The awful thing was that Willow secretly agreed with him. Her sisters were crazy about diamonds—and so were plenty of the women she worked with—yet she’d always found them a cold and emotionless stone. The giant solitaire winked at her now like some malevolent foe, splashing rainbow fire over her pale fingers as Dante emerged from the bathroom.
Quickly, she looked up, her heart beginning to pound. She’d been half expecting him to emerge wearing nothing but a towel slung around his hips, and guessed she should be pleased that he must have dressed in the bathroom. But her overriding sensation was one of disappointment. Had she secretly been hoping to catch a glimpse of that magnificent olive body as he patted himself dry? Was there some masochistic urge lurking inside her which wanted to taunt her with what she hadn’t got?
Yet the dark trousers and silk shirt he wore did little to disguise his muscular physique and his fully dressed state did nothing to dim his powerful air of allure. His black hair was still damp and his eyes looked intensely blue, and suddenly Willow felt her heart lurch with a dizzying yet wasted sense of desire. Because since that interrupted seduction at her sister’s wedding, he hadn’t touched her. Not once. He had avoided all physical contact with the studied exaggeration of someone in the military walking through a field studded with landmines.
His gaze flickered to where she’d been studying her hand and his eyes gleamed with mockery. As if he’d caught her gloating. ‘Do you like your ring?’
‘It looks way too big on my hand,’ she said truthfully. ‘And huge solitaire diamonds aren’t really my thing.’
He raised his dark brows mockingly, as if he didn’t quite believe her.
‘But they have a much better resale value than something bespoke,’ he drawled.
‘Of course,’ she said, and then a rush of nerves washed over her as she thought about the reality of going to dinner that evening and playing the part of his intended bride. ‘You know, if we’re planning to convince your grandfather that we really are a couple, then I’m going to need to know something about you. And if you could try being a little less hostile towards me that might help.’
He slipped a pair of heavy gold cufflinks in place and clipped them closed before answering. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’
She wanted to know why he was so cynical. And why his face had darkened as soon as the helicopter had landed here today.
‘You told me about being sent away to boarding school in Switzerland, but you didn’t say why.’
‘Does there have to be a reason?’
She hesitated. ‘I’m thinking that maybe there was. And if there was, then I would probably know about it.’
Dante’s instinct was to snap out some terse response—the familiar blocking technique he used whenever questions strayed into the territory of personal. Because he didn’t trust personal. He didn’t trust anyone or anything, and Willow Hamilton was no exception in the trust stakes, with her manipulation and evasion. But suddenly her face had become soft with what looked like genuine concern and he felt a tug of something unfamiliar deep inside him. An inexplicable urge to colour in some of the blank spaces of his past. Was that because he wanted his grandfather to die happy by convincing him that he’d found true love at last? Or because—despite her careless tongue landing them in this ridiculous situation—she possessed a curious sense of vulnerability which somehow managed to burrow beneath his defences.
His lips tightened as he reminded himself how clever Giovanni was. How he would see through a fake engagement in the blinking of an eye if he wasn’t careful. So tell her, he thought. She was right. He should tell her the stuff which any fiancée would expect to know.
‘I’m one of seven children,’ he said, shooting out the facts like bullets. ‘And my grandfather stepped in to care for us when my parents died very suddenly.’
‘And...how did they die?’
‘Violently,’ he answered succinctly.
Her eyes clouded and Dante saw comprehension written in their soft, grey depths. As if she understood pain. And he didn’t want her to understand. He wanted her to nod as he presented her with the bare facts—not look at him as if he was some kind of problem she could solve.
Yet there had been times when he’d longed for someone to work their magic on him. He stared out at the distant glitter of the lake. To find a woman he’d be happy to go to bed with, night after night—instead of suffering from chronic boredom as soon as anyone tried to get close to him. To find some kind of peace with another human being?
?the kind of peace which seemed almost unimaginable to him. Was that how his twin had felt about Anais? he wondered.
He thought about Dario and felt the bitter twist of remorse as he remembered what he had done to his brother.
‘What exactly happened?’ Willow was asking.
Her gentle tone threatened to undermine his resolve. Making him want to show her what his life had been like. To show her that she didn’t have the monopoly on difficult childhoods. And suddenly, it was like a dam breaking through and flooding him.
‘My father was a screwed-up hedonist,’ he said bluntly. ‘A kid with too much money who saw salvation in the bottom of a bottle, or in the little pile of white dust he snorted through a hundred dollar bill.’ His lips tightened. ‘He blamed his addictions on the fact that my grandfather had never been there for him when he was growing up—but plenty of people have absent parents and don’t end up having to live their lives on a constant high.’
‘And what about your mother?’ she questioned as calmly as if he’d just been telling her that his father had been president of the Union.
He shook his head. ‘She was cut from the same cloth. Or maybe he taught her to be that way—I don’t know. All I do know is that she liked the feeling of being out of her head as well. Or maybe she needed to blot out the reality, because my father wasn’t exactly known for his fidelity. Their parties were legendary. I remember I used to creep downstairs to find it looking like some kind of Roman orgy, with people lying around among the empty bottles and glasses and the sounds of women gasping in the pool house. And then one day my mother just stopped. She started seeing a therapist and went into rehab, and although she replaced the drink and the drugs with a shopping addiction, for a while everything was...’ He shrugged as he struggled to find a word which would sum up the chaos of his family life.
‘Normal?’
He gave a short and bitter laugh. ‘No, Willow. It was never normal, but it was better. In fact, for a while it was great. We felt we’d got our mother back. And then...’
‘Then?’ she prompted again.