Frowning slightly, puzzled by both the cryptic remark and what he had tossed to her, she looked down to find that she was holding the keys to the Mercedes in her hand.
Her frown deepened, and for a confused moment she actually wondered if he was ordering her to go and garage the car! Then enlightenment struck. The sardonic words began to make sense.
He had not been watching their son; he had been watching her. And the sweetener remark had been a sarcastic reference to her reaction to the confidence with which Santo knew his place here!
But, worse than that, the keys had not been tossed to her to use to garage anything.
Vito was making her a gift of this beautiful Mercedes!
Her eyes shot up to clash with his, shaded lenses trying to probe through shaded lenses in an effort to try and discover before she responded if this was some kind of joke! Out here beneath his native skies he looked more the arrogant Italian than he had ever done. The darkness of his hair, the richness of his skin and the proud angle at which he held his head all sent the kind of tingling messages running through her that she did not like to feel.
Sexual messages. Without her being able to do a single thing to control it, the soft, springy cluster of curls nestling at the crown of her thighs began to tingle and stir beneath the covering of her thin jade summer dress. And her nipples gave a couple of sharp pricking stings in response.
It was awful, like being bewitched. She even found it shamefully sexy to note the way he had rolled up the sleeves on his pale blue shirt—as if it came as supremely natural for him to have them settle at just the right place to draw attention to the hair-peppered strength in his forearms.
‘I can’t accept this!’ she burst out shrilly—and secretly wondered if it was the car or the man’s sexual pull that she was refusing to accept. ‘It’s too much, Vito,’ she tagged on hurriedly. ‘And I have a car tucked away here somewhere,’ she remembered, glancing around her as if she expected her little Fiat runabout to suddenly appear of its own volition.
‘It lost the will to live over a year ago,’ he informed her with yet more dry sarcasm. ‘When no one else bothered to use it.’
And when she still hovered there in the sunlight, so conditioned to accepting nothing from Vito that she couldn’t bring herself to accept this gift now, she heard him release a small sigh. ‘Just bite the bullet and say thank you graciously,’ he grimly suggested.
‘As gracious as you were in offering the car to me?’ she couldn’t resist flashing back.
His grimace acknowledged her thrust as a hit. And he opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was stalled by the sudden appearance of his mother on the terrace.
In her sixties now, Luisa was still a truly beautiful woman. Only slightly smaller than Catherine, and naturally slender, she was a walking advert for eternal youth. Her skin was as smooth as any twenty-year-old’s, and her hair kept its blackness with only the occasional help from her talented hairdresser.
But it was the inner Luisa that drew people to her like bees to the sweetest honeypot ever found. There wasn’t a selfish bone in her body. She was good, she was kind, she was instinctively loving. And if she had one teeny-teeny fault, then it was an almost painful refusal to see bad in anyone.
And that included her daughter-in-law, most definitely her son, and of course her goddaughter—Marietta.
‘Darling, I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to see you standing here!’ Luisa murmured sincerely as she walked down the steps and right into Catherine’s open embrace. ‘And you look so lovely!’ she
declared as she drew away again. ‘Vittorio, the Giordani eye for true beauty did not escape you,’ his mother informed him. ‘This woman will still be a source of pride to you when you are both old and grey.’
Off with the old, on with the new, Catherine wryly chanted to herself. In true Luisa form she was discarding the last three intensely hostile years as if they’d never happened.
‘Come,’ Luisa said, linking her arm through Catherine’s and turning them both towards the house. ‘Santo is already raiding the kitchen for snacks, and I have a light tea prepared in the summer room. The special carrier bringing your luggage will not be here for another couple of hours, so we have time to sit and have a long chat before you need worry about overseeing your unpacking...’
Behind her, Catherine was aware of Vito’s shaded gaze following them as arm in arm they mounted the steps. And there was an unexpected urge in her to turn round and invite him to come and join them. But somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. That kind of gesture had no place in what they had with each other.
Yet...
With her fingers curling around the bunch of keys she still held in her palm, she paused on the top step that formed the beginning of the wide terrace.
‘Wait,’ she murmured to Luisa. And on impulse turned and strode back down the steps to where Vito was still standing where they had left him.
An excuse? she asked herself as she drew to a stop in front of him. Had she needed an excuse to justify coming back to him? Yes, it was an excuse, she answered her own question. And, yes, she needed one to approach Vito in any way shape or form.
‘Thank you for the car,’ she murmured politely.
He was gazing down at her through those dratted glasses, though in a way she was glad they were there so she didn’t have to read his expression.
She saw his mouth twitch. ‘My pleasure,’ he drawled with super-silken sardonicism.
It put her set teeth on edge. ‘I really do appreciate the thought,’ she added through them.
‘My heart is gladdened by your sincerity,’ he replied with taunting whimsy.