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With those words he set free a dozen evocative memories that she never, ever allowed herself to consciously think about. In the act of bracing her hands against his sleeves to break his hold on her, Kerry met his eyes and intimate images bombarded her without mercy: sunlight on her skin, Luciano in her arms, the potent allurement of him, the wildness of her own longing and the soaring belief that she was the luckiest woman in the world.
He took her soft pink mouth in a hard, deep kiss. Faster than the speed of light, her own body reacted to the surge of heat that flared in her pelvis. Her head swam, her knees shook. She could no more have halted the chain reaction of her own desire than she could have pulled back from him. More primitive reactions had taken over, making her push herself into contact with the hard muscularity of his lithe, powerful frame. A startled whimper of burning excitement broke in her throat as his tongue ravished the tender interior of her mouth.
Luciano set her back from him. Adrenalin on full charge, he was on a complete high. At that moment, it didn’t matter that the fierce ache of his own sexual hunger was actual pain. He was getting too big a kick out of watching her stumble back from him like a blind woman to steady herself on the chair back and he was revelling in the shell-shocked look on her face. Had the entire range of his ancestors crowed in triumph with him from the heavens he would not have been surprised, for never had his Sicilian genes been more in the ascendant.
‘I see you haven’t lost your taste for me,’ Luciano murmured in husky provocation.
Kerry flinched as though he had doused her with a bucket of cold water. Paper-pale from the aftermath of her own degrading response to him, she hovered, stricken blue eyes locked to him. Bitterly aware as she was of the terrible pain that he had already caused her, her temper exploded. She slapped him hard enough to numb her hand and make her wrist ache.
‘You bastard!’ she condemned. ‘I h-hate you!’
Luciano did not even wince and, as Kerry watched the marks of her own fingers flare up red over his cheekbone, she went into deeper shock at her own behaviour. Nothing he had said excused her violence and never before had she lost control to the extent that she had struck someone else. Blinking in shaken turmoil, appalled that she had let herself down to that extent, she muttered a harried apology.
Luciano surveyed her with lethal golden eyes and an unnerving degree of impassive cool, for he was simply chalking up one more score to be settled. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow…and don’t be late this time.’
As the door closed on Kerry’s hurried departure, a sardonic smile of intense satisfaction lit Luciano’s lean, strong features. She had lost her head. She was breaking up. He would find out what he needed to know tomorrow. And then? He finally understood why no other woman had yet been able to excite his interest. He still wanted her. Why? Had five years shut away from a world that had moved on without him left him trapped in time? In one sense, he acknowledged the truth of that. But he also thought his own urges were a lot more basic. Desire and revenge made an intoxicating combination. He hated her but he still burned to have her under him, to have those long, perfect legs wrapped round him, hear her cry out his name, learn the pleasure that he could give her…before he took it away again.
Outside the impressive building that housed da Valenza Technology, Kerry came to a sudden halt on the acknowledgement that she did not even know where she was going.
Stepping back from the milling crowds on the pavement, she attempted to still her jangling nerves. It did not help her to appreciate that she had made a complete hash of her meeting with Luciano. That kiss followed by that slap. Stupid…stupid…stupid, she told herself angrily as she noticed a café on the other side of the street and headed for the crossing.
He had accused her of trying to ignore the ‘personal dimension’ but what else could he have expected from her? Compassion? Forgiveness? Understanding? The anguish and self-blame that his infidelity had inflicted would live with her until the day she died. Just when she had been within reach of finally believing that she was someone of value, he had dashed her down lower than ever before.
The seeds of her difficult relationship with her stepsister, Rochelle, had been sown right back in childhood, Kerry acknowledged heavily. Within months of divorcing Carrie, her mother, her father had remarried. His second wife, Pamela Bailey, had been a widow with two young children. However, Harold Linwood had made no attempt to remove his four-year-old daughter from the care of her Irish grandparents. In fact, it had been six years before he thought better of that arrangement and finally came to Ireland to take Kerry back to England and into his own home.
By then, Rochelle had been twelve and the spoilt darling of the household. While her fifteen-year-old brother, Miles, had accepted Kerry, neither his mother nor his sister had been as tolerant. Rochelle had been outraged by the belated revelation that the stepfather she adored already had a daughter from a previous marriage. Yet there had never been any risk of Kerry stealing Rochelle’s place in the family. Kerry’s father had been infinitely fonder of his pretty, playful stepdaughter than he had ever been of his own child. Kerry had reminded him far too much of the ex-wife he still hated and denigrated for having humiliated him with her lovers. In addition, her stepmother had truly resented having to raise her irresponsible predecessor’s child.
The following five years had been very unhappy ones for Kerry. At home, she had endured regular taunts about her mother’s promiscuity and at school she had been relentlessly bullied by Rochelle and her friends. Finally reaching breaking point, Kerry had run away from home. When her grandfather had phoned Harold Linwood to inform him that Kerry had shown up safe and sound at Ballybawn, her furious father had washed his hands of his daughter altogether and left her there.
In spite of that, however, six years later, fresh from university and with her business degree and, if anything, even more desperate than she had once been to win acceptance from the older man, Kerry had still applied for a job at Linwoods. She had hoped that as an adult she might achieve the closer relationship with her father that she had failed to establish while she was a child. Looking back, she could only wince at her own innocence, for the older man had only employed her out of a grudging sense of duty. Blood bond or not, she had always been an outsider in the Linwood family and growing up hadn’t changed that fact.
Nor, unfortunately, had it changed Rochelle. And even more than five years after the event, Kerry still felt sick when she recalled the day that she had learnt to her horror that the man she loved, the man whose engagement ring she wore, had in fact slept with Rochelle long before she herself had even met him. Eighteen months earlier, her stepsister had enjoyed a weekend fling with Luciano while she was modelling in Italy. It had been a ghastly coincidence that nobody could have foreseen or even guarded against. Naturally, Luciano had not associated Rochelle Bailey with Linwoods, and when he had been headhunted into the task of revitalising the flagging fortunes of the Linwood wine chain Rochelle had been living in New York.
‘It was just a casual thing,’ Luciano had explained after Rochelle had walked into the office one day and all hell had broken loose when the outspoken blonde realised that Kerry was engaged to one of her own former lovers.
When, regardless of all Luciano’s efforts to comfort and calm her, Kerry had continued to be extremely distressed, he had finally studied her with frowning perturb
ation. ‘It was no big deal to either of us,’ he had reasoned. ‘I’m not proud of it but I’m not ashamed of it either. At times, I’ve been forced to work such long hours that it was impossible for me to sustain a longer relationship. Don’t make so much of this. It’s very unfortunate that Rochelle is your stepsister, but we’re all adults and Rochelle and I parted as friends.’
Only Rochelle had wanted more than a friendly parting. And Luciano had either been unusually obtuse in refusing to concede that fact or far too clever to highlight it. That same afternoon all Kerry’s happiness in their engagement had died, only to be replaced by a helpless sense of threat and insecurity. She had needed no crystal ball to foresee that Rochelle’s competitive instincts would soon cause trouble.
Within forty-eight hours, Rochelle had drawn up the battle lines: her stepsister, whose loathing for daily employment was a standing joke, had signed up for a temporary office job at Linwoods and had sashayed into work in a clingy top and a very short skirt. Her stepsister had used every seductive weapon she possessed in her determination to tempt Luciano back into her bed. Kerry had stood on the sidelines like the spectre at the feast while Rochelle flirted shamelessly with Luciano, and when Kerry complained about that Luciano had groaned out loud and told her to stop being ‘paranoid’. Within the space of ten days, he had been telling her that jealousy and possessiveness were very unattractive traits.
Inevitably, Rochelle had won, Kerry reflected painfully as she sat over her untouched coffee in the café where she had taken refuge. Each memory that forced its way through the cracks in her self-discipline was more painful than the previous one…
Just a few short weeks later Kerry had returned from a brief trip back to Ballybawn, and Rochelle, having picked a very distinctive gold designer cuff-link up off her bedroom carpet, handed it to Kerry with a taunting smile of triumph.
‘Yes, Luciano slept with me last night. Why should I cover up for him?’ her stepsister asked, her amused gaze pinned to Kerry’s shattered face. ‘But don’t be too hard on him. He’s a very passionate guy. How could you think that you could hang on to a rampant stud like Luciano with that pitiful I-wanna-be-a-virgin-on-my-wedding-night routine?’
‘He told you…that?’ Kerry was sick with humiliation that something so very private should have been shared and equally aware that only Luciano could have provided that same information.
‘We had a laugh about it,’ Rochelle mocked. ‘You’re a right little goody-two-shoes. However, if it’s any consolation, the sex may have been tremendous but Luciano’s not planning to ditch you and replace you with little old me—’
‘Shut up!’ Kerry shouted, distraught, but there was no silencing Rochelle.
‘But then, I won’t come endowed with the greater part of Daddy Linwood’s chain of wine stores, will I?’ her stepsister continued spitefully. ‘Naturally Luciano has his eye on the main chance. How else do you think he clawed his way up out of the back streets to become what he is now? While you’ve got your wine-store dowry, you’ve got him. Maybe you should consider trading in your sensible underwear and unlocking the bedroom door to prevent him straying again…but then I doubt that a little prude like you could match his incredible stamina and inventiveness between the sheets!’
Choosing to conserve what little pride she had had left, Kerry had decided not to confront Luciano on the score of his infidelity and had simply returned his ring to him. Why had she done it that way? She had felt that while all three of them were still working together at Linwoods, she would suffer the greatest humiliation if Luciano’s behaviour was to become open knowledge. Had she shared that story with the rest of the family, Rochelle, brazen to the last, would have used that as an excuse to ensure that all their friends and employees also found out why Kerry’s engagement had been broken off. The next day, while she had still been steeling herself to go into work, Luciano had been arrested.
