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‘That wasn’t love,’ Claudia said, suddenly finding the will to push him away and take another step backwards. As his hands lost contact with her she felt herself sway with intense disappointment—as if she had just lost some vital part of herself.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Marco agreed. ‘You made your feelings for me plain afterwards when you said that you hated me. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good sex. Incredible sex.’
He stepped closer once more, his well-toned muscles rippling deliciously beneath his taut bronze skin, sorely testing her resolve to keep her distance. Although the soft sand shifted beneath his feet, he moved with an amazing fluid grace that spoke of power and control.
She gazed at his superb athletic form, bewildered by a haze of conflicting thoughts and emotions. When they’d first met, she’d believed that he was a good man—the kind of man who took care of people. In her heart she’d felt they had made a real connection, but he’d proven her wrong when he’d disappeared. And almost everything he’d done since then had been at odds with her initial belief in him.
‘Is that all it ever was?’ she asked. Could she really have fallen in love with someone so heartless? ‘It felt like so much more.’
‘It was an act,’ he said. ‘We were both acting.’
‘It can’t have been just an act,’ she protested, not caring about saving face in front of him. She was losing—had lost—something that really mattered to her and she needed to come to terms with what had happened. ‘The kindness you showed me, the way you seemed to understand what I was feeling and thinking about everything. You were inside my head and my heart.’
‘I did my job well,’ Marco said, looking down at her dispassionately, despite the tug of some unidentifiable emotion bubbling distractingly inside him. He ignored it—he would not let her get to him again. She was obviously getting desperate—playing another of her games with him. ‘How do you think I got where I am today? When Vasile took everything my family owned I was left with next to nothing. I worked hard to build my business, but it takes more than commitment and effort. To be successful it’s vital to understand what motivates people.’
‘But that’s not what you’re like—I know it isn’t.’ Her eyes were wide as she stared up at him, and he felt his chest ache in a subconscious response to the innocent image she was projecting. She was trying to appeal to his better nature—but that was something that he’d slammed shut the day she’d betrayed Bianca. ‘You?
?re not the kind of man who uses people and takes what he wants without caring who gets hurt.’
‘You don’t know me,’ he said, suddenly reaching out to drag her hard against him. ‘Because this is exactly what I’m like.’
‘No, I don’t believe it. Let me go!’ She struggled in his arms, trying to pull away, but he tightened his hold on her with one arm clamped around her waist and lifted his other hand to stroke her cheek.
‘You don’t want me to let you go,’ Marco said, dipping his head close to hers so that his mouth hovered only inches above hers. ‘You want me to kiss you senseless. Then make love to you, right here on the sand.’
‘That’s the last thing I want.’ She stopped struggling against him—it was simply making her dangerously aware of his raw masculine sensuality. She took a breath and stood absolutely still, trying to close her mind to the mental picture of making love with Marco on the beach and suppress the feelings that image aroused.
‘Maybe that’s what your head is telling you,’ he said, stepping just far enough away from her to let his smouldering gaze slide lazily down from her head to her toes. ‘But your body is telling you something completely different.’
‘It’s not my head speaking to me,’ Claudia said, doing her best to ignore the physical sensation ignited by the sweep of his gaze. ‘If I listened to my head I’d be on a boat out of here. It’s my heart—in my heart I can’t believe you are doing this.’
‘You ought to be grateful to me,’ Marco said. ‘In two days’ time Vasile will be destroyed and you’ll be free of him.’
‘But what about my father? If I don’t marry him—’
‘Vasile will go to prison whether you marry him or not,’ Marco said. ‘And if I let you go ahead with the wedding you would lose everything. Any funds transferred from your trust fund would be seized to repay Vasile’s debts.’
‘I don’t care about money!’ Claudia gasped. ‘I was doing it to protect my father—to stop Primo revealing damaging information.’
‘What does Vasile say he has on your father?’ Marco asked.
‘I’m not telling you!’ Claudia said. ‘You’ll just use the information yourself.’
‘I don’t believe Vasile has anything,’ Marco said. ‘God knows I’ve invested enough time and money looking for incriminating evidence. Did they show you proof?’
Claudia bit her lip and looked up at Marco, thinking she’d be a fool to tell him anything. But she also knew that Marco was never going to let her marry Primo, so the information was going to come out anyway.
‘He took money from the pension fund,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know why he did it—he must have been intending to replace it, but then he got sick.’
A triumphant look flashed across Marco’s face and Claudia stared up at him in agitation. She had the feeling that, yet again, he knew something she didn’t.
‘Vasile embezzled the pension fund, not your father,’ Marco said. ‘Millions of euros. Hard evidence of that was part of the information I picked up from my legal team in Turin.’
‘I don’t…’ Claudia’s voice died away in confusion. ‘But they had evidence. Proof that my father had transferred money.’
‘Did you study them properly?’ Marco asked. ‘Were they original documents?’
‘I don’t know…’ Claudia stared at Marco momentarily stunned. She realised just how much of a fool she’d been. She’d let Primo and Francesca use her without properly questioning what they had told her.
