Modern Romance - The Best of the Year

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN SAM HEARD the telltale purr of a powerful engine as she lay in bed that night she looked at her clock in disbelief. It was before midnight and Rafaele was home? Home. She grimaced at how easily that had slipped into her mind.

Feeling like a teenager, but unable to help herself, she got out of bed and went to her window, pulling back the curtain ever so slightly. Her heart was thumping. Rafaele hadn’t got out of the car yet, and even from here she could see his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly.

Sam had the uncanny feeling that he was imagining the wheel was her neck. Then suddenly the door opened and he got out, unfolding his huge frame from the sleek low-slung vehicle. In any other instance Sam would have sighed in sheer awe at the stunningly designed lines.

She stopped breathing as she took in Rafaele, just standing there for a moment. He wore a tuxedo. Sam knew from past experience that he had a dressing room and fully stocked wardrobe at his office. His shirt was open at the throat, his bow tie hanging rakishly undone.

Rafaele shut the car door and then surprised her by leaning back against the car and putting his hands deep in his pockets, crossing his long legs at the ankle. He looked down, and something about him was so intensely lonely that Sam felt like a voyeur. She hated the way her heart clenched.

She’d been so stunned to see him again that she hadn’t really contemplated how much of a shock it must have been for him discovering he had a son. He would never forgive her.

Sam quickly shut the curtain again and climbed back into bed, feeling cold from the inside. Eventually she heard the opening and closing of the front door, and then heavy footsteps. She held her breath for a moment when she fancied they stopped outside her door, and then, when she heard the faintest sounds of another door closing, let her breath out in a shuddery whoosh.

About an hour later Sam gave up any pretence of trying to sleep. She threw back the covers and padded softly out of her bedroom. All was quiet and still. She looked in on Milo, who was sprawled across his bed fast asleep, and then made her way to the kitchen to get some water. She was halfway into the room before she realised she wasn’t alone.

She gave a small yelp of shock when she saw Rafaele in the corner of the kitchen, in low-slung faded jeans, bare feet and a T-shirt, calmly lifting a coffee cup to his lips.

She put a hand to her rapid heart. ‘You scared me. I thought you were in bed.’

Rafaele arched a brow mockingly. ‘Don’t tell me—you couldn’t sleep until you knew I was home safe?’

Sam scowled and hated that he’d caught her like this: sleep-mussed, wearing nothing but brief pants and a threadbare V-necked T-shirt.

Anger rushed through her. Anger at the day she’d spent with her thoughts revolving sickeningly around one person—him. Anger that she had to face him like this in what she would have once considered her sanctuary. And, worst of all, anger at herself for not having told him about Milo when she should have.

Feeling emotional, and terrified he’d see it, she stalked to the sink. ‘I’m just getting some water. I couldn’t sleep and it has nothing to do with you coming home or not.’

Liar.

Sam heard his voice over the gush of water.

‘I couldn’t sleep either.’

Sam remembered the intensely lonely air about him as he’d waited outside before coming in. Now she felt guilty for having witnessed it. She held the glass of water in both hands and turned, feeling disorientated.

She looked at the coffee cup and remarked dryly, ‘Well, that’s hardly likely to help matters.’

Rafaele shrugged and drained the coffee, the strong column of his throat working. He put the cup down. ‘When I couldn’t sleep I came down to do some work.’

His gaze narrowed on her then, and Sam’s skin prickled. She gripped the glass tighter.

He drawled, ‘But as I’m just a guest in your house perhaps I should ask for permission?’

Sam’s anger was back just like that. Anger at herself for thinking she’d seen Rafaele vulnerable even for a moment. ‘But you’re not really a guest, are you? You’re here to punish me, to make me pay for not telling you about your son.’

Feeling agitated, Sam put down the glass, sloshing some water over the side. She clenched her hands and rounded on Rafaele. ‘I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about Milo. I should have, and I didn’t. And I’m sorry.’

Rafaele went very still and put his hands in his pockets. The air thickened between them and swirled with electricity. He looked relaxed, but Sam could tell he was as tense as she was.

‘Why?’

One word, a simple question, and Sam felt something crumble inside her. He hadn’t actually asked her that yet. He’d asked her how she could have, but not why.

She looked down and put her arms around herself in an unconscious gesture of defence, unaware of how it pushed her breasts up and unaware of how Rafaele’s eyes dropped there for a moment or the flush that darkened his cheekbones. She was only aware of her own inner turmoil. She would never be brave enough to tell him of her hurt and her own secret suspicion that it had been that weak emotion that had been her main motivator. She was too ashamed.

She steeled herself and looked up. Rafaele’s eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘It was for all the reasons I’ve already told you, Rafaele. I was in shock. I’d almost lost my baby only days after finding out that I was pregnant in the first place. It was all...too much. And I truly believed you had no interest—that you would prefer if I just went away and didn’t bother you again.’

She almost quailed at the way his jaw tightened but went on. ‘My father was not really there for me. Ever. Even though he brought me up and we lived in this house together. He didn’t know how to relate to me. What I needed. I think...I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping Milo from a similar experience.’

Rafaele crossed his arms too, making his muscles bunch. It felt as if something was fizzing between them under the words. A subtext that was alive. All she could see was that powerful body. Lean and hard.

‘You had no right.’

Sam looked at him, willing down the way her body insisted on being divorced from her mind, becoming aroused as if nothing had happened between them. As if he didn’t hate her.

‘I know,’ she said flatly. ‘But it happened, and you’re going to have to let it go or Milo will pick up on it—especially now you’re living here too.’

Anger surged within Rafaele at her pronouncement. He uncrossed his arms, unable to disguise his frustration. Sam was standing before him, and despite the charged atmosphere and the words between them he was acutely aware that all he wanted to do was rip that flimsy T-shirt over her head and position her on the counter behind her so that he could thrust deep into her and obliterate all the questions and turmoil in his head.

When she’d walked into the room all he’d seen had been the tantalising shape of her firm breasts, their pointed tips visible through the thin fabric. Her sleep-mussed hair had reminded him of when she’d been on top of him, riding him, her head falling back...

Desire was like a wild thing inside him, clawing for fulfilment. It wasn’t helped by the fact that in a bid to prove that Sam didn’t have this unique effect on him, he’d found himself hitting on his friend’s mistress at the function earlier. Flirting with her, handing her his card—desperate to provoke some response in his flatlining libido. He’d acted completely out of character, managed to insult his friend Andreas Xenakis, and he’d proved nothing.

Except that he wanted this woman more than ever.

He hated her. But he wanted her. And he wanted his son.

‘Let it go?’ he asked now with deceptive softness, and something in him exulted when he saw how Sam paled slightly. ‘I think I’ve more than proved myself to be accommodating where my son and your deception are concerned.’

Rafaele knew he was reacting to Sam’s almost patronising tone and to his anger at this inconvenient desire.

His lip curled. ‘Do you really think I would be here in the suburbs with you if it wasn’t in my son’s best interests? Do you really think I want you working at the factory for any reason other than because I want to keep you where I can see your every treacherous move?’

She paled even more at that, and Rafaele felt something lance him deep inside, but he couldn’t stop.

‘You’ve put us all in this position by choosing the path that you did. By believing that you knew best. Well, now I know best and you’re just going to have to live with it. You’re going to have to let it go, Samantha.’

The hurt Sam felt at Rafaele’s words shamed her. He looked as hard and obdurate as a granite block just feet away. And as unyielding. The thought of them ever reaching some sort of amicable agreement felt like the biggest and most ludicrous fantasy on earth. And yet between her legs her panties chafed uncomfortably against swollen slick folds of flesh. She wanted to scream out her frustration at her wayward body.

Just before he’d fallen asleep earlier Milo had asked, in a small, hesitant voice, ‘Will the man...I mean Rafelli...will he remember to take me in the car tomorrow?’

Anger at Rafaele’s assertion that he was doing his utmost to think of Milo when all he seemed to be concerned about was needling her made her lash out. ‘You might feel like you’re sacrificing your glamorous life for your son, Rafaele, but when will you get bored and want out? Milo has been talking about you all day. He’s terrified you won’t remember to take him out in the car tomorrow. He’s fast heading for hero-worship territory and he’ll be devastated if you keep leading him on this path only to disappear from his life.’

Sam was breathing heavily. ‘This is what I wanted to avoid all along. Milo’s vulnerable. He doesn’t understand what’s going on between us. You can punish me all you want, Rafaele, but it’s Milo who matters now. And I can’t say sorry again.’

Rafaele was completely unreadable, but Sam sensed his tension spike.

‘What makes you think that I am going to disappear from Milo’s life?’

The words were softly delivered, but Sam could sense the volcanic anger behind them.

‘You know what I mean. You’re not going to stay here for ever. You’ll leave sooner or later. Milo will be confused. Upset.’

Sam was aware that she could have been talking about herself, about what had happened to her.

Panic at the way Rafaele took a step closer made Sam’s breath choppy. Instinctively she moved back. ‘I think this was a very bad idea. I think you should move out before he gets too attached. You can visit us. That way he won’t be so upset when you leave...we’ll have proper boundaries.’

‘Boundaries, you say?’ His accent sounded thicker. ‘Like the kind of boundaries you put around yourself and my son when you decided that it would be a good idea not to inform me of his existence?’

‘You’re just...not about commitment, Rafaele. You said it yourself to me over and over again. And a child is all about commitment—a lifetime of it.’

Rafaele was so close now that she could see veritable sparks shooting from those green depths.

His voice was low and blistering. ‘How dare you patronise me? You have had the experience of giving birth to a baby and all the natural bonding that goes with it—a bonding experience you decided to deny me. I now have the task of bonding with my son when his personality is practically formed. He has missed out on the natural bonding between a father and son. You have deprived us both of that.’

He stopped in front of her and Sam found it hard to concentrate when she could smell his musky heat. The anger within her was vying with something far hotter and more dangerous.

‘I can give my son a lifetime of commitment. That is not a problem. If and when I do leave this place he will know I am his father. He will be as much a part of me and my life as the very air I breathe.’

His eyes pinned her to the spot.

‘Know this, Sam. I am in Milo’s life now, and yours, and I’m not going away. I am his father and I am not shirking that responsibility. You and I are going to have to learn to co-exist.’

Sam’s arms were so tight now that she felt she might be constricting the bloodflow to her brain. ‘I’m willing to try to co-exist, Rafaele. But sooner or later you’ll have to forgive me, or we’ll never move on.’

* * *

Rafaele stood for a long moment after Sam had left, his heart still racing. She had no idea how close he’d come to reaching for her, pulling her into him so that he could taste her again.

Sooner or later you’ll have to forgive me.

For the first time Rafaele didn’t feel the intense anger surge. Instead he thought of Sam’s stricken pale features that day in the clinic. He remembered his own sense of panic, and the awful shameful relief when he could run away, far and fast, and put Sam and the emotions she’d evoked within him behind him.

For the first time he had to ask the question: if he’d been in her position would he have done the same thing? If he’d believed that his baby was unwanted by one parent? It wasn’t so black and white any more. Rafaele had to admit to the role he’d played.

Completely unbidden a memory came to him of something Sam had told him one night while they’d been lying in bed. It was something he avoided like the plague—the post-coital intimacy that women seemed engineered to pursue—but this hadn’t been like that. Sam had started telling him something and then stopped. He’d urged her on.

It was her mention of her relationship with her father just a short while before that had brought it back to him. She’d told him then of how one night, when she’d been about six, she’d not been able to sleep. She’d come downstairs and found her father weeping silently over a picture of his late wife—Sam’s mother.

Sam had said, ‘He was talking to her...the picture...asking her what to do with me, asking her how he could cope because I was a girl. He said, “If she was a boy I’d know what to do...but I don’t know what to do or say to her.”’

Sam had sighed deeply. ‘So I went upstairs to the bathroom that night, found a pair of scissors and cut all my hair off. It used to fall to my waist. When our housekeeper saw me in the morning she screamed and dropped a plate.’

Sam’s mouth had twisted sadly. ‘My father, though, he didn’t even notice—too distracted with a problem he was trying to solve. I thought I could try to be a son for him...’

Rafaele could remember a falling sensation. Sam’s inherent lack of self-confidence in her innate sensuality had all made sense. He too had known what it was like to have an absentee father. Even though he’d spent time with his father growing up, the man had been so embittered by his wife leaving him that he’d been no use to Rafaele and had rarely expressed much interest in his son. In some small part Rafaele knew that even resurrecting the family car industry had been a kind of effort to connect with his father.

It had been that weekend that Rafaele had let Sam stay in his palazzo. It had been that weekend that he’d postponed an important business trip because he’d wanted her too much to leave. And it was after that weekend, once he’d gained some distance from her, that he’d realised just how dangerous she was to him.

And he’d just proved that nothing had changed. She was still just as dangerous and he must never forget it.

* * *

The following day Milo was practically bursting with excitement at being in Rafaele’s car. It was the latest model of the Falcone road car—the third to be rolled out since Rafaele had taken control of the bankrupt company.

It was completely impractical as far as children went, but Rafaele had surprised Sam. She’d seen that he’d got a child’s car seat from somewhere and had it fitted into the backseat. Every time Sam looked around Milo just grinned at her like a loon. She shook her head ruefully as Rafaele negotiated out of the driveway and onto the main road with confident ease.

Sam tried to ignore his big hands on the wheel and gearstick. But there was something undeniably sexy about a man who handled a car well—and especially one like this, which was more like an art form than a car. Rafaele was a confident driver, and not the kind of person who felt the need for speed just to impress.

Happy sounds were coming from the back of the car—Milo imitating the engine. Sam felt a flutter near her heart and blocked it out. Dangerous. She still felt tense after that impassioned exchange the previous evening. Predictably, she hadn’t been able to sleep well and she felt fuzzy now. She’d avoided looking directly at Rafaele this morning over breakfast, preferring to let Milo take centre stage, demanding the attention of this new, charismatic person in their midst.

Rafaele had seemed equally keen to be distracted, and Sam could only wonder if he’d taken anything of what she’d said to heart. Was he prepared to forgive her at all?

Sam noticed that Milo had gone silent behind them and looked back to see that he’d fallen asleep. Rafaele glanced her way and Sam quickly looked forward again, saying a little too breathlessly for her liking, ‘He was so excited about today... He doesn’t really nap any more but sometimes it catches up with him.’

She was babbling, and the thought of increased proximity to Rafaele when she started working with him tomorrow made her feel panicky. She steeled herself and turned to his proud profile. The profile of a great line of aristocratic Italian ancestors.

‘Look, Rafaele...about me working at the factory...’ She saw his jaw clench and rushed on. ‘You said yourself last night that you’re only doing it to keep me where you can see me. I can work perfectly well from the university. After last night I can’t see how our working together will improve things.’

His hands clenched on the wheel now, and Sam looked at them, so strong and large. She recalled how hot they’d felt exploring her body.

Distracted, she almost missed it when Rafaele said in a low voice, with clear reluctance, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t entirely true.’

Sam gulped and looked back at him. ‘It wasn’t?’ Somewhere a tiny flame lit inside her, and against every atom of self-preservation she couldn’t douse it.

‘After all,’ he reminded her, ‘I contacted you about working for me before I knew about Milo and you refused to listen.’

The panic she’d felt then was still vivid. ‘Yes,’ she said faintly. ‘I...it was a shock to hear from you.’

Rafaele slanted her a look and said dryly, ‘You don’t say.’ He looked at the road again. ‘But the fact remains that I knew about your research. You were mentioned in an article in Automotive Monthly and I realised that you were leading the field in research into kinetic energy recovery systems.’

The little flame inside Sam sputtered. Of course he hadn’t been motivated by anything other than professional interest. ‘I see,’ she responded. ‘And that’s why you wanted to contact me?’

Rafaele shrugged minutely, his broad shoulders moving sinuously under his leather jacket, battered and worn to an almost sensual texture. Dammit... Sam cursed herself. Why did everything have to return to all things physical even when he was wounding her with his words? She looked away resolutely.

He continued, ‘I knew we were setting up in England, I figured you were still based here... It seemed like a logical choice to ask you to work for us again...’