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Strong hands flipped her on her back and he covered her with the lean, muscular length of his body. ‘I love you. I messed up badly but you’re going to forgive me because you love me too. And it isn’t because you don’t love me that you’re hesitating, it’s because you’re afraid.’
‘I know.’
‘And you can get over that. You’re the toughest, strongest woman I know. I can’t believe how you’ve coped with so much on your own. That awful day two years ago—I wasn’t listening to you properly,’ he confessed in a raw tone. ‘You rang me and you told me you were worried but the doctor had already told me he thought you’d be fine so half my mind—more than half my mind if I’m honest—was on the business deal I was trying to close. It is no defence, but it was something I’d been working on for five years. Had I known how frightened you were, I would have dropped everything and come.’
‘I was terrified.’
He gave a groan of remorse and rolled onto his back, taking her with him. His hand was in her hair, his eyes holding hers. ‘I wish I could rewind the clock and do things differently. You have no idea how much I wish that.’
‘It wouldn’t change anything. You wouldn’t have jeopardised a deal for me, Cristiano.’
‘My marriage was more important than any deal but at the time I didn’t realise it was a choice. I didn’t realise just how important it was to you that I be there. It’s no excuse but the doctor did assure me that you would be fine.’
His eyes were beautiful, she thought. Or perhaps it was his eyelashes that were beautiful. Dense and inky-black, they framed a gaze that read her all too easily. Most men were emotionally inarticulate but Cristiano was the exception. He had no trouble expressing his feelings and no problem interpreting hers. His emotional sophistication far exceeded hers. Which made his response to her desperate plea for him to be there all the more out of character.
If he’d been distracted then it must have been a major distraction. ‘Why was that deal so important to you?’
‘It doesn’t matter now. There are no excuses for the way I behaved.’
‘Tell me about the deal, Cristiano.’
He lay still, and then he sighed and sat up, raking one hand through his hair. ‘It goes without saying that it came at the worst time. Five years of work that came to a head the day before you flew back from London. I’d planned for us both to have dinner. Instead you were flying in and I was flying out.’
Too late she remembered that he’d been preoccupied on the phone—that he’d barely responded the first time she’d tentatively mentioned that she thought something might be wrong.
‘What was so important about that particular deal?’
He stared down at his hands and gave a bitter laugh. ‘You ask me that now and I can’t even remember. It was another prime piece of land that would have been perfect for an exclusive resort hotel. More of what I already do. Except that this was bigger than anything we’d dealt with and I wanted it badly. I knew that owning that island would secure the future of the company and our reputation at the top end of the business.’
‘Was the company in trouble?’
‘No, but no business that majors in tourism can afford to be complacent. The whole market is volatile. That’s another reason we operate at the expensive end.’ His bronzed back was sleek and smooth, the muscles in those shoulders a blatant declaration of his physical power. ‘You accused me of being a workaholic and you’re right. That is what I am.’
Laurel remembered what Dani had said about him having held everything together after their father had died. ‘I suppose you had to be. You found your
self in control of everything at a young age.’
‘Everything?’ His laughter lacked humour. ‘If we’re talking about the business then “everything” amounted to two small hotels which barely scraped a profit.’
‘I thought it was your father’s business?’
‘What I have now grew out of my father’s business.’ He stared through the open doors to the prettily lit terrace and the turquoise-blue shimmer of the infinity pool. ‘I was at college when my father died and suddenly I was in charge, thrown into the middle of something I knew nothing about. My mother was devastated, my brother and sister were still at school. My father owned two hotels on the island, neither of them doing that well. I was the oldest son. I was studying structural engineering, but that was irrelevant. Everyone was depending on me.’
And he’d only been in his very early twenties, she calculated. Studying in the US on the brink of his own adventure.
How much had it taken to give all that up and return home to continue his father’s dreams instead of pursuing his own?
‘What started as necessity became a habit. After a while I didn’t even question why I was working so hard. It was just the way I lived my life. It didn’t matter how much money I made or how successful the business became, I couldn’t forget that everyone was depending on me. On my ability to expand and grow the company.’
And he hadn’t just been supporting his mother and siblings, Laurel realised, but employing huge numbers of his family. Not just his brother and sister but several cousins and two uncles.
They’d made him the Provider.
They’d leaned on him, and he’d braced his powerful shoulders and taken on that role.
‘Carlo advised me to walk away from the Caribbean deal because the price they were demanding just didn’t make it a viable proposition. We were about to give up when they came back with a counter-offer. We had twenty-four hours to make a decision on whether to go ahead or not. I thought that deal would secure the future of the company. It was a recession-proof investment.’
‘So you went ahead?’ She hadn’t questioned what had happened to the business after she’d walked out.
