A Clash With Cannavaro (8 page)

‘Always,’ he responded succinctly. ‘I was my father’s heir.’ His mouth compressed as though his thoughts had led him into some inner chamber of his mind to where Lauren definitely couldn’t follow. ‘Like your heir to the throne, I was schooled, educated and primed for that very purpose,’ he continued, but there was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a minute ago.

‘And not Angelo?’ Lauren asked, surprised.

‘No.’ His chest rose and fell steeply before he said, ‘Angelo was allowed to follow whatever path he chose.’

Which was a path of self-destruction, Lauren thought unhappily. In the end.

From the stark emotion that made his cheekbones stand out in the arresting structure of his face, it was clear Emiliano was thinking along the same lines.

‘And did you resent that?’

She wasn’t sure why she asked it, and the flicker of danger she read in his eyes made her suddenly fear she had spoken out of turn.

She was surprised, therefore, when he exhaled deeply and answered, ‘Yes. I resented it.’

‘But you were happy as a child?’ He wasn’t saying so, but some surfacing memory led her to wonder whether he had been.

On the eve of their siblings’ wedding he had given her scant insight into why he hadn’t been Angelo’s best man. His brother and he had moved on. Made their own lives, he’d said simply, which had seemed to explain why the role had fallen to the bridegroom’s closest friend. Yet there had been strained feeling, Lauren had detected, between the two brothers, noticeable in the way Angelo had praised Emiliano with a kind of cynical self-mockery, as though he was jealous and resentful of his older brother in some way, and not the other way around. There had been a strained politeness too, she had sensed, between Emiliano and Claudette Cannavaro, the middle-aged, amazingly glamorous French ex-model who had been introduced to Lauren as the brothers’ stepmother. Lauren remembered her as a rather distant, rock-hard beauty who hadn’t projected much warmth.

‘So what about you, Lauren? Did you have a happy childhood?’

Her smile was warm and wistful. ‘Very.’

‘In the house where you are living now?’

She nodded, having already told him how she had moved from London, where she’d lived for little more than a year, back to the farmhouse when she had taken on caring for Danny. It was then that she’d let out the stables and taken on the unmarried, intrepid Fiona to run them.

‘And did you have any dreams or desires before you were forced into the role of guardian, beyond working on the checkout at your local garden centre, or typing house particulars in an estate agent’s office?’

She remembered mentioning the estate agent’s job on the night they had met, but not the reason for her being in London in the first place—not how hard she had been studying during her evenings and at weekends.

‘Yes, I did,’ she answered and, deciding to wipe out that glimmer of mockery in his devastating eyes, along with any more preconceived ideas he might have about her, added, ‘I wanted to be a vet.’

He looked surprised, just as she’d thought he would.

‘So why didn’t you?’ he enquired, frowning.

‘My parents died during my first term at uni.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘So I left.’

‘Mamma mia!
I’d no idea!’

‘That my parents were dead?’ She couldn’t believe he could have forgotten a thing like that. She couldn’t imagine him ever forgetting anything.

‘No, of course not.’ Now it was his turn to sound slightly affronted. ‘Only that you had lost them in such recent years. For some reason I imagined it was when you were a child...’

‘I thought Angelo might have mentioned it,’ she said. ‘Vikki must have told him.’ Or perhaps she hadn’t, Lauren thought wildly, remembering with an aching regret how her sister had always seemed ashamed of her parents and her lowly origin.

‘If she did, he didn’t say anything to me. My brother and I communicated very little,’ Emiliano said, ‘and, when we did, it was seldom on a social footing. I am afraid that Angelo and I rarely saw eye to eye.’

There it was. Clarified. Everything she had suspected and speculated over.

‘What did your parents do?’ he enquired before she could ask him why.

‘Mum wrote horoscopes. You know, star signs? For an astrology magazine. She believed every word of it.’ Her mouth curved fondly as she thought about her gentle, often distracted mother, who had the ability to let every worldly care wash over her. ‘She was unconventional in her ideas. Her views. In the way she dressed...’ So much so, Lauren remembered, that she and her sister had often been the butt of some unkind teasing at school, although she had never minded quite as much as Vikki had.

‘And your father?’

‘He was a teacher. Well, a retired professor, really. Mum was a dropout student from the college where he taught. That’s how they met. At some sort of reunion or other.’

‘And what did he profess?’

‘Natural sciences.’ She grinned. ‘And the whackiest ideas no one ever wanted to listen to!’

Emiliano smiled. ‘They sound like characters.’

‘They were.’

‘What happened?’ he prompted in a gentle tone.

‘Mum got hold of an idea that she had an ancestor who really had mystical powers. Dad didn’t actually believe most of what Mum wrote, but he adored her and supported her in everything she wanted to do. They took a backpacking trip in South America on the trail of this mysterious ancestor. They never found one, but they caught a tropical fever for their trouble, and I lost
two
in the process.’

‘I’m sorry.’

She made a dismissive little gesture with her hands. ‘It happened.’

Emiliano’s eyes were darkly reflective. ‘And you would have been...how old at the time?’

When she told him, he said only, ‘So you relinquished your career path to look after your sister, who would, no doubt, have been still at school.’

‘I had to earn some money.’

‘You have never told me this before,’ he reproached softly.

He was right. But then she hadn’t wanted to spin a sob story to a man she had only just met, reluctant as she had been to ruin the magic of those two days. When she’d mentioned losing her parents, she recalled saying that it had happened when she and Vikki were young. She hadn’t wanted to talk about the past or to dwell on anything unhappy and, highly tuned as he was to the sensibilities of those around him, he hadn’t pressed her for any more information.

‘And you have never thought about going back?’

‘To university?’ She shrugged again. ‘For a while I did, but financially it wasn’t possible. I needed to live. And then...when Vikki...’

He nodded as her voice tailed off, obviously understanding how much it still hurt to talk about the accident.

‘Of course.’

Quickly stemming emotion, she said, ‘And now there are far more important things in life.’

Like caring for his nephew, Emiliano thought, shaken to the core by what she had told him—by the compromises she had had to make. He wondered how many more surprises this lovely young woman had in store for him, because it had suddenly dawned on him how little he knew about her, despite the past intimacies they had shared.

All he had wanted two years ago, he realised guiltily, was to get her into bed and to keep her there for as long as he wanted to amuse himself with her. It had driven his libido through the ceiling when he had discovered that all she seemed to want was to indulge him in his fantasy—which was to lose himself in that glorious body of hers as much as she wanted to lose herself in his.

He had bedded a gold-digger, he had thought that day he had heard her discussing him with her sister. Or had it been the other way round? He couldn’t say with any certainty any more. But he had still been convinced she was a woman with a mission when he had turned up at her home and accused her of monopolising his brother’s child. What he hadn’t expected to find was a girl who rescued dogs and rubbed bumps on a toddler’s knees, and who had been handed more than her fair share of responsibility at a very young age. Now he wanted to know more about her beyond the purely physical, he realised, startled even to be thinking it.

A simple gesture from him summoned a waiter to their table and a few minutes later he was settling the bill.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said.

* * *

Lauren was far too conscious of Emiliano’s dark attraction as they walked, without touching, along the waterfront and out onto the night-shrouded jetty.

Here lights twinkled on either side of the wooden structure, throwing back distorted reflections from the dark water. But the silence was like a mocking witness to the powerful sensuality that lay between them and, unable to cope with her screaming responses, Lauren tried to still them by asking, ‘Why didn’t you get along with your brother?’

His lips were pursed as he thought about it, his profile given added strength by the night shadows and the scant light from a fine sliver of new moon.

‘Different personalities. Different temperaments.’

He wasn’t saying that Angelo Cannavaro was a womanising gambler who thought that life was just a playing field for whatever pleasure took his fancy out of respect for his brother’s memory—even if he was thinking it—and she admired him for that.

‘He got on with your stepmother?’ She had sensed that much on the night of the party, something her sister had later confirmed.

‘He was only eight months old when she married my father and, as she already knew she couldn’t have any children, she doted on him as if he were her own baby.’

‘Indulged him, you mean.’

His lips moved in a wry gesture.

‘So what about you?’ Lauren asked.

‘I was five. Self-willed and far too much for her to handle. A very intractable child.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ she smiled. ‘Wilful, maybe, with a mind of your own.’

‘Always.’

‘But not deliberately naughty.’

He merely shrugged at that.

‘It must have been hard for you too. I mean...having another woman step into your birth mother’s shoes.’ She remembered reading somewhere that Marco Cannavaro had lost his first wife to cancer only two months after the birth of their second son, Angelo. What she hadn’t known was that the boys’ father had married again so soon.

‘Do you remember her?’ she asked Emiliano quietly, feeling for him.

‘Surprisingly vividly,’ he replied. ‘The way her hair shone. Her smile. The way she smelled—although any memories of actually being with her are very vague. And,
sì
, my father
did
have an extra-marital affair and
did
marry his mistress, if that is what you are wondering,’ he concluded, surprising her, because she had been, but had been far too prudent to ask.

‘So how did she learn to cope? Your stepmother?’ Lauren expanded.

‘With boarding schools and vacations spent with a very strict maiden aunt, who wasn’t actually an aunt at all, but my father’s second cousin.’

‘You mean you were sent away?’
Treated as if he wasn’t one of the family?
‘Didn’t your father mind?’

‘He was happy just as long as Claudette was happy. He believed it would develop my powers of self-sufficiency and make me independent, and I suppose it did. It did not, however, help to bring us close as a family. And Angelo...’ He made a sort of exasperated sound and a hopeless gesture with his hands, which somehow seemed to say everything that he couldn’t. ‘In the end I could do nothing except stand by and watch my brother destroy himself. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?’

‘Yes,’ Lauren empathised, with her heart going out to him, and realised now what he had meant at that party when he’d said he couldn’t actually call himself a friend of the family. He’d had no family to speak of, she thought. Not one that cared. ‘It makes you feel useless and self-recriminating and as though you’ve somehow desperately failed.’

They had never spoken like this before and his revelation had her opening up to him and unburdening herself of things she had never told a soul.

‘When our parents died, I think that Vikki was angry with them for leaving her. She reacted by doing everything she knew she shouldn’t. Staying out all night. Getting into bad company, drugs...You know the sort of thing. In the end I couldn’t reason with her and I just let her walk away. I could have done more and I didn’t. If I’d only concentrated less on myself and how I was going to get by and taken more interest in her, she might not have left and drifted so far away from all the values that Mum and Dad taught us. If I’d done more—’

‘Don’t,’ Emiliano interrupted firmly, stopping dead and pulling her round to face him. ‘You were little more than a child yourself, having to cope with what amounted to parental responsibility. At eighteen we are still learning to take responsibility for ourselves. You said you opted out of university and then gave up any idea of furthering your studies when you were left with Daniele to look after. Twice you have given up your career for your sister. Don’t give up any more of your life by letting it be eroded by guilt. You have done a marvellous job, especially with our nephew. Given up so much...’ He slid his fingers along her arm in a sensual caress. ‘Which is why I could be excused, I think, for imagining you would want to take more of a back seat now and let someone else take the strain.’

‘No!’ She tried to pull away, but he had caught her by the hand. ‘You don’t understand! How can you?’ she uttered, her words torn from her heart. ‘When you didn’t even have a family you were remotely close to? I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever loved!’ Tears were threatening, burning her eyes, but she refused to let him see them fall. ‘I can’t lose Danny too! Not to you. Not to anyone! I can’t and I
won’t
give him up!’

She looked away from him, at the blur of lights along the walkway over which they had just come, ashamed of the tears that had triumphed.

‘Maybe I didn’t understand. But I think I’m beginning to,’ she heard Emiliano saying heavily as he cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand and gently turned her face to his.

He was the enemy, she thought. The one person who could destroy her very world. Yet even the simplest touch from him had the power to set her pulse racing, and with no strength now to resist him she turned her tear-streaked face into his warm palm.