he may refuse to leave with you,’ she warned, adding anxiously, ‘You do understand that I won’t make him go with you if he doesn’t want to?’
‘I am a mother,’ Luisa said. ‘Of course I understand. So I will come, as arranged, and we will hope that Santo has had a change of heart after sleeping on his decision.’
Some hope of that, Catherine thought as she replaced the receiver. For Luisa was labouring under the misconception that Santo’s problems were caused by a sudden and unexplainable loss of confidence in his papà—when in actual fact the little boy’s reasoning was all too explainable.
And she went by the name of Marietta, Catherine mocked bitterly. Marietta, the long-standing friend of the family. Marietta the highly trusted member of Giordani Investments’ board of directors. Marietta the long-standing mistress—the bitch.
She was tall, she was dark, she was inherently Italian. She had grace, she had style, she had unwavering charm. She had beauty and brains and knew how to use both to her own advantage. And, to top it all off, she was shrewd and sly and careful to whom she revealed her true self.
That she had dared to reveal that true self to Santo had, in Catherine’s view, been Marietta’s first big mistake in her long campaign to get Vito. For she might have managed to make Catherine run away like a silly whimpering coward, but she would not send Santo the same way.
Not even over my dead body, Catherine vowed as she prepared for bed that night …
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER spending the night tossing and turning, at around five o’clock the next morning Catherine finally gave up trying to sleep, and was just dragging herself out of bed when the distinctive sound of a black cab rumbling to a halt outside in the street caught her attention. A couple of her neighbours often commuted by taxi early in the morning if they were having to catch an early train somewhere, so she didn’t think twice about it as she padded off to use the bathroom.
Anyway, her mind was busy with other things, like the day ahead of her, which was promising to be as traumatic as the evening that had preceded it.
On her way past his room, she slid open her son’s door to check if he was still sleeping. The sight of his dark head peeping out from a snuggle of brightly printed duvet was reassuring. At least Santo had managed to sleep through his worries.
Closing the door again, she went downstairs with the intention of making herself a large pot of coffee over which she hoped to revive herself before the next round of battles commenced—but a shadow suddenly distorting the early-morning daylight seeping in through the frosted glass panel in her front door made her pause.
Glancing up, she saw the dark bulk of a human body standing in her porch. Her frown deepened. Surely it was too early for the postman? she asked herself, yet still continued to stand there expecting her letterbox to open and a wad of post to come sliding through it. But when instead of bending the dark figure lifted a hand towards her doorbell, Catherine was suddenly leaping into action.
In her urgency to stop whoever it was from ringing the bell and waking up her son she was pulling the door open without really thinking clearly about what she was doing. So it was only after the door opened wide on the motion that she realised she had gone to bed last night without putting the safety chain on.
By then it didn’t matter. It was already too late to remember caution, and all the other safety rules that were a natural part of living these days, when she found herself staring at the very last person she’d expected to see standing on her doorstep.
Her heart took a quivering dive to her stomach, the shock of seeing Vito in the actual flesh for the first time in three long years so debilitating that for the next whole minute she couldn’t seem to function on any other level than sight.
A sight that absorbed in one dizzying glance every hard-edged, clean-cut detail, from the cold sting of his eyes to the grim slant of his mouth and even the way he had one side of his jacket shoved casually aside so he could thrust a hand into his trouser pocket—though she wasn’t aware of her eyes dipping down that low over him.
He was wearing a black dinner suit and a white shirt that conjured up the picture she had built of him the night before; only the bow tie was missing, and the top button of the shirt yanked impatiently open at his lean brown throat.
Had he come here directly from storming out of his house in Naples? she wondered. And decided he had to have done to get here to London this quickly. But if his haste in getting here was supposed to impress her by how seriously he was taking her concerns about Santo—then it didn’t.
She didn’t want him here. And, worse, she didn’t want to watch those honeyed eyes of his drift over her on a very slow and very comprehensive scan of her person, as if she was still one of his possessions.
And the fact that she became acutely aware of her own sleep-mussed state didn’t enamour her, either. He had no right to study the way her tangled mass of copper-gold hair was hanging limp about her shoulders, or the fact that she was standing here in thin white cotton that barely hid what it covered.
Then his gaze moved lower, jet-black lashes sinking over golden eyes that seemed to draw a caressing line across the surface of her skin as they moved over the pair of loose-fitting pyjama shorts which left much of her slender legs on show. And Catherine felt something very old and very basic spring to life inside her.
It was called sexual arousal. The man had always only had to look at her like this to make her make her so aware of herself that she could barely think straight.
‘What are you doing here?’ she lashed out in sheer retaliation.
Arrogance personified, she observed, as a black eyebrow arched and those incredible eyes somehow managed to disparage her down the length of his roman nose, despite the fact that she stood a deep step higher than him, which placed them almost at a level.
‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ Vito coolly replied. ‘I am here to see my son.’
‘It’s only five o’clock,’ she protested. ‘Santo is still asleep.’
‘I am well aware of the time, Catherine,’ he replied rather heavily, and something passed across his face—a weariness she hadn’t noticed was there until that moment.
Which was the point when she began to notice other things about him. He looked older than she would have expected, for instance. The signs of a carefully honed cynicism were scoring grooves into his handsome face where once none had been. And the corners of his firm mouth were turned down slightly, as if he never let himself smile much any more.
Seeing that for some reason made her insides hurt. And the sensation infuriated her because she didn’t want to feel anything but total indifference for this man’s state of mind.
‘How did you get here so quickly, anyway?’ she asked with surly shortness.
‘I flew myself in overnight,’ he replied. ‘Then came directly here from the airport.’
Which meant he must have been on the go all night, she concluded. Then another thought sent an icy chill slithering down her spine.
After flying half the night, had he then driven himself here in one of the supercharged death-traps he tended to favour? Glancing over his shoulder, she expected to see some long, low, sleek growling monster of a car
