Master Of Pleasure

‘But it is, of course, strong enough for you to come here and verbally stone me. It’s been over ten years, Gabriel. Isn’t it time—’

‘Isn’t it time what? That I claimed the debt you owe me, along with its accrued interest? I’m a man who likes payment in full, Sasha. Carlo knew that.’

Something—either old knowledge or female instinct—iced down her spine in a cold trickle of awareness she didn’t want but couldn’t ignore.

‘What do you mean? What did Carlo know?’

‘He knew that when he asked me to lend him money that money would have to be repaid.’

‘You loaned Carlo money?’

Gabriel inclined his head. ‘Against the security of the deeds to his hotels. He had overtraded, and badly. I told him that, but he believed he could borrow his way out of trouble, and since we were family I could not refuse him the help he wanted. Unfortunately for him he did not manage to turn the business around. Fortunately for me his debt was covered by his assets. My assets now. Including this place, of course.’

Sasha stared at him.

‘Yours?’ She couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. ‘You mean that you own this hotel?’

‘This hotel,’ he agreed, ‘and the others. And your home, the money in your bank, the clothes on your back. It all belongs to me now, Sasha. Everything. Carlo’s debt is repaid,’ he told her softly, ‘but yours to me is still outstanding. Did you think it had been forgotten? That I wouldn’t bother to seek retribution?’

She wanted desperately to look at her sons, to reassure herself that they were there, whole and safe, and that none of this could touch or harm them. But she was afraid that somehow just looking at them would draw Gabriel’s attention to their vulnerability.

Instead she drew in a deep, unsteady breath and said, ‘You seek retribution from me? I was the one who was the victim in our relationship, Gabriel. You were the one who—’

‘You were the one who sold herself to the highest bidder.’ Somehow she made herself look at him. ‘You left me with no other option,’ she told him quietly.

It was, after all, the truth. She had gone to him looking for all those things she’d never had, still able to believe that miracles could happen, even for girls like her, and that all the wrongs in her life could be made right. She had still trusted in her dreams then. She felt pity for the girl she had been, was glad that she was gone, and even more glad to be the woman who had taken her place.

Before Gabriel could say anything else she demanded, ‘What is it exactly that you want, Gabriel? I assume you haven’t wasted your precious time coming here just to gloat? Or did you think it would be amusing to throw us out personally? Well, I’ll save you the bother. It won’t take us long to pack.’ Of all the luxuries she would have to give up this was the one she would miss the most. The luxury of pride. Because she knew so well just what a luxury it was.

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he told her.

There was more? What? Surely it wasn’t possible for things to be any worse?

‘Before he died, Carlo appointed me as his sons’ legal guardian.’

It was a joke. A cruel deliberate attempt to frighten her. Payback time with a vengeance. But of course it couldn’t be true.

‘What’s wrong?’ she heard Gabriel demanding softly when he caught her swift indrawn breath and the shocked disbelief she was trying to hide. ‘Surely Carlo told you that he intended to appoint me as their legal family guardian in accordance with traditional Sardinian law?’

He knew, of course, that Carlo had done no such thing because his cousin had told him so himself.

‘It is for the best,’ Carlo had whispered painfully to Gabriel. ‘Even though I know Sasha won’t see it that way at first.’

She certainly didn’t, Gabriel recognised. Her eyes were wild with disbelief as she shook her head in denial.

This couldn’t be happening, Sasha thought frantically. This was the nightmare to end all nightmares. The ultimate betrayal. A knife-sharp edge of fear sliced into her heart and paralysed her defences.

‘No!’ she told him, shock bleeding the colour from her face, clenching her hands into small, anguished fists. ‘No. I don’t believe you.’

‘My lawyers have all the necessary papers.’

This wasn’t some kind of malicious joke, Sasha recognised numbly. This was real. Her head was aching, bursting with unanswerable questions. She was too distraught to maintain the protective distance of remote disinterest.

‘I don’t understand…Why would Carlo do something like that? Why?’

Gabriel shrugged, a small movement of powerfully strong shoulders. Sickeningly for a second the scene in front of her swung crazily out of focus and she was seeing another, younger Gabriel, sea water sluicing from the bare tanned strength of those same shoulders as he hauled himself up out of the ocean onto the deck of his yacht, his body naked and unashamedly ready for her, just as hers had been equally ready for him.

And she had always been ready for him. Ready, eager, wanting. Hungry for the intimacy of any sexual act that would bring him closer to her and keep him there. She had had no inhibitions, and she suspected he would not have allowed her to have any. With their privacy guaranteed she had thought nothing of shrugging on one of his shirts and wearing nothing else, as turned on by the knowledge that beneath it she was openly available to his touch as she knew he had been. As a lover he had opened her eyes to a whole new world of pleasure, and he had imprinted that pleasure on her body in such a way that she knew she would never be able to forget it. There had been long hours when he had held her on their bed and caressed and kissed his way over every inch of her—the curve of her throat, the tender flesh inside her arm, her fingers. If she closed her eyes she knew she would almost be able to feel the slow wet curl of his tongue as he drew slow patterns of almost unendurable erotic stimulation along the whole length of her.

Aroused to a fever pitch, she would invariably forget his command to remain still and reach for him, arching her back, spreading her legs, moaning with raw delight when he carefully held apart the outer lips of her sex and stroked his tongue-tip the full length of it. Her orgasm would begin before he entered her, her body welcoming his fierce thrusts even while deep down inside herself a part of her ached to feel him there without the barrier of the condoms he’d always insisted on using.

Abruptly Sasha realised the danger of what she was doing. No! Her silent tortured denial reverberated inside her skull. What was happening to her? How could he be making her remember that now?

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she could hear Gabriel saying coolly. ‘Carlo knew the state his financial and business affairs were in. He told me himself that he wanted to do everything he could to protect his sons and their future. Obviously by making me their guardian he believed he would be morally compelling me to provide for them financially.’

‘No, he wouldn’t do that,’ Sasha protested. But even as she said the words she knew that she was deceiving herself. It was exactly the sort of thing Carlo would have done—albeit for the best of motives. Carlo had had such a deep-rooted sense of family. He had been proud of being a Calbrini, proud too that the twins would bear that name. He had cared about her, and he had protected her from the pain of loving Gabriel and being rejected by him, but the boys had Calbrini blood in their veins, and in the end that had mattered more to him than her.

Sasha was trying hard to remain strong, to focus on what Gabriel was saying instead of slipping back into the past, but the memories Gabriel was evoking had a dangerously strong hold on her and were making her feel frighteningly weak. How could it be that just standing here with him could awaken the kind of erotic thoughts she had truly believed she had left behind in her past?

‘To provide for them financially,’ Gabriel repeated, adding as smoothly as though he were sliding a knife up through her ribs and straight into her heart, ‘and to protect them from their mother.’

It took several seconds for her brain to absorb what he was saying, and then several more for her to react to the cruel injustice of his words. ‘They don’t need to be protected from me, and neither do they need you.’

‘Carlo obviously didn’t agree with you, and neither will the law. I am their guardian. They are my wards. That was their father’s dying wish.’

‘But I am their mother.’

‘The kind of mother who some might say they would be better off not having.’

‘You have no right to say that. You know nothing about my relationship with my sons.’

‘I know you. You went to Carlo because he was prepared to give you what I would not. Now he is dead, and sooner rather than later you will be looking for another man to take his place. Obviously Carlo feared that should you remarry your new husband might not have Carlo’s sons’best interests at heart, and he wanted to protect them.’

‘I would never marry a man unless I thought he would love them as though they were his own.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

Sasha suspected she knew what he was thinking. ‘You still haven’t forgiven your mother, have you? Well, I am not her, Gabriel. I love my sons—’

‘Enough! This has nothing to do with my mother.’

Sasha wasn’t going to argue with him. What was the point? It would be like trying to break down granite with her bare hands. But she knew that she was right. Gabriel measured women by the yardstick of his mother’s failure to be a mother to him, and he condemned them all along with her. He wanted to believe that all women were capable of abandoning their children for money because he needed to believe it; because not to do so meant accepting that his own mother had left him because of some failure within himself to merit her maternal love. He spoke his beliefs as though they were a truth written in stone, and Sasha knew that inside his head, in what passed for his heart, they were. In his eyes she was already condemned and would remain condemned. What he believed could not be changed, because he did not want it to be changed.

She had learned so much on her own sometimes difficult and painful journey to maturity and acceptance of her own past. And most of all she had learned that it was impossible to make another person’s journey of self-knowledge and healing for them.

Gabriel had decided a long time ago to sacrifice the ability to love and be loved in exchange for the protection of a bitter pride that would not allow him to see her sex as motivated by anything other than the most callous form of self-interest.

Carlo might have believed he was doing what was right, but Sasha wished he had not brought Gabriel back into her life—and more importantly into the lives of her sons. They meant everything to her. There was nothing she would not do to protect them, no sacrifice she would not make.