Sins of the Past

That firm mouth compressed. ‘As I said, I’m sorry.’

She gave a brittle little laugh. ‘Don’t be. After all, it wasn’t your fault she sank into depression after her wrecked engagement to the man she loved!’

‘You’re holding me responsible for that?’

‘If the cap fits.’

‘Unfortunately, Riva, it doesn’t.’ He glanced across to the window, his clean-shaven yet darkly shadowed jaw a statement to his hard and potent virility. ‘You know full well why Marcello broke off his engagement to your mother,’ he stated with dogmatic cruelty. ‘She was investigated and found wanting. You both were.’

‘Yes, but only by you!’

‘Because Marcello was too bewitched by a pretty face and a pair of dancing blue eyes to see beyond the superficially sweet smiles and the cleverly crafted cover-up.’

‘Which you weren’t, of course?’

‘Hardly.’ His jaw-line hardened as he expounded. ‘And, while my uncle might have been treated to a watered-down version of the truth from your mother, he wasn’t the one chosen to be the recipient of the most blatant lies.’

He was talking about her, and she cringed now at the elaborate story she had woven around herself, around her background and her upbringing, shuddering from her naïveté in believing he would never find out. Nothing, though, could reverse that, and she could never tell him exactly why she had lied.

‘Now, if it’s all the same to you, you won’t mind if we get on and do the job you’ve been sent here to do.’ His outstretched arm demanded that she precede him out of the room.

Glad to let their conversation drop, Riva complied.

Watching the way she moved as he directed her back downstairs to the room he wanted redesigning, he couldn’t help noticing the proud little tilt to her pointed chin and the slim back held straight as a rod beneath the soft jersey top.

She had spirit. He had to hand her that.

He caught a waft of her perfume, flowery and fresh, and felt a kick in his loins that shook him to the very core of his being.

With that fiery hair, that milky skin, and breasts that certainly couldn’t be called buxom, she wasn’t the tall, blonde, leggy type he usually gravitated towards, but there was something about her … something that attracted him even as it irritated him. He was having to acknowledge that he still wanted the arty little creature, as he had wanted her from the moment he had first laid eyes on her all those years ago in his uncle’s villa.

When Marcello had informed him that he was getting married, he’d been naturally delighted, he remembered. His uncle—his late father’s brother—had been a widower for more than ten years. But Damiano couldn’t deny that when he had arrived at the villa at Marcello’s invitation, to meet his proposed new bride, he had been shocked to discover a woman half Marcello’s age with a fully-grown daughter in tow.

At first he had thought they were sisters. On first name terms, and so alike in build and stature, with their loose floral skirts and their long straight hair—except that, unlike the vibrant redhead, the other had been a platinum blonde.

He had been dubious about them from the start. Who were they? Where had they come from, with their joss-sticks and their beads and their home-made sandals, which the younger of the two had often preferred to discard? And what woman, still only in her thirties—as he’d discovered the older one was—would want to tie herself to a handsome, yet nevertheless elderly widower? Unless she was attracted less to his warmth and generosity of spirit than to his status as head of one of the oldest families in Italy, with all the money and influence that went with it?

That Marcello had plucked them both from a market stall selling hand-made jewellery in some English seaside resort had only fuelled Damiano’s need to find out more about them, since his uncle had been too infatuated with his new fiancée even to want to know or care.

He had put his own staff on the job, and set about pumping the more reserved though equally—as he’d believed—worldly daughter for all the information he could get out of her, while maintaining his resolve not to let her get to him in any way.

Her father, she’d told him, had been an officer in the Royal Navy. A brave man, decorated for services to his country, who’d been away from home a lot while she had been growing up. Chelsea, she had convinced him, could have used her talents as a commercial artist, but her husband had always frowned on her having her own career, believing that it was demeaning for the wife of a man in his position to have to work. He had given Riva the best possible education, she had told him with undisguised admiration, but then he’d been tragically killed in a car crash while on leave. He had left her and her mother well provided for, she had gone on to assure him, although the lovely house where they’d lived had been far too big for the two of them after he’d died.

She had given him more—far more—than he could ever have expected, he thought grimly, and not just information.

A nerve twitched in his jaw as he thought about it, because even now it still rankled with him that he had deflowered a virgin in his determination to get at the truth. Yet he had salved his conscience by assuring himself that in going to bed with him the scheming little witch must have had a very marked agenda of her own.

He shuddered now as he thought of the consequences that falling for her charade of experience and sophistication could have brought down on his head, because he had been proved right by the team he had paid to check out both her and her mother.

They were drop-outs, protest marchers—troublemakers, in his opinion—and, as he’d suspected all along, just a pair of gold-diggers. Nothing Riva had told him had held a gram of truth.

Born illegitimate to parents who had never bothered to marry, she had come from a grossly under-privileged area, attending only basic, run-of the-mill state schools. Her mother, far from being a potential career woman, had found it hard holding down even the most menial job to pay the rent—or not, as the fancy took her—on a changing assortment of cheap, downmarket digs. The closest her father had come to being a ‘naval man'—as both Chelsea and Riva had referred to him—was when he’d been employed for a time unloading barges, and the only uniform he had worn had been inside one of Her Majesty’s prisons, where he’d been serving a well-earned sentence for fraud! The one scrap of authenticity in the whole story was that he had been killed in a car accident—the year after his release and under the influence of drink!

That he had saved his uncle from the clutches of such a dubious pair of women was something Damiano would continue to be thankful for. He regretted what had happened to Chelsea Singleman. Per amor di Dio! He would hardly be human if he didn’t! But it was galling to realise that if she had married his uncle, who had sadly died after a short illness eighteen months ago, and Marcello had left everything to his grieving widow, then because of Chelsea’s unfortunate death since, this little opportunist would now be enjoying the benefits of all Marcello D’Amico’s wealth!

‘So what do you think?’ His voice was harsh from the turn his thoughts had taken as he watched her surveying what the studio had informed her was to be redesigned as a crafts and hobbies room. ‘We were imagining something with more of a Continental feel, perhaps. Are you up to the task?’

Riva took in the rather drab décor and the few pieces of furniture—mostly covered in dust sheets, apart from a tall bookcase and a large rectangular table that stood against one wall. It was a room obviously designed as a private sanctuary, tucked away at the back of the house. She could see that someone—perhaps the woman herself—had already tried to add a classical feel and fallen far short of what they had been intending. The only redeeming feature was the pair of floor-to-ceiling doors that looked out onto a quiet terrace—although some of the paving stones were broken. There was a pleasing aspect of the old manor, though, she noted, through the specimen trees.

Meeting that hostile masculine gaze now, she said, ‘Are you asking me—or telling me?’

‘I take it it’s within your capabilities?’ he pursued, ignoring her barbed question, and didn’t fail to notice the way her tight little mouth compressed.

He had her where he wanted her—jumping to his command—and she knew it, he realised. He derived a rather guilty pleasure from that.

‘What does your grandmother do?’ Grudgingly she moved away into the centre of the room, studying its lay-out, its dimensions, its position—whether or not it faced the sun. There was nothing, though, not even in the empty bookcases, she realised, dropping her bag down on the table, to give her any clue as to the woman’s character.

‘Do?’

‘Yes.’ She swung round to see him frowning. ‘Her crafts and hobbies? What are they?’

He gave a barely discernible shrug. ‘She reads. She stitches. She … er … ricamare … ‘

‘Embroiders?’ Riva supplied, guessing that that was the word that was eluding him. ‘So … she sews.’ With a little inward smile she turned away from his disturbing scrutiny and that powerful aura of sexuality he exuded, which even now—even after what he had done—turned her knees to jelly, making her breathless, her pulse throb a little too hard.

‘This room faces north, so the light stays constant … Perhaps one wall with a hint of colour.’ She was already planning, feeling her enthusiasm building—despite everything; getting excited. It always happened when she was handed a project. Even now, when the dealer of that project was the man she despised more than anyone else in the world. But it was her job, and she was a professional. She didn’t intend letting old hostilities stand in the way of her career. ‘If we enlarge on the classical theme …’ She was thinking aloud. ‘Does she like Grecian?’

‘Definitely.’

She glanced at him, wondering why he sounded so uninterested. Perhaps he thought his grandmother’s need for a sewing room trivial and frivolous, she considered waspishly, deciding that she would do her best to please the old lady, even if it bored the socks off her superior grandson!

‘Those patio doors supply adequate light … but it still needs brightening up.’ She was assessing the space behind her. ‘It’s long enough and wide enough. Perhaps something on that wall … something bold and dramatic …’ She was getting carried away, but stopped suddenly, her arm suspended in mid-air. ‘Do you find something amusing?’ she challenged pointedly.

Arms folded, leaning back against the bookcase, the man was watching her with mocking insolence. ‘On the contrary.’ His mouth pulled down at one side. ‘I’m rather impressed.’

‘What did you expect?’ she retorted, in no mood to be gracious. ‘That I’d be out of my depth?’

‘Like you were before?’ Letting his arms fall, he moved away from the bookcase, a figure of such predatory watchfulness and cool intimidation that Riva brought her tongue nervously across her top lip.

Refusing, though, to be drawn into any further discussion with him on that subject, or anything else but the reason why she was there, she said pithily, ‘That was then, Damiano—this is now. And if you don’t mind I’d like to get on with the job the studio are paying me to do!’

She pivoted away from him, but, her temper still roused, she turned back and flung at him, ‘Why me? In view of what you think you know about me, aren’t you worried that I might decide the job isn’t really worth all the hassle? That I might decide it would simply benefit me more just to take off with a few of your—of your grandmother’s—priceless antiques?’

His mouth twisted speculatively as he weighed up that last comment.

‘One.’ He started counting out points. “Regardless of what you say to the contrary, I’m sure you value your job far too much. Two. There isn’t anything in this house worth more than having my curiosity satisfied. And three …’ His voice had grown dangerously soft. ‘Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’d find me a very lenient master if I had to come after you, Riva. You seem to be forgetting that I’ve dealt with you before, and I’d certainly have no qualms about dealing with you again.’

She wasn’t sure what he meant by dealing with her, but she certainly wasn’t going to take a chance on finding out. He was a ruthless adversary—as she knew all too well from the unscrupulous methods he had used to bring her to her knees before.