Unexpected Pleasures (16 page)

On the surface it was both a sensible and a compassionate plan, but compassion was an emotion that simply didn’t get under Gabriel’s defensive radar. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Some hidden agenda motivating him that he was keeping to himself. She looked quickly at her sons, her heart thudding with apprehension. It was easy to see their Calbrini heritage in their looks, even if they were too young to have developed the predatory Sardinian profile shared by both Carlo and Gabriel. Carlo had always said proudly that they were true Calbrinis, and he had promised her...

Her fingers curled tightly into her palms. Carlo had been a man of honour, she reassured herself. He would not have broken the promise he had made her before their birth.

‘The boys are due back at school in London in September,’ she told Gabriel warningly.

‘It is only July. They have the whole summer to enjoy being here, and to get used to my role in their lives.’

‘You’re planning to spend the summer here?’

‘Why not? Sardinia is my home, after all. It makes sense for me to be here to supervise the turning back of the hotel into a private home, and to spend time getting to know my wards.’

She lifted her chin.

‘You do realise that I shall be here with them?’

‘Hoping to make time to slip away to Port Cervo and find someone to take Carlo’s place? Another rich old man to sell yourself to? Or perhaps this time you’re hoping for a rich young one? Don’t get your hopes up too high, will you, Sasha? You’re getting older, and you’ve got a lot of competition. Plus, not every man wants to be burdened with another man’s sons. But then, of course, I was forgetting—that problem is easily solved, isn’t it? You’ll just put them in boarding school and go off and live your own life without them, like you did when Carlo was dying.’

‘You have no right—’ Sasha began, but it was too late.

Gabriel was ignoring her, stepping past her to walk determinedly towards the boys. She started to run over the slippery rocks, instinctively wanting to put herself between him and her sons, wincing as she slipped and the corner of one of the sharp rocks scraped against her bare leg, piercing the flesh. As though they sensed her anxiety, the boys had stopped playing to watch the two adults approaching them. Both of them now immediately hurried over to Sasha and stood one on other either side of her in a way that would normally have made her smile almost ruefully because of its instinctive maleness. The boys were totally identical, so much so that even she was sometimes almost deceived when they played tricks on people and pretended to change places. There were subtle differences between them, though, that only a mother could see,

She looked magnificent, Gabriel admitted. A tigress guarding her young, ignoring the blood trickling down her leg and the broken strap of her flimsy footwear.

Out of nowhere, raw, primitive and unwanted emotions savaged him.

Sardinia’s family hierarchies and patriarchs had long memories, and the history of the island was filled with tales of revenge and bitterness waged between warring families. He came from those people who truly believed in the rule of an eye for an eye, even though in these modern times they paid lip service to modern laws, and that ancestral history rose up inside him now. He had believed that Sasha was
his
, and that she would remain his until he no longer had any use for her. That he had been the one who controlled their relationship, and through it
her
. It had been the primary unwritten law that governed their relationship. But she had broken that law, and in doing so she had offended his pride.

He could never forget what his mother had done to him, and how she had chosen to reject his claim on her. As he had grown to manhood he had told himself that he would not have his power or his emotional security challenged or threatened by any woman. In those relationships with women he chose to have
he
would always be the one who ended them. He
had
planned to end his relationship with Sasha. But she had walked out on him before he could. And, worse, she had walked out into the arms of another man. His cousin! Oh, yes, Sasha owed him—and he intended to drink his fill of his chosen cup of revenge.

CHAPTER FOUR

S
ASHA
WASN
’
T
GOING
to be parted from her sons, not for a minute—even if that meant she had to stay here with Gabriel, Sasha told herself fiercely. But thankfully it wouldn’t be for long. Not even Gabriel could hold back the start of the new school year. Which reminded her... She looked down at the rings on her fingers. Thanks to her diligence and determination she now had the satisfying credentials of a degree and an MBA. And thanks to Carlo’s generosity the sale of her jewellery should give her enough to buy a small house in London close to the boys’ school, pay their school fees and put some money in the bank for a rainy day.

‘Come,’ Gabriel demanded autocratically, holding his hand out towards the nearest boy.

Sasha could feel Sam looking up at her questioningly.

It would be so easy to turn them against Gabriel, and to fill their pliable minds with thoughts of bitterness and resentment, to drip poison into them so that they became filled with hatred and fear for the man their father had appointed as their guardian. But, no matter what she felt personally, she could not do that to them. She would not damage them in that kind of way. They came before everything and everyone else, in her life and in her heart.

Forcing herself to smile, she gave Sam and then Nico a small gentle push towards Gabriel.

‘Your father has appointed Gabriel to be your guardian, and that means that we can stay here in Sardinia for the rest of the summer,’ she told them as lightly as she could.

It was better to keep things simple and easy for them to accept and understand. They both loved Sardinia, and why shouldn’t they? This country was, after all, a big part of them and their family history. They had spent every summer here since their birth.

* * *

I
T
FELT
ODD
to receive the formal handshakes of these two miniature representations of his own family genes mingled with those of their mother instead of embracing them in true Sardinian fashion, Gabriel acknowledged. But then their father had been an elderly father, very much of the old school, and part educated in England himself, so naturally their manners reflected that.

‘What are we to call you?’ Sam asked shyly.

‘Gabriel is the second cousin of your father,’ Sasha explained quickly, not willing to give Gabriel the opportunity to take control even in this small matter. ‘So perhaps you should call him Cousin Gabriel?’

‘Cousin Gabriel.’ Sam rolled the words around his tongue. He was both the more serious and at times the more reckless of the two boys, whereas Nico tended to follow his twin’s lead. ‘I like it,’ he announced judiciously.

‘Good. I am glad that you do,’ Gabriel told him cordially, neatly taking charge of the conversation. ‘I used to call your father Cousin Carlo when I first knew him.’

Oh, very clever, Sasha acknowledged, as she saw the way her sons were starting to relax and move closer to him, like to like, male to male, the boys drawn instinctively towards this new figure in their lives.

Carlo had loved them deeply, but when he had become ill two energetic youngsters had been too much for him to cope with other than for a few minutes at a time. So she had set herself up as buffer between her sons and her husband, wanting to protect both from pain—emotional pain on the part of her sons, and physical pain on the part of her frail husband.

‘Can we do some fishing this afternoon?’ Nico asked her eagerly.

Fishing was a new passion, and most days the three of them spent time sitting on the rocks, waiting for fish to bite on the lines Sasha had taught the boys how to bait.

But it was Gabriel who answered, before she could, saying calmly, ‘There are some matters I need to discuss with your mother, so we must return to the hotel. But perhaps this afternoon you can show me the best place to fish.’

He was seducing her sons every bit as easily as he had once seduced her, Sasha recognized, as the twins danced up and down with delight, eagerly falling into step beside Gabriel and abandoning her as they all made their way back to the hotel.

‘Can you play football?’ she could hear Nico asking Gabriel with eager shyness.

Immediately Gabriel stopped walking and turned to look down at the small earnest-looking face turned up towards his own. ‘Do fish swim?’ he teased Nico, adding with a small shrug, ‘I’m Italian, aren’t I?’

‘Sam supports Chelsea, but AC Milan is my team.’ Nico beamed.

‘I support Chelsea because half of us is English,’ Sam informed Gabriel seriously. ‘So it’s only fair, isn’t it?’

Her sons were so engrossed in talking about football with Gabriel that she might as well not be here, Sasha decided with a sharp pang.

‘You need to get that leg cleaned up.’ They had reached the hotel, and Gabriel’s terse instruction brought Sasha’s lips together in an usually tight line.

‘Oh, please.’ Her voice dripped sarcasm. ‘Don’t try to pretend you’re concerned. The compassionate act doesn’t suit you, Gabriel, and besides, we both know that you have no compassion for the female sex in general, and me in particular.’

She turned to look at her sons, who had been lagging behind but who had now caught up with them. ‘Boys, go and get cleaned up, please, and then down to the kitchen for lunch.’

Sasha believed in nurturing her sons with loving but firm boundaries. She upheld the importance of good manners, but this, in her opinion, was a double-lane highway. If she expected her sons to behave politely, and to understand the importance of good manners, they deserved to be on the receiving end of them themselves. So far—backed up, thankfully, by the same kind of attitude in their school—they were developing a happy mixture of automatic pleases and thank-yous accompanied by natural boyish high spirits and occasional forgetfulness.

‘You’re a fine one to talk about concern,’ Gabriel said as soon as the boys had raced upstairs, out of their hearing. ‘You may be clever enough not to employ full-time care for those two—Carlo would never have agreed to that, as we both know—but you obviously make sure you aren’t left with
too
much responsibility for their day-to-day care.’

‘Just because they asked you a few questions about football, that hardly makes me an uncaring or uninvolved mother,’ Sasha told him scornfully.

‘That wasn’t what I meant. I was referring to the fact that you are sending them down to the kitchen to eat while you, no doubt, will enjoy your lunch somewhere a little more elegant and without their presence. If you were left to your own devices you would probably also import a lover—possibly the same one you were seen dining with in New York.’

Sasha stared at him in outraged fury. She was too angry to even think about responding to him. She owed him nothing. Less than nothing. And she wasn’t going to give any kind of legitimacy to his accusations by bothering to defend herself from them. Why should she?

‘It’s a pity there isn’t something you could take for that perverted and warped sense of reality of yours, Gabriel. And, for your information, whoever you were paying to spy on me didn’t deserve their fee. If they had done their work properly then they would have known that the only man I spent any time with when I was in New York was the specialist oncologist I had gone to see. You see, unlike you, I didn’t want to sit around waiting for Carlo to die when there was the remotest chance that there could be some drug or treatment that might have given him some extra time,’ she told him contemptuously, before turning on her heel and following her sons upstairs.

He didn’t let her get very far, his fingers manacling her wrist and yanking her round to face him before she had climbed more than a couple of stairs.

‘Very effective—or at least it would have been if I did not know you so well. Has it occurred to you that Carlo could have been ready to die? That he might even have preferred to die peacefully in his own bed rather than have his life eked out for a few months, days or weeks, so that you could continue to feed off him? While he was alive he was your passport to the life you had always wanted, the life you sold your body to get. He was besotted by you and you knew it—so much so that he begged me to lend him more money at any rate I cared to name just so he could satisfy your greed.’

‘That’s not true!’

Her face was as white as the marble hallway and its curling flight of stairs. Her eyes had filled with tears. They clouded her vision, making Gabriel’s features shimmer and break up. ‘It was Carlo’s pride that made him go on borrowing, not me. I didn’t even know what he was doing.’

‘Liar.’

He was still holding her wrist, and as she looked down at him she was abruptly reminded of another time and another set of marble stairs on which she had stood and looked down into his face—laughed down, in fact, with delight and teasing provocation. The stairs had been in an exclusive atelier, where he had taken her to try on the dress that she had been modelling for him, layers of black silk chiffon that sighed and whispered against her skin as she walked. She had leaned towards him, she remembered, not caring that the silk was slipping from her, in truth delighting in the fact that his gaze was caressing her semi-naked body, and that his hand was cupping her bare breast. She had still believed then that it just wasn’t possible for him to mean it when he said that love and emotion had no place in his life. She had been so crazily in love with him that she had believed the sheer force of her love for him would make him love her back. Then.

But this was now. Separated from the past by the ocean of tears she had cried, and the protective wall she had thrown up around herself. That wall was impenetrable, reinforced with the bitterness of reality and the strength of her hatred, bonded together with her tears.

‘I hate you so much,’ she told him fiercely, her emotions darkening her eyes. She could feel the blistering hiss of Gabriel’s exhaled breath against her skin as his own anger overwhelmed him and he jerked her towards him.

She had been standing awkwardly on the stair, caught in mid-step, and his angry movement made her overbalance and lurch into him. ‘So you say. But my bet is that you would still go to bed with me—for a price.’

The pain inside her was instant and savage, making her recoil and fight to escape it, her nostrils flaring and the smooth muscles of her throat tightening her skin.

‘You were the one who taught me to separate my emotions from my body, to treat sex as a physical activity with no connection to any kind of emotional feelings. So yes, I dare say if I wanted to have sex with you I could detach myself enough from my emotional loathing of you as a person to enable me to do so,’ she agreed thinly. ‘But I do not want to, and neither do I need to use my body as currency.’

‘Why? Have you found another man to replace Carlo before he is even cold in his grave?’ What was that pain slicing and ripping at his guts? He didn’t want her; he had stopped wanting her when she had started her unsuccessful bid for a more permanent role in his life. He could hear her voice now, soft with false emotion as she told him, ‘I love you, Gabriel, and I know that you love me, even if you refuse to say the words.’

‘You know wrong, then,’ he had answered, and had meant it. ‘I do not love anyone. The ability and the desire to love was kicked and beaten out of me by foster parents. The same foster parents who claimed to love me when they discovered that I’d become financially successful. You say you love me, but what you really mean is that you want me to keep you permanently in my life because I am rich and you are poor. What you love is what I give you.’

‘That isn’t true,’ she had protested. But of course he had known better than to believe her.

He looked at her now as she told him fiercely, ‘No. Unlike you, Gabriel, I’ve moved on from my past.’ She lifted her head proudly. ‘I have a degree now, and an MBA. I’m fully qualified to get a job that pays me enough to support myself and my sons.’ She only prayed that would be true.

Gabriel had to fight against the shock of feeling that was gripping him. Why the hell should he be so angry and resentful at the thought of her working to support herself and being independent of him?

‘You can’t deceive me, Sasha, with your pseudo-maternal act,’ he retaliated. ‘Were you the mother you are trying to pretend to be, do you think for one moment that Carlo would have felt it necessary to appoint me as his sons’ guardian? It’s obvious that in the end he recognised exactly what you are, and that he wanted to protect them.’

Sasha had raised her hand before she could rationalise what she was doing, but just as swiftly he reacted to her action, clipping her arms to her sides. Before she could guess what he intended to do he was suddenly dragging her into his arms and kissing her in angry punishment. The pressure of his mouth ground down on her own, bruising the softness of her lips as she fought against his domination. But it was her retaliatory savage nip at his bottom lip that drew the blood she could taste on her tongue. He thrust her away so roughly that she almost fell, his eyes as dark as murder as he wiped the back of his hand across his split lip.

‘Bitch,’ he said brutally, before he turned and strode back down the stairs, leaving her standing watching him whilst her belly churned with ice and fire, fear and need, hatred and... And what? The opposite of hatred was love, and she did not love him. She raised the back of her hand to her eyes, shocked to see that it came away wet with tears.

* * *

P
ART
OF
THE
charm of the hotel was that it was in many ways still very much a private house, Sasha admitted as she stood in the bedroom of the top-floor private suite that Carlo had always insisted was not to be treated as part of the hotel or occupied by anyone else.

Below this, the next floor contained another large suite and three smaller ones, with the rest of the bedrooms contained in what had once been the stable block of the house. The reception rooms were decorated and furnished as though they were rooms in a private home, and a large conservatory had been added to the rear of the house to provide a dining room that opened out onto a terrace, beyond which was the swimming pool. It would be easy enough for a man with Gabriel’s wealth to turn it back into a private home. And it would certainly be more comfortable than the semi-fortress in the mountains that had been his grandfather’s home.