tempted to retrace her steps across the room and remove the towel for him. But if she made love with him again wouldn’t it just complicate their relationship even more? Her eyes flew to his face and she caught her breath when she saw the sensual heat in his silvery gaze.
‘You have thirty seconds to leave, cara, or we won’t be eating that chicken until midnight,’ he said roughly.
Rebekah did not need a second warning, and fled!
THEY had dinner that evening on the terrace which overlooked lush green farmland and fields of tall ripe corn that rippled like a golden lake. In the distance the mountains towered majestically, their jagged outline softened by the mellow light as the sun sank slowly beneath the horizon.
The panoramic view was breathtaking. ‘It’s like a painting by one of the Old Masters,’ Rebekah commented as she sat with her chin propped on her hand and drank in the beauty of the Tuscan landscape. ‘How can you ever bear to leave this place?’
‘I enjoy a busy life in London, a demanding career and good social life, but I must admit I miss the tranquillity of the Casa di Colombe.’ Dante took a sip of the particularly good red wine that was made from grapes grown on his estate. ‘One day I’ll move here permanently and learn to make wine and press olives—’ he slanted a smile at her ‘—perhaps even learn how to cook as well as you do. The dinner you made tonight was divine.’
‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ Rebekah gave a contented sigh as she drained her glass of pomegranate juice. Her fear that things would be strained between her and Dante after she had reacted so badly about the clothes he had bought her had been unfounded. During dinner he had been a charming and entertaining companion and had made her laugh with his dry humour. She had slowly started to feel relaxed and been fascinated when he had told her more of the history of the house and when it had been a monastery hundreds of years ago.
‘Where I come from in North Wales is beautiful too, and we have mountains. You can see Snowdon from my parents’ farm,’ she told him. Her expression grew wistful. ‘I think home is where the heart is—where the people you love are.’
‘I guess there’s some truth in that,’ Dante agreed. His grandmother had lived here in Tuscany, and perhaps that was why he loved this house so much. But Lara hadn’t liked it here. She had found the quiet, remote location boring and on the couple of occasions she had visited Nonna with him she had been impatient to get back to the city. He should have realised they were too different for their relationship to have succeeded, he thought heavily.
He glanced at Rebekah, noting how the last golden rays of the sun burnished her hair so that it looked like a stream of shimmering silk, and he felt a peculiar sensation, as if his insides had twisted.
‘Tell me about your family. How many brothers did you say you have?’
‘Seven—there’s Owen, Aled, Cai, Bryn, Huw, Morgan and Rhys, who is the baby, only he’s twenty-two now. My mother is from a big family too and I am the seventh child of a seventh child, which, according to my grandmother, means I have the sixth sense. But I don’t believe in superstition. If I possessed psychic powers I would surely have known about Gareth,’ Rebekah said unthinkingly. She flushed when Dante shot her an intent look.
‘Gareth, I take it, is the Welsh ex-boyfriend. What would you have known about him?’
Strangely, Rebekah discovered that she wanted to talk to Dante about what had happened.
‘That he was having an affair with my best friend and chief bridesmaid.’
‘You mean you were engaged?’ Dante did not know why he was so surprised. Presumably, if she had been hoping to marry her boyfriend she had been in love with him. Was she still? he wondered.
‘For five years. But we had been dating for longer than that. We met at school, Gareth lived on the farm close to my home and we grew up together. I thought I knew him. I thought we would always be together and have a long and happy marriage like my parents—’ she swallowed ‘—but it turned out that I never knew him at all.’
‘It must have been a shock when you discovered your fiancé had been unfaithful.’ Dante frowned. Had Rebekah felt the same gut-wrenching sense of betrayal that had ripped through him when Lara had confessed she had been sleeping with another man? He had heard the lingering hurt in her voice. Irrationally, he wished he could meet the Welsh farmer and connect his fist with the guy’s jaw. ‘So what happened—how did you find out?’
‘He confessed that he didn’t want to marry me two weeks before the wedding.’ She could not bring herself to tell Dante of the painful event that had prompted Gareth to admit he did not love her, she thought bleakly.
She sighed. ‘I had no idea that Gareth had secretly been seeing Claire for months. In retrospect, things hadn’t been right between us for a while, but I was so busy with the wedding preparations and I assumed that once we were married our relationship would go back to how it had been. I couldn’t believe it when he admitted that he and Claire were having an affair. But it explained a lot,’ she said wryly.
‘What do you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘Before we split up Gareth had lost interest in … well—’ she flushed ‘—the physical side of our relationship. I knew he was working hard, and all relationships go through flat patches. I felt he didn’t find me attractive any more and I put it down to the fact that I’d put on a few pounds. Being around food all day tends to be bad for your waistline,’ she said ruefully, remembering how confused and humiliated she had felt when Gareth had regularly fallen asleep in front of the television when she had been desperate for him to take her to bed. ‘I should have guessed that he didn’t want to have sex with me because he was having it with someone else.’
Dante nodded, as if he understood, which puzzled her because she did not see how he could know how it felt to be rejected. It was not something a handsome millionaire was likely to experience, she thought.
‘Infidelity and the betrayal of trust can be devastating,’ he said harshly.
Rebekah stared at him, taken aback by his statement and the bitterness she had heard in his voice. How could a self-confessed playboy understand the pain caused by hearing that someone you loved had been unfaithful?
‘Are you saying that from the point of view of the betrayer or the betrayed?’
He did not reply, and his shuttered expression gave no clue to his thoughts. But then he said tautly, ‘Let’s just say I learned the hard way that men and women are drawn together by lust but our so-called civilised society insists on romanticising what is essentially just a physical need and calling it love.’
‘So you don’t believe in the concept of everlasting love?’
‘Do you, after the man you loved and were expecting to marry turned out to be a liar and a cheat?’
She turned away from Dante and watched the dying rays of the sun streak the sky with fiery flames of pink and orange. The beauty of it touched her soul and with a little flare of pain she thought how heartbreaking it was that her child had never seen a sunset.
She was shocked by the realisation that Dante must have been hurt in the past. She had believed him to be a womaniser who had no interest in meaningful relationships—a
