The Italian in Need of an Heir Page 9

‘Raffaele...?’ she began uncertainly.

  ‘I’m not sure I can stay here,’ he muttered raggedly, lifting a shaking hand to rake it through his luxuriant black hair. ‘I had a flashback. I haven’t had one in many years. It happened out there before breakfast.’

  Compassion stirred in Maya; her gentle heart touched because that Raffaele could be vulnerable in his own hidden way had not once occurred to her. Instantly she was dismayed by the one-dimensional view she had taken of him. ‘A flashback of what?’ she pressed, moving across to him, one slender hand closing over one of his, her arm curving round the base of his spine in an effort to urge him towards the seating area to the left of them.

  ‘Of Julieta killing my dogs,’ he mumbled sickly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  REELING WITH SHOCK at that revelation as they sank down, Maya looked up into haunted dark golden eyes and her heart clenched as though someone had squeezed it. ‘Why on earth would your mother have done something so dreadful?’

  And he told her about Julieta then, and the day she had pulled out a gun over breakfast while he was playing with his childhood pets, how she had accused him of loving the dogs more than he loved her. In her adolescence, his mother had suffered a serious head injury and brain damage in a car accident, and it was after the crash that her mental health issues had developed. Although she had received many different diagnoses and had endured an ever-changing regime of medication, no treatment and no therapy had ever given her peace or normality.

  ‘She can’t be held responsible for anything wrong that she did. She was rarely in rational control of herself,’ Raffaele pointed out with creditable loyalty. ‘Unfortunately for me, her wealth and her lawyers protected her from outside interference.’

  ‘You were eight years old, Raffaele. Who was looking after you?’

  ‘The domestic staff generally took care of my physical needs, but they couldn’t protect me from her because she sacked them immediately if they tried to intervene,’ Raffaele admitted curtly.

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Julieta shut Tommaso out of our lives while I was still a baby,’ he explained. ‘They were only married for a couple of years. He offended my mother by trying to compensate some waitress she had had fired in a restaurant and she threw him out. He had been cast off by the Manzinis when he married her and, in the divorce, he didn’t get anything because their marriage hadn’t lasted long enough. He didn’t have the money to fight her through the courts for access to his son. He didn’t have any choice in what followed.’

  ‘So, tell me about the dogs,’ she encouraged softly, reaching out to link her fingers carefully with his taut ones, noticing how he glanced down at their entangled hands with bemused discomfiture as they sat side by side on the sofa. ‘And stop beating yourself up for being human, Raffaele. You went through an appalling experience as a child. It’s still totally masculine and normal to be upset by the memory of it.’

  Faint colour flared over his exotic cheekbones at that assurance but he let it go past. ‘Bella and Lupo were puppies when they arrived that summer. I adored them,’ he declared simply. ‘They were the closest thing to a family that I ever had. They loved me back.’

  ‘Didn’t your mother love you?’

  ‘If she did, she wasn’t capable of showing it. She was very possessive of me, though. Nannies weren’t allowed to show me physical affection, even if I was hurt or ill. With Julieta,’ Raffaele revealed absently with a lack of emotion that cut Maya deep, ‘it was half beating me to death one week and then a trip to Disneyland with every conceivable extra the next, all extremes, while she flailed from one mood into another.’

  ‘There was physical abuse?’ Maya queried with a concealed shudder and only belatedly did she recall him saying, when she had tried to slap him in his office, ‘Nobody hits me now.’

  ‘She was subject to uncontrollable rages. I was the most convenient target. Staff just quit on the spot if she lost her head with them.’ Raffaele’s fingers tensed in hers. ‘I have scars all down my back from the time she took a belt to me. There was nobody to stop her except the nanny and Sal, who was a new employee. The nanny waited until the last possible moment to shout for Sal and I almost died from blood loss and shock. It was all hushed up, of course, by her lawyers. Julieta tried to sack Sal afterwards, but the lawyers insisted that he remain to look after my welfare. Julieta hated him but she couldn’t get rid of him and there were no more beatings. If only Sal had been around when my dogs were alive, he would have got the gun off her. The night I first met Aldo, he admitted that he’d heard a rumour about my mistreatment around that time and that he’d tried to visit me. But Julieta wouldn’t consent to him seeing me.’

  Maya sat listening in a growing pool of horror. She had assumed that he had had it so easy all his life...all that money. But instead, he had lived a nightmare, rich but unloved, neglected while being both over-indulged and abused. All of a sudden she understood so much more about Raffaele Manzini from his apparent lack of emotion to his granite cool. It was all a front, there to convince everybody, not least him, that he had survived and flourished despite his appalling childhood.

  ‘What age were you then?’ she whispered.

  ‘At the time of the beating? Maybe nine... I only remember fragments of it,’ he muttered uncomfortably. ‘Let’s not dwell on this, Maya. It happened, it’s done, it’s over.’

  ‘But you’re still feeling it, you’re still living it,’ she told him gently.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ he breathed in a raw bitter undertone. ‘I don’t want to feel anything!’

  ‘I know...well...er... I can imagine,’ she whispered ruefully, overwhelmed by her new awareness of the inner self he had successfully concealed from her. She also knew that she would never again feel short-changed for her childhood with parents who were hopeless with money but who had absolutely adored their children and treated them accordingly.

  Raffaele snatched in a steadying breath and his ebony brows pleated. ‘How did you get all that out of me?’ he demanded abruptly. ‘I’ve never talked about it before.’

  ‘I got you at a weak moment. Don’t feel bad—we all have them and sometimes it’s good for you to talk,’ she soothed, looking up into eyes that were pure golden enticement in the sunlight, inky dark lashes enhancing them.

  And the silence smouldered.

  Raffaele’s grip on her hand tightened and he reached down with his other hand to curve it to her hip and lift her up easily onto his lap. ‘I want you,’ he told her boldly.

  Maya rolled her eyes at him. ‘That’s only because you feel ill at ease after telling me all that private stuff. It’s a natural reaction for a macho male personality. You’re trying to compensate.’

  ‘No, it’s a natural reaction to being with a very beautiful, compassionate woman, who also happens to be my wife,’ Raffaele corrected in a driven undertone. ‘I...want...you. Right here, right now.’

  Maya released a long-suffering sigh because he was so irredeemably basic, in no way adjusted to his own emotional prompts and what drove him at any given moment. ‘Raffaele,’ she began.

  A split second after she parted her lips, he forced them apart with the delving lick of his tongue and she gasped. Logic became too steep a hill to climb as the burn of the hunger he could induce in her without effort began to infiltrate her quivering body. Beneath her she could feel him hard and ready, the jeans he sported doing nothing to conceal his arousal, and she felt a piercing pulse of hunger kick up between her thighs even though she still ached there from their earlier encounter. Once again, it rewrote all her assumptions that once that desire was sated, it would stay quiet for a good while and wouldn’t unduly bother her again. All of a sudden she was hot, needy and desperate and twisting on his lap, grinding down on him with ridiculous enthusiasm, making him laugh, rough and low in this throat in that infuriating way of his, as if he knew some things better than
she did, which, she finally conceded, he possibly did...

  What followed was wild and passionate in a way she had never envisaged herself being. He hauled her up into his arms and carried her into a bedroom with a ridiculously huge bed surrounded by mirrored furniture that threw up far too many disorientating reflections.

  ‘Yuck,’ she commented on the décor.

  ‘Sì, I should’ve organised a refurbishment,’ Raffaele muttered in exasperation as he, very briefly, took the opportunity to look around himself and then froze.

  Just taking in his pallor, Maya registered that memories had stolen him away from her again and she yanked him down shamelessly on the silly giant bed, slender hands smoothing up over long muscular thighs to gently brush the revealing bulge at his pelvis and, that fast, Raffaele was back in tune with her again, rolling her over on the bed and kissing her breathless. He was frantic for her, which she perfectly understood after the secrets he had shared and the effect on him of having to relive them. What she did not understand was that she should be equally frantic for him. After all, nothing distressing had happened to her. She had merely been an observer, an available listener, yet everything he had confided had somehow touched her too and his pain had distressed her.

  When Raffaele flipped her over onto her knees and drove into her with urgent force, that scorching passion was somehow what she expected from him in that moment. She was not surprised or shocked or even standing outside herself marvelling because he had already taught her to expect that wild incredible flood of excitement. The sheer physical release of sex was a necessity for Raffaele after those confessions about his unhappy past. He couldn’t handle the emotions, but he could vent them the only way he knew how. His hunger, his sudden overpowering need for her, was as much an expression of distress as he was capable of making and it both saddened and delighted her that he had turned to her for comfort. Yet that intense sharing of his had released something in her as well, she acknowledged, and made her feel much closer to him.

  ‘So...’ Maya refused to let go of him in the aftermath because even if he didn’t know it, she knew he needed to be held. Her fingers smoothed down his long spine, feeling the slight roughness of scarring there, remembering what he had told her about that beating his mother had inflicted on him. Her eyes prickled and she stroked a soothing hand over his back, wishing fiercely that she could take the pain of that recollection from him, that knowledge that the person who should have most protected him had damaged him instead. He was still struggling to catch his breath and her body was humming with an unbelievable surfeit of pleasure and she pressed her mouth softly across his shoulder in an affectionate caress she could not withhold. ‘Obviously you’re not still planning to stay here in this house.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Since it’s clear that this is not a happy place for you,’ Maya retorted bluntly. ‘And what would we do here anyway?’

  Raffaele studied her with glittering wicked eyes. ‘What we’re doing now.’

  Maya rolled her eyes.

  Raffaele laughed, relaxation winging through him. It was true: he hated the house but it had taken Maya to make him admit the fact. ‘I’ll visit the spot above the beach where the dogs were buried and then we’ll get back on the yacht and tour with lots of sex included,’ he compromised.

  ‘Either you should sell this little island or demolish the house and rebuild,’ Maya told him, ignoring the ‘lots of sex’ quip even though it irritated her. ‘It shouldn’t have been sitting here for so many years empty and unused.’

  Raffaele released his breath on a slow hiss. ‘I married an alpha woman, keen to remake me. Why didn’t I spot the warning signs?’

  Beneath his intent gaze, Maya scrunched up her small nose. ‘Because you were too full of yourself to believe that an alpha woman could talk common sense?’

  Raffaele winced and then suddenly grinned. ‘It’s possible...but here you are.’

  ‘Here I am,’ Maya murmured, both arms wrapped round him as she surveyed him and the lustrous dark golden eyes locked to her like magnets.

  And, he reflected, this kind of holding is fine and meaningless. He might not have enjoyed a relationship in which such affection existed before, but he trusted himself enough to believe that emotion didn’t come into it for him. How could it possibly when he didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel? He should never have brought her to the island, never have told her what had happened in the house, should never have dropped his guard to that extent. He had made three mistakes in succession, he conceded grimly. No good ever came from letting people get too close, he reminded himself stubbornly. Maya was hotter than hot in bed and, in addition to her intelligence, it was a winning combination for their marriage. In fact, he could not have done better, he mused, because she picked up on his moods as well as a weathervane forecasting a storm. But then, she was a clever woman, a very clever woman, and no doubt as detached as he was from anything deeper developing between them.

  * * *

  Maya drifted awake thinking about her sister, Izzy, and missing her. She was alone in bed and that was typical, because Raffaele always rose at the crack of dawn to spend a few hours working in his on-board office. Taking over his great-grandfather’s business empire had kept him incredibly busy.

  Just over a month had passed since the wedding and the secrecy Maya had embraced on that score had driven a wedge between her and the sister she loved, she conceded unhappily. Although they had talked with apparent openness on the phone during those weeks, Maya was stuck with the lie that she had taken a job in Italy. Yet how could she possibly tell Izzy the truth without upsetting her? Izzy, already dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and a new relationship in a foreign country, would be distraught if she knew what Maya had agreed to do to protect their parents and Matt.

  Yet right now, there was a chance that Maya could be pregnant too and it was with a fierce desire to know, one way or another, that Maya slid out of bed. Her head swam dizzily as she straightened and moved into the bathroom to dig out one of the tests she had bought the day before and buried deep in the back of a cupboard. Her hands were a little unsteady as she sat down and unwrapped the box to pull out the instructions. The test was very simple, unlike her marriage, she conceded ruefully.

  If she was pregnant, the marriage as such would be virtually over because that was what had been decided at the outset when she had insisted on exclusivity. Raffaele had agreed to stay faithful only until she conceived. He wanted his freedom back, the freedom to go out and sleep with other women. Why did the idea of that bother her? Why, when she had suspected for more than a week that she could have conceived, had she taken so long to buy the tests?

  She had told Raffaele off for imagining he should be more than human that day on the island of Aoussa and now here she was being guilty of expecting more than she should from herself. After all, how could she live in such an intimate relationship with a man who attracted her and feel absolutely nothing for him? That wasn’t realistic. At least not for her and her generous heart, it wasn’t. Raffaele, though? Now that was a very different ball game.

  Unlike her, Raffaele had spent a lifetime carefully ensuring that he felt very little for anyone. That was how he had got over his dysfunctional beginning in life; that was how he had learned to cope. Was he even capable of changing? And why would he even want to change when he was perfectly content as he was?

  Yet that indifference in him to the more tender emotions scared and intimidated Maya, she acknowledged reluctantly. On his terms, she was just a business project and the child he wanted to conceive merely a useful tool that would give him the right to buy her grandfather’s technology company. On her terms, however, Raffaele was the guy she had hated when she married him and then somehow, incomprehensibly to her, he had turned into a man she was learning to love...

  How could she be falling for Raffaele Manzini? How could the impossible have happened? A sea
change had taken place inside her that day on the island as soon as she understood what he had suffered because he had shown her his vulnerability. With that single act he had broken through her barriers and demolished her defences. She had stood above the beach with him where the dogs were buried and tears had misted her eyes when she’d seen the mound of pebbles he had gathered to mark the spot and the rough cross, cobbled together from driftwood by the gardener, Raffaele had explained. And, unfortunately for her, the way he had treated her since then had only encouraged the warmth of her developing feelings.

  To date, being married to Raffaele was nothing at all as she had expected. He was wonderfully caring towards her and always coming up with new ways to please or entertain her. They had cruised the Mediterranean in the yacht, stopping off in random places to shop or explore ruins or sheltered coves and dine out, the very casualness of their itinerary relaxing.

  And when it came to anything she might want, nothing was too much trouble for Raffaele. A reference to her interest in archaeology had led to a surprise flight to Egypt and the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to see the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Raffaele wasn’t into any of that and yet he had still patiently, considerately ensured that she also toured the treasures in the Cairo Museum, saw the pyramids and caught another flight to visit the temples at Luxor. He had devoted an entire energetic ten days to her enjoyment of antiquities. Her fingers toyed abstractedly with the gold sphinx necklace he had given her as a memento of their stay.

  He had given her a feast of memories that she would remember all her life. He had even had a cabin on the yacht set up for her to work in, complete with whiteboards and cutting-edge technology. Even if she worked all day and late into the night, he didn’t complain. No, he certainly wasn’t clingy, but he was capable of interrupting her to remind her to eat or to initiate sex, she conceded with a rueful grin.

  For over a month she had lived in a fantasy world with a gorgeous guy who behaved as if she was so incredibly beautiful and alluring that he couldn’t resist her. Sexually, Raffaele was insatiable and yet the same man had admitted to her that prior to their wedding he hadn’t sought the release of sex for weeks because he had become bored with it. Only he could scarcely afford to be bored with sex when his main goal was to conceive a child, she reminded herself sourly. And only an idiot like herself could have forgotten that reality for long enough to become infatuated with him. I don’t get attached to people, he had warned her at the outset. With an angry snort at her own act of self-destruction, Maya finally stood up to check the test wand and see the result.