* * *
Serena came into the kitchen feeling ridiculously shy. Luca looked stern, intense.
‘I didn’t know you cooked.’
Luca grimaced in a half-smile, some of the intensity in his expression diminishing slightly as he continued whisking. ‘I don’t...I have a very limited repertoire and scrambled eggs is about as haute cuisine as it gets.’
Serena sat up on a stool by the island and tried not to let herself melt too much at seeing Luca in such a domestic setting in worn jeans and a T-shirt, his hair mussed up and a dark growth of stubble on his jaw.
‘Where did you learn?’
He was taking thin strips of bacon now, and placing them under a hot grill. He didn’t look at her. ‘When my mother left, my father let the housekeeper go; he always felt it was an unnecessary expense.’
Serena felt indignation rise. ‘But how did you cope? Did your father cook?’
Luca shook his head. ‘I was at boarding school outside Rio for most of the time, so it was only the holidays when I had to fend for myself.’ His mouth twisted. ‘One of my father’s many mistresses took pity on me when she found me eating dry cereal. She taught me some basics. I liked her—she was one of the nicer ones—but she left.’
More sharply than she’d intended, Serena said, ‘She wasn’t the one who seduced you?’
Luca looked at her, a small smile playing around his hard mouth. ‘No.’
Embarrassed by the surge of jealousy, Serena said, ‘Your father never married again?’
‘No.’
Luca poured some delicious-smelling coffee out of a pot into big mugs, handing her one. Serena bent her head to smell deeply.
‘He learnt his lesson after my mother walked away with a small fortune. She’d come from money in Italy, but by then it was almost all gone.’
Serena thought of his parents not even caring which boy went with who and felt sad. She remarked almost to herself, ‘I can’t imagine how I would have coped if Siena and I had been separated.’
Luca put a plate full of fluffy scrambled eggs and crispy bacon in front of Serena. He looked at her as he settled on his own stool. ‘You’re close, aren’t you?’
Serena nodded, emotional for a second at the thought of her sister and her family. ‘Yes, she saved me.’
Luca’s gaze sharpened. ‘It sounds to me like you saved yourself, as soon as you could.’
Serena shrugged minutely, embarrassed again under Luca’s regard. ‘I guess I did.’ She swallowed some of the delicious food and asked curiously, ‘Is your twin brother like you? Determined to right the wrongs of the world?’
Luca sighed heavily. ‘Max is...complicated. He resented me for a long time because my father insisted on leaving everything to me—even though I tried to give him half when our father died. He was too proud to take it.’
Serena shook her head in disbelief, and was more than touched to know that Luca had been generous enough to do that.
‘He had a tougher time than me—our mother was completely unstable, lurching from rich man to rich man in a bid to feather her nest, and in and out of rehab. Max went from being enrolled in an exclusive Swiss boarding school to living on the streets in Rome...’
Serena’s eyes widened.
‘He pulled himself out of the gutter with little or no help; he wouldn’t accept any from me and he certainly wouldn’t take it from my father. It was only years later, when he’d made his first million, that we could meet on common ground.’
Serena put down her knife and fork. Luca had shown signs of such intransigence and an inability to forgive when she’d first come to Rio, but now she was seeing far deeper into the man and realising he’d had just as much of a complicated background as she had in many respects. And yet he’d emerged without being tainted by the corruption of his father, or by the vagaries of his mother—vagaries that she understood far too well.
For the first time Serena had to concede that perhaps she hadn’t done too badly, considering how easy it would have been to insist on living in a fog, not dealing with reality.
Luca was looking at her with an eyebrow raised. He was waiting for an answer to a question she hadn’t heard. She blushed. ‘Sorry. I was a million miles away.’
‘You said when you first got here that you wanted to see Rio?’
Serena nodded, not sure where this was going or what might happen after last night.
‘Well...’
Luca was exhibiting a tiny glimmer of a lack of his usual arrogance and it set Serena’s heart beating fast.
‘It’s the weekend. I’d like to show you Rio.’
The bottom seemed to drop out of Serena’s stomach. She felt ridiculously shy again. Something bubbled up inside her—lightness. Happiness. It was alien enough to take her by surprise.
‘Okay, I’d like that.’
‘HAD ENOUGH YET?’
Serena mumbled something indistinct. This was paradise. Lying on Ipanema Beach as the fading rays of the sun baked her skin and body in delicious heat. There was a low hum of conversation from nearby, the beautiful sing-song cadence of Portuguese, people were laughing, sighing, talking. The surf of the sea was crashing against the shore.
And then she felt Luca’s mouth on hers and her whole body orientated itself towards his. She opened her eyes with an effort to find him looking down at her. Her heart flip-flopped. She smiled.
‘Can we stay for the sunset?’
Luca was trying to hang on to some semblance of normality when the day that had just passed had veered out of normal for him on so many levels it was scary.
‘Sure,’ he said, with an easiness belying his trepidation. Serena’s open smile was doing little to restore any sense of equilibrium.
One day spent walking around Rio and then a couple of hours on the beach was all it had taken to touch her skin with a luminous golden glow. Her hair looked blonder, almost white, her blue eyes were standing out even more starkly.
That morning they had taken the train up through the forest to the Cristo Redentor on Corcovado and Serena had been captivated by every tiny thing. Standing at the railing, looking down over the breathtaking panorama of Rio, she’d turned to him and asked, with a look of gleaming excitement that had reminded him of a child, ‘Can we go to the beach later?’
Luca’s insides had tightened ominously. She didn’t want to go shopping. She wanted to see Rio. Genuinely.
Before
