A Clash With Cannavaro (7 page)

She was being lifted off her feet, and so unexpectedly that she let out a surprised shriek as she found herself caught against the surging strength of his hard, virile body.

‘Put me down!’

‘I thought you said there are no rules.’

‘There are,’ she stressed, suddenly panicky.

‘Well, just as you said, I am breaking them.’ He was wading with her into the translucent aquamarine water, which was coming further up his muscular legs with every powerful stride he took.

‘What are you going to do?’ She didn’t know and she wasn’t looking forward to finding out. ‘Please don’t throw me in.’

‘I would not dream of it.’ He grinned.

‘Please!’
She swivelled her head towards the water and back to his strong teasing features. ‘You’ll be sorry if you do!’

‘Such spirit!’ He laughed. ‘And what could you do to me,
mia cara,
that would make my regret really not worth dropping you?’

‘You dare!’ He was laughing and it was exciting her. Nevertheless, she tightened her hold around his neck and superbly masculine shoulder, clinging to him for all she was worth.

‘What is the matter?’ he asked. ‘Can you not swim?’

‘Not this far out. I’ll panic.
Please!’

He was still laughing. ‘And there I was imagining you were a woman who could do anything.’

‘I am.’ She was adamant about that. ‘But my survival tactics don’t extend to being thrown into the sea.’ Only to big hunky Italians who threatened mischief just to get a woman to cling to them, she thought, suddenly aware of exactly what game he was playing.

‘OK. So drop me! Come on, you big bully. Let me see...ahhh!’

The splash as she hit the water was nonetheless an unexpected shock. But quickly, as the water closed over her, she was already recovering herself.

Swiftly, she struck out and down and, seeing those strong feet planted firmly on the sea bed, she reached out and grabbed one muscular leg, toppling him off-balance as she took him totally unawares.

She was back on her feet and wading towards the shore when she heard the thrust of his body breaking through the water.

‘So you can’t swim, huh?’ There was the promise of some exciting retribution in his voice as he stood up and starting wading in pursuit, and it suddenly dawned on Lauren that he must have seen her slicing through the pool that morning before anyone was up. He would never have thrown her in like that otherwise. ‘You had better stand there and wait for me,
cara
, because you are not going to get away!’

Was he kidding?

Reaching the shore, she raced off along the beach towards the inviting shade of the palm trees, the wet sand like warmed cream beneath her feet.

He had gained on her even before she could change her mind and dart off towards the house and suddenly she felt too scantily clothed to be playing this game with him.

‘You’re all wet,’ she breathed, laughing as she turned around. She was running backwards, taking in the rivulets streaming down his face and the hair that was plastered to his skull. Her body was pulsing with a reckless excitement as she noted the determination stamped on every pursuing inch of him.

‘I wonder why!’

‘You deserved it.’

He was laughing, but his eyes held a dark intent. ‘You really think so?’

‘OK. I’m sorry!’

‘Too late.’ He’d slowed his pace, but still kept coming.

‘It’s never too late.’ She put up her hands as he moved like a slow, stealthy predator over the sand. ‘You’ll be sorry,’ she promised, battling with the rising excitement coursing through her.

‘I think not,’ he said in a voice that was softly mocking. ‘And I think,
mia cara
, that we have definitely been there before.’

Just a few minutes ago, she thought chaotically, and gasped as her heel caught on a small, smooth stone between the trees and she landed flat on her back.

His soft laughter was a sensuous excitement on her racing senses.

‘OK.’ With the strands of her wet hair twisting over one shoulder, she raised herself up on her elbows to say challengingly, ‘So what are you proposing to do now?’

His dark hooded eyes slid to the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, which were accentuated by the provocative pose.

‘Something you have been wanting me to do from the moment you saw me walking across that stable yard. Something we were never able to leave alone from the moment we saw each other at that farce of a pre-nuptial party.’

Standing above her now, he suddenly stooped and started to lower himself towards her, the veins in his powerful arms standing out as they supported his weight at full stretch, so that miraculously he wasn’t actually touching her.

Just the promise of all that masculine strength pressing down on her made her head swim with dizzying desire. She fell back on the sand to widen the space between them, and yet inviting the whole exciting length of his hard wet body.

She let out a shuddering gasp as he brought it down over her softness, her words trembling as she uttered, ‘You’re a bastard.’

‘And you like it.’

Dear heaven! Did she? Was she so sick that she could only find pleasure and arousal in drawing swords, as he’d once described it, with a man who despised her and who hadn’t spared a single feeling for letting her know it?

‘No, I don’t.’ Her breathing was becoming more ragged by the second, giving the lie to her statement.

‘But you like this.’ It was a whispered caress against her throat, making her whimper from the delicious sensation. ‘And this.’ His teeth grazed the underside of her jaw, moving upwards along the soft curve of her cheek. ‘And if I remember the language of your body from those hours that you graced my bed,
carissima
, it positively pleaded with me to do this.’

Just the action of her bikini top being pulled down dragged a guttural sound from her throat and made her body sing in wild anticipation.

‘Open your eyes.’

Reluctantly, her eyelids fluttered apart.

Her breasts were heavy and swollen, spread out like a feast before him, and now he watched the way her eyes darkened and her face crumpled in agonising pleasure as his hands caressed their hardened, sensitive crests.

Desire sent a burning arrow of need piercing through her to the heart of her femininity.

It was Nature’s way, she thought through a spiral of heightening yet dismaying pleasure, that this man who didn’t even like her could turn her on as easily as if he were flicking switches, and trigger electrical impulses that opened up other circuits of her body to his will.

‘Emiliano...’ His name felt like music on her lips.

He lowered his head and covered her mouth with his and she responded to it with a deep groan of satisfaction, her mouth widening to allow the kiss to deepen, her fingers clutching at his strong wet hair, her breath mingling, tongue blending with his.

He was warm and wet and strong, his weight an erotic pleasure pressing her into the sand.

His body hair rasped against her breasts and against the comparative smoothness of her parting thighs. His arousal nudged her through the wet triangle of her bikini bottom, making her wriggle beneath him and thrust her pelvis upwards for the greater intimacy she craved.

She was his—and he knew it. A slave to her eternal need for this man that she’d thought had died. Killed off by his flaying remarks at that wedding and the shame and humiliation she had had to deal with afterwards. But it hadn’t been. And now, as his hands reclaimed her luscious breasts, pushing them up to take each throbbing crest in his mouth in turn, she writhed beneath him like a wild nymph, debauched, untamed and wholly abandoned.

‘Your body was made for loving.’ Emiliano’s voice was hoarse with desire. ‘But not by just anyone.’ He drew her breast more deeply into his mouth before letting it go. ‘Loving by me. We both recognised that as soon as we kissed that first time, did we not,
mia bella
?’

Groaning her agreement, Lauren arched her back, unable to get enough of his exquisite torture.

She was his plaything, she realised. Nothing more. And it was going against everything she had said and believed in as an independent, free-thinking woman. But right now her body was in control of her and it wanted nothing more than to have this one man lie with her—play with her—and, having admitted that, she lifted her arms above her head in an arc of total submission.

Acknowledging it, he slipped his hands under her taut buttocks and pulled her lower body hard against the thrilling evidence of his need.

He was hot and hard—as hard as she was soft—and she was more than ready for him. There was only the barrier of her string to be removed and she would be taking him into her. Only a few more seconds and...

She wasn’t protected!

The thought rushed at her, dragging her sufficiently out of her sensual torpor to recognise something else. The sound of a child crying!

Danny!

She could hear him wailing from somewhere in the house, bawling away at the top of his little lungs.

‘I’ve got to go!’

She was wriggling under Emiliano, but this time for her freedom. It took him only a second to realise why.

‘I expect, like all little boys, he is objecting to being bathed,’ he remarked, sounding less concerned than she was, reminding her that she had mentioned Danny’s aversion to bath time to him on the plane the previous day.

‘No. It’s not that sort of cry.’ She was already on her feet, quickly adjusting her bikini top. ‘Something’s wrong. I’ve got to go!’

Her body was aching with frustration. But none of that compared to the anguish that was gnawing at her as she raced, full pelt, across the sand.

She knew Emiliano would need a minute to compose himself before he followed her. Nevertheless, he had caught up with her by the time she reached the steps to the terrace.

Now they both looked up as Constance came running out through the front porch.

‘Oh Mr Cannavaro, I was coming to look for you. The little boy—he’s inconsolable. I tried to put him to bed but he keeps screaming for Miss Westwood. I thought maybe he’d been stung, but I don’t think that’s what it is.’

Fraught with worry, Lauren raced through the luxurious house and straight up to the little room that only days ago, she’d been told, had been furnished as a nursery. A huge Norfolk Island Pine outside in the grounds shaded it from the heat of the afternoon sun.

A young maid was bouncing the screaming toddler on her hip, but the little boy was refusing to be pacified.

Red-faced, tears streaming down his cheeks, he wailed even louder when he saw Lauren enter the room and instantly held out his arms for her to pick him up.

‘It’s all right,’ she breathed against his hot little face. ‘It’s all right, Danny. I’m here. Mummy’s here.’

She didn’t know why she’d said that. At her own decision he’d called her ‘Laa-wen’ from the moment he’d learned to talk. It was something she’d decided was right as she was simply his aunt and hadn’t wanted to feel as though she was betraying Vikki. Pushing her sister aside. Taking her place.

But perhaps it was the sudden fierce protectiveness that had surged up in her as she had caught his convulsive little body to her that had made it come naturally to her to say it. Thankfully now, though, the screams had subsided, replaced by merely tearful sobbing over being abandoned.

‘Has he been stung?’

She’d forgotten all about Emiliano.

Glancing up over the toddler’s head, she noticed that his strong features were grooved with concern.

‘No,’ she assured him, relieved by the swift survey she’d already made of the little face and limbs that there was nothing to worry about on that score.

‘How can you be sure?’ he quizzed, still looking anxious.

‘He wouldn’t have quietened down so quickly if he had been. He just isn’t used to anyone else other than me and Fiona putting him to bed.’

Beneath the pale T-shirt Emiliano had obviously grabbed from the terrace on his way up here, his wide shoulders visibly relaxed. Shoulders that had felt like satin-clad steel beneath her hands...

With a jolt of something like shame, she realised that they might have been making full-blown love now if they hadn’t been so fortuitously interrupted. With no protection, she reminded herself, remembering that Emiliano had never been so reckless before. She wondered if, when the moment had come, either of them would have had the strength of will to pull back.

Would Emiliano have thought of it? Or even asked her? she wondered. Or had he automatically assumed she was on the Pill?

She couldn’t meet the dark intensity of his eyes as she rocked the infant, who was drifting off to sleep against her shoulder, sucking contentedly on his knuckles.

Was he thinking about what they’d been doing? Regretting the interruption? Or just relieved that she’d known what was wrong with his nephew?

Whichever, she decided, blanking her mind to what had happened out there. She could tell him something that fitted all probabilities, and said assuredly, ‘That’s what being a parent is all about.’

Suddenly his lashes came down and his dark Latin features became an inscrutable mask.

Perhaps he didn’t like having to acknowledge how much Danny needed her, she thought, before he turned away, leaving her and Constance and the young maid to cope without him.

CHAPTER FIVE

O
VER
THE
NEXT
few days Lauren came to appreciate the meaning of the phrase ‘tropical paradise’ when every day was spent in utter relaxation.

There were barbecues on the beach, with Emiliano pointing out the pelicans to Daniele as they dived—sometimes three of them in unison—into the surging aquamarine waves for fish. Then there were times when Emiliano went out to attend to some local business and, with Daniele having his afternoon nap, Lauren was left alone to enjoy the peace of her surroundings, basking on a sunbed on the balcony beyond the luxuriously feminine bedroom they had given her, reading a book, or simply just lying back under the cool canopy of the terrace and listening to the eternal waves breaking on the deserted beach below the house.

The only thing that detracted from her total enjoyment of such a holiday of a lifetime was the mutual attraction between herself and Emiliano.

‘I know you thought that in agreeing to come here I was consenting to us taking up where we left off two years ago, but I’m not,’ she told him, sitting on a lounger and rubbing sunscreen into Daniele’s delicate skin the morning after that shamefully intimate scene with Emiliano on the beach. ‘It isn’t going to help matters. In fact, it’s only going to complicate things, so we’re just going to have to curb any further developments on that score.’

All he had done was send her a dubious look and said only, ‘Can we?’ and with so much scepticism that even that had started her blood throbbing in her veins.

But he was right. How could they? Lauren thought. He only had to come within feet of her to make her body pulse with reckless excitement. Consequently, she felt tense and uneasy around him.

Like the morning she came down into the cooler atmosphere of the salon and found him, with his foot resting on the low sill of the open window, gazing out to sea as he talked formally to someone on the phone.

‘I’m sorry.’ Though they had been as intimate with each other in the past as it was possible to get, Lauren knew she had no real place, either in his private life or in his business affairs, and quickly made to withdraw.

Seeing her, he raised his hand in a detaining gesture, and hesitantly she moved back across the room.

‘Thank you,’ she heard him saying. ‘I’d be honoured to speak at the opening ceremony. ‘I look forward to it,’ he expressed.

And with natural warmth, Lauren decided, guessing that he had just made some local official very happy.

‘You’re very popular with the people here,’ she observed aloud as he came off the phone. ‘Constance told me they’ve even named a ward after you at the hospital.’ For funding a much needed and expensive piece of equipment, she remembered the housekeeper telling her proudly, which meant that the islanders didn’t have to travel to one of the larger islands for the specialised treatment they might need.

‘
Sì
,’ he confirmed, turning to face her now, and then with a lack of pretentiousness that she was beginning to expect from him, added, ‘but it was a joint enterprise. I did not do it alone. It took a great deal of hard work and awareness-raising by a lot of members of the community. All I did was present the final cheque.’

As if it was nothing! Lauren thought, having looked up his involvement with the hospital on the Internet and discovered how generous he had been. She was beginning to realise that there was far more depth to this complex man than she could ever have given him credit for.

‘I thought you might like to look at these. Some time when you aren’t too busy,’ she added hastily, suddenly feeling awkward handing something so trivial as a baby album to a man who helped people cross continents and supplied hospitals with machines that made the difference between life and death.

He was looking at the gold lettering embossed on the cover. ‘“Our baby”,’ he read aloud, with a curious twist to his mouth.

‘I bought it for Vikki and Angelo, but they’d split up before I could give it to them,’ she said quickly, hoping he wasn’t drawing any wrong conclusions from it—like imagining she was calling Danny theirs, as though he were a child they had created between them. ‘Babies always have albums,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t want Danny to miss out just because he didn’t have a mother, and a father who didn’t want to know him, so I put all the photos I took of him in there from when he was a tiny baby, plus the ones I’ve taken since he’s been with me.’

He was turning over the pages, pausing now and then as one particular photograph caught his eye, and Lauren couldn’t help noticing how good his hands looked against the soft white leather, the nails clean and cut straight across, the fingers long and tanned.

‘You have kept a whole record.’ He sounded impressed. ‘I should be grateful to you.’

For when she handed Danny over?

Fear stabbed her in the chest, making her suddenly snap, ‘Thanks. But I didn’t do it for you.’ Although she had—in part, she realised, just in case his father and the rest of the Cannavaro family ever realised what they were missing in abandoning their own flesh and blood. ‘Well, Vikki and Angelo didn’t bother,’ she tagged on when she saw the way Emiliano’s eyebrow had lifted at her change of tone and what had been, even to her own ears, a rather juvenile remark.

Looking as breathtaking in his casual clothes as he did when he was dressed for business, he was giving her all of his attention now.

‘Why is it that whenever it comes round to the subject of my nephew you turn extremely defensive, Lauren?’

Her shoulders went back as she sucked in a deep breath. ‘Perhaps it’s because of references like that.’

‘Like what?’ His eyes narrowed as he studied her tight, tense features.

‘
My
nephew,’ she echoed with emphasis.

‘But he
is
my nephew!’ Incredulity coloured his voice. ‘And I have made no secret of the fact that I’m hoping he will soon become my adopted son.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘I hardly think,’ he said, pulling a face, ‘that I would really need to resort to such drastic action as that. Apart from which—’ his mouth tugged wryly ‘—I prefer your body just the way it is.’

‘It isn’t funny!’

‘No, it is not,’ he agreed, suddenly turning serious. ‘For heaven’s sake, Lauren! Try to see the logic in this. Every boy needs a father.’

‘No more than he needs a mother.’

‘That’s debatable.’

‘Not to me, it isn’t!’

‘Can you not understand,’ he said in more conciliatory tones, laying the album aside, ‘that I just want the best for Daniele?’

‘And you think I don’t?’

‘I know how much you care about him—’

‘You couldn’t possibly.’

‘But would it not be fairer,’ he suggested, ignoring her rejoinder, ‘to allow him to have the start in life that you as a single parent, and in your position, could never provide?’

Was she being unfair?

Emotion bubbled up inside her from the mere suggestion that she might be. Was she being selfish denying Vikki’s child the right to all his father’s family could provide?

‘
You’d
be a single parent,’ she pointed out lamely. ‘As well as a man.’ But what a man! she thought grudgingly, unable to drag her gaze from his almost intimidating masculinity, as he stood, legs apart, towering above her in stature, status and that undeniable authority that could sway even the most prejudiced of minds in his favour.

‘
Sì
, but with a whole entourage of advisers and nannies that I could easily afford to pay.’

‘And you think advisers and nannies can give him the love he needs and stop him from waking up screaming in the night because he’s been wrenched away from the only family he’s ever known?’ she argued as he moved closer to her. ‘No!’ As his hands came to rest on her shoulders she pulled forcefully away. ‘You’re not getting round me like that!’

Dear heaven! If he tried, she thought, it would make a mockery of everything she had said about not getting involved with him, because she knew she was too weak to resist him.

His arms fell to his sides, his shoulders dropping beneath the cream-coloured T-shirt he wore with light linen trousers. ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said heavily.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she agreed.

‘I don’t want to fight with you, Lauren.’ He sounded weary all of a sudden. ‘Fighting is such an unproductive waste of time.’

‘Then don’t,’ she advised him, suddenly near to tears, and swung away from him, out of the room, before he could guess at how defeated she felt.

Despite that, though, Emiliano was bonding surprisingly well with Danny, Lauren noted with mixed feelings over the next couple of weeks. Already Emiliano seemed to be laying plans for their nephew to become a champion swimmer, she thought and, in a lighter moment, told him so, while silently marvelling at how gentle and patient he was with the child who, with little floats attached to his tiny arms, was splashing around, squealing delightedly, while Emiliano held him in the garden’s shaded pool.

In turn, in his own way, the toddler was instructing Emiliano as to what being a hands-on uncle was all about, and Lauren couldn’t help but be amazed at how well Emiliano took to it. Like letting his nephew use him as a climbing frame while he was relaxing, either indoors or outside on one of the loungers, or like spreading his big body on the floor of the
salon
while helping him construct small towers out of the toy bricks he had bought for him, even though Daniele seemed to be much happier knocking them down.

The little boy was even letting Emiliano and Constance put him to bed these days whenever Lauren was willing to let them, but it was still his aunt he ran to on those occasions when he toppled over, too enthusiastic on his little legs; only Lauren who could provide the comfort he howled for as she rubbed his knees and kissed away his tears.

‘I think you have earned a night out,’ Emiliano told her one evening when she had finally got a very active Daniele off to sleep after what seemed like hours after she had put him to bed.

‘I thought you were going to say a knighthood,’ she whispered with a tired smile, glad that he had come looking for her in the nursery earlier and stayed to share the load, yet affected by him so unbearably that she felt drained of every last one of her emotional resources.

He grimaced. ‘That too,’ he said, obviously noticing how sleepy she looked. ‘You go to bed. I will stay here for a while in case he wakes again.’ And when she hesitated, ‘Go on,’ he insisted. ‘But tomorrow night you will be coming out with me.’

* * *

The following evening he took her out to dine at a harbourside restaurant, where rum cocktails flowed like water and where Lauren was careful to resist a second after feeling the punch packed simply by one.

‘That’s better,’ he said quietly from across the table, as the tensions she had been harbouring from just being around him over the past two weeks started to ebb away and her shoulders visibly relaxed.

He had finished his meal some time ago, and now, finishing hers, Lauren went to pick up her cell phone that was lying on the table.

‘No,’ Emiliano advised, reaching across and lightly covering her hand with his. ‘He will be all right,’ he emphasised in that same soft voice. ‘Constance will call us if he isn’t.’ But he didn’t withdraw his hand or that cool gaze from her face and, after a heart-stopping moment, he said, ‘You know you really are remarkably beautiful.’

Lauren lifted her gaze to his magnificent bone structure and the breathtaking clarity of his eyes and, with a little quiver along her spine, answered, ‘So are you.’

He laughed very softly, his voice carrying above the chink of glasses at the open-air bar and the exotic sounds from a steel band playing further along the wharf.

It had still been light when he had brought her here, driving around the coast on narrow winding roads, between sensational white beaches and thickly forested hillsides to uncover this amazing rendezvous.

A Colonial-style bar, perfectly circular in structure, its tree-shaded tables and chairs were scattered along the waterfront, where sailboats bobbed on their moorings alongside catamarans and fishing boats and, further out, beyond the stretching arm of the jetty, several luxury yachts graced the silent waters of the lagoon. Across the other side of the lagoon, rising into the hills, were private mansions, set like jaw-dropping gems above the coastline.

When they had first arrived she had seen their spectacular walled gardens awash with colour, from the paper-like flowers of bougainvillaea varying from red and purple to magenta, to the heavy pink clusters of oleander and the white and yellow stars of the sweet-scented frangipani.

Now it was dark and the very air was humming with the song of crickets and tiny lizards. Lights glowed from the yachts, one of which—a monster of a thing—had come in while they had been sitting there, while lanterns spilled light down from the almond trees, casting leafy shadows over the couples seated at other tables and over the strong features of the man sitting opposite her.

‘If I owned a house here I’d never want to leave,’ Lauren expressed tremulously, drawing her hand from under his, although she could still feel the burn of his touch as tangibly as the warm wind that caressed her bare shoulders and the humidity that was teasing her loose hair into tendrils around her face.

‘Which is why I try to divide my time between my home in Italy and the one I have here,’ he informed her, accepting her nervous rejection and sitting back on his chair, ‘although I will probably be spending much more time in this part of the world from now on.’

He had told her two weeks ago that his company was taking over an ailing American cruise line and that being in the Caribbean meant that he could fly to the States and the hub of all the negotiations and activity and attend necessary meetings far more quickly than he could from Rome. A wry smile touched his mouth. ‘Do I take it from your obvious appreciation that you are not sorry you came?’

How could she be? Lauren thought, although telling him that would be one sure step towards lessening her resistance to him. And so, with a secretive little smile that she couldn’t have hidden even if she’d tried, she asked, changing the subject, ‘Did you ever want to do anything else besides run the company? Or was it always a foregone conclusion that you would?’