Dark Angel

Yet hadn’t Luciano also said that the onus was on him to make provision for her grandparents? A statement that suggested he had rethought his attitude towards the O’Briens. Ought she to dismiss out of hand an arrangement that would allow the older couple to return to their home and live there in comfort? But then even had she wished to accept that offer, it would be an impossible situation. No way could she openly live with Luciano in her grandparents’ vicinity!

Having watched the minibus of tourists depart, Luciano went off in search of Kerry. She was not in the kitchen. But as he turned to leave again, he noticed a familiar crumpled sheet of notepaper lying on the tall dresser. He was going to look, he knew he was going to look. Telling himself that nobody left really private correspondence lying around, he studied the letter that Kerry had been crying over the day before. His wide, sensual mouth compressed.

Kerry walked in and stopped dead at the sight of him. ‘I suppose you’re about to complain about the tour but you did say that business-related ventures should continue here—’

‘When did the letter about your mother arrive? Yesterday?’ Luciano cut in.

‘Didn’t you even think twice about reading it?’ Kerry swept up the letter and added it to the box of correspondence she had been sorting out for her grandfather.

‘I wanted to know why you were upset.’ Luciano rested his gleaming golden gaze on her in level challenge. ‘I’m sorry you got the news like that.’

‘You think it means that she’s dead too…?’

Luciano nodded his head in reluctant confirmation and watched her bright head lower to hide the pain and disappointment in her expressive face.

‘I used to think that no news might well be good news where your mother was concerned,’ Luciano confided bluntly.

‘That’s an awful thing to say…’ Tears pricking the backs of her eyes, Kerry spun away. ‘Just because you

r mother kept you and raised you in spite of everyone’s disapproval!’

Yet even as she upbraided him, Kerry was unhappily aware that her fond childhood fantasies of a loving mother returning to reclaim her had not survived what she had learnt about Carrie as she grew older. Her mother had been an only child and very much loved but almost from the moment she had become a teenager she had gone off the rails and had brought her parents nothing but grief. She had been expelled from several schools. There had been a scandalous hushed-up affair with a married man and a miscarriage as a result of it. At the age of eighteen, Carrie had left home without a word of warning and it had been more than ten years before she came back again.

‘Your mother, Carrie, has considerable charm,’ Hunt O’Brien had once told Kerry with great sadness. ‘But regardless of who is hurt, she will always do exactly as she wants and what she wants changes with the wind. As she won’t consider how her actions affect others, she can be very destructive towards herself and towards those who try to depend on her.’

Not a young woman likely to miss the burden of a child once she had become a divorcee, not a woman likely to agonise much over her own failings or indeed those she left behind, but a woman who lived for the day and the hour and her own self.

‘But then my mother was excessively fond of babies and small animals. No puppy or kitten was ever turned from the door and I fell very much into the same category,’ Luciano countered, forcing Kerry out of her self-preoccupation as he drew her back against his lithe, muscular frame with confident hands. ‘She accepted her lot in life because she was very humble. When my father set dogs on me, she was more shocked that I had dared to approach him.’

Kerry’s eyes widened to their fullest extent and she flipped round to look up at him. ‘Your father set dogs on you?’

‘They chased me…they didn’t bite,’ Luciano extended, seeking to make light of an event he had not intended to share.

‘I don’t care…how did it happen?’ Kerry prompted fiercely.

‘At school, I was taunted for being the good count’s little embarrassing mistake: he got drunk one night and honoured my seventeen-year-old mother with his attentions. When I was eight, I began hanging around outside the walls of his villa and I was soon peering over them, hoping to see him. My grandfather died and one day inevitably I went over the wall…and the rest as they say…is history,’ Luciano concluded with a look of mockery that in no way matched the roughened edge that had entered his deep, rich drawl.

‘What happened?’ Her blue eyes were soft. ‘Stop being macho about it.’

‘Tessari was in his garden and I went right up to him and asked him if he was my father. He panicked, denied it and put his dogs on me to get rid of me…’ His aggressive jawline clenched, golden eyes darkening and hardening. ‘The next day, my mother was told to leave our home on the Contarini estate—’

‘Oh, no, that was wicked!’ Kerry exclaimed.

‘My father was afraid of a scandal that might embarrass his lady wife and himself and, since giving my mother financial help would’ve been seen as an acknowledgement of paternity, he was careful from the day of my birth to keep his hands firmly in his pockets,’ Luciano told her with a raw derision that made her flinch. ‘We moved to the city, where we almost starved until my mother found work.’

Some of his history she had known but she had not heard it from him. She had read a more sensationalised account of his background in a newspaper a couple of years earlier and she had marvelled then at how much he had contrived not to tell her even when she had been engaged to him.

‘Why did you never tell me who your father was and what he did to your mother and you?’ she asked, her regret on that score unconcealed.

‘Because Roberto Tessari wasn’t my father in any way that I could respect. He was a hypocrite and a coward—’

‘But he did help you to fight to prove your innocence after you were imprisoned,’ Kerry reminded him gently.

‘Guilt…the fact that fate laughed in his face and he never had another child…the need of a dying man to make peace with his maker…who knows?’ Luciano shrugged, chilling indifference etched in his bronzed features. ‘My mother was only thirty-three when she died from pneumonia. She was never strong but to keep us she had to clean houses and take in washing. Roberto Tessari trashed her life. Do you think I could ever forget that?’

‘No…I suppose not,’ Kerry conceded in a rather wobbly undertone, her throat convulsing because she ached for the pain that he was so determined to hide from her.

‘I’ve depressed you so much you’re crying—’