Latin Lovers: Italian Husbands: The Italian's Bought Bride / The Italian Playboy's Secret Son / The Italian Doctor's Perfect Family. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ how his fingers had sought her, punished her, thrilled her. And then, worst and most hurtful of all: the blazing look of contempt, cruelty in his eyes. ‘But last night proved to me that you’re the same man you were seven years ago, treating me the same way.’ The words rang with contempt and condemnation, but Stefano didn’t react. He merely stilled, his face blank, his eyes hard. Silence. Yet again the only response to her words, her plea for understanding, was silence.

      She heard the ticking of the clock, the clink of china as Stefano carefully, slowly stirred his coffee. ‘Think what you like,’ he finally said. He looked up, smiled in a way that was utterly chilling to Allegra. It was the smile, she thought numbly, of a person who didn’t care at all. And, she realized, even now she wanted him to care.

      ‘It doesn’t really matter. I apologised for my behaviour, and it won’t happen again. As you said,’ Stefano continued in a voice of determined pleasantness, ‘you’re here to help Lucio. We don’t need to deal with each other at all.’

      ‘It’s not that simple—’

      ‘It will be,’ Stefano said, and there was hard finality to his words, his face. ‘It will be.’

      Allegra tried once more. ‘Unless we deal with it, with our feelings—’

      Stefano laughed. Allegra didn’t like the sound. ‘But I don’t have feelings for you, Allegra, remember? I bought you. I treated you like a possession. I thought of you as a possession … you told me so yourself. Why should I have feelings for an object?’

      Allegra opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. ‘But …’

      ‘So if I didn’t have feelings for you then,’ he continued, cutting across her useless, incoherent denial, his voice horribly soft, ‘why should I now?’

      But he wasn’t finished. His eyes glittered as he leaned forward, his voice thrumming with power and knowledge. ‘You want to talk about feelings, Allegra?’ he challenged. ‘What about yours?’

      Allegra drew back. ‘What about mine?’

      ‘You think I’m the only one who doesn’t like to talk about the past? What about you? What about the fact that you haven’t seen your mother or your father since that night you ran away?’

      ‘My father’s dead,’ Allegra said. ‘Stefano, this has nothing—’

      ‘To do with it? Perhaps it does. You don’t want to face what you’ve done. Well, neither do I.’ His voice was quiet and controlled, yet Allegra felt as if he were shouting. She felt as if he were shouting at her. ‘Why did you cut off all contact with your family? You stayed at your father’s funeral for less than an hour. I know. I was there.’

      Her mouth opened, yet no words came out. He gave her a faint feral smile, yet she saw a bleakness in his eyes, a bleakness Allegra felt herself.

      ‘I watched you from afar. You never saw me.’

      ‘Why did you come?’

      ‘I knew your father too, Allegra. I shared in the guilt for his death. He was a foolish man, even an immoral one, but no one deserves to suffer such despair.’

      Allegra held up one hand as if to ward off his words, as if they were blows. ‘Don’t—’

      ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ Stefano said softly. ‘To remember.’

       ‘Stefano—’

      ‘You cut yourself off from everything and everyone you’d ever known, Allegra,’ Stefano said, every word a condemnation. ‘Even yourself.’

      ‘You don’t know—’

      ‘Because you couldn’t face it. You don’t want to face it. So don’t ask me to face anything, when you’ve been running from the past for seven years, and you still haven’t stopped.’

      ‘This is not about me!’ Allegra shrieked. Her voice felt as if it had been ripped from her lungs and her chest, heaving with emotion, hurt. ‘This is not about me,’ she said again, and this time her voice cracked.

      ‘No? None of it’s about you?’ Stefano rose from the table, his face harsh, his voice utterly merciless. ‘What about your father, Allegra? Did he have nothing to do with you? I know he was crushed by your betrayal. I know it was one of the reasons he killed himself.’

      ‘No.’ She wouldn’t think of it. She wouldn’t allow him to make her think of it. Like a steel trap, the lid of the box Stefano had ripped open snapped shut. Allegra felt herself go numb—numb and cold, blessedly blank. She rose from the table too, curling her hands around the back of her chair to steady herself. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said in a flat, cold voice quite unlike her own.

      Stefano laughed shortly. ‘I think I know all too well. But it’s better this way, isn’t it? For both of us.’ He turned away. ‘We leave for Abruzzo within the hour.’

      ‘Fine.’ Allegra nodded, still numb. It was so much easier not to feel. Not to feel anything.

      Yet, as he left, she found her legs going weak and it all came rushing back, a tide of emotion she couldn’t deal with. Wouldn’t deal with. Allegra sank into her chair, dropped her head in her hands.

      Whatever either of them tried to believe, the past was not forgotten. It was alive and well and vibrating between them with a thousand torturous memories.

      The sun was high and bright in the sky when they pulled away from the narrow street and into the clogged city traffic. Stefano was dressed casually in jeans and a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled back against his forearms.

      ‘I think you’ll like Abruzzo,’ he said when they’d cleared the traffic and the road stretched endlessly ahead of them, winding through dusty brown hills and fields of sunflowers ready for harvest. He spoke in a pleasant, impersonal tone that Allegra knew she should be thankful for but instead it grated on her nerves, made her hands clench in her lap. ‘It’s very relaxing there, very quiet. A good place for you to work with Lucio.’

      ‘I look forward to it,’ she said tersely, her face averted.

      ‘Good.’

      They’d silently agreed on a tense truce, and Allegra wondered how long it would last. For Lucio’s sake, she couldn’t be distracted by Stefano when she worked with him. She knew that, saw it as her first consideration, and she knew Stefano did as well.

      At least on that point—the only point, it seemed—they were in agreement.

      They both lapsed into silence and drove that way for an hour as the plains and fields around Rome turned hilly, and then mountainous. In the distance Allegra glimpsed rolling fields of saffron, the small purple flowers with their distinctive red-gold stigma stretching to the craggy, snow-topped peak of Gran Sasso.

      Stefano turned off the motorway and they drove on a small winding road through several hill towns, huddled against the unforgiving landscape as if they had but a desperate, precarious hold on this earth.

      Allegra glimpsed an old woman, dressed from head to toe in black, leading a bony cow along the road. She grinned toothlessly at СКАЧАТЬ