Sins of the Past (10 page)

‘That’s big of you!’

He didn’t look at all fazed by having to admit that he had made a whopping great blunder in assuming the worst about her. If anything, he looked remarkably contained.

In contrast she felt agitated and uptight as she started putting clean cups and cutlery away, slamming drawers and cupboards in a way she wouldn’t normally have dreamed of doing.

‘Do I take it that it is Ben who has been on your mind ever since we met?’

Dropping a tea-towel, she hastened to retrieve it—but Damiano had already swooped to pick it up.

‘Take it any way you like!’ she snapped, snatching it from him.

‘So what happened to Ben’s father? Were you seriously involved with the man?’

She didn’t want this interrogation, but couldn’t help retorting, ‘I was stupid enough to think so.’

A slight tilt of his head acknowledged the bitterness in her voice. ‘What did he do, Riva? Run out on you both?’

Flinging the folded tea-towel down on the work surface, she turned to face him. ‘If you must know, I left him.’

She didn’t want to talk about it, to remember his verbal brutality, the shame and humiliation she had suffered before she and her mother had been sent away from the villa, the shock of finding out she was pregnant by a man who had merely used her.

‘Where is he now?’ he pressed, oblivious to how much he was hurting her.

She didn’t answer. How could she? she asked herself torturously, finding his line of questioning both unsettling and harrowing in equal measure.

‘Does he see his child?’

‘No.’
You made it quite clear from the outset that you wouldn’t want to!
Before she’d convinced him that there was no chance of her getting pregnant; before reaffirming her bare-faced lie about being on the pill.

‘And is that your decision, Riva, or his?’

This last disconcerting question as he followed her back into the sitting room only intensified the guilt already plaguing her.

Angrily she flared over her shoulder, ‘Why the third degree? I don’t see that it’s any of your—’

She clammed up as Ben chose that moment to burst into the room, the film he had been watching still running—abandoned—in his bedroom.

Damiano dropped onto his haunches to take the semitransparent box containing a plastic dinosaur that Ben wanted him to look at, which Riva had bought for his last birthday. She couldn’t help noticing how the muscles bunched in those strong thighs as he inspected the toy.

‘You’re very interested in dinosaurs, are you not,
piccolo?’
the man observed, tugging at the little boy’s blue pyjama top.

‘He’s been learning about them at pre-school,’ Riva told him, desperately wishing that he would go.

‘Will you mend it for me?’ Ben suddenly appealed to him trustingly.

‘No, Ben!’ She said it too quickly, much too sharply. ‘Mr D’Amico’s a very busy man,’ she added gently, seeing her son’s wounded expression.

Damiano’s mouth, however, was faintly mocking. He probably knew what a cost it would be to her pride to have him do anything for her—or for her child.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ he enquired, pulling the toy out of its box.

‘His leg keeps coming off,’ Ben supplied.

‘We’ve lost one of the parts,’ Riva told him, when it was clear that neither of them could be dissuaded. ‘I don’t think it can be repaired.’

‘Well, let’s have a look, shall we?’ he said determinedly.

Above those surprisingly gentle hands that were examining the little toy—hands which had loved her with the same tender absorption all those years ago—the masculine wrists furred with dark silky hairs were a striking contrast against the immaculate white cuff of his shirt.

The sight of his dark head bending towards her son’s, however, sent another cruel dart into her heart. Every minute that he stayed was weakening her resolve not to tell him the truth …

‘Don’t you have to be somewhere?’ she asked, rather churlishly.

Black hair brushed his collar as he tossed over his shoulder, ‘Not particularly.’

Riva clamped her teeth together, willing him to go. Why wouldn’t he go? ‘No, Ben!’

Distracted by the sight of next door’s cat, jumping off the
garden wall, the little boy had bolted into the kitchen, intent on making for the back door.

Riva made a dart for him, but Damiano reached him first. Laughingly, he scooped the infant up into his arms.

‘You haven’t got any shoes on,’ Riva reminded her son gently, in response to his little groaned protest. ‘Go and put some on,’ she advised more firmly as the man released him, trying not to let Damiano see how much his easy camaraderie with the little boy affected her.

‘I wonder where he got that trait from,’ he remarked. His gaze slid deliberately to her milky-white feet, with their red-tipped toes curling tensely against the cool lino. ‘Some habits never seem to die, do they,
cara?’

His bittersweet reminder brought the colour rushing to her cheeks.

She had gone barefoot almost continuously during that long Italian summer, and had paid for it when she had cut herself quite badly one day, walking in the grounds with her mother and Marcello.

Damiano had only just come out to join them, looking fantastic as always in dark trousers and a long-sleeved, casually buttoned white shirt that had emphasised the deep bronze of his throat and the crisp black hair of his hard, virile body. Moments later—probably because she hadn’t been able to keep her mind on anything else when he was around—she’d stepped on some broken paving.

She remembered her gasped surprise when, having heard her shocked little cry of pain, he had taken one look at her foot and lifted her effortlessly into his arms, unaware of how excited she had been by his breath-catching strength and the thrill of being held so hard against him.

He had carried her down to a stone seat beside an old pump, scolding her gently—first in his own language and then in English—for walking around like a child of nature, he’d said, without any shoes. He’d moistened his clean white handkerchief with fresh spring water from the pump, his strong dark
fingers tender, yet disturbingly erotic, around her comparatively pale and slender ankle as he’d ministered deftly to her wound.

What girl wouldn’t have fallen for him? she thought poignantly, wondering if his concern for her—his infinite tenderness that day and during the scorching days that had followed—had all been an act.

That way lay insanity, she remonstrated with herself, if she believed that it had been anything but a ploy for his own Machiavellian ends.

He had kissed her, though, afterwards, sitting beside her on that sun-warmed seat, before he’d insisted on carrying her back into the villa. It was the first time he had kissed her, she remembered; the first time anyone had kissed her like that. Open-mouthed, tender and yet overtly sensual, while she had leaned into him and responded with all the eagerness of her awakening womanhood, with the bees and the other nameless insects humming around them, and the scents of erotic herbs filling the heated air.

‘It seems you never learn from your mistakes, doesn’t it,
carissima,’
he said softly, knowing as surely as she did where her thoughts had taken her.

Which meant what? she wondered, in no doubt that he was referring to more than just her walking about without shoes. Was he referring to the way she still responded to him, even after all he had done? Or to getting herself involved—as he believed—with another man who had supposedly used her? Or both?

‘Oh, I’ve learned, Damiano. Don’t be fooled—I’ve learned,’ she assured him brittly. ‘You were a very good teacher.’

‘I believe in more ways than one.’

With sniping precision she was reminded of how he had accused her of choosing him to initiate her sexually. Crushed, she wondered again what he would say if he knew that there never had been any other man who had shared her bed. That
he remained her only tutor in the art of making love—and a bitter lesson she had learned because of it too!

The shrill sound of his cell phone cut through the strained little silence. He reached into his breast pocket, flicked open the slim black casing with a competent hand.

‘Sì. Sì.
‘ He turned away from her, speaking to whoever it was in his own language.

She couldn’t understand what he saying, but the tonal quality of his voice slid like silk across her senses. She remembered how he had used it when he had been making love to her, driving her to fever pitch, uninhibited, wild for him.

‘I have to go.’ She hadn’t realised he had finished the call, and felt herself blushing to her roots, imagining he might have guessed what she was thinking. ‘Tell Ben I hope he’s feeling better soon …’ He was retrieving the toy and the box he had discarded on her dresser when he had gone after the little boy just now. ‘And that I’ll let him have this back …’ he waved it in the air ‘… as soon as I can.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Riva told him, dismayed and surprised to realise he was taking her son’s request seriously.

He gave her a calculating smile as he moved over to her, saying with a dangerously smooth quality to his voice, ‘Oh, but I do.’

Because then he’d have a reason to come back here, she thought, panicking, scouring her mind for the right words to say that would prevent that happening and finding they just wouldn’t come.

‘And you, Riva …’ A cool finger slid along her jaw, making her breath lock from the frightening excitement even that simple touch produced. ‘Openness inspires a far better working relationship.’

‘As well as betrayal?’

He didn’t stay to acknowledge that breathless little jibe that was torn from her as he let himself out of her flat.

* * *

Damiano’s mind was anywhere but on his executive level meeting as he drove straight to his office after leaving Riva.

He had been wrong about her, he accepted, when he had believed that her recent tiredness, her rushing off early and then her absence today was because of some demanding lover. All along what spare time she had was being taken up by the demands of an energetic three-year-old. Who would have believed it? he thought, amazed. Were there any more surprises this girl could throw at him? he wondered, putting his foot down hard on the accelerator to overtake a rather dawdling motorist, aware that the petite little Riva Singleman was taking up far too much of his mental energies of late.

But who was this man she must have taken up with during the months after leaving
his
bed? Was he someone she had hoped to build a life with? Or had he been just a casual lover—someone with whom to amuse herself—as he had been? And if not—if her relationship with this man had been on a far more serious footing—as she had led him to believe—had her child been planned?

Pulling back into the nearside lane, he shot away, leaving the other vehicle standing. He already knew Riva to be a woman who thought very carefully about what she did. The fact that she’d taken steps to protect herself even whilst she was still a virgin was testimony to that. Yet how contemptibly she had spoken of her child’s father! he ruminated, checking his rearview mirror. As if she despised the very ground he walked on! Perhaps she did. Perhaps she despised all men, it occurred to him.

He understood now, though, what Olivia Redwood had meant by the hard circumstances she’d said Riva had worked under, and also how hard she must have worked to achieve the standard she had already reached in her career.

It couldn’t have been easy, he acknowledged, flicking on his indicator to overtake a cyclist. He was always ready, as the head of a multi-million-pound conglomerate, to commend hard work and dedication whenever he saw it. But it
just went to show how focused and self-sacrificing she must be, he found himself thinking, which didn’t quite tie in with the little gold-digger he had always believed her to be—the girl who, until this morning, he had suspected of living the high life night after night. That would have been impossible, though—he was forced to recognise it now—even without a child. The serious nature of her job probably still demanded a great deal of studying time.

Something like admiration for her stirred in him for the first time—a sensation that made him feel even worse about the way he had treated her in the past.

He’d had his reasons, he thought doggedly, vindicating himself—though with less conviction than usual—with the reminder that he had done it for Marcello.

He was surprised by how much it angered him, however, to think of Riva sharing her bed with another man. To think that she had surrendered to this man—and who knew how many more?—since she’d surrendered her virginity to
him.

He laughed harshly out loud at this possessive side of his nature, tormented with images of Riva in another man’s arms—lying in another man’s bed.

It only strengthened his resolve, therefore, as he brought the Porsche into his company’s car park and swung into his own personally reserved space, that the very next man’s bed this redhead occupied would be
his.

‘Y
OU’RE
lucky,’ Olivia told Riva a couple of days later as she managed to secure a potential appointment with some decorators in case Damiano approved her brief and the work at the Old Coach House went ahead. ‘Things don’t always go as easily as planned—especially on your first major assignment.’

No, but all she had to do, Riva was finding, to spur on the assistance she might need, was mention the D’Amico name and problems straightened themselves out like creases under a hot iron. Money meant influence, and influence meant clout. And he had it in bucketloads, Riva thought, resenting him and the power he wielded, even while she nursed a whole heap of guilt about not coming clean to him about Ben.

What was she afraid of? His rejection for a second time? Because he wouldn’t just be rejecting her this time, but Ben as well?

From the way he had interacted with her son, it was surprisingly plain that he liked children. But how he would react if he discovered that the common little trollop whom he had bedded and then accused of sleeping with him just to feather her own nest had not only laid but hatched an egg from that nest, didn’t bear thinking about. Nevertheless, that still didn’t do much to alleviate the feeling that she was being decidedly underhanded in not telling him—a feeling that was only made worse during the lunch he insisted she have with him two days
later, under the guise of discussing some changes to the work she was planning to carry out on his grandmother’s room.