Her Last Night of Innocence (5 page)

A fat tear wobbled for a second on her eyelashes and then
fell, glittering, and sank into the thick blue carpet as she pictured her son. Cristiano didn’t deserve to know Alexander, she thought fiercely. Children weren’t possessions to be passed between rightful owners. It took more than one night of great sex to make a parent, more than genes and chromosomes. It took love. Selflessness. Dedication. Patience.
Being there.

And Cristiano Maresca didn’t qualify on any of those counts.

Gathering herself, she yanked open the wardrobe door. Suddenly aware that she was shaking violently, she pulled on the polo-necked jumper that her mother had given her for Christmas over the blue dress and began bundling up the rest of her things and shoving them back into the case from which she’d so recently unfolded them.

A knock at the door made her jump. It must be the concierge, with information about changing her flight home, she thought with a surge of relief, throwing an armful of underwear on the top of the bag and rushing to answer it. Please God, let him have found her a seat on a plane tonight—

She had only opened the door a crack when she realised her mistake.

It wasn’t the concierge who stood there.

It was Cristiano Maresca.

A jolt of electricity shot through her, and acting on pure adrenaline-fuelled instinct she went to slam the door in his face. But he was too quick for her. Too quick and too strong. Before she knew it she was stumbling backwards as he thrust his body into the gap between the door and the wall.

‘Wh-what are you doing here?’

Kate’s chest was rising and falling rapidly, her breath coming in uneven gasps, but he was perfectly unruffled. His face was completely expressionless, his eyes dark and opaque.

‘I want to talk to you,’ he said softly.

Kate couldn’t stop the bitter laugh from escaping her. ‘Really? That wasn’t what it looked like back there.’

Her voice was breathless and shaky. He made no move
towards her, but her heart was hammering viciously against her ribs, and beneath the jumper she was suddenly boiling hot.

‘We were interrupted.’ Leaning back against the wall with deceptive nonchalance, he was still looking at her steadily. ‘I hoped you’d wait.’

‘I did.’ Suddenly the narrow space by the door seemed horribly claustrophobic. Whirling round, Kate walked quickly back into the room, desperate to put some space between them. ‘Last time. I waited last time—remember?’

‘What?’

Something in his tone made her turn back to look at him. He had levered himself away from the wall and was advancing across the room towards her, his eyes burning with an intensity that was almost frightening.

‘Forget it,’ she muttered, going into the bathroom to collect the things she’d left in there. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She threw her toothbrush into her washbag and, going out again, collided with him in the doorway.

Before she could back away, he caught hold of her shoulders and looked down at her with a twisted, ironic smile that skewered her heart. ‘Actually, it does.’ Noticing the washbag, he frowned. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Packing. I’m going home.’

His grip on her shoulders didn’t loosen, but his gaze shifted from hers, sliding downwards. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said gravely. ‘I would have liked to get to know you better.’ He lifted a hand, brushing a strand of hair back from her cheek. In the soft light his face wore an abstracted expression, and was almost impossibly perfect. ‘Could I persuade you to stay?’

Agonising desire zigzagged through her like lightning, rooting her to the spot for a second as every nerve in her body sang beneath his touch and her senses reeled at his nearness. For all this time she had carried the scent of his skin in her memory, and now it was in her head, and the eyes she had looked into so often in her dreams were staring straight back into hers…

But their expression was different now. Gone was the emotion that had reached inside her and tugged her heart from her chest, and in its place was something darker. Harder. Colder.

‘
No.
’

Wrenching herself away, she took a couple of steps backwards, gathering up folds of satin, twisting them in her damp fists as she walked around to the other side of the pristine hotel bed. ‘I don’t want to be another notch on your bedpost, another anonymous name on your list of one-night stands.’ Grabbing her case, she viciously shoved the washbag into it and gave a shaky, slightly hysterical laugh. ‘I suppose that if you take into account that night four years ago that would technically make it a
two
-night stand, but it would also make me doubly stupid to fall for the same routine tw—’

The knock at the door made her jump and stopped her mid-sentence. Rushing to open it, she was dimly aware that she was still wearing the blue satin dress and had just put all the rest of her clothes in the suitcase. What was it about Cristiano Maresca that made it impossible to think straight?

‘Good evening,
mademoiselle
.’

It was the concierge—a short, sleek man, with a neat moustache like Hercule Poirot. A strange mixture of relief and panic churned inside her at the thought of leaving here now. Walking away down the wide, thick-carpeted corridor. Walking away from Cristiano for good.

‘You asked to be booked on a flight back to Leeds, England, as soon as possible?’ the concierge asked politely.

‘Yes. I’ll just get my—’

‘Pardonez-moi, mademoiselle,
but I’m afraid I have bad news. Due to thick fog over Leeds tonight many flights have been cancelled, and the remaining ones are being diverted to Heathrow. I’m afraid there are no seats available on any UK flight with any airline at the moment.’

Kate felt the air whoosh from her lungs and the ground tilt a little beneath her feet as she took in this information. It felt like absorbing a physical blow.

‘But that can’t be right, surely? There must be something…’

‘I’m afraid not,
mademoiselle
,’ the concierge murmured gravely. ‘I have checked with all the airlines. Of course,’ he added doubtfully, glancing at her very obviously un-designer jumper, ‘if it is urgent I could possibly look into a private charter…?’

Kate shook her head, swallowing back the hysterical bubble of laughter that rose inside her. Dominic was notoriously relaxed when it came to expenses, but she suspected that even he might balk at private jet hire. And, since most weeks she struggled to afford petrol for her ancient car, it certainly wasn’t going to come out of her own pocket.

‘Very well,
mademoiselle
.’ The concierge gave a little bow. ‘I am sorry not to have been able to help. If there’s anything more I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to call down to Reception.’

‘Thank you,’ Kate murmured faintly, shutting the door behind his departing back and leaning against it for a moment while she struggled to control her desolation.

She wanted so much to go home—back to Alexander. Dominic had given them all a week off to enjoy the considerable luxury of the hotel and explore the city, so their scheduled flight home wasn’t until Friday. She hadn’t argued because, she now realised, deep down she’d secretly hoped that she’d be with Cristiano.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She turned round abruptly, gritting her teeth as a crashing wave of homesickness and despair washed over her, not knowing what to do now. Cristiano was at the window. He had pulled the curtain back and was standing by the doors to the balcony, the lurid lights from the square outside casting hollows beneath his cheekbones and making his olive skin look strangely bleached of colour.

‘So, it looks like you’re not going home after all,’ he said, without turning round to look at her.

‘You don’t have to sound so pleased.’ She hated the bitterness
and misery in her tone, but was suddenly too tired to hide them any more. Too tired to pretend.

He dropped the curtain, so his face was suddenly plunged into shadow again.

‘I don’t want you to run away until we’ve had a chance to talk.’

‘What about?’

Oh, God. For the first time it occurred to her that he might somehow have already found out about Alexander. Nausea rolled through her. She wanted to sink down onto the bed, but knew she’d feel at a disadvantage with him towering over her, so settled instead for perching on the edge of the dressing table. Her heart was battering against her ribs as he came towards her, and she searched his face for clues.

There were none. Apart from a muscle flickering in his lean, tanned cheek it was very still and completely blank.

‘The night we spent together.’

She gave an anxious laugh. ‘I don’t know why. It clearly didn’t make it onto your list of top ten one-night stands, so unless you need the details to put in some kind of no-holds barred, X-rated autobiography there’s really not much point in going over it.’ Nerves were making her talk too much, too fast, and tears stung at the back of her eyes. ‘It’s funny,’ she went on. ‘Although on some level I understand that when you sleep with a man who is known throughout the world as a heart-breaking, womanising playboy you can’t exactly expect flowers and a card on your anniversary, it would at least be nice to think that he’d recognise you again. Especially after—’

She stopped, suddenly breathless. An image, suppressed for the last four years, rose to the surface of her mind. The sun rising over the sea, bathing their naked bodies in rosy pink light, painting streaks of gold into his hair while, bleak-faced and rigid, he told her about his past.

‘After what?’

The man in front of her looked the same—agonisingly,
mockingly the same—and yet so different. Tears welled in her eyes and she got sharply to her feet.

‘Forget it.’ Impatiently she dashed the tears away as she made to move past him, and gave a broken laugh. ‘Oh, but of course you already have—haven’t you?’

He gave a low, savage curse. Catching hold of her arm, he pulled her back so that she hit the hard wall of his chest.

‘Yes,’ he rasped, his face ashen, his eyes like glittering pools of tar. ‘Yes, I bloody well have. I’ve forgotten
everything
from the time I got into that car to qualify for the race to the moment I hit the barrier. It’s lost. Twenty-four hours of nothingness. So that’s why we need to talk. I want to know what happened.’

For a long, shivering moment it felt as if time had stopped as their gazes locked. But then her hoarse whisper broke the silence. Broke the spell.

‘Oh, God, Cristiano. I—I’m sorry.’

Letting go of her abruptly, Cristiano spun round and walked back to the window, raising a hand to his pounding forehead. Why the hell had he just said that? He had come up here to get out of her whatever he could, using whatever means it took—he had intended to
seduce
her, not confide in her,
per l’amore di Dio
. He didn’t want anyone to know about this. Never mind some girl he didn’t know, didn’t trust not to go to the papers.

‘I had no idea.’

‘No. Well, it’s not exactly something I want to broadcast,’ he said icily.

‘But why?’ There was a curious tension in her voice, and the light from the lamp beside her turned her skin to gold satin and reflected in her eyes, making it look as if there was a flame leaping in their depths. ‘I mean, you had a terrible accident, and people would—’

‘Love to know that I’m not over it?’ He cut her off sharply, as if that would also help him cut off the urge to cross the room and take her face in his hands and kiss that soft mouth
again. ‘That I have this…this
gap
? Can you imagine what would happen if it got out that I have no memory of that evening? How many women would come forward and claim I was with them? That I slept with them, assaulted them, fathered their children? The tabloid newspapers would have enough salacious front pages for the next three years, and there would be nothing I could do—
nothing
—because
I can’t remember
.’

‘Oh.’ It was more like a defeated exhalation than a properly enunciated word. Tugging her jumper down over her hands, as if she was cold, she shook her head slightly, so that her soft hair shimmered in the light of the lamp. ‘I didn’t think of it like that. Why would anyone do that? Make things up?’

He gave a harsh laugh. ‘How about for five minutes of fame and a few hundred grand? Even if a story could be disproved, with a DNA test or an alibi, by that time the damage would already have been done.’

She stood up, wrapping her arms around herself for a moment and looking around as if she was disorientated. ‘Well, you don’t need to worry about that any more. You were with me.’ She looked at him then, straight in the eye, and gave a painful smile that seemed to reach down inside him and twist at his heart. ‘
I
know what happened, and I promise you I’m not going to spread it all over the front pages. You can relax. Get back to your party and your adoring fans and stop worrying about it.’

Her voice was soft, resigned. Cristiano tried to focus on what she was saying—to make sense of it—but the ache in his head had intensified so that it felt as if someone was hitting the inside of his skull with a sledgehammer.

‘I have no intention of going back,’ he said tersely, remembering how he had planned to spend the rest of the night. In bed with her. Seducing her into telling him everything he so badly wanted to know. But he had underestimated her, he realised now. He had assumed she would fall into bed with him at the merest hint of an opportunity, like any one of the scores of women across the square who were no doubt searching
the Casino for him right now. The fact that she hadn’t was intriguing, as well as surprisingly painfully frustrating.

He thrust his hands in his pockets, gritting his teeth against the throbbing in his head—and in other, more basic parts of his anatomy. ‘I’m going away for a while.’

She had moved across to the bed again and was leaning forward, unzipping the case she’d just finished packing. Her hand stilled. ‘Oh? Where to?’

‘A chalet in the Alps. It belongs to a friend.’

His voice was rough in the quiet room. From a long way off he could just about hear the sounds of the party in the Casino—the pulse of the music and the muffled sound of a lot of voices raised to speak over it. Suddenly he was profoundly glad to have escaped.