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And why did I let him?
She pressed her lips together where the tiny bite still tingled. The jet taxied down the runway, forcing her body into the seat as it tilted into its ascent.
It hadn’t been much more than a playful little nip, followed by a quick brush of his mouth against hers. It wasn’t a case of letting him or not letting him. It wasn’t that big a deal. She mustn’t overreact. This was all part of the game he was playing.
But why wouldn’t her lips stop buzzing?
This was worse than she thought, she realised as she heard the ping of the seat-belt sign switching off and her fingers white-knuckled on the arm rest.
Not only did she not have a clue what game Nick Delisantro was playing, but she had an awful feeling that whatever game it was, he planned to win.
CHAPTER NINE
THE chauffeur-driven car wound through the carefully manicured hedgerows of the Alegria estate, the red geraniums splashing vibrant colour into the intense green. The duca must have a small army of gardeners, Eva calculated, to keep the flowers blooming in this heat. She slipped open another button on her blouse, careful to keep her body turned to the window and away from her fellow passenger, who’d folded his long body into the seat next to her over two hours ago and promptly fallen asleep.
She’d lost her jacket as soon as she’d been positive Nick wasn’t faking sleep to lull her into a false sense of security. Despite the air-conditioning, the sun glaring off the tinted windows, and the overwhelming presence of the man sleeping next to her, had made the interior of the limo stifling. She glanced down at her cleavage, glad to see only the smallest glimpse of flesh and the slight glow of perspiration. She wanted to look as professional as possible when they arrived, and she also didn’t want to give Nick any ideas. He’d taken more than enough liberties already on that score. Although quite why he had, she still hadn’t figured out.
She risked a look over her shoulder. With his chin tucked into his chest, his arms folded and his long legs crossed at the ankle and stretched out in front of him in the limo’s spacious seat well, he’d hardly budged during th
e journey.
But how could he have fallen asleep so easily?
How could he be so apparently uninterested about meeting his grandfather for the first time? He hadn’t asked a single question on the plane about the duca, or her research—or even the estate. In fact, apart from that moment of teasing and the kiss—she pressed her lips together—which she refused to think about again, he’d hardly spoken at all. Instead, he’d opened an expensive laptop not long after take-off and typed at a steady pace, pausing only to order a tomato juice.
When she thought of how absorbing she found tracing the ancestry of people who had been long dead and who she had no connection with whatsoever, she was even more astonished by his attitude. How could he be so calm and composed about meeting a man he was actually related to?
But even as the question echoed in her head she recalled his flat refusal to read Leonardo’s journal. To even discuss the man. And the brittle anger in his voice. Maybe he wasn’t indifferent about his past and his heritage at all. Maybe he was simply defensive about it. Because discussing the affair between his mother and Leonardo De Rossi brought back painful memories?
She watched him, the vulnerability of sleep making his harsh dominant features look almost boyish, and felt the little blip in her heartbeat at the thought of what he might have suffered when he discovered that Carmine Delisantro was not his father.
The crunch of the car wheels on gravel had Eva blinking back the sentimental thought.
Stop it—you promised yourself you wouldn’t do this.
Romanticising Nick’s reactions, and reading an emotional response into this visit that almost certainly wasn’t even there, would only get her into trouble. She should never have probed about his relationship with his mother, but curiosity, and a stupid desire to soothe the anger she’d seen flash in his eyes, had got the better of her. Nick wasn’t a little boy, as he had already pointed out, he was all grown up now. And the secrets of his past were none of her business.
The car swept out of the hedged driveway and rolled to a stop in front of the Alegria Palazzo. Eva sucked in an awed breath, craning her neck to get a better view. She’d seen photographs of the duca’s estate, but nothing could have prepared her for the size and grandeur of the structure up close. Wide terraces separated the front of the building from the waterfront. The lake lapped against a wooden dock, where a couple of small sailboats were dwarfed by a muscular scarlet power cruiser.
Multicoloured formal gardens surrounded the mansion itself and stretched towards the forests that rimmed the property. In the distance the Dolomite Mountains created a dramatic natural backdrop to all the man-made splendour, towering over the northern tip of the Lake. She’d done her research on the Ducal Palazzo. Had discovered that it was originally a summer house built on the shores of the lake in the eighteenth-century to take advantage of Garda’s pleasant micro-climate and provide the De Rossi family with an escape from the gruelling summer heat of their Tuscan olive plantations. But she hadn’t expected anything quite this grand. Obviously a summer house to a duca was a little different in size and magnificence from an ordinary summer house.
Two women in stylish dark-purple uniforms and a man in a matching dark purple suit came out of the palazzo and hurried down the limestone steps that led to the driveway.
Nick hadn’t stirred, and she debated whether to wake him, when the chauffeur whisked open her door and bowed. ‘Noi siamo arrivati, signora.’
‘Grazie, Paolo,’ she said in her rudimentary Italian.
She turned to wake Nick only to find him watching her out of hooded eyes.
‘We’ve arrived at the palazzo,’ she said, a bit inanely.
He stretched and then flicked a brief glance out of the window. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured. If he was as blown away by the duca’s estate as she was, there was no trace of it as he climbed out of the car.
The staff had lined up to greet them, the butler standing so stiff and erect, Eva was half expecting him to salute as she and Nick approached. The man cleared his throat and rattled off a stream of Italian, only some of which Eva understood. Nick replied in the perfectly accented Italian she’d heard him use at the airport, then shook the man’s hand and nodded at the two female staff, apparently unperturbed by the way all three of them were gaping at him as if they’d seen a ghost. She would hazard a guess the staff must all have worked for the duca when Leonardo was still alive.
She muddled her way through the introductions with Nick interpreting in short, staccato sentences. For a moment she thought he might be nervous. But he didn’t look nervous as he strolled into the house beside her and they were directed to a drawing room just off the entrance hall. The room smelled of lemon polish and old wood, the elegant furnishings as ornate and luxurious as the palazzo’s terracotta façade. Floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with musty leather-bound volumes marked the room out as some kind of library, the partially closed shutters on the casement windows cast long shadows on the tiled flooring. The air felt cool and pleasantly dry after the muggy heat of the outdoors.
A slim middle-aged man in a perfectly tailored suit stood as soon as they entered and walked towards them. He was a few inches shorter than Nick, his clean-shaven jaw and sleek designer clothing in sharp contrast to Nick’s worn jeans and day-old stubble. The man spoke in rapid Italian.
