Sins of the Past (21 page)

‘Oh?’ What did he want to speak to her about? she wondered torturously. Was he going to tell her what she had discovered by accident today? Apologise for not having the guts to tell her himself?

‘It concerns Eloise.’

‘Why? What’s wrong?’ Anxiety filled her. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she?’

There was a brief pause while she dreaded the worst. ‘She’s fine.’

‘What, then?’ Her caginess couldn’t hide the bone-weakening relief in her voice.

‘As you’re probably aware, it’s her birthday next week, and Françoise and André are flying over to England with her later this week. I’ll be flying back to the UK myself at the weekend, and she’s asked me to arrange a party for her at the Old Coach House on Monday. It’ll be just a few of her friends and mutual acquaintances—but I’d like you and Ben to be there.’

She wanted to refuse. To stay as far away from Damiano as she could—which was the only way she would ever get over him, she realised—but she couldn’t. He was Ben’s father, and that made Eloise Ben’s great-grandmother. Besides, Riva was very fond of the old lady, and it was her birthday.

‘There’s just one thing …’

Riva tensed, catching something in the silky quality of his voice that put all her instincts on high alert.

‘I’ve organised caterers and florists to arrive during the afternoon, and as Eloise will be at the hairdresser’s someone will need to make sure that everything is done exactly as it should be. Could you be there to oversee things for me?’

‘How can I?’ Riva’s head swam as she wondered why he had even imagined she would be able to take time off when she had only just come back from being away for a month—at his insistence—already. ‘It’s a working day!’

‘All I’m asking is a couple of hours,’ he stated, with infuriating disregard for putting her career in further jeopardy. ‘Monday, then,’ he established, leaving no room for argument as he rang off.

Surprisingly, Olivia Redwood didn’t turn a hair when Riva very gingerly requested a couple of hours away from the office the following Monday.

‘Take the whole afternoon,’ the woman responded, remarkably generously—far more generously than Riva could have dared to hope.

Arranging to pick Ben up from preschool after she had finished at the Old Coach House, Riva turned along the estate road and pulled up outside. She hadn’t been there for weeks,
and it was with a piercing stab to her heart that she remembered how enthusiastically she had tripped up those steps on that first day.

The ancient board advertising the big house had a huge ‘
SOLD
‘ sign emblazoned across it. So someone had bought it at last, she thought distractedly, guessing that only a developer would want it, to turn into money-spinning luxury apartments or—worse—to pull it down and erect some unsightly modern building in its place.

Deciding there was nothing she could do about it, even if she’d wanted to, although years ago it would have been something she might well have protested over, she did, however, feel a twinge of anxiety as to what any adverse development so close to the Old Coach House might mean for Eloise. Damiano’s grandmother obviously liked peace and country views. She hoped this sale wouldn’t mean her being deprived of them as she used the spare key she still had on her key-ring to let herself into the house.

There was an air of serenity about the place—so different from the tight, tense atmosphere generated when she had been there with Damiano, fighting her hopeless lack of resistance to him as she’d battled to keep him from finding out about Ben.

Tripping lightly upstairs to the main sitting room, to wait for the caterers and the florists, she came to a shocked standstill in the doorway.

Glasses gleamed on the damask cloth gracing the table that was to be used for the evening’s buffet, alongside cutlery wrapped in crisp white napkins and sparkling china. Pink roses in a reservoir in the centre were spectacularly displayed, while in strategic places around the room other bowls of professionally arranged flowers added brightness and colour and sweet scents such as she would have appreciated if she hadn’t been so winded by the sight of them.

Everything had been done. How could it have been? she
wondered, totally bewildered. What was Damiano playing at? No one was supposed to have been coming until three!

Then she heard the front door close in the hall below and swung round, her head spinning. Had she left it open? She hadn’t heard anyone drive in, so who …?

‘I can feel the vibes now,’ Damiano’s voice assured her from the top of the stairs, ‘so don’t say anything, Riva.’

In a dark suit that showed off the sleek, powerful lines of his body, and a white shirt that accentuated his olive skin and the dark hair curling so tantalisingly against his collar, she had always thought he looked his most sensational. Yet beneath the glow of his healthy tan he looked unusually strained.

‘Don’t say anything?’ Unconsciously she slumped against the doorframe, the sight of his hard, executive image making her weak at the knees. ‘You force me to take more time off. Bring me here under false pretences—again! What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Damiano? What gives you the right to think you can control other people’s lives?’

He threw out his hands, remarkably unperturbed by her outburst. ‘You only ever seem to want to speak to me these days unless it’s on Ben’s behalf. How else could I even hope to get you on your own?’

Now his reasons for bringing her here became all too clear. She had rejected his proposal and quite obviously he had decided not to press her again. Perhaps he was even relieved, she considered agonisingly, to realise that he had been mercifully released from his so-called duty to her. Yet he knew from the way she always responded to him that she had no defence against this dangerous attraction that always manifested itself when they were alone together. She could feel it now, licking along her veins and causing her breath to move shallowly through her lungs, just from the way his gaze was tugging over her simple white V-necked top and tight black skirt.

‘Well, since I’m wasting valuable time away from the office, you won’t mind if I don’t appreciate being brought
here on a fool’s errand,’ she returned, her breathing erratic as she made to get out of there and away from him as fast as she could.

And she might have succeeded if his arms hadn’t come up to effectively block the doorway, so that she had to draw herself up swiftly to avoid colliding with him.

‘Let me out of here, Damiano.’ She had intended it to sound like a warning. Instead it came out sounding like a desperate appeal.

‘Why so panicky?’ He lifted his hands from the doorframe, turning them over in a gesture of feigned innocence. ‘What can you possibly be afraid of—other than yourself?’

And that was the truth of it, she thought, despairing with herself. Because even now, when every instinct of self-survival was leaping to defend her from the danger he presented, her treacherous femininity was urging her to strain towards him, to feel the texture of that immaculate suit under her hands as she slid her arms around his neck and forced his lips down to hers, as she drank in the heady potion of his kiss and her body acknowledged the hardening strength of his.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she breathed rather inanely, because her mouth felt dry and her heart was fluttering like a large Seychelles moth in her chest.

‘Then why are you so nervous?’

‘I’m not.’

A sceptical eyebrow lifted. ‘No? The trembling mouth, that panicky look in those beautiful eyes.’ He was moving closer, and now she could smell his cologne, sense the predatory instinct in him like a large cat stalking its prey. ‘It’s very becoming, but not quite the response I expected of a woman who refused a wedding ring and yet was quite happy to become my mistress.’

‘I’ve never said I’d be your mistress.’

That doubting eyebrow climbed higher. ‘That wasn’t quite the impression you gave me when we were away.’

Because I never stopped loving you! her heart screamed,
while she struggled to appear calm and collected in light of all he was saying. And because, deep down, I thought I could make you love me,
her brain tagged on, ridiculing her now for being such a stupid, stupid fool.

‘The fact is that we never have been able to slake this ridiculous craving for each other, have we,
cara?
Time couldn’t kill it. Self-denial certainly couldn’t. In fact abstinence only increased the need—like a pressure cooker without any means of letting the steam escape. Perhaps the only way to turn off the pressure is to let it run its course. Perhaps that’s the only way either of us will be able to view the other objectively—as we have to for Ben’s sake—without this impossible crazy inferno always flaring up whenever our paths have to cross.’

Ridiculous. Impossible. Crazy. Every syllable he uttered was like a nail being driven into her heart. If he couldn’t repay the debt he felt he owed her by marrying her, he would have her anyway, until he had purged himself of this ‘ridiculous'—as he called it—addiction she held for him, which he clearly resented.

Every straining cell in her body was urging her to accept his proposition, because the promise of that degree of rapture with him—for however short a time—and then being able to walk away when it had run its course—as he was so convinced it would—was almost too much to resist. But she couldn’t accept—because it wouldn’t burn itself out. Not for her, at any rate. And at the end of it he would be the one to walk away unscathed, while she would only have delayed the inevitable and unbearable pain she knew would unquestionably follow.

‘I won’t be your mistress,’ she stated flatly, feeling like a starving woman who was passing up the last life-sustaining meal she would ever have.

‘No?’ He gave her a sort of resigned half-smile, but then he shrugged and said, ‘Pity. But then it’s probably for the best. We wouldn’t want to give our son false hope, would we?’

How could he treat it so lightly, when her heart was bleeding
from his indifference to her feelings and his obvious lack of feeling for her?

‘Is that all you have to say? Because if it is I’m sure you won’t mind if I get back to work and make up the precious time I’ve wasted in coming here.’ Hot colour blazed along her cheekbones and her voice was trembling from the emotion she was trying to hold back. ‘You want everything your own way, Damiano—and you just use people to get it. You always did—no matter who got hurt. Well, you can’t hurt me any more.’ Like hell he couldn’t! she thought, wanting only to get out of there before she broke down completely. ‘And you’re certainly never, ever going to use me again. I’ll be here tonight—with Ben—but only because it’s for Eloise. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve more important things to do than stand here engaging in a pointless conversation with you!’

She finished on a sob, fleeing out through the door before he could realise how much his imperviousness was torturing her.

‘Just one last thing …’

That lazy drawl behind her stopped her as she reached the top of the stairs.

Crazily expectant, heart thumping, she half turned to face him, the tears she was fighting to control already glistening in her eyes.

‘You left something behind when you were here last. Some samples, I think you call them. They’re still where you left them,’ he said, his strained-looking features impassive—like a stranger, or an employer who was telling her he no longer needed her services. ‘Perhaps you’d like to pick them up on your way out.’

Turning away from him, she tore blindly down the stairs. What had she been expecting? she demanded of herself. A change of heart? What else could he have offered her when he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted most—his love?

She was crying freely, her tears unimpeded now he could no longer see her, as she stumbled along to his grandmother’s
private sanctuary at the other end of the house. She and Damiano were a lost cause, she thought agonisingly. Like the ones she had fought so loyally with Chelsea, even when she’d known that in the end it would all be hopeless. They never had been an item, she reminded herself fiercely, and she must accept that—no matter how much it hurt.

Turning sightlessly into the room she had created her plans for all those weeks before, focusing on her samples on the table, quickly she scooped them up, remembering how earnestly she had worked—and how gullibly—how …

Brushing tears from her eyes, she blinked several times, unable to believe what she was seeing.
He hadn’t … He couldn’t have. But he had!

D
ROPPING
her pad of samples back down on the table, trying to bring focus into her dazed mind, she turned her head this way and that, studying every aspect of the light and airy space, unable to take it in, pivoting round and round.

It was the finished version of all that she had planned for this room. Her nostrils came alive now to the smell of fresh paint, new flooring and fabrics. Right down to the smallest detail. Her Greek theme, which encompassed everything that was serene and beautiful and timeless, he had used to the full—from the touches of marble, soft colours and the unobtrusive lighting, to the tasteful and classically themed paintings he had had selected for the walls.

Beyond the patio doors the marble figure she had only envisaged graced the centre of the new mosaic-tiled terrace, and a silver ribbon of water cascaded through delicately sculpted hands into a natural pool.

He must have had people working round the clock to get it finished in time for Eloise’s birthday, she realised, staggered, but he had had
her,
Riva’s, plans and designs carried out to the letter. He’d even included things she had talked to him about while they had been away, when she hadn’t even realised he had been pumping her. Just the way he had five years ago—except that he had used that shrewd intelligence to honour her skills and to please her this time, rather than to bring about her downfall.

‘Well?’ he prompted, so that she swung round, saw him standing there in the doorway. ‘What do you think?’

Tall and dark and commanding, he appeared so calm, he might have been asking her what she thought about the weather.