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This time, the concierge was wise enough to call Luca on the house phone.
“Mr. Bellini,” he said, “I thought you might want to know that your brother is on his way up.”
By the time Matteo stepped from the elevator, Cheyenne and Luca were having coffee on the terrace.
They looked innocent…unless you noticed that her face was flushed and Luca’s sweatshirt was inside out.
“Matteo,” Luca said, clapping his brother on the back. “What a nice surprise.”
Matteo looked from Luca to Cheyenne. “Indeed,” he said politely
“You remember Ms. McKenna?”
Matteo said that he did.
“She stopped by to discuss, ah, to discuss plans for her ranch. “
If this was the way people looked when they discussed plans for ranches, Matteo thought with delight, the world would surely discuss ranches more often.
“Such dedicated people,” Matteo said. “Working even on a Sunday.”
“Business always comes first,” Luca said stiffly.
Matteo smiled, shook hands with Cheyenne and declined his brother’s offer to join them. “As you said, business comes first, and I am sure you would prefer to get back to it.”
Luca glared at Matteo as he walked him to the door.
“That remark about business was inappropriate,” he growled.
“I have no idea what you mean…unless… Is something going on between you two?”
“Certainly not. But just to avoid confusion, I would appreciate it if you would not mention any of this to our sisters.”
“Why would I do that?” Matteo asked, looking aggrieved at being told such a thing. And was it his fault the news slipped out the next day, when he called his sisters?
They wanted all the details and though there weren’t many, the three Bellinis agreed.
Something was going on.
The trick would be in discovering what—and in getting a good look at Cheyenne McKenna. If their brother was seeing her, there had to be more to her than the bitchiness they’d all observed July fourth weekend.
Luca, no fool, suspected Matteo would pass the news along.
He waited for it to trouble him—and realized that it didn’t. In fact, he began to think it would be nice to introduce Cheyenne to his family under better circumstances than when they’d all first met.
He realized another thing, too.
He was more than happy. He was content.
By day, he was deeply involved in work on the residential glass tower he was designing. By night, he was deeply involved with Cheyenne.
He loved ending the day with her, going out to dinner or ordering in pizza, even if she preferred hers with broccoli instead of pepperoni. He loved the way they shared what the day had been like. She was thrilled because she was working again. Just as she’d hoped, the job in Milan had changed things. Top-notch offers were rolling in, and she’d already been booked with several designers for New York’s famous Fall Fashion Week.
She told him that she’d learned to keep her advice for photographers and makeup artists and everybody else to herself.
“Most of the time,” she added.
Luca grinned and kissed her.
She sighed as she nestled in his arms.
She had learned to curb the need to exert control. She also knew it was Luca’s doing.
In bed and out, she could trust him. Give herself to him.
Be her real self with him.
For years, she’d hidden the true Cheyenne McKenna from the world. Maybe it was one of the reasons she’d had so much success as a model. She had the right looks—the slender but curvy body, the coltish legs, the fine-boned face, the sexy stride, all of that—but so did a lot of girls.
Her strength was in becoming the precise girl a designer or advertiser needed.
A girl straight out of the Old West? She was it. An exotic beauty from the Arabian Nights? Of course. A seductress who could convince men that the perfume she wore would magically turn their wives and girlfriends into duplicates of her? Consider it done.
She could still do those things, lose herself in an assumed persona while the cameras clicked, but now, away from the cameras, she could also be Cheyenne McKenna.
She could laugh with Luca. Be silly with Luca. Go for long walks with him, share the Times with him on a rainy Sunday, stop at a hotdog stand just because the hotdogs you got from a corner cart in Manhattan were the best in the world. Spend a long weekend together at her little country place, introduce him to her horses and watch with delight as the still-shy pair of animals took to her lover as if he’d always been part of their world.
She’d let Luca see who she really was.
He knew about her mother. About Baby. He knew her, the good her and the bad her…
Except, he didn’t.
He didn’t know the ugliest, darkest part of who she was.
She told herself there was no reason for him to know. Nobody had to know everything about another person.
Unless—unless you were building a life together. Honesty counted then, didn’t it? But they weren’t building a life together. They weren’t even living together…
And then, one evening, she faced the truth.
In all the ways that mattered, they were living together.
And he had begun talking about the future.
He spoke of the future in little ways—making idle plans for Thanksgiving, for Christmas—but she knew it marked a change in their relationship.
She wanted that change more than she’d ever wanted anything, but how could she think of the future when the past was always ready to reach out and grab her by the throat?
A shrink, the only one who’d ever done her any good, had assured her that the things that had been done to her had been exactly that. Things that had been done to her. Forced upon her. She had not brought them on, she had not wanted them. In all the ways that mattered, she had not participated in them.
“You were a child,” the shrink had said gently. “Twelve years, then thirteen years old. You were a little girl, helpless, terrified, alone. You were not responsible for what happened to you. And you were brave. You went from being a victim to taking charge of your life. That’s a wonderful accomplishment.”
She told that to herself. She tried to believe it. But it didn’t work.
Why had it taken what had happened to Baby to make her stand up for herself?
The shrink said that Baby had been the catalyst that forced her to face what was being done to her. Until then, she said, Cheyenne had protected herself from the ugly reality of her life by shutting down.
“When your mother got drunk or stoned and handed you off to a man,” the shrink said, “you took refuge within yourself by pretending nothing was happening—but you couldn’t do that when it came to the horse. You’d stopped permitting yourself to feel anything, but Baby was different. You felt his pain, and you loved him enough to fight back.”
It was, the shrink said, why she treated sex the way she did. Being in total control with men kept her from feeling anything. It gave her a sense of power that drove away childhood memories.
“Will it ever be different?” Cheyenne had asked during one of their last sessions.
The shrink had done an un-shrinklike thing. She’d reached over and squeezed Cheyenne’s hand.
“It will be,” she’d said, “if you keep working through these things. If you let yourself begin to feel. You’ll finally acknowledge that you were a brave child who grew into a courageous woman and when you do, you’ll find a wonderful man who will love you for who you are and not just for who you permit the world to see.”
One night, she was sitting in a corner of Luca’s long white couch, reading a magazine. He was reading, too, lying stretched out with his head in her lap. And without any warning, she looked down at her lover’s face and faced the truth.
She was in love with him.
She loved everything about him, from their wildest, most pa
ssionate lovemaking to—she smiled to herself—to the plain vanilla kind.
She loved lying in his arms without having sex at all.
The other night, as always, he’d drawn her to him in bed and started to caress her.
She’d stopped him.
“I just got my period,” she’d said softly.
“I want you anyway,” he’d murmured. “Don’t you know that, cara?”
She’d blushed.
Silly, but she had. And she’d told him that she loved what he’d said, but the thing was that when she had her period, she got crampy and headachy, and for the first day, anyway, she mostly felt rotten.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he’d said. “I’m so sorry.”
Did she want some tea? Aspirin? A heating pad? Did she want him to rub her back? Was there nothing he could do? He’d treated her as if she were made of glass and he’d held her close through the night, no sex, nothing but care and concern and—and—
Love.
Wasn’t that what he’d shown her? That he loved her…
