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‘If I can.’ He raised his glass. ‘This should help.’ Enough of it would allow him a few precious hours of oblivion to the firecracker who would be sleeping at such close quarters to him.
‘How long do we have until we reach Fiji?’
He checked his watch. ‘Nine hours until we land at Nadi.’
‘We get another flight from there?’ Livia already knew the answer to this but the dimming of the lights seemed to have shrunk the generously proportioned cabin and given it an air of dangerous intimacy.
What was it about darkness that could change an atmosphere so acutely? Livia had grown up scared of the dark. The Secondigliano was a dangerous place in daylight. At night, all the monsters came out.
The dangers now were as different as night and day compared to her childhood and adolescence but she felt them as keenly. With Massimo’s face in shadows his handsome features took on a devilish quality that set her stomach loose with butterflies and her skin vibrating with awareness.
‘I’ve chartered a Cessna to fly us to Seibua Island.’
‘You managed to get the name changed?’ She couldn’t remember the original name of the island Massimo’s grandfather had been born and raised on.
‘The paperwork’s still being sorted but I’ve been reliably informed it’s been accepted.’ He finished his drink and poured himself another, raising the bottle at her in an unspoken question.
She shook her head. Marriage to Massimo had given her a real appreciation of bourbon but too much alcohol had a tendency to loosen her tongue, which she was the first to admit didn’t need loosening. It also loosened her inhibitions. She’d never had any inhibitions around Massimo before but to get through the weekend in one piece she needed them as greatly as she needed to keep her guard up around him. All of this would be easier to cope with if her heart didn’t ache so much just to share the same air as him again.
‘Are you going to buy a Cessna of your own to keep there?’
He grimaced and finally perched himself on his bed. The overhead light shone down on him. ‘The yacht’s already moored there and can be used as transport. Whether I buy a plane too depends on how often the family use the island.’ The resort created on the island would be available for the entire extended family to use as and when they wished, free of charge. The only stipulation would be that they treated it with respect.
‘Knowing your sister it will be often.’ It was doubtful Massimo would ever use it. His idea of a holiday was to take a Sunday off work.
She caught the whisper of a smile on his firm mouth but it disappeared behind his glass as he took another drink.
‘When did your family get there?’
‘They arrived three days ago.’
‘Have you been to the island yet?’
‘I haven’t had the time.’
She chewed her bottom lip rather than give voice to her thoughts that this was typical Massimo, never having the time for anything that didn’t revolve around work. He’d jumped through hoops and paid an astronomical sum for the island but those hoops had been jumped through by his lawyers and accountants. He’d spent a further fortune having the complex for the family built but, again, he’d had little involvement past hiring the architects and transferring the cash. Livia had signed off on the initial blueprint for the complex in the weeks before she’d left him. She had no idea if he’d even bothered to do more than cast an eye over it.
There was no point in her saying anything. It would only be a rehash of a conversation they’d had many times before, a conversation that would only lead to an argument. Or, as usually happened, it would lead to her getting increasingly het up at his refusal to engage in the conversation and losing her temper, and Massimo walking away in contempt leaving her shouting at the walls.
In any case, Massimo’s sidelining of anything that wasn’t work-related was none of her business. Not any more. If he wanted to blow his own money on projects and assets he had no intention of enjoying then that was up to him. If he wanted to keep his family on the fringes of his life for eternity then that was up to him too. He wasn’t an adolescent like her youngest brother, Gianluca, who’d been born seven months after their father’s death.
There was hope for Gianluca. Unlike their other siblings, who had succumbed to life in the Secondigliano, Gianluca’s humanity was still there. The question was whether he had the courage to take Livia’s hand and join her far from the violence and drugs that were such an intrinsic part of the Espositos’ lives before it was too late and he was sucked into a life of crime from which his only escape would be in a coffin.
It was too late for Pasquale, who like their dead father had risen high in Don Fortunato’s ranks, and too late for Denise who had married one of Pasquale’s equally ambitious friends and was currently pregnant with their second child. Livia’s siblings and her mother all knew Livia’s door was always open for them. Gianluca was the only one she allowed herself to hope for. He could still leave without repercussions just as she had but time was running out. He’d recently turned eighteen. Should Don Fortunato decide Gianluca was worthy of joining his guard he would strike soon.
The man Livia had married, a man who abhorred violence and anything to do with illegal drugs, had made his choice when he was only a few years older than Gianluca. He’d chosen to leave Italy and leave his family, just as his own grandfather had done seventy years before him. The difference was his grandfather had left Fiji for the love of his life, an Englishwoman, and set up home with her in England. When their daughter Sera had married an Italian, Jimmy and Elizabeth had moved again, this time to Italy so they could stay close to their daughter. For them, family came first above all else. They were as close as close could be. All except for Massimo himself.
He didn’t want to change. He saw nothing wrong with how he lived his life, nothing wrong with keeping a physical and emotional distance from the people who loved him. That was the choice he’d made and Livia had to respect that. She couldn’t change it. She’d tried. When the realisation hit that his emotional distance from his family extended to her too, along with the recognition that this too would never change, she’d had no choice but to leave him.
She hadn’t clawed her way out of the Secondigliano to spend her life as a trophy in a glass cabinet masquerading as a home.
While she had spent the past four months trying desperately to fix herself back together, for Massimo there had been nothing to fix. He’d got on with his life as if she’d never been a part of it.
Finishing her drink, she put the empty glass in the holder beside her bed and got under the covers. ‘I’m going to get some sleep. Goodnight.’ Then she turned her back on him and closed her eyes.
Massimo lay under his bed sheets, eyes wide open. He’d drunk enough bourbon to tranquillise an elephant but his mind was too busy. Except now it wasn’t the project he’d spent over a year working on that stopped his mind switching off.
Turning his head, eyes adjusted to the dark, he watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Livia’s duvet. He guessed she’d been asleep for around an hour now. He always knew when she was properly asleep and not just faking it. When she faked it, she lay rigid in absolute silence.
They’d slept together the first night they’d met—once they’d got talking at the hotel bar he hadn’t let her out of his sight—and both of them had known it was no one-night stand. He’d been dozing in the aftermath, Livia wrapped in his arms, his body thrumming with the delights they’d just shared, when she’d mumbled something. That was his first experience of her sleep-talking. He’d quickly discovered that she talked a lot in her sleep. Sometimes the words were distinct. He remembered the feeling that had erupted through him the first time she’d mumbled his name. It had been ten times the magnitude of what he’d felt to be offered two hundred million dollars for the stupid game he’d developed during his boring university evenings.
But her dreams hadn’t always been good. At least once a week he’d had to wake her from a bad one. The darkness of the life she’d lived until she’d left Naples at eighteen still haunted her.
Had another man woken her from the nightmares since she’d left him?
He pinched the bridge of his nose and willed the pain spearing him away.
Livia’s sex life was no longer his business.
The thought of her with a lover was something that hadn’t even occurred to him until she’d stepped onto his plane and now it was all he could think of.
In the four months since she’d left him, his own libido had gone into hibernation. From the feelings erupting through him now, he realised he’d shut down far more than his libido.
He’d shut down long before she’d left him.
Their marriage had begun with such high hopes and such certainty. They’d both been too foolish to realise that it was nothing but lust, a flaming passion that could only burn itself out.
He’d been intoxicated by her. He’d never met anyone like her: tough on the outside but marshmallow-soft inside. Straight talking. Capable of lancing with her tongue. But tender and compassionate. Someone who would drop everything if she were needed. Someone who would give everything they had if it were needed. Massimo had never been one for showing his emotions but being tactile with Livia had come naturally. She’d brought that side of him out right from the start.
And then the tide had turned. His assumptions that he would be able to continue his life and work in the same way he always had but with his beautiful, vivacious wife to come home to had been quickly dispelled.
He should never have married her, that was the truth of it, but he’d been so swept up in the need to tie her to him and make her his in every way possible that he’d blinded himself to what marriage to a woman like Livia would actually entail. It entailed far more than he could give.
It was still dark when Livia woke. Groping for her phone, she looked at the time and was relieved to see they only had a couple of hours left until they landed.
Creeping out of her bed so as not to wake Massimo, she took her overnight bag from the compartment and made her way to the bedroom. She needed a shower. It was pure misfortune that the main bathroom was reached through the bedroom.
The moment she opened the bedroom door and stepped inside, she realised her mistake. The bathroom light was already switched on and the scent of Massimo’s shower gel seeped through the gap in the door. Before she could beat a hasty retreat, the door opened and he stepped over the threshold as naked as the day he was born.
Startled caramel eyes met hers. All the air flew from her lungs.
Seconds passed that stretched like hours as they did nothing but stare at each other.
A compression formed in her chest and tightened her throat.
For a man who rarely worked out, Massimo had a physique to die for. Lean but muscular, his deep olive skin had only the lightest brush of fine dark hair over his defined pecs and the plane of his washboard stomach. The hair thickened considerably below his abdomen to the huge…
Her own abdomen contracted, heat rushing through her pelvis as she noticed—couldn’t help but notice—his growing erection.
The heat in her pelvis spread. It suffused her cheeks with colour and she tightened her hold on her bag, crushing it against her chest.
Slowly, his features became taut, his nostrils flaring. His caramel eyes swirled with something she recognised, something that should have her spinning round immediately and leaving. But she couldn’t. Her feet were rooted to the floor.
He’d had more work done on his tattoo, she noticed dimly, trying desperately hard not to let her gaze fall back below his waist, trying even harder to contain the rush of sultry warmth flooding her veins. His tattoo covered the entire bicep around his left shoulder, all in bold black lines. The large sun, the centrepiece that he had once told her symbolised his rebirth and represented the way he strove for perfection in all he did, was encircled by sharks’ teeth, which represented power, leadership and protection, and they were now encircled by spearheads. She didn’t know what the spearheads represented but knew they must mean something to him.
Instinct told her they represented something to do with her.
The sensation in her fingers that had almost had her touching his sleeping face earlier tingled again. An ache to touch his tattoo. To touch him. A yearning to feel the heat of his powerful body flush against hers, to be swept in his arms and to lose herself in the wonder she had always found in his lovemaking. It all hit her so quickly that if he had reached out for her she would have fallen into his arms in an instant.
More seconds stretched without a word exchanged but with that thick, sick chemistry shrouding them.
And then Massimo closed his eyes.
When he next looked at her, the swirling desire had gone.
He’d shut down again.
He turned and walked back into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.
CHAPTER FOUR
LIVIA GAZED OUT of the window of the Cessna they’d transferred to after landing at Fiji’s Nadi airport and soaked in the oval-shaped patch of land that rose like a majestic tropical oasis from the South Pacific below. Ringed with golden sand and light turquoise shores that deepened to ultramarine, Seibua Island was far more beautiful and exotic than even its namesake had described.
Livia had only ever travelled from her Italian homeland to the US; the scents that exploded through her airways when she stepped onto the small airfield were ones she’d never had the pleasure of smelling before.
She stared up at the rising sun before closing her eyes and savouring the sensation of the most incredible warmth on her skin.
Then she cast a glance at Massimo to witness his reaction at his first steps on his grandfather’s homeland.
Far from savouring anything, he’d immediately headed to the waiting golf buggy and was introducing himself to its elderly driver.
Like Livia, who’d changed into a knee-length red sundress, Massimo had donned summer clothing too, opting for a pair of black canvas shorts and a fitted navy T-shirt with the cover of a hellraising rock band’s album on it. Ever the chameleon, he looked as divine in these casual items as he did in a full dinner jacket but it only made her think that he never looked better than when he wore nothing at all, and she had to push hard to rid her mind of the vivid image of him standing before her naked. It was a battle she’d been losing for the past four hours.
She forced a smile at the two young men who were removing their luggage from the small plane and loading it onto a second buggy, and walked over to Massimo, who introduced her to the man he employed to run the island for him, first in English then in Italian for her benefit.
She shook the extended hand from the friendly looking man and carefully said, ‘It is nice to see you.’
She caught the dart of surprise that flashed in Massimo’s eyes but he said nothing about her attempt at English, indicating only that she should get into the buggy.
She slid into the back and was relieved when Massimo climbed in the front beside the driver.
‘How long until we get to the complex?’ she asked. The island was bigger than she’d envisaged. Naively, she’d imagined something around the size of a small field with a solitary palm tree as a marker.
‘Not long. Five or ten minutes.’
Soon the thick, scented flora they drove through separated and the golden sand she’d seen from the air lay before them, glimmering under the glorious sunshine.
Stunned, she craned her neck to take in the thatched chalets nestled—but not too closely together—along the length of a high rock formation that ended on the shore of the beach. A long wooden bridge led the eye to a further thatched chalet that appeared to rise out of the ocean itself. On the other side of the thatched cottages and lower down, separated from the beach by a wall, lay the chalet designated for Massimo’s grandfather. Beside it lay a handful of smaller though no less beautiful chalets. To the right of all these dwellings was the centrepiece, the huge, multi-purpose lodge behind which, virtually camouflaged by the coconut palms and other tropical trees and foliage that thrived on the island, were the structures that housed the great kitchens and the island staff’s living quarters. Further to the right, where the beach curved out of sight, were the mangrove saplings, recently planted in their thousands to protect the island from erosion and rising sea levels.
Everything Massimo had envisaged for the island of his grandfather’s birth had come to life in spectacular fashion.
The driver stopped in front of the main lodge and said something to Massimo before jumping out.
Livia’s heart almost dropped to her feet when Massimo followed suit and held his hand out to her.
Confused at this unexpected gesture, especially since they’d spent the past four hours after she’d inadvertently walked in on him naked ignoring each other’s existence, she stared into the caramel eyes that were fixed on her with an intensity that belied the easy smile playing on his lips.
A child’s cry rang out and in an instant she understood. Massimo’s family were already there. He was holding his hand out because they must be watching.
She reached out and wrapped her fingers loosely round the waiting hand.
At the first touch of her skin to his, her heart flew from her feet to her throat and her fingers reflexively tightened.
For that one singular moment in time, the world paused on its axis as she stared into his soulful eyes and a rush of helpless longing swept through her, long-buried emotions rising up and clutching her throat.
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