He looked into her flushed face. ‘I told you that I was Tuscan by birth?’
‘Mmm.’ Cassie nodded, snuggling a little closer to him. ‘What’s it like in Tuscany?’
The clean, fresh smell of her struck some long-hidden chord within him so that for once he allowed himself to think of the green hills and sun-washed landscape of home—even though he had ring-fenced his memories and put them out of bounds. Exiled himself from it in all the ways that he could—so that even on his rare, duty visits home he didn’t allow nostalgia or sentiment to lure him.
‘What’s it like? Well, it is very beautiful. In fact, some people say it’s the most beautiful place on earth.’
‘So why…why live here, and not there?’
‘It’s complicated.’ He wound a strand of blonde hair around his finger. ‘My brother lives there—and it’s a little too small for both of us.’
He had a brother. She felt as if she had just discovered a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. ‘What’s he like?’
‘We’re twins.’
‘Twins!’ She turned onto her tummy and looked at him. ‘Identical twins?’
‘Not really. Well, we…look the same,’ he said, and then gave a short laugh. ‘But no two men are identical, Cassandra—if you were a little more experienced, you’d know that.’
Cassie registered the darkness which underpinned his voice. ‘You had some sort of fall-out?’ she guessed softly.
Giancarlo looked into her eyes and suddenly had the strangest desire to tell her. Was it because pillow talk and secrets were the currency traditionally shared with a mistress—or because her place in his life was so temporary that telling her would have no impact on it? She didn’t mix in his circles and she never would. And hadn’t he buried the memory so deep that he was curious now to see what it would look like if he dragged it out into the cold and dispassionate light of day?
‘A fall-out? Yes, I guess you could say that.’
‘What happened?’
Giancarlo swallowed because the acid taste of betrayal could still catch him unawares. Even now. He stared at the ceiling. ‘It all started soon after the death of our parents. My mother died when I was twelve—my father five years earlier.’
‘That must have been very hard,’ said Cassie softly.
She had the kind of voice which soothed—which felt like balm on his troubled recall. ‘Yes. It was a lonely kind of childhood. Plenty of money but not much else.’
‘And who looked after you?’
‘Oh, we had a series of guardians—aristocratic and intellectual men appointed by the estate who were supposed to educate us, and who we used to take pleasure in outwitting.’ He shrugged his broad, naked shoulders. ‘We were pretty much a law unto ourselves. And of course—we were fiercely competitive. Life was a constant battle to each prove ourselves—maybe to compensate for the lack of parental guidance.’
His mouth hardened. And the lack of warmth, or softness, of course—for there had been no compensatory woman’s touch. No comfort or reassurance from the gentler sex given to two little rich boys who ran wild as gypsies.
Giancarlo felt something like pain as memories came flooding back—more vivid than he had expected them to be. ‘Both Raul and I went to university in Rome. I read law and he read business. We were due to inherit the family estate when we turned twenty-one and we were going to work it between us.’
He remembered Gabriella, too. Tiny and beautiful—with thick hair even blacker than his own and eyes like polished jet. Gabriella, the darling and beauty of the campus. The woman every man had wanted and she had wanted Giancarlo. Oh, yes. His competitive nature had been at first flattered and then seduced by her attention towards him. How he had basked in her adoration and the envy of his peers and how he had revelled in that hot, heady explosion of first love. For a while they became the golden couple—making plans for the future and the family they would make together. And then…
‘So what happened?’
Cassie’s question broke into his thoughts. ‘We both qualified.’
‘Similar degrees?’
‘Mine was better.’ He shrugged. ‘And that is not a boast, but a fact. And that rankled with my brother. On our twenty-first birthday we were summoned into our lawyer’s office and told that Raul would inherit everything. The farms. The vineyards. The olive groves and the properties in Rome and Siena. The vast estates with which the Vellutini name was synonymous would all pass to him.’ He paused. ‘While I would receive precisely nothing.’