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‘Julieta shut Tommaso out of our lives while I was still a baby,’ he explained. ‘They were only married for a couple of years. He offended my mother by trying to compensate some waitress she had had fired in a restaurant and she threw him out. He had been cast off by the Manzinis when he married her and, in the divorce, he didn’t get anything because their marriage hadn’t lasted long enough. He didn’t have the money to fight her through the courts for access to his son. He didn’t have any choice in what followed.’
‘So, tell me about the dogs,’ she encouraged softly, reaching out to link her fingers carefully with his taut ones, noticing how he glanced down at their entangled hands with bemused discomfiture as they sat side by side on the sofa. ‘And stop beating yourself up for being human, Raffaele. You went through an appalling experience as a child. It’s still totally masculineandnormal to be upset by the memory of it.’
Faint colour flared over his exotic cheekbones at that assurance but he let it go past. ‘Bella and Lupo were puppies when they arrived that summer. I adored them,’ he declared simply. ‘They were the closest thing to a family that I ever had. They loved me back.’
‘Didn’t your mother love you?’
‘If she did, she wasn’t capable of showing it. She was very possessive of me, though. Nannies weren’t allowed to show me physical affection, even if I was hurt or ill. With Julieta,’ Raffaele revealed absently with a lack of emotion that cut Maya deep, ‘it was half beating me to death one week and then a trip to Disneyland with every conceivable extra the next, all extremes, while she flailed from one mood into another.’
‘There was physical abuse?’ Maya queried with a concealed shudder and only belatedly did she recall him saying, when she had tried to slap him in his office, ‘Nobody hits me now.’
‘She was subject to uncontrollable rages. I was the most convenient target. Staff just quit on the spot if she lost her head with them.’ Raffaele’s fingers tensed in hers. ‘I have scars all down my back from the time she took a belt to me. There was nobody to stop her except the nanny and Sal, who was a new employee. The nanny waited until the last possible moment to shout for Sal and I almost died from blood loss and shock. It was all hushed up, of course, by her lawyers. Julieta tried to sack Sal afterwards, but the lawyers insisted that he remain to look after my welfare. Julieta hated him but she couldn’t get rid of him and there were no more beatings. If only Sal had been around when my dogs were alive, he would have got the gun off her. The night I first met Aldo, he admitted that he’d heard a rumour about my mistreatment around that time and that he’d tried to visit me. But Julieta wouldn’t consent to him seeing me.’
Maya sat listening in a growing pool of horror. She had assumed that he had had it so easy all his life...all that money. But instead, he had lived a nightmare, rich but unloved, neglected while being both over-indulged and abused. All of a sudden she understood so much more about Raffaele Manzini from his apparent lack of emotion to his granite cool. It wasalla front, there to convince everybody, not least him, that he had survived and flourished despite his appalling childhood.
‘What age were you then?’ she whispered.
‘At the time of the beating? Maybe nine... I only remember fragments of it,’ he muttered uncomfortably. ‘Let’s not dwell on this, Maya. It happened, it’s done, it’s over.’
‘But you’re still feeling it, you’re still living it,’ she told him gently.
‘I don’t want to,’ he breathed in a raw bitter undertone. ‘I don’t want tofeelanything!’
‘I know...well...er... I can imagine,’ she whispered ruefully, overwhelmed by her new awareness of the inner self he had successfully concealed from her. She also knew that she would never again feel short-changed for her childhood with parents who were hopeless with money but who had absolutely adored their children and treated them accordingly.
Raffaele snatched in a steadying breath and his ebony brows pleated. ‘How did you get all that out of me?’ he demanded abruptly. ‘I’ve never talked about it before.’
‘I got you at a weak moment. Don’t feel bad—we all have them and sometimes it’s good for you to talk,’ she soothed, looking up into eyes that were pure golden enticement in the sunlight, inky dark lashes enhancing them.
And the silence smouldered.
Raffaele’s grip on her hand tightened and he reached down with his other hand to curve it to her hip and lift her up easily onto his lap. ‘I want you,’ he told her boldly.
Maya rolled her eyes at him. ‘That’s only because you feel ill at ease after telling me all that private stuff. It’s a natural reaction for a macho male personality. You’re trying to compensate.’
‘No, it’s a natural reaction to being with a very beautiful, compassionate woman, who also happens to be my wife,’ Raffaele corrected in a driven undertone. ‘I...want...you.Right here, right now.’
Maya released a long-suffering sigh because he was so irredeemablybasic, in no way adjusted to his own emotional prompts and what drove him at any given moment. ‘Raffaele,’ she began.
A split second after she parted her lips, he forced them apart with the delving lick of his tongue and she gasped. Logic became too steep a hill to climb as the burn of the hunger he could induce in her without effort began to infiltrate her quivering body. Beneath her she could feel him hard and ready, the jeans he sported doing nothing to conceal his arousal, and she felt a piercing pulse of hunger kick up between her thighs even though she still ached there from their earlier encounter. Once again, it rewrote all her assumptions that once that desire was sated, it would stay quiet for a good while and wouldn’t unduly bother her again. All of a sudden she was hot, needy and desperate and twisting on his lap, grinding down on him with ridiculous enthusiasm, making him laugh, rough and low in this throat in that infuriating way of his, as if he knew some things better than she did, which, she finally conceded, he possibly did...
What followed was wild and passionate in a way she had never envisaged herself being. He hauled her up into his arms and carried her into a bedroom with a ridiculously huge bed surrounded by mirrored furniture that threw up far too many disorientating reflections.
‘Yuck,’ she commented on the décor.
‘Sì, I should’ve organised a refurbishment,’ Raffaele muttered in exasperation as he, very briefly, took the opportunity to look around himself and then froze.
Just taking in his pallor, Maya registered that memories had stolen him away from her again and she yanked him down shamelessly on the silly giant bed, slender hands smoothing up over long muscular thighs to gently brush the revealing bulge at his pelvis and, that fast, Raffaele was back in tune with her again, rolling her over on the bed and kissing her breathless. He was frantic for her, which she perfectly understood after the secrets he had shared and the effect on him of having to relive them. What she didnotunderstand was that she should be equally frantic for him. After all, nothing distressing had happened to her. She had merely been an observer, an available listener, yet everything he had confided had somehow touched her too and his pain had distressed her.
When Raffaele flipped her over onto her knees and drove into her with urgent force, that scorching passion was somehow what she expected from him in that moment. She was not surprised or shocked or even standing outside herself marvelling because he had already taught her to expect that wild incredible flood of excitement. The sheer physical release of sex was a necessity for Raffaele after those confessions about his unhappy past. He couldn’t handle the emotions, but he could vent them the only way he knew how. His hunger, his sudden overpowering need for her, was as much an expression of distress as he was capable of making and it both saddened and delighted her that he had turned to her for comfort. Yet that intense sharing of his had released something in her as well, she acknowledged, and made her feel much closer to him.
‘So...’ Maya refused to let go of him in the aftermath because even if he didn’t know it, sheknewhe needed to be held. Her fingers smoothed down his long spine, feeling the slight roughness of scarring there, remembering what he had told her about that beating his mother had inflicted on him. Her eyes prickled and she stroked a soothing hand over his back, wishing fiercely that she could take the pain of that recollection from him, that knowledge that the person who should have most protected him had damaged him instead. He was still struggling to catch his breath and her body was humming with an unbelievable surfeit of pleasure and she pressed her mouth softly across his shoulder in an affectionate caress she could not withhold. ‘Obviously you’re not still planning to stay here in this house.’
‘Why not?’
‘Since it’s clear that this is not a happy place for you,’ Maya retorted bluntly. ‘And what would we do here anyway?’
Raffaele studied her with glittering wicked eyes. ‘What we’re doing now.’
