Sins of the Past (15 page)

‘Just as long as they remember that, and don’t try and move
into ours!’ she breathed with another involuntary shudder. But it was the feel of that masculine arm coming around her, of that strong, sinewy body that could please and pleasure and even protect her, she thought, ashamed of needing him for any reason, that was responsible for the sensations now shivering along her spine.

‘Are you scared of the spiders, Benito?’ How naturally she had taken to calling him that!

‘I’m not scared,’ the little boy boasted proudly, and with a good deal of noise pretended to shoot them all.

Damiano grimaced. ‘It’s a … what is it you say? Ah, sì! A man thing,’ he remembered, and the broad smile he gave the little boy as the child ran up to him squeezed her heart with the need to have him smile at her like that.

She watched him sweep their son—shrieking with delight—high into the air. ‘I might have guessed!’ she breathed, rolling her eyes. Less than a week and already the two of them were as thick as thieves, she thought, amazed by how well they had bonded. She couldn’t help feeling as equally threatened by that as she felt pleased.

They had lunch in a local hotel, and ‘Afterwards,’ Damiano promised Ben, who had insisted on sitting beside him, ‘we are going to see something very, very special.’

‘Were you as chummy with your own father?’ Riva queried from across the table, as Ben tucked into the largest ice cream she had ever seen him try to demolish. ‘Or is it just a secret yearning you have to return to your own childhood?’ she said dryly.

His sidelong grin acknowledged that she was probably right.

‘The latter certainly,’ he responded, with a self-mocking twist to his lips. ‘And also the former—being “chummy", as you call it, with my father …’ Pain darkened his eyes. From the man’s untimely death, Riva decided, rather than anything else, when he answered more sombrely, ‘Sì. Yes, I was.’

Riva stuck her spoon into the smaller dish of chocolate ice cream she had ordered for herself. ‘You were lucky.’ she said.

‘Sì,’
he said again. ‘I was.’

She spooned the ice cream into her mouth. It found a tender spot, making her shut her eyes tightly for a moment until the sensitivity subsided.

‘What about you?’ she heard Damiano asking with some hesitancy. ‘Was there ever a time when—’

‘No,’ she cut in quickly, before he could ask. ‘During all my infancy he was in jail, and when he wasn’t—before he died—he only ever came back to us when he needed money.’

‘That must have been hard,’ he accepted.

‘For Mum—it must have been. Where I was concerned, I never really knew him. I only missed what I didn’t have—what my friends enjoyed, and what you obviously had with your father. What hurt most was that he abandoned us—even more than what he did in defrauding other people. He left us by getting himself put in jail. When I was a child Mum protected me from that part of it. We never talked about it. If anyone ever wanted to know where he was she simply said he was a navy man and away a lot. It was only afterwards—when I started growing up and people asked me about him, when they knew the truth—that we were instantly bracketed as being in the same ball park. Not quite as good as other people.’ She remembered the withering looks, the embarrassment it had seemed to cause, how they had been positively shunned by some people. ‘I was so ashamed.’

She stared down at the melting brown mess she had made of her ice cream, unable to look at him, recoiling inside from the elaborate lies she had told him all those years ago, hungry for his approval. He had been one of those people. Prejudiced. Discriminating. Unwilling to comprehend how she felt.

‘And how do you feel about it now?’

‘Now?’ His surprisingly soft query made her glance up briefly before she dropped her gaze again, wondering why he’d even asked. ‘I’ve learned to accept that that was just the
way he was—that no one’s perfect,’ she murmured, trying to convince herself as much as Damiano. ‘What he did wasn’t a reflection on me or on Mum. He was weak and found it difficult to take responsibility—honour commitment. He had good points too. He must have had, otherwise Mum wouldn’t have loved him. She didn’t love easily. When she did it was with all of her heart. All of her soul.’

As she loved your uncle.

She didn’t say it. She didn’t have to.

Blame. Accusation. And above all need. It was all there as she lifted her head, in the clouded emerald of her eyes. A desperate longing for just one word of repentance from him that would help her to understand these dangerous feelings she harboured for him—if not to excuse them entirely.

Across the table their eyes met and held, yet she could read nothing in that unfathomable gaze.

Was he even the tiniest bit sorry for what he had done?

‘Benito—no!’

The spell was broken by Damiano’s swift endeavour to dissuade the little boy from bashing the remainder of his ice cream with his spoon to see how high it would splash.

Surprisingly, Ben responded immediately to the authority in Damiano’s voice, dropping the spoon obediently into his dish.

‘I think he’s reached his boredom threshold.’ Riva grimaced, floundering beneath a tide of mixed emotions.

‘In that case I think it’s time to change that—don’t you,
piccolo?’
Damiano suggested with a complicit wink at Riva, and even the knowledge of sharing secrets with him produced a warm feeling right down to her toes.

She knew what the surprise was, of course, but was as thrilled as Ben when they came out onto a large area of scrubland behind the hotel, where a colony of giant tortoises was ambling in the shade of the palm trees.

A little girl was riding on the back of one of the massive shells, but when Ben ran forward to scramble onto another,
whose occupant was obliviously munching away at some vegetation, Damiano pulled him back.

‘Those shells are very old—that’s why they grow so large—so we must respect that, mustn’t we?’ he advised Ben gently. ‘They were hunted nearly to extinction,’ he went on, addressing Riva. ‘Their main undoing was the fact that they can live for months without food or water, so they were a favourite diet of ancient mariners. Fortunately nowadays there is a conservation programme in place, which means that they can roam freely and safely all over these islands.’ As he spoke he was caressing the smooth curvature of the huge shell that Ben had tried to climb on, encouraging the little boy to do the same. ‘It’s hard to believe that these placid creatures can live up to a hundred—perhaps a hundred and fifty—years old.’

‘A hundred and fifty years!’ Ben’s little mouth was a perfect circle of incredulity. ‘That’s older than you and Mummy!’

Both adults laughed, and Riva couldn’t help thinking how handsome Damiano looked, with his perfect strong teeth gleaming and the crinkled lines around his eyes softening the noble lines of his face. Under the strong sun, she could see a couple of grey hairs just below his temple, mingling with the midnight-black, which added something to his sophistication. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

‘Why do they have shells?’

‘Because its shell is its home, Ben,’ she heard his father saying through a sudden cauldron of desire and need and wanting. ‘It protects it from anything that might try to harm it.’

The little boy’s eyes widened. ‘Like monsters and things?’

Damiano smiled indulgently. ‘No, Benito. Not monsters.’

The child looked up at Riva, and back to his father again. ‘Why can’t we take our homes with us wherever we go?’

Riva smiled and exchanged glances with Damiano. Sometimes a child asked questions to which there were no easy answers, she thought.

Damiano brought his six-feet-plus frame down to the little
boy’s level. ‘We do,
piccolo.
It’s with us all the time, only you can’t see it.’

The little brow puckered. ‘Why not?’

‘Home is in here, Benito,’ Damiano said, pressing his bunched fingers to his chest.

Something tugged so hard at Riva’s insides that it took her breath away. She couldn’t have answered Ben’s question so simply and yet so profoundly if she had tried. She was beginning to understand just how much home and family meant to Damiano D’Amico, and wondered with startling comprehension if that was why he had been so driven to protect Marcello. And in that moment she was struck with the even more startling realisation that she was falling in love with him all over again. In spite of everything, she was hopelessly smitten. Head over heels. Crazy about him. And there wasn’t a single thing she could do about it.

‘T
AKE
care with that soft skin of yours,
cara.
Skin as pale as yours is apt to burn.’

Lying face down on a sunbed under one of the large thatched parasols at the poolside, because the sea was too rough for the beach today, Riva quickly raised her head from her crossed arms and saw Damiano standing above her.

In a pair of dark bathing trunks, bare shoulders wide above a tapering chest and tautly muscled waist, he looked magnificent, Riva thought, and everything that was feminine in her was leaping in response to the sight of his muscular hair-covered thighs, and the fact that the silky fabric spanning his hips was doing nothing to conceal his powerful manhood.

Strength and beauty—like the bougainvillaea-draped boulders of granite around the pool, she thought, comparing him with them. A specimen of perfect proportions and disciplined fitness.

He was handing her a tall glass, frosted with condensation. ‘I thought you might like something to cool you down.’

That was an understatement!

Half turning to face him, hoping he would think that the flush she could feel burning her cheeks was caused merely by the sun, Riva took the cold glass of peach-coloured liquid that promised to quench her thirst. Yet she knew it would do nothing to slake the hunger inside that his very nearness produced.

‘Thanks.’ She drained half the glass in one go.

Tanned fingers took it from her, setting it down on the small wicker table beside her. ‘Your shoulders are already burning.’

So were her insides! Riva thought, when those fingers—cool from the glass—lightly skimmed across the slightly inflamed area. ‘I have warned you that with your colouring you can burn even from the rays in the air.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It’s not a subject for amusement. Did you put some sunscreen on?’

‘Of course.’

‘Not enough, obviously. And I fail to see how you can cover every area successfully by applying it yourself. Why didn’t you ask me to help you?’ He had picked up the bottle from the table and was already unscrewing the cap.

‘I can manage,’ she croaked, wondering how she could conceal how much she wanted him if he so much as touched her as she watched the milky fluid pool into the palm of his hand.

‘Turn over,’ he commanded, sitting down on the edge of the sunbed.

Her awareness of him prickled along every nerve. But refusing to do as he was suggesting would only tell him what he already knew—that she was terrified of this attraction between them and what he could do to her, no matter how much she professed to despise him. And so she complied, glad that her white wet-look bikini, with its halterneck strap and skimpy briefs, was at least more modest than the string version she had been musing over in a shop the day before coming away.

‘Relax,’ he advised, wise to how she’d tensed the instant his fingers slid across her back.

His touch was as sensual as the sun and the wild sea.

‘Where’s Ben?’ Dear heaven! How could you sound breathless when you were lying still?

‘Why? Are you worried he might witness something it’s rather ill-advised for a four-year-old to witness?’

‘No!’ It came out too fast, too sharply, trembling on the sensuous edge of her thoughts.

‘You’re absolutely right, Riva. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to do what we both want and take you up to my room, but there are far too many important issues to sort out before we grant ourselves that ultimate luxury. However, if it makes you feel less guilty about entertaining such thoughts when he isn’t around, André and Françoise took him out in the car with my grandmother. They are not likely to return for some time.’

The imagery his words gave rise to, plus the knowledge that there was time for him to do anything with her—despite what he had said—caused her breasts to swell, their tips tightening in shameless response, producing a contraction of need deep inside her.

‘What issues?’ She could barely speak, and decided not to add fuel to an already inflamed situation by denying the truth of what he had said. He might just call her bluff by showing her he was right, and she had suffered enough humiliation at his hands already.

‘What are we going to do about Benito?’

‘What do you mean, “do"?’

‘As I said before—a child needs two parents?’

‘He has two parents.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. Would you, for instance, allow me to take him out of the country on my own?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? Because you don’t trust me to bring him back?’

‘Why should I?’ she challenged, and, even though it hurt like hell to admit it, couldn’t help adding, ‘When I know you would have preferred anyone but me to be the mother of your child.’

Above the powerful surge of the ocean, she heard him inhale deeply. ‘Let’s just say that neither of us intended this to happen.’ So he accepted it now. ‘But the deed is done.’

And if it hadn’t been she wouldn’t be lying here now, with those excruciatingly skilled hands massaging her heated skin, sliding over the curves of her hips, turning her on even if he wasn’t intending to—wouldn’t be lying here loving him and feeling so guilty about it, aching for him to love her and not just with his body, she agonized. His absence of any feeling for her was torturing her as much as his cleverly manipulating hands were torturing her into hopeless arousal.

‘Relax,’ he advised for the second time—misunderstanding, she realised, as he promised, ‘I’d never try to break the bond between you and Benito. I was merely assessing how we stand—your concerns. And I have a few of my own.’