Master Of Pleasure

Gabriel’s foster parents had appealed to his grandfather. They were poor and could not afford to feed a hungry child. Giorgio Calbrini had refused to help. The child was nothing to him. His daughter had also remarried—this time to the man of his choice—and he was hoping that within a very short space of time she would give him a grandson with the lineage his pride demanded.

Only she hadn’t, and when Gabriel was ten years old his mother and her second husband had both been killed when the helicopter they were in crashed. Giorgio Calbrini had then had no alternative but to make the best of the only heir he had—Gabriel.

It had been an austere, loveless life for a young boy, Gabriel remembered, with a grandfather who’d had no love for him and had despised the blood he had inherited from his father. But at least under his grandfather’s roof he had been properly fed. His grandfather had sent him to the best schools—and had made sure that he was taught everything he would need to know when the time came to take over from him and become the head of the house of Calbrini. Not that his grandfather had had high hopes of him being able to do so, as he had made plain to Gabriel more than once. ‘I have to do this because I have no choice, because you are the only grandson I have,’ he had told Gabriel, ceaselessly and bitterly.

Gabriel, though, had been determined to prove him wrong. Not to win his grandfather’s love. Gabriel did not believe in love. No, he had wanted to prove that he was the better man, the stronger man. And that was exactly what he had done. At first his grandfather had refused to believe Gabriel’s tutors when they praised his grasp of financial politics and all the complexities that went with them. But by the time he was twenty Gabriel had quadrupled the small amount of capital his grandfather had given him on his eighteenth birthday.

Then, three weeks after Gabriel had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his grandfather had died unexpectedly and Gabriel had inherited his vast wealth and position. Those who had predicted that he would never be able to step into his grandfather’s shoes had been forced to eat their words. Gabriel was a true Calbrini, and he possessed an even sharper instinct for making money than his grandfather. But there was more to his life than making money. There was also the need to make himself emotionally invulnerable.

And that was exactly what he was, Gabriel reflected now. No woman would ever be allowed to repeat his mother’s rejection of him and go unpunished.

Especially not this woman.

He could hear Sasha speaking to her sons, the sound of her voice, but not her words, carried to him by the breeze.

Sasha! By the time Gabriel was twenty-five he had become a billionaire. A billionaire who trusted no one and who kept the women he chose to warm his bed as exactly that—bedmates and nothing else. The rules he laid down for his relationships with them were simple and non-negotiable. No talk of love, or a future, or commitment; absolute fidelity to him while they were partners; absolute and total adherence to his safe sex and no babies policy. And, just to make sure that this latter rule wasn’t broken ‘accidentally on purpose’, Gabriel always took care of that side of things himself.

Over the years he had endured his share of angry, bitter scenes, with weeping women who had thought they could change those rules and then learned their mistake. Magically those tears had quickly dried once they were offered a generous goodbye gift. His mouth twisted cynically. Was it any wonder that he had become a man who trusted no one, and most of all a man who despised women? So far as Gabriel was concerned there wasn’t a woman in existence who could not be bought. His mother had shown him what women were, and all the other women he had come into contact with since had confirmed what she had taught him when she had abandoned him for money.

Not that he didn’t enjoy the company of women, or rather the pleasure of their bodies. He did. He had inherited his father’s good looks, and finding a willing female partner to satisfy his sexual needs had never been a problem.

‘Sam, don’t go too far. Stay here, where I can see you.’ Sasha’s words reached him this time, as she raised her voice so that her son could hear it. A caring mother? Sasha?

Like his bitterness, the past wouldn’t let go of him. It was here around him now, gripping him so tightly that he could feel its pain.

After his grandfather’s death he had had closed up his grandfather’s remote and uncomfortable house in Sardinia and bought himself a yacht. With financial interests in property, it had made sense for him to travel, looking for fresh acquisitions both material and sexual. And if a woman invited him to use her for his sexual pleasure then why should he not do so? Just so long as she understood that once his appetite was sated there would not be a place in his life for her.

By the time he was twenty-five he had also already made the decision that when the time came he would pay a woman to provide him with an heir—a child to which he would make sure he had exclusive rights.

Gabriel watched Sasha with cold-eyed contempt. Six weeks ago, just after his thirty-fifth birthday, he had stood beside the hospital bed of his dying second cousin—the Calbrini family was extensive, and had many different branches—listening to Carlo pleading for his help for the two sons Carlo loved more than anything else in the world.

The same warm breeze that was playing sensually with Sasha’s long hair was flattening the thick darkness of his own to reveal the harsh purity of a bone structure that bore the open stamp of Sardinia’s human history—the straight line of his Roman nose a classic delineation of masculine features that echoed the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, coupled with the musculature of a man in his prime. Centuries ago the Saracens had invaded Sardinia, leaving their mark on its history and its inhabitants through the women they had taken and impregnated. It had been Carlo who had told him that legend had it that boy children born to such women were said to possess the physical stamina and legendary merciless cruelty of the men who had fathered them. Gabriel knew that there was Saracen blood in his own family’s past, and he knew too that it showed in his attitude to life. He had no mercy for those who double-crossed him.

Eyes as golden and as deathly watchful as those of an eagle studied the two boys. Privileged, and loved by a doting elderly father. Their childhood was so very different from his own. The sunlight gilded his skin, warmly gold rather than deeply olive. He looked on the promise Carlo had begged from him as an almost sacred trust, an admission from his cousin without words being spoken that he was entrusting his sons to Gabriel’s care because he did not trust their mother—because on his deathbed he had finally been prepared to admit that she could not be trusted.

But still Carlo’s last words to him had been of her.

‘Sasha,’he had told Gabriel. ‘You must understand…’

He had been too weak to say any more, but there had been no need. Gabriel knew all there was to know about Sasha. Just like his mother, she had walked out on him. The memory of that was like a constant piece of grit rubbing against his pride, exacerbating the darkness within him. She was unfinished business, the cause of a blow to his pride against which it had banked a debt of compounded interest—which he was now here to claim in full.

A roar of protest from one of the twins caused Sasha to turn to look in maternal anxiety, and then to call out, ‘Stop fighting, you two.’

Something—no, someone had moved between her and the sun. Immediately she shielded her gaze to see who it was.

There were moments in life that happened both so quickly and yet so slowly that they could never be ignored or forgotten. Sasha felt the abrupt cessation of her heartbeat, then a suffocating sense of shocked disbelief, streaked with fear and panic—and something else so painful that she refused to give it either life or a name. She listened to the slow heavy thud of her heart as though it belonged to another woman, distantly aware of it propelling the blood into her veins, keeping her physically functioning while, emotionally, every nerve felt as though it had been tortured and then severed. Just one word was torn from her throat.

‘Gabriel!’

CHAPTER TWO

JUST one word, but it was so filled with anger, shock and fear that it seemed to reverberate between them.

Sasha had to tilt her head back to look up at Gabriel, and she could feel the panicky beat of the pulse at the base of her throat. She resisted an urge to place a covering hand over it.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ It was a mistake to ask him that. He would be able to hear the panic in her voice and see how she was having to fight to control her fear. The way his mouth was twisting into that cruelly unkind and satisfied smile she remembered so well told her that.

‘What do you think I want?’

His voice was so soft and gentle that it could almost have been the tender stroke of a lover’s touch against her skin, or the brush of an angel’s wings. Just for a second her body reacted to the memories it evoked. She was seventeen again, a desperate bundle of aching, emotional need she had kept hidden beneath a shield of bravado. Her body was bereft of its sexually challenging armour of short skirt and minuscule vest top, and her long hair, with its amateur blonde streaks, was still damp from the shower Gabriel had insisted she have. She was watching him watching her, overwhelmed by the feeling, the longing suddenly shooting through her; knowing for the first time in her life what it felt like to experience physical sexual desire. And she wanted him, desired him so very badly.

A door had swung open on her past. She didn’t want to see what lay behind it, but it was already too late. She remembered how she had been too impatient to wait for him to come to her, running to him instead. He had caught hold of her, holding her at arm’s length whilst he studied her naked body. Even her flesh had signalled its eager readiness to him, her breasts firming and lifting as she imagined him touching her there. But when he did she had realised that her imagination had not had the power to tell her just how his touch would feel, or what it would do to her. The flesh of his fingertips had been hard and slightly rough, the flesh of a man who worked and lived physically, not just cerebrally. She had shivered, and then shuddered with uncontained delight when he had slowly explored the shape of her breasts. The erotic roughness of his touch had increased her arousal so much that she had suddenly become aware of not just how much she wanted him, and how excited she was, but how ready her body was for him, how hot and wet and achingly sensitive that most intimate part of her had felt. As though he had sensed that, too, Gabriel had trailed his hand down over her body, smoothly and determinedly. When he had allowed it to rest on her hip, cupping the gently protruding bone, she had been seized with impatient urgency and the need to feel him caressing her more intimately.

Had she then moved closer to him, openly parting her legs, or had he been the one to propel her closer to him, moving his hand to her thigh? She couldn’t remember. But she could remember how it had felt, how she had felt, when he had bent his head to kiss the smooth column of her throat at the same time as he had stroked apart the swollen lips of her sex to dip his fingers in the slick moist heat that was waiting for him. She had almost reached orgasm there and then.

A shudder punched through her. What was she doing, thinking about that now? She could feel the strain of her own emotions. Fear? Guilt? Longing? No, never again. The girl she had been was gone, and with her everything that that girl had felt.

Sasha looked down towards the beach, where her sons were still playing, oblivious to what was happening, and then looked quickly away, instinctively not wanting to contaminate them with what was happening to her. Her sharpest and most urgent need was not to protect herself but to protect them. As she looked away she stepped to one side, as though to draw Gabriel’s attention to her rather than her vulnerable young. There was nothing she would not do to protect her sons. Nothing.

Gabriel tracked the involuntary movement she made away from the two boys. Carlo had claimed that she was a very protective mother, but of course she would have been while she believed that Carlo was a wealthy man and her role as their mother gave her unlimited access to that wealth. Carlo, like many men who come to fatherhood so late in life, had worshipped the flesh of his flesh, evidence of his potency. His heirs…Now the heirs to precisely nothing. Gabriel’s tiger-eyed gaze pounced on the visual evidence of their privileged cosmopolitan lifestyle—expensive Italian clothes, healthy American teeth, upper-class English accents, their flesh and bones that of children who had from birth been well fed and nurtured. At their age he had been wearing rags, his body thin and bony.

He switched his gaze from the beach to the woman in front of him. She too had good teeth, expensive teeth—paid for, of course, by her doting husband. Her doting and now dead husband. Her hair was cut in the kind of style that looked artless but, as Gabriel knew, cost a fortune to maintain. The ‘simple’ linen dress she was wearing, with its elegant lines, no doubt possessed a designer label, just as her hands and feet with their uncoloured but carefully manicured nails spoke of a woman who had the kind of confidence that came from enjoying position and wealth. But not any longer. What had she felt when she had learned of Carlo’s death? Relief at the thought that she would no longer have to give herself to an old man? Avaricious pleasure at the belief that she would now be wealthy?

Well, she would have one of those two feelings to keep, he acknowledged brutally, although probably not for very long. She must be close to thirty now, and if she wanted to find another rich old man to support her she would discover she was competing with much younger, unencumbered women. The kind of women who fawned around him wherever he went.

One of Gabriel’s mistresses had once told him that it was his Saracen ancestry that gave him the dark and dangerous side to his nature that his enemies feared and his women loved. For himself, he believed that any child growing up as he had done—unwanted, harshly treated, both physically and emotionally—quickly learned to give back as good as it got. A child who had to literally fight off the farm dogs for a scrap of bread was bound to develop a hard carapace to protect both his flesh and his spirit.

An unexpected smile dimpled his chin as he watched Sasha swallow and saw the telltale darkening of her eyes, but there was no warmth to that smile. ‘Yes, it must have been hard for you, lying there in bed, letting an old man take his pleasure with your body and being unable to give you any pleasure back. But then, of course, you had all that money to pleasure you, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t marry Carlo for his money.’

‘No? Then why did you marry him?’

Ah, now he had her. He could hear the uneven ratcheting of her breath escaping from her lungs. How well he knew that fierce need to protect oneself from a death blow. Unfortunately for her it was too late. There was no protection for her here.

‘It certainly wasn’t for love,’he taunted her unkindly. ‘I saw him just before he died. He was in the hospital in Milan. You, I believe, were in New York—shopping. Very conveniently you had also boarded your sons at their school, in order to give yourself the freedom to do so.’

All the colour bled out of her face. Infuriatingly Gabriel recognised that even now, almost bleached of blood and life, she still managed to look impossibly beautiful.

Sasha was terrified she might actually faint, so great was the pressure of her anger. She had gone to NewYork in secret, to meet with yet another specialist to see if there was some way that Carlo might be saved. She might not have loved her husband as a woman, but she had been grateful to him for all that he had done for her and for the twins. The decision to ask the school if the boys could board was not one she had made without a great deal of soul searching. For her, the boys’emotional security was always paramount, but she and they had owed Carlo a huge debt. What kind of person would she be if she had not done absolutely everything she could to find a way to give her husband more time with them? It wouldn’t have been possible to travel to NewYork to seek a second opinion with the boys. And then there had been the added worry of how it would affect them to watch Carlo slowly dying. She had needed to be on hand to visit the hospital and then the hospice sometimes twice or three times a day. Carlo had wanted to die in Italy, not London, where the boys were at school. She had made what she had believed was the best decision she could at the time, but now Gabriel was pin-pointing the guilt that still nagged at her for having had to leave the boys at school for a term.

‘You know, of course, that the business is ruined and that all he has left you is debt?’

‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed bleakly. There was no point in even attempting to conceal the reality of her financial situation from him, or trying to explain to him how she felt about Carlo. He would not understand because he was incapable of understanding. Their shared experience of damaged childhood years, instead of forging shared bonds of mutual compassion, had turned them into the bitterest of enemies. He would never understand why she had left him for Carlo, and she would never tell him—because there was simply no point.

‘I suppose I should be honoured that you’ve actually come to gloat in person. After all, you weren’t at the funeral.’

‘To watch you cry crocodile tears? Even my stomach isn’t strong enough for that.’