Bartering Her Innocence

Tina surveyed her mother with disbelief. So very beautiful and so very stupid. ‘So every time you get a loan top-up from Luca Barbarigo, you go shopping at his cousin’s factory.’

Her mother had the sheer audacity to shrug. Tina wanted to shake her. ‘He sends a water taxi. It doesn’t cost me a thing.’

‘No, Lily,’ she said, pushing back her chair to stand.

There was no point in searching for an answer any longer. Not when there wasn’t one. ‘It’s cost you everything! I just don’t believe how you could be so selfish. Carmela is working down there for a pittance you sometimes neglect to pay. You can barely afford to pay her, and yet you fill up this crumbling palazzo with so much weight of useless glass, it’s a wonder it hasn’t collapsed into the canal under the weight of it all!’

‘Carmela gets her board!’

‘While you get deeper and deeper into debt! What will happen to her, do you think, when Luca Barbarigo throws you both out on the street? Who will look after her then?’

Her mother blinked, her lips tightly pursed, and for a moment Tina thought she almost looked vulnerable.

‘You won’t let that happen, will you?’ she said meekly. ‘You’ll talk to him?’

‘For all the good it will do, yes, I’ll talk to him. But I don’t see why it will make a shred of difference. He’s got you so tightly stitched up financially, why should he relax the stranglehold now?’

‘Because he’s Eduardo’s nephew.’

‘So?’

‘And Eduardo loved me.’

Indulged you, more like it, Tina thought, cursing the stupid pride of the man for letting his wife think his fortune was bottomless and not bothering to curb her spending while he was alive, and not caring what might happen to his estate when he was gone.

‘Besides,’ her mother continued, ‘you’ll make him see reason. He’ll listen to you.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘But you were friends—’

‘We were never friends! And if you knew the things he said about you, you would know he was never your friend either, no matter how much money he is so happy to lend you.’

‘What did he say? Tell me!’

Tina shook her head. She’d said too much. She didn’t want to remember the ugly things he’d said before she’d slapped his smug face. Instead she pulled her jacket from the back of her chair. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I need to get some fresh air.’

‘Valentina!’

She fled the veritable glass museum with the sound of her mother’s voice still ringing in her ears, running down the marble steps and out past the five-hundred-year-old well with no idea where she was going, simply that she had to get away.

Away from the lamps that looked like trees and the goldfish frozen in glass and the tons of chandeliers that threatened to sink the building under their weight.

Ran from her mother’s sheer naivety and her unbelievable inability to read the terms of an agreement and then to blithely disregard them as unimportant when she did.

Fleeing from her own fear that there was no way she could sort out her mother’s problems and be home in a mere three days. Her mother was drowning in debt, just as the ancient palazzo itself was threatening to collapse into the canal and drown under the weight of tons of expensive but ultimately useless glass.

And there was not one thing she could do about it. This trip was a complete waste of time and money. It was pointless. There was nothing she could do.

She turned left out of the gate, heading back down the narrow calle towards the canal and a vaporetto that would take her somewhere—anywhere—her mother was not. And at the next corner she turned tight left again, too suddenly to see anyone coming, too consumed with her thoughts to remember she should be walking on the other side of the path. And much too suddenly to stop until his big hands were at her shoulders, braking her before she could collide headlong into his chest, punching the air from her lungs in the process. Air that had already conveyed the unmistakable news to her brain.

Luca.

CHAPTER FOUR

HIS eyes were shuttered behind dark glasses, and still she caught a glint of something behind the lenses as he recognised her, some flash of recognition that was mirrored in the upwards tweak of his lips, and she hated him all the more for it. Just as she hated the sizzle where his long fingers burned into her skin.

‘Valentina?’ he said, in a voice that must have been a gift from the gods at his birth, stroking like a pure dark velvet assault on her senses. ‘Is it you?’

She tugged fruitlessly against his steel grip to be free. He was too close, so close that the air was flavoured with the very essence of him, one hundred per cent male with just a hint of Bulgari, a scent that worked to lure her closer even as she struggled to keep her distance. A scent that was like a key opening up the lid on memories she’d rather forget and sending fragments from the past hurtling through her brain, fragments that contained the memory of that scent—of taking his nipple between her teeth and breathing him in; of the rasp of his whiskered chin against her throat making her gasp; and the feel of him driving into her with the taste of his name in her mouth.

And she cursed the combination of a velvet voice and an evocative scent; cursed that she remembered in way too much detail and the fact that he still looked as good as he always had and hadn’t put on twenty kilos and lost his hair since she had last seen him.

Cursed the fact that there was clearly no justice in this world.

For instead he was as beautiful as she remembered, a linen jacket over a white shirt that clung to his lean muscled chest as if it were a second skin, and camel-coloured linen trousers bound low over his hips by a wide leather belt.

He looked every bit the urbane Italian male, as polished and sleek as the streamlined water taxis that prowled the canals, the powerful aristocrats of this watery world. And she was suddenly aware of the disparity between them, with her raw-faced from her shower and dressed in faded jeans and a chain-store jade-coloured vest that was perfectly at home on the farm or even in town but here and now in his presence felt tired and cheap.

‘But of course it is you. My apologies, I almost didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’

And a velvet voice turned to sandpaper, to scrape across senses already reeling from the shock of their meeting and leaving them raw and stinging.

‘Luca,’ she managed in an ice-laden voice designed to slice straight through his smugness, ‘I’d like to say it’s good to see you again, but right now I just want you to let me go.’

His smile only widened, but he did let her go then, even if his hands lingered at her shoulders just a fraction longer than necessary, the shudder as his thumbs swept an arc across her skin as they departed and left her shivery just as unwelcome. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry? I understood you had only now arrived.’

There was no point being surprised or asking how he knew. Her mother had been making calls when she’d arrived.One of them was to her father, her mother had said, but was another to Luca Barbarigo, sorting out the next instalment of her loan so she could purchase a new bargeful of glassware? She wouldn’t be surprised. For all her mother’s protests about the unfair actions of the man, she needed him for her supply of funds like a drug addict needed their supply of crack cocaine. She didn’t waste time being polite. ‘What’s it to you where I am going?’

‘Only that I might have missed you. I was coming to pay my respects.’

‘Why? So you could gloat to my face about my mother’s pathetic money management skills? Don’t bother, I’ve known about them for ever. It’s hardly news to me. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time but I’ll be heading back to Australia the first flight I can get. And now, if you’ll excuse me …’ She made to move past him but it wasn’t easy. In the busy calle he was too tall, too broad across the shoulders. His very presence seemed to absorb what little space there was. But as soon as this next group of tourists passed …

He shifted to the right, blocking her escape. ‘You’re leaving Venice so soon?’

She tried to ignore what his presence was doing to her blood pressure. Tried to pretend it was anger with her mother that was setting her skin to burn and her senses to overload. ‘What would be the point of staying? I’m sure you’re not as naive as my mother, Signore Barbarigo. You must know there is nothing I can do to save her from financial ruin. Not after the way you’ve so neatly stitched her up.’

His eyes glinted in the thin light, and Tina had no doubt the heated spark came not from what was left of the sun, but from a place deep inside.

‘So combatative, Valentina? Surely we can talk like reasonable people.’

‘But that would require you to be a reasonable person, Signore Barbarigo and, having met you in the past, and having examined my mother’s accounts, I would hazard the opinion that you have not one reasonable bone in your body.’

He laughed out loud, a sound that reverberated between the brick walls and bounced all the way up to the fading sky, grinding on her senses. ‘Perhaps you are right, Valentina. But that does not stop your mother from believing that you will rescue her from the brink of ruin.’

‘Then she is more of a fool than I thought. You have no intention of letting her off the hook, do you? You won’t be happy until you have thrown her out of the palazzo!’

Heads turned in their direction, ears of passing tourists pricking up at her raised voice, eager to happen upon a possible conflict to add colour and local spice to their Venetian experience.