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What would Bea do?
She wouldn’t have let him in.
Get a grip! Beatrice wasn’t here, she was, and she couldn’t let Beatrice fight her battles any more. Maya was never going to give in to a bully, not ever again.
She got between him and the bedroom door, and she turned to face the advancing figure, who suddenly seemed about ten feet tall, raising her hands as if she could actually physically stop him. She knew she’d have had more chance of stopping a hurricane! It struck her that the analogy was very apt—there was something truly elemental about him.
‘There are rules,’ she said, refusing to give ground. ‘Ground rules.’
He looked astonished.‘Rules...?’
‘If Mattio has fallen asleep again, don’t wake him up—please.’
She held her breath, once again seeing in her head the image of herself being lifted bodily by two strong hands—which produced another worryingly ambiguous reaction low in her stomach.
She cleared her throat. ‘It took a long time for him to settle.’
Sam looked from the door to her pleading face and after a moment he nodded.
Her relief seemed genuine. ‘So, what is Violetta playing at? What little scheme have you two been hatching?’ he asked.
‘I hate to ruin a conspiracy theory with inconvenient things like facts, but there is no scheme or hatching, there is nous two.’
‘She is your sister, isn’t she?’ The fact that she looked sexily wholesome on the surface made her far more dangerous than her overtly glamorous but entirely toxic sister.
‘Half-sister, actually.’
‘She ran to you, left her baby with you, so you two must be close.’
A little laugh escaped Maya’s parted lips. ‘I hadn’t even met her before last night when she turned up with Mattio.’
Unlikely as it sounded, Samuele found he was inclined to believe the ring of truth in her voice.
‘So she’s using you. Typical.’
‘No, she’s not... Do not twist everything I say.’
‘So when did she leave?’
There seemed very little to gain from not telling him. ‘I’m not sure. I woke up, and there was a note...’ Maya’s hand went to her pocket. ‘She seems really desperate.’
He laughed and said something that sounded pretty rude in Italian before he tacked on a polite translation in English. ‘She isreallydevious.’
‘She’s probably suffering from postnatal depression—new mothers needsupport, you know.’ As if he’d know the meaning of the word, she thought, throwing a look of seething contempt at him.
‘She left her baby and you’restilldefending her. You really don’t know your sister very well at all, do you?’
‘I know enough, about her and about you too...’
His dark eyes narrowed on her flushed face his expression assessing as his long lashes rested briefly on the cutting angle of his cheekbones. ‘Ah, so my reputation precedes me,’ he drawled with a slow smile that Maya found almost as disturbing as his apparent ability to read her mind. ‘So what has the absent mother been saying? Actually, don’t bother, I can guess most of it, but maybe you should allow for a little bit of artistic licence on her part.’
‘You probably make her feel inadequate!’
‘Projection, much?’
The hot angry colour flew to her cheeks. ‘You don’t make me feel inadequate.’ Her chin lifted to another defiant angle as she claimed boldly, ‘Nobody makes me feel inadequate.’
The overreaction hinted at a vulnerability that was none of his business, he told himself, swiftly closing down that line of speculation.
