The Truth Behind his Touch

Three floors up, Giancarlo, in the middle of a meeting with three corporate financiers, was interrupted by his secretary, who whispered something in his ear that made him still and brought the shutters down on his dark, cold eyes.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked in a clipped voice. Elena Carli seldom made mistakes; it was why she had worked for him so successfully for the past five-and-a-half years. She did her job with breathtaking efficiency, obeyed orders without question and seldom made mistakes. When she nodded firmly, he immediately got to his feet, made his excuses—though not profusely, because these financiers needed him far more than he needed them—and then, meeting dismissed, he walked across to the window to stare down at the paved, private courtyard onto which his offices backed.

So the past he thought to have left behind was returning. Good sense counselled him to turn his back on this unexpected intrusion in his life, but he was curious and what harm would there be in indulging his curiosity? In his life of unimaginable wealth and vast power, curiosity was a rare visitor, after all.

Giancarlo de Vito had been ferociously single-minded and ruthlessly ambitious to get where he was now. He had had no choice. His mother had needed to be kept and after a series of unfortunate lovers the only person left to keep her had been him. He had finished his university career with a first and had launched himself into the world of high finance with such dazzling expertise that it hadn’t been long before doors began to open. Within three years of finishing university, he’d been able to pick and choose his employer. Within five years, he’d no longer needed an employer because he had become the powerhouse who did the employing. Now, at just over thirty, he had become a billionaire, diversifying with gratifying success, branching out and stealing the march on competitors with every successive merger and acquisition and in the process building himself a reputation that rendered him virtually untouchable.

His mother had seen only the tip of his enormous success, as she had died six years previously—perhaps, fittingly, in the passenger seat of her young lover’s fast car—a victim, as he had seen it, of a life gone wrong. As her only offspring, Giancarlo knew he should have been more heartbroken than he actually was, but his mother had been a temperamental and difficult woman, fond of spending money and easily dissatisfied. He had found her flitting from lover to lover rather distasteful, but never had he once criticized her. At the end of the day, hadn’t she been through enough?

Unaccustomed to taking these trips down memory lane, Giancarlo shook himself out of his introspection with a certain amount of impatience. Presumably the woman who had come to see him and who was currently sitting in the grand marble foyer was to blame for his lapse in self-control. With his thoughts back in order and back where they belonged, he buzzed her up.

‘You may go up now.’ The receptionist beckoned to Caroline, who could have stayed sitting in the air-conditioned foyer quite happily for another few hours. Her feet were killing her and she had finally begun cooling down after the hours spent in the suffocating heat. ‘Signora Carli will meet you up at the top of the elevator and show you to Signore De Vito’s office. If you like, you may leave your … case here.’

Caroline thought that the last thing the receptionist seemed to want was her battered pull-along being left anywhere in the foyer. At any rate, she needed it with her.

And, now that she was finally here, she felt a little twist of nervousness at the prospect of what lay ahead. She wouldn’t want to return to the lake house empty-handed. Alberto had suffered a heart attack several weeks previously. His health was not good and, his doctor had confided in her, the less stress the better.

With a determined lift of her head, Caroline followed the personal assistant in silence, passing offices which seemed abnormally silent, staffed with lots of hard-working executives who barely looked up as they walked past.

Everyone seemed very well-groomed. The women were all thin, good-looking and severe, with their hair scraped back and their suits shrieking of money well spent.

In comparison, Caroline felt overweight, short and dishevelled. She had never been skinny, even as a child. When she sucked her breath in and looked at herself sideways through narrowed eyes, she could almost convince herself that she was curvy and voluptuous, but the illusion was always destroyed the second she took a harder look at her reflection. Nor was her hair of the manageable variety. It rarely did as it was told; it flowed in wild abandon down her back and was only ever remotely obedient when it was wet. Right now the heat had added more curl than normal and she knew that tendrils were flying wildly out of their impromptu braid. She had to keep blowing them off her face.

After trailing along behind Elena—who had introduced herself briefly and then seen fit to say absolutely nothing else on the way up—a door was opened into an office so exquisite that for a few seconds Caroline wasn’t even aware that she had been deposited like an unwanted parcel, nor did she notice the man by the window turning slowly around to look at her.

All she could see was the expanse of splendid, antique Persian rug on the marble floor; the soft, silk wallpaper on the walls; the smooth, dark patina of a bookshelf that half-filled an entire wall; the warm, old paintings on the walls—not paintings of silly lines and shapes that no one could ever decipher, but paintings of beautiful landscapes, heavy with trees and rivers.

‘Wow,’ she breathed, deeply impressed as she continued to look around her with shameless awe.

At long last her eyes rested on the man staring at her and she was overcome with a suffocating, giddy sensation as she absorbed the wild, impossible beauty of his face. Black hair, combed back and ever so slightly too long, framed a face of stunning perfection. His features were classically perfect and invested with a raw sensuality that brought a heated flush to her cheeks. His eyes were dark and unreadable. Expensive, lovingly hand-tailored charcoal-grey trousers sheathed long legs and the crisp white shirt rolled to the elbows revealed strong, bronzed forearms with a sprinkling of dark hair. In the space of a few seconds, Caroline realised that she was staring at the most spectacular-looking man she had ever clapped eyes on in her life. She also belatedly realised that she was gaping, mouth inelegantly open, and she cleared her throat in an attempt to get a hold of herself.

The silence stretched to breaking point and then at last the man spoke and introduced himself, inviting her to take a seat, which she was only too happy to do because her legs felt like jelly. His voice matched his appearance. It was deep, dark, smooth and velvety. It was also icy cold, and a trickle of doubt began creeping in, because this was not a man who looked as though he could be persuaded into doing anything he didn’t want to do.

‘So …’ Giancarlo sat down, pushing himself away from his desk so that he could cross his long legs, and stared at her. ‘What makes you think that you can just barge into my offices, Miss …?’

‘Rossi. Caroline.’

‘I was in the middle of a meeting.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ She stumbled over the apology. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt anything. I would have been happy to wait until you were finished …’ Her naturally sunny personality rose to the surface and she offered him a small smile. ‘In fact, it was so wonderfully cool in your foyer and I was just so grateful to rest my legs. I’ve been on the go for absolutely ages and it’s as hot as a furnace out there.’ In receipt of his continuing and unwelcoming silence, her voice faded away and she licked her lips nervously.

Giancarlo was quite happy to let her stew in her own discomfiture.

‘This is a fantastic building, by the way.’

‘Let’s do away with the pleasantries, Miss Rossi. What are you doing here?’

‘Your father sent me.’

‘So I gather. Which is why you’re sitting in my office. My question is why? I haven’t had any contact with my father in over fifteen years, so I’m curious as to why he should suddenly decide to send a henchman to get in touch with me.’

Caroline felt an uncustomary warming anger flood through her as she tried to marry up this cold, dark stranger with the old man of whom she was so deeply fond, but getting angry wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

‘And who are you anyway? My father is hardly a spring chicken. Don’t tell me that he’s managed to find himself a young wife to nurse him faithfully through his old age?’ He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. ‘Nothing too beautiful, of course,’ he murmured, casting insolent, assessing eyes over her. ‘Devotion in the form of a young, beautiful, nubile wife is never a good idea for an old man, even a rich old man …’

‘How dare you?’

Giancarlo laughed coldly. ‘You show up here, unannounced, with a message from a father who was written out of my life a long time ago. Frankly, I have every right to dare.’

‘I am not married to your father!’

‘Well, now the alternative is even more distasteful, not to mention downright stupid. Why involve yourself with someone three times your age unless you’re in it for the financial gain? Don’t tell me the sex is breathtaking?’

‘I can’t believe you’re saying these things!’ She wondered how she could have been so bowled over by the way he looked when he was obviously a loathsome individual, just the sort of cold, unfeeling, sneering sort she hated. ‘I’m not involved with your father in any way other than professionally, signore!’

‘No? Then what is a young girl like you doing in a rambling old house by a lake with only an old man for company?’

Caroline glared at him. She was still smarting at the way his eyes had roamed over her and dismissed her as ‘nothing too beautiful’. She knew she wasn’t beautiful but to hear it casually emerge from the mouth of someone she didn’t know was beyond rude. Especially from the mouth of someone as physically compelling as the man sitting in front of her. Why hadn’t she done what most other people would have in similar circumstances and found herself an Internet café so that she could do some background research on the man she had been told to ferret out? At least then she might have been prepared!

She had to grit her teeth together and fight the irresistible urge to grab her suitcase and jump ship.

‘Well? I’m all ears.’

‘There’s no need to be horrible to me, signore. I’m sorry if I’ve ruined your meeting, or … or whatever you were doing, but I didn’t volunteer to come here.’

Giancarlo almost didn’t believe his ears. People never accused him of being horrible. Granted, they might sometimes think that, but it was vaguely shocking to actually hear someone come right out and say it. Especially a woman. He was accustomed to women doing everything within their power to please him. He looked narrowly at his uninvited visitor. She was certainly not the sort of rakethin beauty eulogised in the pages of magazines. She was trying hard to conceal her expression but it was transparently clear that the last place she wanted to be was in his office, being interrogated.

Too bad.

‘I take it my father manipulated you into doing what he wanted. Are you his housekeeper? Why would he employ an English housekeeper?’

‘I’m his personal assistant,’ Caroline admitted reluctantly. ‘He used to know my father once upon a time. Your father had a one-year posting in England lecturing at a university and my father was one of his students. He was my father’s mentor and they kept in touch after your father returned to Italy. My father is Italian. I think he enjoyed having someone he could speak to in Italian.

‘Anyway, I didn’t go to university, but my parents thought it would be nice for me to learn Italian, seeing that it’s my father’s native tongue, and he asked Alberto if he could help me find a posting over here for a few months. So I’m helping your father with his memoirs and also pretty much taking care of all the admin—stuff like that. Don’t you want to know … um … how he is? You haven’t seen him in such a long time.’

‘If I had wanted to see my father, don’t you think I would have contacted him before now?’

‘Yes, well, pride can sometimes get in the way of us doing what we want to do.’

‘If your aim is to play amateur psychologist, then the door is right behind you. Avail yourself of it.’

‘I’m not playing amateur psychologist,’ Caroline persisted stubbornly. ‘I just think, well, I know that it probably wasn’t ideal when your parents got divorced. Alberto doesn’t talk much about it, but I know that when your mother walked out and took you with her you were only twelve …’

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’ Intensely private, Giancarlo could scarcely credit that he was listening to someone drag his past out of the closet in which it had been very firmly shut.

‘How else am I supposed to deal with this situation?’ Caroline asked, bewildered and dismayed.

‘I am not in the habit of discussing my past!’