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the building. Once repairs had been done and he had put in a power shower, a jacuzzi and under-floor heating, it would be an unusual pied-à-terre but perfectly acceptable. Of course, he would have to be frank and tell her that marriage wasn’t on the cards this time. Whatever, she would not lose by the arrangement. He would turf her friend, the artist with the Egyptian fixation, out of the Georgian wing and have it renovated for her grandparents’ occupation. He would also make Kerry his estate manager. He pictured her waiting here for him on Friday evenings…smiling at the door or in the jacuzzi.
Humming under her breath, dogs at her heels, Kerry balanced the tray on her hip and opened the bedroom door. ‘I bet you’re hungry,’ she said chirpily.
‘Funnily enough…’ As Luciano absorbed her hopeful, brimming smile, he hesitated on the instant negative he was about to utter.
She set a tray on his lap. He stared down at the picture-perfect cooked breakfast in astonishment, for he was convinced that nothing that looked that good could taste bad. ‘This is fantastic…’
‘A few years back, I did a couple of catering courses,’ Kerry confessed with wry amusement. ‘At one time I thought of opening a small restaurant here but in the end I appreciated that there wasn’t the demand for it.’
‘Restaurants are a very high-risk venture,’ Luciano murmured approvingly, adding a kitchen to his refurbishment plans as he ate. ‘We have to talk.’
Meeting his level dark golden gaze and remembering the night hours that had passed along with the incredible passion, Kerry was consumed by an attack of shyness. ‘What about?’
‘Us…where we go from here.’
Although she thought it much too soon for any such discussion, Kerry said nothing, for she suspected that Luciano was quite incapable of just letting their relationship drift. He had always liked everything organised, controlled and structured.
Lounging back against the banked-up pillows, Luciano studied her with a quality of cool gravity that made her tense. ‘I’ve got to be honest…I’m not going to marry you—’
‘For goodness’ sake…’ Her fingers clenched convulsively into the over-long sleeves of her cardigan which she had been unconsciously fiddling with and her face flamed. ‘Give me some credit. I’m not expecting you to be thinking about marriage right this minute—’
‘But that’s not what I’m telling you. I’m saying that I’m never going to think of marriage,’ Luciano delivered steadily. ‘I find you very attractive and at this moment in time I still want you in my life, but we can’t go back to where we once were. That’s gone.’
A deep inner quiver had convulsed Kerry’s insides. She could feel the colour and the warmth draining from her, for when he had said ‘never’ in that cool tone of emphasis it sent a chill down her spine. When he felt the need to impose rigid boundaries within hours of their new intimacy, it degraded what she had believed they had shared to the lowest possible physical level.
‘Agreed that the past is way back and we’re both bound to have changed…’ Valiantly, Kerry swallowed hard on the thickness in her throat. Broken things could be fixed and the past could be reclaimed. Didn’t he know that? ‘But I don’t see why we have to talk about this now—’
‘I don’t want any misunderstandings. Come here…’ He stretched out a lean, imperious hand and she was so tense she had to force herself forward. As her fingers were engulfed in his, he tugged her down beside him and anchored one arm round her slight, taut shoulders. ‘That’s better. I have plans for Ballybawn.’
‘Oh…?’ She loved him, Kerry reminded herself bracingly, and it was very early days. Naturally, he wasn’t about to plunge right back into where they had been five years earlier but he might have done her the justice of appreciating that that had not been her expectation either. Instead, whether he realised it or not, he had made it sound as though her sole ambition was to marry him.
‘I shall renovate it—’
‘Restore…the word’s restore,’ Kerry corrected, trying to still the little shake in her voice, for she was conceding that she needed to be honest with herself too and admit that she naturally did still want to marry him. She wondered if in some ghastly immature way she had already made the mistake of letting him see just how much he still meant to her. Was that what had inspired his wounding determination to tell her that everything was over before they had even really begun? For wasn’t that what he was telling her? That their present relationship was a temporary thing that could go no place at all?
There was nothing worthy of restoration in Luciano’s opinion but, having breezed past what he had regarded as the most sensitive point without a word of protest from her, he had relaxed. ‘I’ll make you my estate manager,’ he informed her. ‘You can bring your grandparents back from Dublin and they can live in the Georgian wing—’
‘But my friend, Elphie, is using—’
‘I’ll make it well worth her while to move out. A few coats of paint and we’ll never know she was there in the first place. Once I’ve had a few improvements made, Hunt and Viola will be very comfortable there.’
‘That’s a very generous offer.’ But Kerry was too agitated to stay seated any longer and she got up to pace away a couple of steps before turning back to look at him. ‘We’d be your tenants, then.’
Pure mockery fired Luciano’s golden gaze. ‘I don’t think I’ll be regarding you in quite that light. You won’t be living in the Georgian wing with your grandparents—except of course when I’m not here. But when I am here I’ll want you with me in the main part of the castle, which I will restore for our benefit.’
In a daze of uncertainty, Kerry stared at him, her heart beating so fast it felt as if it was at the foot of her throat. ‘Are you talking about us…er…living together?’
‘No, I’m talking about me flying back here to spend weekends with you…obviously I couldn’t make it every weekend, though.’ Luciano’s besetting sin of needing to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ had kicked in.
‘I…I see.’ And Kerry did see, she truly did see, and what she saw made her very much regret spoiling him with breakfast in bed. She would be his mistress, perhaps not even as much: a casual lover for whenever he felt like a country weekend with sex included. She wondered why it had not dawned on him that her grandfather might feel it rather inappropriate to live off the equivalent of what he would see as his granddaughter’s wages of sin. How could he think that she would even consider such a demeaning arrangement? How could he have got her so wrong? And what was she planning to do about it?
Her attention fell on the door into the bathroom and lingered while she wondered if he had yet to sample the facilities. ‘Let me run you a bath—’
‘Forget it…the plumbing is shot. Last night, I used the shower in the holiday cottage—’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the plumbing. In fact you were depriving yourself of a very special bathing experience.’ Kerry let the bathroom door half close behind her and switched on the bath taps, calling, ‘You just need to run the water a while.’
When Luciano finally took the bait and pushed open the door to see what she was doing, she was waiting to dart behind him and stretch up on tiptoe to cover his eyes with her spread hands. ‘Close your eyes,’ she urged in a playful tone.
