Innocent of His Claim. Janette Kenny
it matter now? Too much had happened between them. He was more jaded than ever before and she was as well or she wouldn’t be this cautious, this remote.
“Fine,” she huffed out, crossing her arms and staring militantly out the window. “Forget I asked.”
He caught himself smiling at her show of temper, admiring that steel that ran down her spine. A gentleman would comply with her request. But he was no gentleman.
“It is roughly twenty kilometers south of the villa. Half an hour by car.” He stared at her profile, willing her to face him. “Less if I’m driving.”
She continued her vigil out the window but he thought some of the tension eased from her narrow shoulders, that the slightest hint of a smile teased her soft lips. “How long before we reach the villa?”
“It should not take more than twenty minutes,” he said, answering as calmly as she’d asked, keeping his tone low, intimate, as she’d done.
It didn’t require a response and she didn’t offer one. That was for the best. More than ever he needed to get back to the reason she was here.
Theirs was simply a working relationship. Anything beyond that was too great a risk.
Yet instead of relaxing, his heart accelerated even more during the drive to the Cabriotini villa. The easy explanation was his own unease at returning here, far easier than admitting his thoughts were on Delanie.
The simple truth was this mansion wasn’t home to him and never would be. The moment he was away from it, he put the man who’d lived and wasted his life and fortune here completely out of his thoughts.
If he could just do the same regarding the enticing woman beside him. She’d plagued his sleep too often over the years. He’d convinced himself he’d hated her.
A damned lie.
He distrusted her but he didn’t hate her. He wanted her with the same fire that had burned in him ten years ago.
The conundrum for him was how to put that fire out?
His gaze flicked to hers and his body stirred more than it had in ages. What the hell was it about this woman? Dare he hope he could get her out of his system? That he could move on?
Overindulgence. Too much of a good thing could sour a man. Perhaps that was what was needed now.
CHAPTER FOUR
DELANIE had caught glimpses of elegant mansions nestled among the hills throughout the drive and had expected Cabriotini Villa to be along the same order. But the moment the auto pulled into an iron-gated drive that swung open automatically, she knew this estate was far grander than any she’d seen so far. Perhaps more so than any she’d visited in England.
For one thing, the villa claimed a commanding view of the valley, perched on a knoll overlooking perfectly aligned fields of grapevines laden with plump purple and blush fruits. On the surrounding fields, groves of olives lined up in precise rows, their leaves shimmering silver in the sun, their black and deep green fruit glistening like jewels.
“Welcome to Cabriotini,” Marco said as the driver sped up a long drive flanked by poplars standing like sentinels.
The sun popping through their dense tops created a dappled effect, as if they were waving Marco home. Only instead of a smile he wore a pensive expression as if he dreaded coming here.
“You don’t care for your ancestral home, do you?” she asked at last.
“I am only here temporarily—this isn’t my home. It’s the estate bequeathed to me and Bella by the man who sired us, and it’s where we’ve lived since discovering our paternity.”
She blinked, stunned by his vehement tone. “That’s a rather impersonal way to refer to your father and your sister.”
He cut her a look that made her shiver. “Antonio Cabriotini wasn’t my father. His seed gave me life. I never spoke with the man. Never met him though I saw him once from a distance long before I was told I had any connection to him.”
An uneasy silence rippled between then. “He must have known who you were.”
He shrugged. “I doubt it. Cabriotini didn’t attempt to look for his bastards until he was dying. That’s when he decided to find an heir.”
She offered a thin smile. “He wanted you then.”
Marco laughed, the bitter sound mirroring his dislike of his paternity. “Don’t paint this into something homey. He detested the thought of leaving his wealth to a distant cousin in Majorca. So he hired investigators to discover if he’d sired any bastards in Italy.” He gave a gruff snort. “Cabriotini’s attorney hit the jackpot, finding my young sister and then me some months after the investigation was launched.”
She winced, her burning cheeks surely as pink as the roses clustered against an ivory wall. “He must have been a very miserable man.”
“Cabriotini lived hard and played hard and enjoyed a procession of mistresses. According to them, he made it clear to every women he bedded that he would deny any ‘mistakes’ that might evolve from a liaison.” His mouth pulled into that pained smile again and she shifted away from the car door without realizing she’d done so.
Not that Marco noticed. His gaze was riveted out the window again, his broad shoulders so stiff she imagined them lashed to a steel girder.
She worried her lower lip, wanting to avoid a scene. God knew she’d endured enough of them in her life.
“You haven’t been a family for very long then,” she ventured, thinking by diverting the conversation to his sister again it could qualify a bit as her doing her job.
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