the room with wide eyes.
Enzo frowned. What was a child doing up at this time of night? It was nearly eleven p.m.
The child—a small boy—took a step into the room, looking around uncertainly. He wore blue pyjamas and his black hair was spiked up. There was something familiar about him. Something that Enzo couldn’t quite put his finger on.
The boy had to be St George’s young son—a surprise late-in-life baby, since St George was in his early sixties. He’d married a woman around half his age four years ago and her subsequent pregnancy so soon after the wedding had caused a minor sensation.
Not that Enzo had ever been particularly interested in gossip, and why he remembered it now was anyone’s guess.
But still. There was something about that boy.
The child took another few steps into the room, his eyes wide. They were an unusual colour. Gold. Like new-minted coins.
The familiarity tugged harder at Enzo. There weren’t many people with eyes that colour, not so clear and startling. In fact, he only knew of two: his father and himself. Golden eyes were a Cardinali family trait and in Monte Santa Maria they’d traditionally been a sign of royalty.
Strange that this child should have them too, though obviously a coincidence.
There was another movement by the door and it opened wider this time, another figure standing in the doorway. A woman.
She wasn’t dressed in high-end couture like the other guests, just a simple pair of jeans and a loose dark blue T-shirt. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun, and it was as red as a fire against a twilight sky.
The tug of familiarity became a pull, deep and hard.
Her hair lying soft across his chest, a silken rope between his fingers as he’d pulled her towards him. Red as that hot mouth he’d kissed...
The woman scanned the room, giving him a good look at her face. High forehead and a sharp nose, a pointed, determined little chin. Freckles across her equally sharp cheekbones. Freckles that she’d fussed about in the tropical sun. Freckles scattered like gold dust across the luscious curves of her breasts, and he’d kissed every single one...
No. It couldn’t be.
She gave the room another scan and then, as inevitably as the sun rising, her gaze met his and he found himself staring into eyes the colour of storm clouds and ice, a pure, clear grey that belied the passion that burned inside her.
A passion he’d tasted for more hours than he cared to count.
A passion he’d never felt before or since.
A passion that had gone as cold as ashes the morning he’d woken up in the villa to find she’d gone.
Four years ago, on an island in the Caribbean, at his brother’s new resort, he’d met a woman.
A woman with red hair and freckles who’d turned him inside out. Who’d made him so hungry he hadn’t been able to think straight.
Who’d made him forget, just for a couple of days, the constant ache in his heart for what he’d lost.
And who’d left him without even a goodbye.
Her gaze went wide as it met his, blanking with shock, and he knew instantly that, yes, it was her. The red-headed, passionate woman he’d had a two-day fling with four years ago.
He’d tried to forget her. Dio, he’d even convinced himself that he had.
But as she stared at him with those wide grey eyes, and he felt the burn of a sudden physical hunger, he knew that he’d been lying to himself.
He hadn’t forgotten. Not the passion that had consumed them or the sense of homecoming that had come over him when she’d put her arms around him.
Or the fury when he’d woken up two days later, alone. His bed empty. His sheets cold.
The fury hit him again now, a hard punch to his gut, twisting with the hunger to become something so intense and volatile he could hardly breathe through it.
Four years, he’d dreamed of her. Four years, he’d woken up hard and aching, wanting something that all the money in the world couldn’t buy him.
Something that only she had been able to give him.
He hadn’t gone looking for her; he’d been too proud, telling himself that one woman would do as well as any other, but that was a lie and he knew it.
And now here she was, years later and thousands of miles from their island, standing in the doorway of an Englishman’s drawing room and staring at him as if what was happening to him was happening to her too.
What was she doing here? Where had she been?
He’d taken one unconscious step towards her when the child turned around suddenly and said, ‘Mummy.’ And launched himself towards the doorway, running to her and wrapping his arms around her legs.
Enzo stopped dead as another punch of shock hit him.
Mummy.
The woman—Summer, she’d told him her name was—put her hand on the boy’s head, but that smoky-grey gaze remained pinned to Enzo’s. As if she couldn’t look away.
That was St George’s child wrapping his arms around her legs. St George’s child, calling her ‘Mummy’. Which meant...
She’s St George’s wife.
The shock got wider, deeper, spreading out inside him.
It shouldn’t matter who she was. It shouldn’t mean a thing. He shouldn’t care, not after all this time.
He hadn’t wanted to visit Dante’s resort anyway. He’d just lost his first attempt at buying Isola Sacra after someone had bought it from under him, and the very last thing he’d felt like doing was checking up on a potential management issue on Dante’s behalf.
But his brother hadn’t been able to do it himself because of various commitments and Enzo was control-freak enough not to want to leave it to someone else.
He’d hated it the moment he’d got off the plane. There had been something about the dense tropical air and the brilliant blue of the sea that had crawled beneath his skin and unsettled him. Made him remember the land he’d come from and the home he hadn’t been able to forget.
He’d stood underneath the palms, listening to the resort manager catalogue the problems the resort had been having, sweating in his custom-made suit, his hand-made leather shoes full of sand, restless and impatient to be home.
And then he’d seen her, a pale, curvy woman in a bright-red bikini that somehow matched her hair. She was on her way to the pool, a towel around her shoulders and a book in one hand, and she’d glanced at him as she’d walked past. She’d had the body of a fifties pin-up and a mouth made for sin, and it had curved as her gaze had met his. And that in itself had caught him by the throat.
Because
