moon was made of cheese, if I’d put my mind to it. Once she gets past the initial shock of this tragedy, she might well change her mind about accepting our offer. We met only briefly and nine years ago at that, but I remember her as being a singularly proud and independent young woman.”
“You’re wrong, both of you.” His father heaved himself up from the sofa to pace the length of the room. “She was anything but proud in the way she threw herself at you after the wedding, Paolo. If you’d given her the slightest encouragement, you’d soon have followed in your brother’s footsteps, and found yourself at the altar, too.”
Again, Paolo’s mother spoke up, unnaturally vigorous in her defense of someone she hardly knew, he thought. “You’re being unfair, Salvatore! I spoke to Caroline at length when she was here, and she was very excited about starting her university studies that September. I don’t believe she’d have abandoned her plans, even if Paolo had encouraged her.”
But there was no even if about it, Paolo thought, a disconcerting pang of shame rising from the ashes of the murky memories suddenly looming up in his mind. Despite his many other excesses in those days, alcohol wasn’t among them. But the night of his brother’s wedding, he’d had too much champagne to remember much beyond the fact that the bride’s pretty sister had been young, impressionable, eminently desirable and willing—though not nearly as experienced as she’d pretended to be.
One night with a novice had been enough to make him regret having seduced her. He wasn’t accustomed to his women being so generous, so trustingly naive. Caroline’s wide-eyed innocence, her sincerity and simple goodness, unnerved him—him, Paolo Giovanni Vittorio Rainero, a man afraid of nothing and no one. But she’d made him look too deep inside himself and he hadn’t liked what he saw.
He was the one who came from a long line of blue bloods, yet beside her he felt undeserving; an emotional pauper with little of worth to offer a girl who could have been a princess. She deserved better than what he could give her.
Facing her the next morning…well, in all truth, he hadn’t. Couldn’t. Her lowered gaze, the crushed disappointment touching her lovely mouth, and knowing he was the one who had put them there, had been more than he could bear. Hangover notwithstanding, he’d made a fast escape.
He hadn’t expected to run into her again, when he stopped by his parents’ apartment, a few days after the wedding. But he’d recognized at once that her earlier infatuation for him had metamorphosed into chilly disgust. A week had been more than long enough for her to realize Paolo Rainero wasn’t at all her kind of man.
Judging from the tone of their recent phone call, time hadn’t exactly mellowed her opinion of him. If his parents’ hopes for the future were to be realized, he was going to have to work very hard to polish his image, and charm her into compliance by whatever means necessary.
The realization did not sit well with him. In fact, it left a distinctly bad taste in his mouth. Seduction for seduction’s sake, whether or not it involved the physical, had long since lost its flavor, especially when it came with a hidden agenda.
“Where are the twins now?” he inquired.
“Tullia took them to the park,” his father said. “We thought a change of scene would be good for them.”
Paolo thought so, too. Huge bouquets had arrived daily since the accident, tokens of sympathy from the family’s vast circle of friends and acquaintances. The overpowering scent of lilies filled the apartment with funereal solemnity. There’d be enough of that at the church on Saturday, and again on Monday, when the immediate family accompanied the remains to the island for the private burial rites.
His mother drifted to the balcony overlooking the rear courtyard. “I don’t know how the children would cope without Tullia,” she said fretfully. “She’s been with them since they were babies, and they cling to her now. They seem to need her more than they need us.”
“And they need us more than they need an aunt they wouldn’t know from Adam,” Salvatore interjected, slipping an arm around her waist and leading her from the room. “Come, Lidia, my love. Stop worrying about Caroline Leighton and start looking after yourself. You’ve barely closed your eyes since we heard the dreadful news, and you need to rest.”
She went unresistingly, but turned in the doorway at the last second. “Will you still be here later, Paolo?”
“Yes,” he said, his glance locking briefly with his father’s and correctly reading the plea he saw there. “I’ll be here for as long as you both need me. You can count on me to do whatever must be done to keep our family intact.”
Although determined to keep such a promise, he hoped he could do so and not end up despising himself for the methods he might have to employ.
The Air France Boeing 777-200 touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris just after eleven o’clock on the Tuesday morning, completing the first leg of her journey to Rome. She’d left San Francisco exactly ten hours earlier, which wasn’t such an inordinately long time to be in the air, especially not when she’d reclined in Executive Class comfort the entire distance. But the fact that it was only two in the morning, Pacific Standard Time, played havoc with Callie’s inner clock, not to mention her appearance.
She’d never been able to cry prettily, the way some women could, and her face bore unmistakable evidence of weeping. It would take considerable cosmetic expertise and every spare second of the two hours before her connecting flight to Rome, to disguise the ravages of grief. But disguise them she would, because when she faced Paolo Rainero again, she intended to be in control—of herself and the situation.
Perhaps if, after deplaning, she’d been less involved in plotting her strategies, she might have noticed him sooner. As it was, she’d have walked straight past him if he hadn’t planted himself so firmly in her path that she almost tripped over his feet.
“Ciao, Caroline,” he greeted her, and before she had time to recover from the impact of Paolo Rainero’s voice assaulting her yet again out of the blue, he’d caught her by the shoulders and bent his head to press a light, continental kiss on each of her cheeks.
She’d wondered if she’d recognize him. If he’d changed much in nine years. If the dissolute life he’d pursued in his early twenties had left only the crumbling remains of his formerly stunning good looks. Would the aristocratic planes of his face have disappeared under a sagging layer of flesh, with his sleek olive skin crisscrossed by a road map of broken veins? Would his middle have grown soft, his hairline receded?
She’d prayed it would be so. It would make seeing him again so much easier. But the man confronting her had lost nothing of his masculine beauty. Rather, he had redefined it.
His shoulders had broadened with maturity, his chest deepened, but not an ounce of fat clung to his frame. The clean, hard line of his jaw, the firm contours of his mouth, spoke of singleminded purpose. There was dignity and strength in his bearing. Authority in his somber, dark brown gaze.
He had a full head of hair. Thick, black, silky hair that begged a woman to run her fingers through it. And only the faintest trace of laugh lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes.
Stunned, she stared at him, all hope that he’d prove himself as susceptible to the passage of time as any other man, evaporating in a rush of molten awareness that battered her with the force of a tornado.
It wasn’t fair. He’d shown a flagrant disregard for the frailty of human life, driving too fast, living on the edge, and daring
