Luca slotted his car into his section of the underground car park at the block of luxury apartments in which he owned the entire top floor, parking it between his low-slung supercar and the top-of-the-range SUV he drove when heading for the Lakes or the Alps. Cutting the engine, he looked at Ariana asleep beside him. In repose, even in the dim light of the car park, she looked...
Beautiful.
The word was in his head before he could stop it. His eyes rested on her. Her head was tilted back, in three-quarter profile. The shadows under her eyes seemed less deep, the perfection of the sculpted features more accentuated. Her mouth more tender.
There was something familiar about her—and yet somethingunfamiliar. Something that was not her as he remembered her. Something...
Like Mia.
His gaze flickered. For the first time he could see the family resemblance. Their parents, after all, had been siblings...
He shook himself mentally. Cousins the two of them might be, Mia and Ariana, but in temperament, and in character, they could not be more different. And yet it was a disturbing thing, to see the faint resemblance between them, even though one was so dark and one so fair, one so gentle and one so—
Memory flared in him. Ariana, hurling her vitriolic denunciation at him in that elevator lobby in New York, her face contorted—as contorted as it had been at the hotel in Lucca—telling him to go to hell. The memories fused. Fused with more. His mother’s rages...
He thrust open his car door to banish the memories—all of them—and the sound awakened Ariana. She opened her eyes, startled.
‘We’re here,’ he told her, getting out of the car, going around to the boot to remove her suitcase.
She got out too, following him wordlessly to the elevator. It swept them up to his penthouse apartment. Inside, he led the way from the entrance hall down a short corridor, opening up a door.
‘Your bedroom,’ he said.
He went in, deposited her suitcase, and Ariana followed him in, gazing about her, saying nothing still.
‘Freshen up,’ he said, ‘then join me in the lounge.’
She didn’t answer, and he left her. Emotions were roiling inside him again, and he needed to be away from her right now.
He strode into his own bedroom—the master suite. It occupied the other flank, away from the entrance hall. It seemed prudent to put as much space between them as the apartment afforded.
More than prudent.
Essential.
CHAPTER NINE
ARIANALIFTEDTHElid of her suitcase, got out her toiletries bag, then disappeared into the en suite bathroom. It was as starkly modern as the bedroom. She washed her face and hands, staring for a while at her reflection. A blank-faced woman looked back at her with nothing in her eyes. Nothing at all.
Why did I come here? Why did I get into that car...let him drive me here?
Why had she not raged, or screamed, or run, or fought...?
But she knew the answer—had known it from the moment she had set eyes on him on the pavement. With a sense of exhaustion, inevitability—defeat.
There had been no point in not going with him. Now that he knew about the baby everything had changed.
She heard again his voice, saying what was unbelievable—unthinkable. Impossible even to contemplate.
‘We shall marry.’
She pushed herself away from the vanity unit. Why had he even bothered to say it? Ofcoursethey would not marry...
Another wave of exhaustion ran through her—not physical as such, but far deeper. For now, all she could do was what she was doing. Not thinking, not feeling...not wanting to. It was all she had the energy for.
She emerged from the bathroom, feeling fresher in face than in spirit, then left the bedroom, making her way back down the corridor and into the front hall. A huge reception room opened off it. Again, the décor was starkly modern. Punishingly expensive. She could tell that at a glance. Plate glass windows marched down the far wall, and a wide terrace was beyond, illuminated with bold lights. To the right, a dining room opened up, and beyond it she could glimpse a kitchen.
Then Luca was walking in. He had changed out of his business suit, swapping it for well-cut trousers and a cashmere sweater, and Ariana frowned. She had never, she realised, seen him in casual wear. In New York he’d been in a tux, in Lucca in a business suit. And in church, at his wedding, he’d been in a morning suit.