trust stakes, with her manipulation and evasion. But suddenly her face had become soft with what looked like genuine concern and he felt a tug of something unfamiliar deep inside him. An inexplicable urge to colour in some of the blank spaces of his past. Was that because he wanted his grandfather to die happy by convincing him that he’d found true love at last? Or because—despite her careless tongue landing them in this ridiculous situation—she possessed a curious sense of vulnerability which somehow managed to burrow beneath his defences.
His lips tightened as he reminded himself how clever Giovanni was. How he would see through a fake engagement in the blinking of an eye if he wasn’t careful. So tell her, he thought. She was right. He should tell her the stuff which any fiancée would expect to know.
‘I’m one of seven children,’ he said, shooting out the facts like bullets. ‘And my grandfather stepped in to care for us when my parents died very suddenly.’
‘And...how did they die?’
‘Violently,’ he answered succinctly.
Her eyes clouded and Dante saw comprehension written in their soft, grey depths. As if she understood pain. And he didn’t want her to understand. He wanted her to nod as he presented her with the bare facts—not look at him as if he was some kind of problem she could solve.
Yet there had been times when he’d longed for someone to work their magic on him. He stared out at the distant glitter of the lake. To find a woman he’d be happy to go to bed with, night after night—instead of suffering from chronic boredom as soon as anyone tried to get close to him. To find some kind of peace with another human being—the kind of peace which seemed almost unimaginable to him. Was that how his twin had felt about Anais? he wondered.
He thought about Dario and felt the bitter twist of remorse as he remembered what he had done to his brother.
‘What exactly happened?’ Willow was asking.
Her gentle tone threatened to undermine his resolve. Making him want to show her what his life had been like. To show her that she didn’t have the monopoly on difficult childhoods. And suddenly, it was like a dam breaking through and flooding him.
‘My father was a screwed-up hedonist,’ he said bluntly. ‘A kid with too much money who saw salvation in the bottom of a bottle, or in the little pile of white dust he snorted through a hundred dollar bill.’ His lips tightened. ‘He blamed his addictions on the fact that my grandfather had never been there for him when he was growing up—but plenty of people have absent parents and don’t end up having to live their lives on a constant high.’
‘And what about your mother?’ she questioned as calmly as if he’d just been telling her that his father had been president of the Union.
He shook his head. ‘She was cut from the same cloth. Or maybe he taught her to be that way—I don’t know. All I do know is that she liked the feeling of being out of her head as well. Or maybe she needed to blot out the reality, because my father wasn’t exactly known for his fidelity. Their parties were legendary. I remember I used to creep downstairs to find it looking like some kind of Roman orgy, with people lying around among the empty bottles and glasses and the sounds of women gasping in the pool house. And then one day my mother just stopped. She started seeing a therapist and went into rehab, and although she replaced the drink and the drugs with a shopping addiction, for a while everything was...’ He shrugged as he struggled to find a word which would sum up the chaos of his family life.
‘Normal?’
He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘No, Willow. It was never normal, but it was better. In fact, for a while it was great. We felt we’d got our mother back. And then...’
‘Then?’ she prompted again.
He wasn’t even angry with her for her persistence because now it felt like some rank poison was throbbing beneath his skin and he needed to cut through the surface to let that poison out.
‘One night there was some big row. I don’t know what it was about—all I do know is that my father was completely loaded and my mother was shouting at him. I heard him yell back that he was going out and then I heard her going after him. I knew he was in no state to drive and I tried to stop her. I...’
He’d done more than try. He’d begged her not to go. He’d run over and clung to her with all the strength his eight-year-old body could muster, but she hadn’t listened. She’d got in the car anyway and the next time he’d seen his mother was when she’d been laid out in her coffin, with white lilies in her hands and that waxy look on her cold, cold cheeks.
‘She wouldn’t listen to me,’ he bit out. ‘He crashed the car and killed them both. And I didn’t manage to stop her. Even though deep down I knew what a state my father was in, I let her go.’
He stared out at the grounds of the house he’d moved into soon afterwards when his grandfather had brought them all here. A place where he’d been unable to shake off his sorrow and his guilt. He’d run wild until his grandfather had sent him and Dario away to school. And he’d just kept on running, hadn’t he? He wondered now if the failure of his attempt to stop his mother had been the beginning of his fierce need to control. The reason why he always felt compelled to step in and influence what was happening around him. Was that why he’d done what he’d done to his twin brother?
‘But maybe you couldn’t stop her.’
Willow’s voice—suddenly so strong and sure—broke into his thoughts.
‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.
‘Children can’t always make adults behave the way they want them to, Dante,’ she said, her words washing over him like balm. ‘No matter how hard they try.’
Dante turned round, still unable to believe how much she’d got out of him. She looked like some kind of angel sitting there, with her pale English skin and that waterfall of silky hair. In her simple cotton dress she looked so pure—hell, she was pure. But it was more than just about sex. She looked as if she could take all the darkness away from him and wash away the stain of guilt from his heart. And her grey eyes were fixed on him, quite calmly—as if she knew exactly what was going on inside his head and was silently urging him to go right ahead and do it.
He wasn’t thinking as he walked across the room to where she sat at an antique writing desk with the oil painting of Sicily which hung on the wall behind it. The hot, scorched brushstrokes and cerulean blue of the sky contrasted vividly with her coolness. Her lips looked soft and inviting. Some warning bell was sounding inside his head, telling him that this was wrong. But some of the poison had left him now. Left him feeling empty and aching and wanting her. Wanting to lose himself in her.
She didn’t object when he pulled her out of the chair and onto her feet. In fact, the sudden yearning in her eyes suggested that she’d wanted him to touch her just as badly as he needed to.
His hands were in her hair and his mouth was hovering over hers, their lips not quite touching, as if he’d had a last-minute moment of sanity and this was his chance to pull back from her. Was that why she stood up on tiptoe and anchored her hands to his shoulders? Why she flickered the tip of her tongue inside his mouth?
‘Willow,’ he whispered as his heart began to pound.
‘Yes,’ she whispered back. ‘I’m right here.’
He groaned as he tasted her—his senses tantalised
