Bartering Her Innocence. Trish Morey

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СКАЧАТЬ palazzo. But only because I have a few more things I want to tell you before I leave.’

      ‘I can hardly wait,’ she heard him mutter as she wheeled around and headed back in the direction she had come. So smug, she thought, wishing there was something she could do or say to wipe the expression from his face. Was he so sure of Lily’s hopelessness that he had known her trip here was futile from the start? Was he laughing at her—at the pointlessness of it all?

      She almost growled as she headed back down the calle, her senses prickling with the knowledge he was right behind her, prickling with the sensation of his eyes burning into her back. She had to fight the impulse to turn and stare him down but then he would know that she felt his heated gaze and his smugness would escalate from unbearable to insufferable, so she kept her eyes rigidly ahead and tried to pretend she didn’t care.

      Carmela met them at the palazzo door, smiling uncertainly as she looked from one to the other. But then Luca smiled and turned on the charm as he greeted her in their own language and even though Carmela knew that her future in this place was held by little more than a gossamer thread this man could sever at any time, Tina would swear the older woman actually blushed. She hated him all the more for it in that moment, hated him for this power to make women melt under the sheer onslaught of his smile.

      ‘Your mother has taken to her bed,’ Carmela said, apologising for her absence. ‘She said she has a headache.’

      Luca arched an eyebrow in Tina’s direction. She ignored him as Carmela showed them upstairs to the main reception room, promising to bring coffee and refreshments. It was a massive room with high ceilings and pastel-decorated walls that should have been airy and bright but was rendered small by the countless cabinets and tables piled high with glass ornaments, figurines and crystal goblets and lamps of every shape and description, glass that now glinted ruby-red as the setting sunlight streamed in through the wide four-door windows.

      It was almost pretty, she thought, a glittering world of glass and illusion, if you could forget about what it had cost.

      ‘You’ve lost weight, Valentina,’ came his voice behind her. ‘You’ve been working too hard.’

      And it rankled with her that all the time he’d been following her he’d been sizing her up. Comparing her to how she’d been three years ago and finding her wanting. No doubt comparing her to all his other women and finding her wanting. Damn it, she didn’t want to think about his other women! They were welcome to him. She spun around. ‘We’ve all changed, Luca. We’re all a few years older. Hopefully a bit wiser into the deal. I know I am.’

      He smiled and picked up a paperweight that glowed red from a collection from a side table, resting it in the palm of his big hand. ‘Some things I see haven’t changed. You are still as beautiful as ever, Valentina.’ He smiled and examined the glass in his hand before replacing it with the others and moving on, finding a slow path around the cluttered room and around her, pausing to examine a tiny crystal animal here, a gilt-edged glass plate there, touching just a fingertip to it before looking up at her again. ‘Perhaps, you are a little more prickly than I remember. Perhaps there is a little more spice. But then I recall you were always very … passionate.’

      He lingered over the word as if he were donning that velvet glove to stroke her memories and warm her senses. She swallowed, fighting back the tide of the past and a surge of heat low in her belly. ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ she said, turning on the spot as he continued to circle the room, touching a hand to the head of a glass boy holding a lantern aloft as if the golden-skinned child was real and not just another of her mother’s follies. ‘Instead, I want to tell you that I know what you’re doing.’

      He tilted his head. ‘And what, exactly, am I doing?’

      ‘I’ve been through Lily’s accounts. You keep lending her money, advance after advance. Money that she turns straight around to purchase more of this—’ she waved her hand around the room ‘—from your own cousin’s glass factory on Murano.’

      He shrugged. ‘What can I say? I am a banker. Lending people money is an occupational hazard. But surely it is not my responsibility how they see fit to use those funds.’

      ‘But you know she has no income to speak of to pay you back, and still you loan her more.’

      He smiled and held up his index finger. ‘Ah. But income is only one consideration a banker must take into account when evaluating a loan risk. You are forgetting that your mother has, what we call in the business, exceptional assets.’

      She snorted. ‘You’ve noticed her assets then.’ The words were out before she could snatch them back, and now they hung in the space like crystal drops from a chandelier, heavy and fat and waiting to be inspected in the light.

      He raised an eyebrow in question. ‘I was talking about the palazzo.’

      ‘So was I,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking about.’

      He laughed a little and ran the tips of his fingers across the rim of a fluted glass bowl on a mantelpiece as he passed, continuing his circuit of the room. Such long fingers, she couldn’t help but notice, such a feather-light touch. A touch she remembered on her skin. A touch she had thought about so often in the dark of night when sleep had eluded her and she had felt so painfully alone.

      ‘Your mother is a very beautiful woman, Valentina. Does it bother you that I might notice?’

      She blinked, trying to get a grip back on the conversation, tilting her head higher as he came closer. ‘Why should it?’

      ‘I don’t know. Unless you’re worried that I have slept with Lily. That maybe I am sleeping with her?’ He stopped before her and smiled. ‘Does that bother you, cara?’

      ‘I don’t want to know! I don’t care! It’s no business of mine who you sleep with.’

      ‘Of course not. And, of course, she is a very beautiful woman.’

      ‘So you said.’ The words were ground out through her teeth.

      ‘Although nowhere—nowhere—near as beautiful as her daughter.’

      He touched those fingers to her brow, smoothing back a wayward strand of hair. She gasped, shivering at the touch, thinking she should stop him—that she should step away—when in truth she could feel herself leaning closer.

      It was Luca who stepped away, dropping his hand, and she blinked, a little stunned, feeling as if she had conceded a point to him, knowing that she had to regain the high ground.

      ‘You told my mother we were old friends.’

      He shrugged and sat down on a red velvet armchair, his long legs lazily sprawled out wide, his elbows resting on the arms. ‘Aren’t we?’

      ‘We were never friends.’

      ‘Come now, Valentina.’ Something about the way he said her name seemed almost as if he were stroking her again with that velvet glove and she crossed her arms over her chest to hide an instinctive and unwanted reaction. ‘Surely, given what we have shared …’

      ‘We shared nothing! We spent one night together, one night that I have regretted ever since.’ And not only because of the things you said and the way we parted.

      ‘I don’t СКАЧАТЬ