Yet even as she knew that, she knew something else too—something that cried from her. Something she dared not admit to...
That she wanted, with all her being, for him to have been the man she’d thought he was when she’d been in his arms.
Not who he’d proved—so cruelly and so callously—to be...
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCASATAThis desk in his Milan office, his expression stark. Hemustput behind him the insanity of the act he’d committed in New York. That night of sex with a woman so unlike any other he had ever been with. Sex so intense, so...sotorrid—the hackneyed term twisted his mouth—and so explosive that it could still, a week later, burn in his head like a flaming brand.
Only sanity had prevailed. He had walked out on her. And when he had—when he’d stood by that elevator—he’d endured what he never intended to endure again. Her face twisted with explosive rage as she hurled her accusations. Her vitriolic condemnation of him. And behind him the shocked embarrassment of the occupants of the hotel elevator as they witnessed the scene.
Memory came from much longer ago. His mother, not caring who saw her in her rages. His father enduring it all, long-suffering, brow-beaten, doing nothing to stop the hideous scenes, endlessly trying to placate her, plead with her, making no difference at all to the way she behaved... And himself as a young boy, cowering, hating it, wanting his mother to stop—stop raging, stop being soangry. Wanting her only to hold out her arms to him... But she never, ever did. Never had...
He felt emotion from long, long ago clench within him.
Emotion from much more recently.
Both toxic.
His jaw steeled, eyes hardening. He would consign Ariana Killane and the disastrous night he’d spent with her to oblivion. Only one woman mattered—the woman of his dreams. The woman he was going to marry. And this very weekend he would stake his claim to her.
There was only one woman, from now on, whom he would ever permit to exist for him.
And it was not—not—Ariana Killane.
Ariana stepped back, staring at her colour board. With a frown of concentration she removed one of the fabric swatches pinned to it, replacing it with another from the clutch she held in her left hand. Yes, that was better. She reached for her camera, reeling off shots to send to her client, together with her detailed proposal.
It would take her till late this evening to complete it, together with the costings and timeframes, but she welcomed the work. Since returning from New York she’d done everything in her power not to let herself remember what had happened there. Yet every time she lost focus on work memory leapt—every searing detail of that unforgettable night...
Until she crashed and burned on the memory of what had come after it.
Thatwas all she should allow herself to remember! That hideous morning-after, when Luca Farnese had shown her just what the night had meant to him.
Nothing—less than nothing...
A mistake. That had been his curt dismissal of it.
Whereas for her...
She felt an ache possess her—an ache for something she tried so hard not to admit. An ache for what had never happened...
And yet it haunted her still with longing.
Waking in his arms, seeing him smiling at me, him kissing me, warmth in his eyes...Ordering breakfast—breakfast in bed—making love again afterwards... Then getting up and dressed...wandering hand in hand through Central Park...finding somewhere to have lunch. We’d talk about ourselves and tell each other everything, laugh and kiss... And he would tell me how glad he was we’d found each other, how amazing our night together was, how special I was to him...
Instead—
‘I’m getting married.’
That was what he had said to her. It had been the indifference of his dismissal, the coldness in his face, his voice—the callousness of what he’d done to her—that had made her call him out for what he was, and her words had been as accurate as they were crude, as she’d hurled them at him in her fury.
The recollection of her blind, humiliated rage was her only comfort now—all that she could cling to along with the shreds of her self-respect. Yet it could not assuage the accusation still lacerating her, the knowledge of her own stupidity and the folly of what she had done.
Her expression hardened, face tightening. Well, she had learnt a lesson, that was for sure! One of the many in her life she’d learnt about not being wanted, not being valued.
Like her father wanting only her grandfather’s money, not the daughter he had conceived. Like her mother preferring whoever her latest husband was to her daughter, jaunting off and leaving her with the grandfather who had only ever found fault with her. Like the grandfather so scathing in his condemnation of everything about her, with his endless unfavourable comparisons with her cousin, so meek and docile.
Like being used as some kind of disposable throwaway sex toy by Luca Farnese, before he headed back to the woman he was going to marry.