it for her.

‘Thanks, Alex, I owe you one,’ she murmured gratefully. ‘Dinner when I get back? Sure, my shout. It will be something to look forward to.’

The dull throb of silence returned once she’d replaced the receiver. Luca was shrugging into his overcoat and his profile could have been cast in iron. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked and, at her reply, he flashed her a hard smile. ‘Only the two men in your life? You are a consistent little thing, Shannon, I will say that.’

Her response was to walk away without giving him the satisfaction of answer. His reasons to be bitter—imagined or otherwise—were his prerogative, but his right to take cheap shots at her now, when other things were so much more important, filled her with fresh contempt. She wasn’t going to explain that Alex was a woman and that Josh was the man who’d saved her life when Luca had done his best to ruin it!

He was standing by the front door when she came out of her bedroom wearing a long black woollen coat and a hat pulled down over her ears, both of which had become essential accessories during the winter the UK was enduring this year.

‘Is this it?’ he asked without making eye contact. In one hand he held her suitcase, in the other the padded black bag that contained her laptop computer.

Settling the strap to her handbag on her shoulder, ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Do you have a car outside or do we need to use mine?’

‘I have a hire car.’

Turning away, he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing, then went to call the lift while Shannon locked up her flat. They rode the lift like perfect strangers, and left the building to walk into driving rain. Luckily his hire car waited only a few yards away. Using a remote control to unlock it, he swung open the passenger door to allow Shannon to get in and out of the rain before he strode round to the boot to stash her things, finally arriving behind the wheel wet through.

Neither had thought to catch up one of the umbrellas she kept by the front door. Neither seemed to give a damn. As the car engine fired Shannon turned her face to the side window. With only a swipe from a hand across his wet face, Luca ignored the raindrops running down the back of his neck and set them moving with the grim desire to get this over with as quickly as it was humanly possible.

He was angry with himself for making that comment about her personal life. It had placed him in the position of sounding hard and nasty, and could have given the impression that he cared when he didn’t. She could have as many Alexes as she liked lining up to take their turn in her bed. Joshua Soames was a different matter. Luca knew all about her close friend and business partner because Keira never ceased to talk about how their graphic design venture had taken off like a rocket from the moment the two of them had begun to trade. The two partners had been friends throughout university, both excelling in computer design. Luca had listened to Keira spouting proud things about her sister even that far back. Only his mood had been more indulgent then—his mind remembering a rather cute, if self-conscious, freckle-faced teenager with a head of gorgeous hair in a pale blue taffeta bridesmaid’s dress that managed to wear her rather than the other way around. She’d simply amused him then. He’d liked her because despite all her teenage awkwardness she’d had a tongue like a whip, which had entertained him all the way through Keira and Angelo’s long wedding breakfast.

Needless to say it was the image he’d used to conjure up of Shannon whenever Keira had mentioned her younger sister. So when, four years later, she’d arrived on her first visit to Florence and he’d found himself confronted by the grown-up version, he had been completely blown away.

Beautiful, he thought, and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Astoundingly, fascinatingly beautiful. The freckles had gone; her body had filled out to take on a shape that was truly spectacular. And instead of teenage awkwardness he’d been faced with a supremely self-confident graduate with a hunger for life and lethal gift for flirtation. She’d plied him with coquettish looks and her plans to start up her own design company with Joshua Soames and take the world by storm. Older, wiser, and as cynical as hell about people with ideals so grand, he’d listened patiently, answered all her eager questions about financial management, and found it was he who was taken by storm.

The first time they’d kissed it had been meant as a brotherly salutation to finish off the evening they’d just spent together listening to Puccini. She had been eager to go to the opera and he had been happy to take her. They’d shared a candlelit dinner at his favourite restaurant afterwards and, even though he had known by then that he was getting in too deep, he had held onto the arrogant belief that he still had control of the situation—until that kiss.

Grimly driving them out of the city now in weather so foul a duck would find shelter, he felt his lips heat at the memory. He had not intended it to be a meaningful kiss, just one of those light exchanges you shared with someone you’d spent a pleasant evening with. But Shannon had fallen into that kiss with the same all-out enthusiasm she threw at life. It had shaken him, sent his libido soaring to a place it had never known was there.

Bringing the car to a halt at a junction, he checked the road either way and used the opportunity to cast a brief glance at her. She was sitting there with her head turned away and that silly little hat pulled down over her ears. Something hot shot from his heart to his loins, then stayed burning there. Only Shannon had ever made that connection, only she had ever been able to turn him into a mass of raging hormones without needing to try.

Ten years his junior, yet divided by almost a millennium’s difference in life experience, she’d caught him, trussed him up and packaged him in a box marked ‘taken’—by the woman with the amazing hair, the stunning face, a fantastic body and an insatiable set of desires that had him balancing on the edge of fear that she might decide to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Well, he’d got his wish, if that was what he had been looking for. And he should have been relieved he’d found out before he’d placed the wedding ring on her finger. Yet oddly he hadn’t been—not once the first flush of anger had worn off, that was. All he’d felt then was regret because at least a wedding ring would have given him a reason to go after her—haul her back by her lovely hair and make her pay for daring to betray him.

Instead he’d enjoyed two years of long, hard, festering about what should have been. And in that time bitterness had turned his view of women so sour he hadn’t been able to touch one since.

A great legacy for her to chew on, if she ever found out she’d rendered him impotent, he grimaced as they drove through rain like sheets of ice.

If he throws me one more nasty look I think I might turn round and hit him, Shannon decided as she sat watching his profile via the side-window reflection. Up to now she had watched him slice her one look of utter blinding derision, several of disgust and two of seething sexual denunciation. The roads were bad enough without him distracting himself from his driving by thinking lewd and hateful thoughts.

A slave to his ever-raging libido, she thought. Sex was all that Luca knew. Not Love but Sex—give me, I need, I want, I have to have. Physical, insatiable, inventive and so good at it that it was no wonder his reputation went before him. Variety—he used to say while grinning unrepentantly when she used to face him with grapevine chatter—is most definitely the spice of life. She should have realised then that she was nothing but a brand new and exciting variety he simply had to try out.

Love? Not this man. He had no idea of the concept if it didn’t attach itself to some physical act. The word? Oh, he’d known how to use the necessary words to gain the required responses. I love you. Ti amo mio per sempre l’innamorato. Whispered words in sensual Italian that could seduce a woman to mush.

Then suddenly she was a slut and a harlot, a woman beneath his dignity to know. One mistake—not even her mistake—and she had been put out in the cold so fast, she was still dealing with the shock of it two years later.

Over him? she asked. No, she wasn’t over him. She was still too angry, bitter and hungry to draw blood to be anywhere near getting over what Luca had done to her.

‘We will never take off in this weather,’ he gritted.

Tears pricked her eyes at the sudden realisation that she had allowed herself to concentrate on Luca instead of on Keira yet again. Oh, may God forgive me, she thought and had to rummage in her bag for a tissue.

‘You OK?’ Luca had heard her telling little snuffle.

‘Fine,’ she said, hating him—hating him with every fiber she was made of.

‘Not far to the airport,’ he said more levelly.

He knew she was crying. But then, he knew her so well. Inside, outside, every which way a man could know a woman he had lived and slept with for half a year before he’d chucked her out. Gritting his teeth together, Luca withdrew inside himself, dark eyes fierce as they pierced the driving rain in his quest to get to the airport and out of close contact with the hate of his life. He had never been more relieved as he was when he saw the lights of the private airport where his plane was waiting for them. He needed some space—air to breathe that wasn’t tainted with the scent of this woman.

The hire-car parking bay was under cover. Getting out, he directed Shannon to the departure lounge, then headed off in the other direction to officially hand back the car keys. By the time he went looking for her, she had removed her hat and coat and was standing in front of the departure lounge viewing window watching the rain pelting down from the sky.

Five feet eight was fairly tall for a woman, but next to him Shannon felt small, frail, delicate. Tonight as he paused to study her slender legs encased in denim and the pale sweater she was wearing he could detect a new fragility in the slender lines of her figure. It was a frailty caused by vulnerability and fear, and realising it made him feel the worst kind of lout for letting his feelings towards her get the better of him.

Smothering the urge to heave out a self-aimed angry sigh, he decided to make it easy on both of them and give her a wide berth. Walking over to the bar, he ordered a stiff drink then remained leaning there staring down at it without drinking, unaware that Shannon had watched his reflection in the window, every grim step of the way.

He hates being here with me as much as I hate him being here, she was thinking heavily, and wished she understood why knowing that caused such a terrible ache deep down inside. She didn’t love him—didn’t even want to be near him any more, so she was glad when he remained by the bar instead of coming near her—wasn’t she?

Forcing her eyes to focus further out into the night, she concentrated on watching the rain hitting the airport lights with almost enough power to smash the glass, while the wind buffeted madly at everything. And inside she prayed fervently that the weather would clear so they could be on their way to what really mattered.

Keira, her beloved Keira, the new baby—and poor, poor Angelo.

Maybe the fates decided to take pity on them because half an hour later Luca appeared at her shoulder. ‘They think there is a hole coming in the storm,’ he informed her. ‘If we can board and be ready, then we might be given the chance to get away from here.’

Getting away sounded so good to her that Shannon instantly turned and went to collect her belongings from the nearby chair where she had placed them. Shrugging into her coat, she pulled on her hat while Luca pulled on his coat. Five minutes later and they were walking side by side yet a million miles apart in every other way.

Magically, halfway to the Salvatore jet the rain suddenly stopped, the wind died away and glancing up Shannon saw the stars appear through a hole in the scurrying clouds. The break in the weather helped to lift some of her fears about Keira. She was going to be all right, Shannon promised herself firmly—willing it to be so.

‘Choose a seat and belt yourself in,’ Luca instructed as soon as they entered the plane. ‘I am going to check with my pilot.’

Even as he finished speaking he was disappearing through a door at the other end of the cabin and a flight attendant appeared to take her outdoor things. The man must have known that this was no pleasure trip because his expression remained sober, and once he had quietly suggested the best place for her to sit in the plush cream leather interior he disappeared, leaving her to make herself comfortable in peace.

Two minutes later the plane left the ground and shot towards the star-scattered hole in the clouds. An hour after that and Luca hadn’t put in an appearance. Deciding he was deliberately keeping out of her way the same as he had done in the airport departure lounge, Shannon finally felt able to relax the guard she’d been keeping on herself, and almost immediately felt her eyelids begin to droop.

Maybe it was for the best if she slept through some of the journey, she consoled herself after trying to fight the urge for a little while. It might feel as if she was abandoning some kind of vigil she had been maintaining for her sister, but common sense told her that stuck up here she couldn’t be more helpless if she tried to be.

So she let herself go, dreamed of her Keira’s familiar light laughter and of sweet-smelling babies. She held her vigil there in her dreams, where everyone was whole and healthy and no dark forces came to disturb the beauty of it.

Luca sat watching her for a while, feeling oddly disturbed by how peaceful she was. She used to sleep like this, he recalled. Lying so quiet and still beside him that he’d sometimes had to fight the urge to lean over her and check that she was still breathing. A foolish notion when he had been holding her in his arms and could feel her living warmth pulsing softly against him.

Dio, stop thinking about it, he told himself and pushed his head back into the seat cushion, then closed his eyes and tried to relax. But ugly scenes began playing on the backs of his eyelids, forcing him to open them again.

Angelo—Angelo … He shifted restlessly. Men didn’t weep. He wanted to weep. He wanted his brother back so he could let him know one last time how much he meant to him.

Tears began to burn like acid. He got up, hurried down the length of the cabin, then turned to pace restlessly back again. This had been the worst day of his life and it still was not over. He felt as if he had spent the day travelling the world carrying bad news like the grim reaper. He’d broken the news to his mother, to his sisters Renata and Sophia, then taken their disapproval with him to fly to London to break the news to Shannon. Now here he was flying home again with his passenger, who clearly found escape in sleep a better option than staying awake to talk to him.

Did he want to talk to Shannon about anything? he asked himself suddenly.

No, he did not.

Did he want her to wake up?

No, to that question too.

He paced away again, then turned and grimly made his way back to her side. She still hadn’t moved a single eyelash. Her face was relaxed but very pale. Her lips were together, soft and flushed with their usual rose-like bloom, but if she was breathing through her nose then he could see no evidence of it, no hint that her breasts were moving up and down.

Don’t be a fool, man! he told himself harshly. You know how she sleeps—you know! Yet still he found himself leaning over her to place light fingertips against her pale cheek.

Shannon came out of her haven of sleep to find Luca standing over her. He was so close she could feel his breath on her face. Their eyes clashed, two years shot away with the force of a gun crack and she was looking into his face as it had once looked minutes after his loving, one that had shattered her for ever. She saw anger, the contempt and dismay. She saw eyes turned black with the same emotion that had been driving him and felt the full wretched impact of hurt surge up once again.

Tears flooded into her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ she choked and struck out at him on impulse with a trembling clenched fist.

‘Hate?’ he echoed and caught the fist before it could land, closing it inside an iron grip. ‘You do not understand the meaning of the word,’ he bit back harshly. ‘This, cara, is hate—’

With a tug he yanked her up against him, aiming her mouth up to his so that they collided, and he smothered her shrill cry of protest with the demanding thrust of his tongue. He kissed her in anger, he kissed her in punishment, but it was the heat of his passion that set her struggling wildly to break free. An arm snaked around her waist and she found herself standing with the front of her body clamped to his. Her fist was released so that he could claim the back of her head and maintain the pressure of the kiss.

He ravished her mouth; he uttered thick curses deep in his throat. Her hair came loose to tumble around his fingers. He kissed her and kissed her until she stopped fighting and started trembling. Two years of abstinence and the reasons for it didn’t matter any more because they were back where they’d left off, at war with each other and using sex as their weapon. She scraped her nails down his shirt front, she scored them into his hair, their lips moved in a hungry, sensuous feasting—then as suddenly as it had begun it finished.

Luca thrust her away so violently that she landed in a huddle back in her seat. Dizzy and disorientated, shocked beyond trying to think, Shannon watched him spin on his heel and stride down the cabin. When he reached the far end he picked up what looked like a bottle of whisky, poured some liquid into a glass, then tossed it to the back of his throat.

Staring at the rigid set of his shoulders, she wanted to say something—spit insults at him for daring to grab and kiss her just to prove a stupid point. But her lips felt hot and bruised and she was shaking so badly inside that she didn’t think she could make the words coherent. Instead she lowered her face into her hands, let her hair fall around her like a curtain and prayed that he had been too busy punishing her to notice that she had been kissing him back.

The silence after that was like a razor blade slicing through every second they had left to travel. They landed under clear, dark Italian skies but it was cold enough for Shannon to be glad of her warm coat.

Luca had left his car in the airport car park. Shannon climbed into the passenger seat leaving Luca to stow her things. They drove towards Florence in total silence; their only exchange of words since the kiss in the cabin had been his terse information that he’d rung the hospital and there was still no change.

Familiar landmarks began to flash by her window. They were nearing Florence and the closer they got to the city, the more anxious Shannon became. Eventually the car slowed and turned in through an entrance in a high stuccoed wall. Shannon saw a building which, despite the gardens neatly surrounding it, still had the look that all hospitals had, even if this one was obviously a very exclusive place to be ill.

As Luca brought the car to a halt her skin began to prickle. Taking a deep breath in an effort to brace herself, she unlocked her seat belt and got out. Her legs began to shake as she walked towards the hospital entrance. Luca came to walk alongside her but made no attempt to touch.

She didn’t want him to touch her, she told herself. But the moment she stepped into the hushed hospital foyer she was having second thoughts about that. Luca indicated towards the lifts. As they stepped into one Shannon began to feel strange—alien to herself almost.

Maybe he sensed it because as the lift doors closed them both inside, he questioned, ‘OK?’

She nodded, swallowing on the build-up of tension that had begun to collect in her throat. Her body was tense, her flesh creeping with feelings no one, unless they were about to face a similar situation, could begin to understand. And she was pale; she knew she was pale because her face felt so cold and washed out.

‘Don’t be alarmed by the amount of equipment you will find surrounding her,’ Luca seemed compelled to warn. ‘It is standard practice in cases like these to monitor just about everything they can …’

He was trying to prepare her. It was all she could do to give a jerky nod of her head in response. The lift stopped. Her heart began to pump so oddly that it made it difficult to draw breath.

The doors slid open on a foyer similar to the one they’d walked through downstairs—and Shannon’s courage seemed to drop like a stone to her feet, stopping her from moving another inch.

She closed her eyes, tried to swallow again, felt her breasts lifting and falling on small tight gasps for air as a stark sense of dread closed her in. Then the lift pinged, giving notice that it was about to close its doors again. Her eyes flickered upwards at the same time that Luca shot out an arm—not towards her but to hold back those impatient doors.

His eyes were fixed on her, narrowed slightly and shadowed by concern. His face was pale, lips slightly parted on tense white teeth as if he was struggling to control an urge to make a grab for her.

‘I’m all right,’ she breathed in whispered assurance. ‘Just give me a second to—’

‘Take your time,’ he said gruffly. ‘There is no rush.’

No? Shannon fretfully contradicted that assertion. She might already be too late!

Too late … She groaned in silent agony. Too late belonged to the years she had avoided coming anywhere near Florence. Too late belonged to the way she had cut Keira right out of her life for months and even after they’d made up—in a fashion—she’d kept her strictly at an arm’s length by being cool, being remote, piling on the guilt and the—

The lift gave another ping and kept on pinging, trying to close its doors against Luca’s blocking arm. On a mammoth dragging-together of her courage Shannon made herself move. The first person she saw was Luca’s mother. She looked dreadful, her beautifully defined face withered by anxiety and grief.

The ever-ready tears rushed into Shannon’s eyes again, her voice wobbling on the words that had to be said. ‘I’m so sorry about Angelo, Mrs Salvatore,’ she murmured in unsteady Italian as she moved on instinct, reaching out with her arms to draw the poor woman in an embrace.

It took a few seconds to realise that the embrace was not welcome. Stiff and unbending, Mrs Salvatore was accepting of her touch out of politeness—but that was all. As Shannon drew away, shaken by the cold reminder of how Luca’s family felt about her, she saw the other faces bearing witness to her rejection.

Then Luca stepped up behind her, bringing his hands up to curve her shoulders in what Shannon could only describe as a declaration of some kind. He didn’t say a single word, but all eyes lifted to his face, then dropped away uncomfortably.

‘To your left,’ he quietly instructed her.

Dry-mouthed, inwardly struck to her core, Shannon forced herself to start walking again. With Luca’s hand still curving her slender nape and with a new kind of silence thickening the air, they entered a corridor that put the rest of his family out of view—thankfully, because she didn’t need any cold witnesses when she faced what was to come.

And it came quickly—too quickly. Through the very first door they encountered, in fact. Luca paused, so did she, watching as he pushed the door open then gently urged her to move again. Her body felt heavy, that sense of dark dread placing a drag on her limbs as she made herself step through the opening into a well-lit room with white walls and staffed by a white-uniformed nurse who stood by a white-sheeted bed.

And then there was the white-faced creature lying in the bed.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS the point when her control split wide open. Shannon had thought she was prepared, she’d truly believed she was ready to deal with whatever she had to face in this room. But she found she couldn’t cope with the sight of her sister lying there so pale and still as if life’s essence itself was slowly seeping out of her.

The choked sob that attempted to escape had to be rammed back into her mouth by a shaking fist at the same moment that she took a staggering step backwards, pressing herself against the full muscle-packed length of Luca, who acted like a wall to halt her cowardly retreat. Eyes blurred, throat thick, mouth trembling, she fought to get a hold on herself.

It was awful. It took a fierce effort to force herself forward on legs that didn’t feel supportive. Arriving at the side of the bed, she reached for one of her sister’s limp hands. It felt warm and that was comforting. Warmth meant life.

‘Keira?’ she called out unsteadily. ‘Keira—it’s Shannon. Can she hear me?’ she demanded of the nurse. Then, before the woman could answer, her attention honed right back on the white face lying against white pillows. ‘Oh, Keira,’ she burst out painfully. ‘Wake up and talk to me!’

‘Here …’ a deep voice prompted. A pair of hands carefully eased the overcoat from her shoulders, then a chair arrived at the back of her knees, giving her no choice but to sit.

The diversion stopped her from falling apart as, she realised, she had been about to do. ‘H-how deeply unconscious is she?’ she asked huskily.

‘Some of it is drug induced,’ Luca offered with what she supposed was meant to be a comfort. The nurse seemed to have slipped away, making her exit without Shannon noticing.

‘Has she woken up at all since the accident?’

‘No,’ Luca answered gruffly.

‘Does that mean she doesn’t even know she’s had her baby?’

‘No,’ he said again.

Shannon felt her insides begin to burn as a whole new set of emotions went raging through her blood. How many failed pregnancies had poor Keira endured through the years before she’d managed to carry this baby to almost full term? Five or six, Shannon was sure, since she’d married Angelo.

Would a girl child be enough for her? With her own life hanging in the balance here, would her sister now give up on her obsession to give Angelo a male heir?

Angelo—what was she thinking? There was no more Angelo. ‘Oh, Keira,’ she whispered painfully. How was she going to cope without her beloved Angelo?

Then began long hours of torment. Nothing around her felt real. She sat by the bed and talked to Keira. When she was gently removed from the room by medical staff who needed to check Keira, she sat outside in the corridor and lost herself in grief for Angelo. Occasionally Luca would appear, or his mother or one of the sisters. It didn’t occur to her that she was never left entirely on her own or that the family attitude towards her had taken a complete about turn. Perhaps, if she had noticed, she would have started to realise that their sharing of her vigil was a bad sign. But she didn’t notice and she rarely spoke, unless it was to Keira—then she talked and talked and talked without remembering a single word.

At one point someone gently asked her if she would like to see the baby. She thought she should do, for Keira’s sake, but that was all. So she agreed and was utterly blown away by the tiny scrap of human life lying in her clear plastic cocoon fighting her own little battle.

Keira’s daughter—Angelo and Keira’s.

She burst into a flood of tears and wept for everyone, her emotions like a driverless vehicle wildly out of control. When she went back to sit with Keira her voice was as calm as a slow-running stream as she talked and talked and talked.

‘You’ve had enough—’

The light touch on her shoulder brought Shannon’s limp head lifting from the crisp white sheet that she had not been aware of resting against. Sleep-starved eyes blinked uncomprehendingly up into a determined gaze that was brown flecked with gold.

‘You can do no more here tonight, Shannon,’ Luca said quietly. ‘It is time for us to leave and get some rest now.’

‘I …’ can be here, she was about to insist, but Luca silenced her with a shake of his head.

‘Keira is stable,’ he stated firmly. ‘The people here know where to contact us if they need to. It is time for us to leave.’

The voice of authority, she recognised. Luca was not going to take no for an answer and if she was honest she knew he was right. She was so utterly used up she was barely functioning on any sensible level.

But it felt like desertion when she made herself get up from the chair and she lifted up one of Keira’s hands and pressed a soft kiss to it before leaning over to leave another kiss on her cheek.

‘Love you,’ she whispered, then she was turning to walk away with wretched tears blurring her progress to the door with Luca following close behind.

‘Where are you going?’

She blinked, her sleep-starved brain taking whole seconds to realise they were now outside her sister’s room, the door having been pulled shut so silently she hadn’t even heard it. ‘The baby,’ she murmured, waving a decidedly uncoordinated hand in the direction of the nursery. ‘I want to …’

‘The baby is fine,’ he assured. ‘I have been with her for the last hour while you sat with Keira.’

An hour? Shannon blinked again. Luca had been with the baby for a whole hour? The picture that produced in her head just didn’t correspond somehow with the man she thought she knew.

‘I watched the nurse attend to her, then they let me hold her for a while …’

Something passed over his face, a wave of unchecked emotion that emphasised the ring of pain that was circling at his mouth. Guilt made a sudden clutching grab at her aching heart. This man had just lost his beloved brother but, while she had been selfishly absorbed in her sister’s plight, Luca had been too busy supporting others to find the time to deal with his own loss. She had been existing in a fog since they’d arrived here, but he’d split his time between comforting his grief-stricken mother or one of his two sisters as well as attending to her.

Now here he stood, doing what he did best: being the strong Salvatore male. But when she looked into his eyes she saw the desolation beneath his glossy black lashes. She also witnessed another painful image of him slipping away to go to the nursery to hold a tiny baby girl who was the only link to his brother.

Her heart ached again, everything ached, for Luca as well as herself.

‘Oh, Luca,’ she murmured as impulse made her take a step closer to him with soft words of sympathy trembling up from her throat.

He saw it coming. His face closed up. ‘Here,’ he clipped. ‘Put this on …’

He held out her coat. Shannon stared at it, aware that she’d just had a door slammed shut in her face again. And why not? she asked herself bleakly as she swallowed the words of comfort and felt the tremor that came with them shiver its way to her feet. Her sister was alive but his brother was dead. Accepting comfort from his ex-lover-turned-enemy would be a blow to his dignity he could do without.

So she let him feed her coat sleeves up her arms without uttering another syllable. As the heavy garment settled on her tired shoulders she pushed her hands into its deep pockets to hug the warm wool around her, then walked towards the bank of lifts. The chairs in the foyer were empty now; the rest of the Salvatore family had been sent home to their beds long ago.

The silence between them held as they drove away into the cool dark night. A glance at the clock illuminated on the car dashboard told it was one o’clock in the morning. It felt as if a whole week had gone by since she’d got out of bed yesterday at six in the morning and rushed out to catch the commuter flight to Paris. Such a lot had happened since then. Too much—too much, she thought dully as she rested her head against the soft leather headrest, then closed her hot, tired, gritty eyes.

Luca watched as she slipped into an exhausted slumber and grimaced to himself. He knew the impression he had given her back there in the hospital, but she could not be more wrong about his motives if she’d tried. However, receiving comfort from a warm and sympathetic Shannon right now would have shattered the control he was hanging onto by a thread.

And it was not over yet—though he was aware that Shannon didn’t know that. There was more to come—a battle—he predicted, because she was not going to like it when she discovered where she was staying. Let his defences drop before the fight was won and he would turn himself into a target for someone of Shannon’s fiercely stubborn independent nature.

Dio, he thought tiredly as he drove them through the silent streets of Florence. He was not that sure that he wasn’t already that target. A mere glance at her sitting beside him with her long legs stretched out in front of her, the white oval of her face so exquisite in repose, he experienced that telling needle-sharp sting of Man on the prowl.

She got to him. She always had done. Love or hate her, he always wanted her and it was knowing that that made him such a target. Give her reason to spark and he was going to catch a light. He was so sure of it that he would try anything to keep her asleep until he had her safely ensconced in a bed—and he’d put himself on the other side of the bedroom door.

A sitting duck. Angelo’s words, he remembered starkly. Angelo had said that the two of them were both targets for a pair of Irish witches to enchant at will.

Angelo … A collapse took place inside his chest. It was a sensation he had grown familiar with during this long, miserable day. He missed his brother—already. He wanted Angelo back. Tears stung hot and dry against the backs of his eyes and he felt his skin stretch across his cheek-bones with tension.

His foot hit the accelerator, using a surge of unnecessary bodily power to release the pressure in his chest. Familiar landmarks flashed by the side window. He saw a set of traffic lights ahead glowing red; he aimed for them—felt the burning rush swell inside him, challenging that bastard called death. It was compelling, seductive.

Shannon stirred. He glanced at her, saw beauty personified in his stark eyes and, clenching his jaw tight and gritting his teeth, he forced himself to slow down. One car crash in the family was enough. The moment of madness eased, leaving Shannon still asleep beside him with no idea how close he’d come to putting her safety at risk.

The sensation remained, though, burning like acid in his gut, anger at the waste of his brother’s life overlaying the numbing sense of grief. It was going to need assuaging and he had a grim suspicion he knew by what source.

It was feeling the car swing sharply down a steep incline that stirred Shannon awake. Opening red-rimmed eyes, she sat up to peer out at the lines of cars parked in the basement car park and, as Luca slotted the car into its reserved parking slot, he waited for recognition to spark.

It didn’t happen. Probably too tired to notice anything much, she yawned then opened her door and stepped out. He did the same, eyeing her carefully as she waited in weary silence for him to recover her luggage then walked beside him to the lift.

They stepped into it together. While he used a plastic security card to activate the lift she went to lean against one of the metal cased walls, thrust her hands into her coat pockets, then proceeded to stare at her booted feet.

‘You have access, then,’ she remarked, smothering yet another yawn.

‘Yes, I have access,’ was all he said.

‘Good of them.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Angelo and Keira. It’s good of them to trust you with security access to their apartment.’

He didn’t answer, keeping his expression blank while he wondered if she was even aware that she’d used his brother’s name as if Angelo were still alive.

That anger stirred again; he crushed it down. The lift began to rise. He wanted to hit something and wished he didn’t feel like this.

‘But then, that’s nothing new,’ she added with a sudden tinge of bitterness in her voice. ‘Security access to each others’ homes has always been the norm for the Salvatores.’

‘You think that’s a bad thing?’

‘I think it’s bloody stupid,’ she replied. ‘I know Italian families like to be close, but having the right to walk in and out of each others’ homes when they feel like it is taking family unity to the extreme.’

‘Because you were once caught out by this—extreme perhaps?’

The taunt hit home. She flinched, then lifted her chin to send him a clear cold stare. He countered it with a thin smile. Mutual antipathy began to sing. The lift stopped. She was so busy defying him to take that comment further that when the lift doors slid open she still did not notice where she was.

So he said nothing and merely mocked her with a gesture of his hand to step out of the lift. Head up, eyes like ice, she walked forward, stooping to collect up her bags from where they sat at his feet before saying tightly. ‘Goodnight, Luca. I’m sure you know your own way out again.’

Then she walked—or did she flounce? Luca mused curiously. Whichever, she did it sensationally in her ankle-length coat and flaming red hair; it was almost a shame that reality was about to spoil it.

She was several strides in before she began to take in the décor of rich cream walls and inlaid wood floors on which stood the kind of heavy antique pieces that she would never have connected with Keira’s more homely tastes.

Luca watched her freeze, watched her take stock, watched her pull in a sharp breath before she spun to stare at him as he slid the plastic security card back into his leather wallet while the lift doors closed behind his blocking frame.

‘No,’ she breathed in stricken protest. ‘I’m not staying here with you, Luca. No way.’

It took fewer strides to bring her back to him. Eyes bright with defiance, she snaked a hand over his shoulder to gave the lift-call button a firm press.

‘It won’t come without my authorisation,’ he reminded her gently.

‘Then authorise it.’

She was standing so close that he could feel her breath on his face. She smelled of Chanel and the hospital, and the tumbled untidiness of her hair flamed like a warning around her face. She was trying her best to defy him but underneath the defiance he knew alarm bells were ringing because she did not understand his motives for bringing her here of all places, back to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

He could reassure her that he had nothing sinister on his mind and that she had to stay somewhere and even he wasn’t so brutal that he take her to a dead man’s house then leave her there alone—but it would not be the truth. Something had happened to him during the mad drive here, and he now wanted her so badly that it burned in his gut like a pounding fever. He wanted to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, find the nearest bed and drop her down on it, then follow with some good, hard sex. No preliminaries, just a quick, hot slaking of all this stuff he was struggling to deal with: his brother, her sister—Shannon back here and within his reach. She had made the last two years of his life a misery—the least she could do in reparation was help him assuage his grief!

Shannon knew what he was thinking—it was vibrating all around them like some dark, compelling force. The desire, the old burning attraction, that needle-sharp prick of sexual awareness that made his eyes glow gold and made her need to run the tip of her tongue around the sudden dry curve of her lips.

‘No,’ she breathed in husky denial.

‘Why not?’ He watched that telling little gesture and smiled. ‘For old time’s sake.’

For old time’s sake? Her own affronted gasp almost choked her. She couldn’t believe he was behaving like this! Didn’t it matter to him that there was a life-threatening situation taking place not far away, or that one person had died and another two were fighting a battle with death?

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she told him, then turned on her heel and walked away across the large square entrance hall with all its familiar trappings of wealth, like the exquisite antique chest set against one wall with the magnificent bronze statue of Apollo standing on its top. She strode beneath the wide archway through which she gained access to the rest of the apartment. And she walked with purpose, knowing exactly where she was making for.

The kitchen, which led to the utility room, which in turn led to the rear exit door. A locked rear exit door, she soon discovered. Her heart sank—but not her resolve, she determined as she dropped her bags to the floor then turned, eyes wearing such a hard glint now that they should have turned him to stone where he stood propping up the other door, watching her lazily.

‘I’ll get out,’ she warned, ‘if I have to break windows.’

‘We are four floors up,’ he reminded her.

‘Broken windows upset people,’ she explained, undeterred. ‘They tend to call in the police when glass comes showering down on top of them.’

His hard mouth gave a mocking twist. ‘Well, that might have been fun,’ he drawled. ‘If the glass wasn’t shatterproof.’

Her shoulders sagged; this was getting stupid. ‘Look,’ she snapped. ‘It’s late. I’m tired—you’re tired. We’ve both had a rotten day! Can we just stop this now?’ She tried a bit of pleading. ‘Let me out of here, Luca—please!’

‘I wish it was that simple,’ he grimaced.

‘It is!’ she insisted.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he returned with a snap that altered his taunting mood to the grimly serious. ‘So let’s get a couple of things straight. You are staying here in my apartment, because it is situated so close to the hospital—’

‘I’d rather stay at Angelo and Keira’s place.’

He stiffened suddenly, dark eyes flaring up with a blistering rage. ‘Angelo is dead!’ he barked at her. ‘So will you stop dotting his name into every damn sentence, for goodness’ sake?’

Shannon blinked in surprise, her face turning as white as a sheet. Had she been doing that? She hadn’t been aware of it. When she thought about her sister she automatically put Angelo with her. Angelo and Keira—it had always been that way. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered, not knowing what else to say.

Luca frowned. ‘Forget I said that,’ he dismissed, then sucked in a deep breath. ‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘that Angelo and Keira have moved since you were last here. It is now more than an hour’s drive out of the city to their new home. My mother is not fit to be on her own right now so she has gone to stay with Sophia, which leaves you with a choice, Shannon,’ he offered finally. ‘You either stay here with me, stay with Renata, or you go and stay with my mother at Sophia’s house.’

Which was absolutely no choice at all, she acknowledged heavily. His mother hated her. So did his sisters. Staying with them would be just a different kind of hell. And anyway, his family had a right to do their grieving together and without an unwanted interloper in their midst.

‘There are such things as hotels, you know,’ she pointed out stubbornly.

‘Are you really so selfish that you would go to a hotel knowing that such a choice would not only offend my mother, but would hurt Keira beyond all that is fair if and when she discovers it?’ He sent her a look that stung. ‘She will blame the family, she will blame me for not being man enough to put my own feelings about you to one side for her sake.’

‘But you aren’t putting your feelings aside!’ she cried.

‘I will if you will.’

‘Liar,’ she breathed. But as for the rest he was, oh, so frustratingly right that, on acceptance, her ability to remain standing upright any longer disintegrated and she sank wearily against the locked door behind her and dropped her face into her hands.

It was a surrender. He knew it and well and she knew it. But Shannon could not resist dropping one final comment into the throbbing silence that fell. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered from the all-enveloping shield of her tumbling hair.

‘No, you don’t,’ Luca denied. ‘You still fancy the hell out of me and that, cara, is what you hate.’

‘That’s a lie!’ The hands dropped so she could spit the disclaimer at him.

‘Is it?’ His eyes were cold now, hardened by his arrogant belief in what he was claiming. ‘Cast your mind back to the kiss on the flight over here,’ he suggested. ‘If I had not stopped it you would have gone up in a plume of smoke.’

‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘You conceited devil!’

‘Maybe.’ He gave an indifferent shrug. ‘But I know what I know.’

‘You kissed me, if you remember!’