Delucca's Marriage Contract

The memory faded...last night he’d felt as if he was climbing an interminable mountain. He’d also felt raw and exposed in his desire for Keelin when she kept pulling back, denying her own desire. A shudder of disgust went through him, to have been reduced to something almost mindless. Again. It had been enough to make him leave, get some space.

He cursed softly as he drove into the forecourt of the villa. No lights shone. Irritation surged, along with a sense of panic at the thought that Keelin might have gone. Disappeared.

A faint sense of unease prickled over his skin. He got out of the jeep and went up the steps, opening the door, flicking on a light. There wasn’t a sound. But somehow Gianni sensed that she was here and something eased inside him, even as that irritation remained.

He took off his jacket and made his way up to the bedroom. It was dark up here too, and for a moment Gianni thought Keelin might be in bed asleep but then he saw a shape by the window.

He flicked on a light and Keelin was illuminated sitting in the window seat, legs drawn up under her chin, hair long and wild around her shoulders. And just like that, lust gripped him with a force that almost made him sway.

But something wasn’t right about the picture. She wasn’t moving. Gianni came further in. Feeling afraid now and not liking it, he rapped out, ‘Keelin?’

Slowly she turned to look at him and he sucked in a breath at how pale she was and how huge her eyes looked. And as he watched, she seemed to come back to life, emotion making those eyes flash and burn like bright jewels.

She got up from the seat and came straight over to him, and lashed out, landing a blow to his chest before he could deflect it. It had enough force to make him take a step back.

‘Don’t you ever, ever, leave me alone like this again. Do you hear me? Never.’

Gianni stared at her. The anger in her voice was palpable. She looked haunted. Not piqued that he’d left her for a day. Haunted.

He said slowly, ‘I would have thought that’s exactly what you wanted since the day we met.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

KEELIN MIGHT HAVE agreed with Gianni if being abandoned wasn’t her particular pyschological demon. Sensations were rushing into limbs that had been locked tight for hours, giving her shooting pains and pins and needles. Her hand throbbed from where she’d hit him. His chest was like a steel wall.

And worse, emotion was rising. Just to see him again. He’d come back. Damn him.

‘You said nothing.’ Keelin was accusing. ‘You didn’t even leave a note.’

Gianni’s jaw tightened. ‘I thought Lucia would tell you.’

Keelin let out a short harsh laugh. ‘Via sign language? I don’t speak Italian and she doesn’t speak English.’

‘You could have phoned me.’

Keelin felt a kind of shame wash over her. She’d slowly become more and more paralysed as the day had gone on. How could she explain that when one was in the grip of something like a panic attack, the last thing you did was the logical one?

‘I couldn’t find your number, and my phone was dead,’ she supplied weakly. And then stronger, ‘There was no one here. Even Lucia disappeared after a while. I was all alone. Anything could have happened, did you think of that?’

Irritation crossed Gianni’s face. ‘For God’s sake, Keelin, it was only a day. You are in one of the most luxurious villas in Italy. There’s an indoor pool and an outdoor pool—’

Keelin whirled away from him and the suggestion she should have been happy to amuse herself, emotion reaching her eyes, making them sting. Making her chest hurt with the pressure it took to contain it. She’d not cried in years, learning that tears only caused her parents to look at her with bafflement. So rousing their ire had become her default position.

Gianni sounded exasperated. ‘Look—’

She kept her back to him and cut him off, saying with a low voice, ‘When I was fourteen I got a taxi home from the train station for my summer half-term holidays. The whole house was locked up. When I rang my father he was in Sao Paulo in Brazil and wouldn’t be home for days. My mother was in St Barts with friends. They’d given the staff a week off. They’d not even bothered to find out what I was doing.’

She turned around to face Gianni, arms folded tightly. ‘They had to send the housekeeper back to take care of me and she was not happy to have her holiday cut short but at least it wasn’t anything new so she wasn’t surprised.’

Gianni interjected in a tight-sounding voice, ‘This had happened before?’

Keelin lifted one shoulder in a gesture of assent. ‘It was a fairly regular occurrence except usually there’d be staff at home. When I was three they left me alone with my nanny for two and a half months while they went to America on business. When they came back I didn’t recognise them.‘Today...’ Emotion tightened her chest again but Keelin forced out, ‘Today, it just got to me. It’s isolated here. I don’t speak the language. I hate that it affected me. But I just—don’t do it again.’

Gianni came closer, all traces of exasperation and irritation gone. In his eyes was not pity, because Keelin couldn’t have handled that. But something else. A kind of understanding.

He cupped his hands around her face, and it was only when he smoothed his thumbs back and forth across her cheeks she realised that she was crying. Mortification rushed through her and she tried to take his hands down but he wouldn’t let her.

She’d planned on being icy and dismissive when he returned and instead she was blubbing all over him and spilling her guts. Keelin said, ‘Look, it’s not a big—’