Sins of the Past

Riva frowned. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘You both come and live with me.’

‘Live with you?’ Shock made it come out on a squeak.

‘Si.’

‘As your kept woman?’ Shrugging off his hands, she brought herself round to face him, leaning back on her elbows, her small breasts thrust tantalisingly upwards. ‘What are you proposing, Damiano? A life of luxury for the little upstart …’ she couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice ‘… in exchange for custody of Ben, with the odd sexual favour thrown in?’

His face was a chiselled rock against the hard blue of the sky. ‘May I remind you that he’s my son too?’ He sounded quietly angry. ‘And, no. Santo cielo! That isn’t what I’m proposing.’

‘What, then?’

‘I think we should marry,’ he said.

ELIZABETH POWER wanted to be a writer from a very early age, but it wasn’t until she was nearly thirty that she took to writing seriously. Writing is now her life. Travelling ranks very highly among her pleasures, and so many places she has visited have been recreated in her books. Living in England’s West Country, Elizabeth likes nothing better than taking walks with her husband along the coast or in the adjoining woods, and enjoying all the wonders that nature has to offer.

FOR ALAN—for everything

PROLOGUE

SANTO cielo! It was her!

With his skill at addressing the immediate, whilst keeping abreast of everything else going on around him, Damiano responded to something the woman behind the desk was saying, though his glittering black eyes were trained on the younger woman who had stopped briefly in the corridor beyond the glass partition.

Red hair—not long, as he remembered it, but short and fashionably tousled. She looked, with that natural curve to her mouth and those small pointed features, like some mischievous elf. Yet it was a mischief, he acknowledged through a rising tide of shock, motivated by opportunism and greed.

‘Mr D’Amico?’

Immaculate dark tailoring couldn’t hide the whipcord strength and physical power of a man in the peak of condition, a man of impressionable force and character, whose striking features were hardening now as he brought himself back sharply to the matter in hand.

How could he allow just one glimpse of that redhead to cause his concentration to slide? He had business to attend to. A chain of leisure centres and retail outlets to get up and running. But when he had arranged this meeting to finalise details with the design team who handled all his UK developments, he hadn’t expected to come in and be confronted by a ghost from his past.

‘That girl …’ She hadn’t seen him! He had only an impression now of feathery strands against an elegantly pale neck as she let herself into the office opposite the one in which he was standing and disappeared from view.

‘You mean Miss Singleman?’ His associate’s eyes had followed his, her swept up black hair and dramatically red lips emphasising the hard edge of a successful businesswoman in her fifties. But she knew who had been stealing his attention. ‘Riva?’

‘Riva …’ The word rolled off his tongue as sensually as it was savoured. So she was still unmarried. ‘Sì.’ He was trying to appear calm. Calmer than he felt! he decided, annoyed. His manner, though, demanded more, and the woman smiled, supplying it.

‘One of our newest recruits. She specialises in the domestic environment at present. She’s young, enthusiastic, a bit off-beat sometimes in her approach, but very, very talented.’

As well as untrustworthy and a scheming liar!

For one fleeting moment he fought the urge to walk out and take his future business elsewhere, rather than let a company who could employ the type of questionable character it had obviously employed with Miss Riva Singleman loose with his money. But intrigue as to how such a dubious little drop-out could possibly have come to be working for such a reputable firm of interior designers, along with the memory of how that lying little mouth had felt beneath his, got the better of him. He had never been faint-hearted. So why shouldn’t he get his business sorted out, accept the opportunity that fate had suddenly presented him with, and satisfy his curiosity along the way?

He listened to the matriarch of Redwood Interiors assuring him that everything was going to schedule, with all his wishes being met, and that whatever members of her team were allotted to handle his affairs at any time would give him no less than two hundred per cent satisfaction.

Like hell they would! he resolved, and gave the woman one of his blazing smiles, charming her witless as he had been doing with women for the whole of his thirty-two years, as he settled on his suddenly innovative and calculating plan.

CHAPTER ONE

RIVA pulled up outside the stone building on the fringes of what had once been a thriving country estate. She could see the old manor house at the end of the long drive, boarded up, uninhabited. A ‘For Sale’ sign hung haphazardly on one of its rusty gates.

But it was the building in front of her that drew her attention as she stepped out of her car onto the gravelled courtyard. The Old Coach House.

Once a stable-block for the manor, this place looked very much inhabited. A couple of other vehicles—one a gleaming black Porsche—were parked outside.

Her light mood was enhanced by the chirruping birds and the late spring sunlight filtering down through the trees as she locked her small hatchback and tripped eagerly across the gravel. Her first real big job where she was to be given carte blanche! To conceptualise and co-ordinate all the furnishings, colours and textures for a special room inside this wonderful old house. What an opportunity!

Her hand was trembling with excitement as she pressed the gleaming brass doorbell. Her portfolio had obviously impressed someone so much that they had asked for her specifically, and if she could pull off this job to everyone’s satisfaction it could be the making of her career! No more struggling to make ends meet—to keep a very necessary roof over her head. And if she was valued enough to be given the chance to immerse herself in a project like this, perhaps one day her dreams of owning her own studio might turn into a reality, and all the anguish she’d endured over the past few years would be a thing of the past.

‘Madame Duval?’

The chic blonde in the charcoal-grey suit who opened the door to her was assessing Riva’s less conventional attire with a quizzical smile.

‘No. Madame’s not here, but you are expected. Miss Singleman, isn’t it?’

Riva nodded and followed in a slipstream of exotic perfume as she was guided up some stairs into the main body of the house. At only five feet three inches she felt dwarfed by the other girl’s height, and wondered whether she should have worn high heels, or even a jacket, but she hated conformity. Until the other woman had opened the door she had felt smart in the belted black and grey striped tunic she had teamed with a short black skirt, dark leggings and pumps.

‘If you’ll just wait here …’

Riva glanced around on finding herself alone in a large, sunny sitting room overlooking the courtyard. Whoever had furnished this heart of the house had taste and style, she decided, if the faultless décor and exemplary furnishings were anything to go by. There was a mix of fine prints—an aerial shot of some tropical islands, some brightly coloured fish, and the most spectacular palm-fringed beach imaginable—adorning the walls.

‘Well, well. If it isn’t Miss Riva Singleman.’

The deeply-accented voice, dark as velvet, enlivened every nerve with its dangerous familiarity.

She swung round so fast that the bag dangling from her hand struck the leg of a small Georgian table, almost toppling the delicate but vastly expensive-looking vase that was standing on top.

‘I do hope this isn’t an indication that you’re going to be accident-prone.’

Tall, olive-skinned, too strong-featured to be called conventionally handsome, the man in the dark suit standing in the doorway was everything she remembered: impeccably dressed, with sleek raven hair combed straight back. His face was a familiar maze of striking angles and exciting complexity, from his high forehead and sculpted cheekbones to the arrogant nose and the hard, wide mouth that was curling now in patent mockery of her clumsiness.

‘Damiano!’

If he was surprised to see her, he wasn’t showing it. Every inch of that lean and disciplined physique exuded command, self-confidence, poise, as did his easy stride as he came into the room, studying her with those penetrating dark eyes and those cunning wits that once had lured her into trusting him. Much to her cost, she reflected bitterly.

‘I thought …’ She was toying agitatedly with the black and grey beaded necklace which lay just above her small breasts. What was he doing here? From what she’d read about him nowadays his UK home was a bachelor apartment in the most fashionable suburb of London. Not this quiet, countrified retreat …

‘You thought what?’ He sent a cursory glance over his shoulder, following the direction of her gaze. ‘My secretary,’ he enlightened her, answering her unspoken question. ‘She was simply handling the appointment.’

And probably a lot more than that, Riva thought waspishly, thinking of the string of stunning high-profile women she had seen his name linked with in the gossip columns over the years. She remembered one article in particular in one of the tabloids recently, featuring society queen and grocery empire heiress Magenta Boweringham, who, being the latest lover to be discarded by this dynamic Italian, had gone to great lengths to report that, however brilliant and focused he might have proved himself to be in every other aspect of his life, where her own sex were concerned, Damiano D’Amico seemed to have a very low boredom threshold.

Ignoring a resurgence of the feelings she had had after reading that article, Riva uttered, baffled, ‘Madame Duval …’ Her tousled red hair caught the morning sunlight streaming in through the long sash window as she shook her head, trying to make sense of the situation.

‘My grandmother,’ he supplied, his easy tone only emphasising her confusion. ‘Obviously you weren’t told she was away.’

‘No, I wasn’t!’ Hot colour washed over her skin and she let her hand drop quickly when his gaze fell, picking up on the agitated way she was fingering her necklace. His grandmother was French? Her head was swimming. She wasn’t sure he had ever told her that. ‘Did you know?’ she demanded. ‘Did you know it was me Redwoods were sending?’ Her name must have aroused his interest, if nothing else.

A wide shoulder merely lifted beneath the fine cloth of his jacket. ‘It does leave me wondering how a girl who was little more than a market trader a few short years ago,’ he said, not answering her, ‘managed to reach the position she’s obviously enjoying now.’

‘She worked!’ Rose colour deepened along her cheekbones, vying with the fire of her hair. ‘She worked, Damiano! Which is more than she’s going to do for you!’

Angrily she brushed past him, her suspicions and disappointment over not being engaged solely on her merits overridden only by her staggering awareness of his masculinity as her arm collided with his.

Shaking from the contact, in a voice that reflected all the tension that was gripping her, she uttered, ‘I’ll tell Ms Redwood that it’s all been a mistake. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I can manage to see myself out!’

Disillusionment contested with a host of other, more complex emotions as she made her determined bid for the stairs. Only the deep, accented voice behind her stopped her precipitate flight along the corridor.

‘I really don’t think you should do that, Riva.’ Those dangerously soft words masked a barely concealed threat.

‘Wh-what do you mean?’ She turned around to see him dominating the narrow space outside the sitting room, and for all her twenty-four years she felt as out of her depth with him as she had as a hapless nineteen-year-old, smitten by that voice, by his earth-shattering looks, his intellect, and his irresistible Continental charm.

‘You’ve been sent here for a specific purpose, and I expect you to honour that purpose. Otherwise I shall have no hesitation in telling your very hard-nosed employer that I shall be taking my business elsewhere.’

A car engine starting up in the courtyard below the window broke the small shocked silence that stretched between them.

His secretary leaving. Leaving her alone with him, Riva decided, with an inexplicable little shudder.

Her blood started pounding, a thundering drum-roll in her ears. Of course. He was more valuable to Redwoods than she was, she realised. And if she refused to work with him, and he reported her lack of co-operation, then it would be her the firm would let go for losing such a prestigious client—not the other way around.

The green eyes looking up into the dark ebony of his sparked with accusation. ‘You mean … you’d get me fired?’ Her voice was strung with anger, disbelief.

His shoulder moved again in that subtly careless gesture. ‘You’d get yourself fired, Riva. Or not. The choice is yours.’

And if she made the wrong one, refused to do exactly as he said, he would destroy her. Just as he had destroyed her dear and oh, so vulnerable mother, because without his cruel intervention Chelsea Singleman would almost surely be alive today!

‘Go back into the sitting room,’ he ordered, in no doubt of the power he wielded.

Reminding herself of how hard she’d worked for this job, and of all she had to lose if she walked away from him, Riva thrust past him again, steeling herself against the sensations that assailed her this time when he didn’t move to allow her an easy route back and once again her arm grazed the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Do that again and I’ll take it that you’re inviting more than just my custom. And we both know what happened the last time you did that, don’t we?’

He had used her, ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly, employing that lethal mix of easy charm and magnetism to snare her. She had been too na?ve and inexperienced to recognise the calculated game he was playing, only realising it afterwards with her pride and her dignity in shreds!

‘I didn’t invite your custom, Damiano. You’re forcing it on me.’

‘Like you’ve probably convinced yourself it was me forcing you … what was it? … four and a half—nearly five years ago?’

Surprisingly, the vital images his words conjured up still had the power to make her blood race, the memory of those warm, skilled hands on her body making her cheeks flame with humiliating shame.

Because she had been a willing conquest beneath those practised hands of his, mindlessly inviting their intimate caresses, mistaking tenderness for affection, his cold, calculated seduction for something much, much more.

Acridly she murmured, ‘No. That was nothing more than my own stupidity.’

That dark head tilted slightly, and a humourless smile still played around the corners of his devastating mouth.

‘You could scarcely blame me for wanting to get at the truth.’

‘The truth? Hah! You wouldn’t recognise the truth if it uprooted itself and tried to wrap itself around your throat!’

He smiled coldly at her graphic metaphor. ‘I didn’t have to. All the evidence spoke for itself.’

Because she had lied to him—and big-time!—covering up even the most personal facts about herself. But only because she had been embarrassed, so unbearably ashamed. He’d been angry with her afterwards, but more, she’d suspected, with himself. Perhaps finding out he’d used a virgin in his plan to destroy Chelsea Singleman didn’t sit too comfortably on his conscience. If he had one! Riva thought vehemently, although she doubted it.

Green eyes glittering with a host of complex emotions, she breathed accusingly, ‘You ruined my mother’s life.’

Damiano’s mouth moved grimly. ‘Because I was instrumental in preventing her from marrying my uncle? I would have been guilty of neglecting my duty if I hadn’t. Anyway, I’m sure she got over it. Women like Chelsea—and I’m afraid to say like you, cara—aren’t left grieving too long over one lost opportunity. If she hasn’t done so yet, I’m sure that before long she’ll find some other rich … what do you English call it? … sucker who will fall prey to her devious charms.’

Pain as sharp as a whiplash cut into Riva’s heart, and it took all her self-control to stop herself lunging forward and knocking the disdain right off that hard, arrogant face.

‘My mother’s dead!’

His obvious shock was a picture she would have relished if she hadn’t felt so raw inside.

The sound of a man whistling for his dog in the quiet lane beyond the courtyard filtered through the open window—the only thing intruding on the loaded silence.

‘I’m sorry.’

She’d have to admit that he looked it, if she hadn’t known him to be incapable of such selfless emotion.

‘No, you’re not.’ How could he even say that when he had contributed so directly to the woman’s inevitable slide into the despair that had finally killed her—and at such a brutally young age?

‘What happened?’

‘What do you care?’

His features hardened at her lack of response. ‘Tell me.’

She didn’t want to. It hurt too much to talk about her once effervescent young mother—who had insisted on Riva calling her Chelsea—especially in front of the one man she had hoped never to see again.

His whole demeanour, however, commanded, and reluctantly she found herself yielding to the sway of his forceful personality by saying, ‘If you must know, it was an accidental overdose of drugs she’d been taking for depression.’ She had also been drinking too, although she didn’t tell him that. The doctors had said it was a lethal mix.

‘When?’

‘Just over a year ago.’

That firm mouth compressed. ‘As I said, I’m sorry.’

She gave a brittle little laugh. ‘Don’t be. After all, it wasn’t your fault she sank into depression after her wrecked engagement to the man she loved!’

‘You’re holding me responsible for that?’

‘If the cap fits.’

‘Unfortunately, Riva, it doesn’t.’ He glanced across to the window, his clean-shaven yet darkly shadowed jaw a statement to his hard and potent virility. ‘You know full well why Marcello broke off his engagement to your mother,’ he stated with dogmatic cruelty. ‘She was investigated and found wanting. You both were.’

‘Yes, but only by you!’

‘Because Marcello was too bewitched by a pretty face and a pair of dancing blue eyes to see beyond the superficially sweet smiles and the cleverly crafted cover-up.’

‘Which you weren’t, of course?’

‘Hardly.’ His jaw-line hardened as he expounded. ‘And, while my uncle might have been treated to a watered-down version of the truth from your mother, he wasn’t the one chosen to be the recipient of the most blatant lies.’

He was talking about her, and she cringed now at the elaborate story she had woven around herself, around her background and her upbringing, shuddering from her naïveté in believing he would never find out. Nothing, though, could reverse that, and she could never tell him exactly why she had lied.

‘Now, if it’s all the same to you, you won’t mind if we get on and do the job you’ve been sent here to do.’ His outstretched arm demanded that she precede him out of the room.

Glad to let their conversation drop, Riva complied.

Watching the way she moved as he directed her back downstairs to the room he wanted redesigning, he couldn’t help noticing the proud little tilt to her pointed chin and the slim back held straight as a rod beneath the soft jersey top.

She had spirit. He had to hand her that.

He caught a waft of her perfume, flowery and fresh, and felt a kick in his loins that shook him to the very core of his being.

With that fiery hair, that milky skin, and breasts that certainly couldn’t be called buxom, she wasn’t the tall, blonde, leggy type he usually gravitated towards, but there was something about her … something that attracted him even as it irritated him. He was having to acknowledge that he still wanted the arty little creature, as he had wanted her from the moment he had first laid eyes on her all those years ago in his uncle’s villa.

When Marcello had informed him that he was getting married, he’d been naturally delighted, he remembered. His uncle—his late father’s brother—had been a widower for more than ten years. But Damiano couldn’t deny that when he had arrived at the villa at Marcello’s invitation, to meet his proposed new bride, he had been shocked to discover a woman half Marcello’s age with a fully-grown daughter in tow.

At first he had thought they were sisters. On first name terms, and so alike in build and stature, with their loose floral skirts and their long straight hair—except that, unlike the vibrant redhead, the other had been a platinum blonde.

He had been dubious about them from the start. Who were they? Where had they come from, with their joss-sticks and their beads and their home-made sandals, which the younger of the two had often preferred to discard? And what woman, still only in her thirties—as he’d discovered the older one was—would want to tie herself to a handsome, yet nevertheless elderly widower? Unless she was attracted less to his warmth and generosity of spirit than to his status as head of one of the oldest families in Italy, with all the money and influence that went with it?

That Marcello had plucked them both from a market stall selling hand-made jewellery in some English seaside resort had only fuelled Damiano’s need to find out more about them, since his uncle had been too infatuated with his new fiancée even to want to know or care.

He had put his own staff on the job, and set about pumping the more reserved though equally—as he’d believed—worldly daughter for all the information he could get out of her, while maintaining his resolve not to let her get to him in any way.

Her father, she’d told him, had been an officer in the Royal Navy. A brave man, decorated for services to his country, who’d been away from home a lot while she had been growing up. Chelsea, she had convinced him, could have used her talents as a commercial artist, but her husband had always frowned on her having her own career, believing that it was demeaning for the wife of a man in his position to have to work. He had given Riva the best possible education, she had told him with undisguised admiration, but then he’d been tragically killed in a car crash while on leave. He had left her and her mother well provided for, she had gone on to assure him, although the lovely house where they’d lived had been far too big for the two of them after he’d died.

She had given him more—far more—than he could ever have expected, he thought grimly, and not just information.

A nerve twitched in his jaw as he thought about it, because even now it still rankled with him that he had deflowered a virgin in his determination to get at the truth. Yet he had salved his conscience by assuring himself that in going to bed with him the scheming little witch must have had a very marked agenda of her own.