Awakened by the Scarred Italian Read online

  ‘Would you like tea or coffee, Miss Templeton?’

  Lara shook her head at the question from the woman and murmured, ‘No, thanks.’ The housekeeper left the room.

  The muted sounds of London traffic could be heard through the huge windows. It was a palatial lounge, beautifully decorated in classic colours with massive paintings hanging on the walls. The paintings were abstract, and a vivid memory exploded into Lara’s head of when Ciro had taken her to an art gallery in Florence, after hours.

  They’d only just met a few days previously, and she’d been surprised enough at his choice of gallery to make him say with a mocking smile, ‘You expected a rough Sicilian to have no taste?’

  She’d blushed, because he’d exposed her for assuming that a very alpha Italian man would veer towards something more...classical, conservative.

  She’d turned to him, still shy around him, wondering what on earth he was doing with her, a pale English arts student. ‘You’re not rough...not at all.’

  He’d been like a sleek panther, oozing a very lethal sense of coiled sensual energy.

  The gallery had been hushed and reverential. She could still remember the delicious knot of tension deep in her abdomen, and how she’d thought to herself, How can I not fall in love with this man who opens art galleries especially for me and makes me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt?

  They hadn’t even kissed at that stage...

  Ciro’s voice broke through her reverie. ‘Would you like something stronger, Lara? Perhaps some brandy for the overwhelming grief you must be feeling?’

  Lara’s nerves were jangling. He’d turned to face her now, and she noticed that he’d taken off the jacket and wore dark trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. Her mouth went dry. She knew how he tasted there. She could still remember how she’d explored that hollow with her tongue—

  Stop.

  She ignored his question. ‘How long have you lived here?’ Had he been here all this time? Just seconds away from where she’d been existing so miserably?

  Lara thought she saw Ciro’s hand tighten on his glass, but put it down to her overwrought imagination. He said, ‘I bought it months ago but the renovations have only just been completed.’

  So he hadn’t been living here. Somehow that thought comforted Lara. She didn’t know if she could have borne being married to Winterborne while knowing Ciro was so close. Even the thought of seeing him with another woman coming out of this house made her insides clench. Crazy. She had no jurisdiction over this man. She never had. She’d been dreaming. Delusional.

  She lifted her chin. ‘I don’t have time for this, Ciro...whatever it is that you want. I have to be somewhere.’

  Evicted. She ignored the fresh spiking of panic.

  Ciro lifted his tumbler of golden liquid and downed the lot in one go. For a second Lara wished she’d asked for a drink.

  Then he said slowly, ‘But that’s just it, Lara. You don’t have anywhere to go, do you?’

  She actually felt the blood drain from her face. How could he possibly...?

  ‘How can I know?’

  He read her mind. Speared her with that dark gaze. Maybe she’d spoken out loud. She felt as if she were slipping under water, losing all sense of control.

  He lifted a brow. ‘The guests at the funeral were a hotbed of gossip, but I also have my contacts, who’ve informed me that Winterborne left everything to a distant relative and that as soon as you collect your things from the apartment, you’re out on the streets. As for your trust fund—apparently you’ve blown through that too. Poor penniless Lara. You should have stayed with me. I’m worth three times as much as your dead husband and you wouldn’t have had to put up with an old man in your bed for the past two years.’

  Lara’s head hurt to think of how he’d obtained all that information about her trust fund, and her insides churned at the mention of old man.

  Any money left to her by her parents had been long gone before she’d ever had a chance to lay her hands on it. ‘It was never about the money.’

  Ciro’s mouth tightened. ‘No. It was about class.’

  No, Lara thought, it was about blackmail and coercion.

  But, yes, it had been about class too. Albeit not for her; she couldn’t have cared less about class. She never had. Not that Ciro would ever believe her. Not after the way she’d convinced him otherwise.

  She clamped her lips together, resisting the urge to defend herself when she knew it would be futile. She hardly knew this person in front of her, even though at one time she’d felt as if she’d known every atom of his being. He’d disabused her of that romantic notion two years ago. Yet, she couldn’t deny the rapid and persistent spike in her pulse-rate ever since Ciro had revealed himself. Her body knew him.

  Something caught her eye then, and she gasped. His right hand...the one holding the glass...was missing a little finger.

  He saw where her gaze had gone. ‘Not very pretty, eh?’

  Lara felt sick. She remembered Ciro lying in that hospital bed, his head and half his face covered in bandages...his arms... She’d been too distraught to notice much else.

  ‘They did that to you? The kidnappers?’ Her voice was a thread.

  He nodded. ‘It amused them. They got bored, waiting for their orders.’

  Lara realised that he was different. Harder. More intimidating. ‘Why am I here, Ciro?’

  ‘Because you betrayed me.’ He carefully put down the glass on the silver tray. And then he looked at her. ‘And I’m here to collect my due.’

  My due. The words revolved sickeningly in Lara’s head.

  ‘I don’t owe you anything.’ The words felt cumbersome in her mouth.

  Liar, whispered a voice.

  ‘Yes, Lara you do. You walked out on me when I needed you most, leaving me at the mercy of the press, who had a field day reviving all the old stories about my family’s links to the Mafia. Not only that, you left me without a bride.’

  A spark of anger mixed with her guilt as she recalled the lurid headlines in the aftermath of the kidnapping and her subsequent engagement to Henry Winterborne. She focused on the anger.

  ‘You only wanted to marry me to take advantage of my connections to a society that had refused you access.’

  Ciro hadn’t loved her. He’d wanted her because at first she’d intrigued him, with her naivety and innocence, and then because of her connections and her name.

  Over the last two years, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, Lara had come to acknowledge how refreshing someone like her must have been for someone as jaded as him. She’d been so trusting. Loving.

  If they had married it never would have lasted. Not beyond the point where her allure would have worn off and he would have become disenchanted with her innocence. Not beyond the point at which her name and connections would have served their purpose for his ambitions. Of that she had no doubt.

  Of course he wasn’t going to forgive her for taking all that away from him. He was out for revenge.

  For a heady moment Lara imagined telling him exactly what had happened. How events had conspired to drive them apart. How her uncle had so cruelly manipulated her. She even opened her mouth—but then she remembered Ciro’s caustic words. They resounded in her head as if he’d said them only moments ago.

  ‘Don’t delude yourself that I felt anything more for you than you felt for me, Lara. I wanted you, yes, but that was purely physical. More than all of that I wanted you because marrying you would have given me a stamp of respectability that money can’t buy.’

  Ciro’s voice broke through the toxic memory as he said coolly, ‘I prefer to think of it as a kind of debt repayment. You said you’d marry me and I’m holding you to that original commitment. I need a wife, and I’ve no intention of getting into messy emotional entanglements when you’re so convenient.’
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  Lara’s blood drained south. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘Is it? Really? People have married for a lot less, Lara.’

  She looked at him helplessly, torn between hating him for appearing like a magician to turn her world upside down and desperately wanting to defend herself. But she’d lost that chance when she’d informed him coldly that she’d never had any intention of going through with their marriage because she was already promised to someone else—someone eminently more suitable.

  She’d told him that it had amused her to go along with his whirlwind proposal, just to see him make a fool of himself over a woman he could never hope to marry. She’d told him all her breathy words of love had been mere platitudes.

  She’d never forget the look of pure loathing that had come over his face after she’d spoken those bilious words. That had been the moment when she’d realised how deluded she’d been. And on some level she’d been glad she was playing a role, that at least she knew how he’d really felt.

  He was almost killed because of you.

  Lara felt sick again. He hadn’t deserved that just for not loving her. And he hadn’t deserved her lies. He’d saved her from the kidnappers. He’d offered up his life for hers. And then she’d learned she’d never really been in danger. He didn’t know that, though. And right now the thought of him ever finding that out made her break out in a cold sweat. However much he hated her already, he would despise her even more.

  Suddenly a ball of emotion swelled inside her chest. Lara couldn’t bear it that Ciro thought so badly of her, even if it was her fault that she’d convinced him so well. Seeing him again was ripping open a raw wound inside her, and before she knew what she was doing she took a step forward, words tumbling out of her mouth.

  ‘Ciro, I did want to marry you—more than anything. But my uncle...he was crazy...he’d lost everything. He didn’t want me to marry you—he saw you as unworthy of a Templeton. He forced me to say those awful things... They were all lies.’

  Lara stopped abruptly and her words hung in the air. The atmosphere was thick with tension. Taut like a wire. Ciro was expressionless. She could remember a time when he’d used to look at her with such warmth and indulgence. And love, or so she’d thought. But it hadn’t been love. It had been desire. Physical desire and the desire for success.

  He lifted his hands and did a slow and deliberate hand-clap, the sound loud in the room. Lara flinched.

  He shook his head. ‘You really are something, Lara, you know that? But the victim act doesn’t suit you and it’s wasted on me. You really expect me to believe you were coerced into marrying a man old enough to be your father and rich enough to pay off the national debt of a small country? You forget I’ve seen your extensive repertoire of guises, and this innocent, earnest one is overdone and totally unnecessary.’

  Her belly sank. She’d known it was futile to try. How could she explain how her uncle had manipulated and exploited her for his own gain since the moment he’d taken over her guardianship after her parents had died? The extent of his ruthlessness still shocked her, even now.

  And she should recognise ruthlessness by now. She should have known Ciro hadn’t been making idle threats two years ago. After all, he was Sicilian through every fibre of his being. He came from a long and bloody tradition of men who meted out revenge and punishment as a way of life, even if they had tried to distance themselves from all that in recent generations.

  Ciro had told her once that his ancestors had been Moorish pirates and she could well believe it. She could see that he’d been wounded beyond redemption—not in his heart, because that had never been available to wound, but in his fierce Sicilian pride. Wounded when she’d walked away, and by the ruthless kidnappers when they’d physically altered him for ever and demonstrated that even he wasn’t invincible.

  She did owe him a debt. But it was a debt she couldn’t afford to pay emotionally.

  Lara’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and she cursed herself for even trying to defend herself. She couldn’t bear for him to find out just how vulnerable she really was—how nothing had really moved on for her since she’d known him. How the last two years of her life had been a kind of lonely torture.

  She ruthlessly pushed aside all those memories and shrugged one shoulder minutely, affecting an air of boredom. She’d played this part once before—she could do it again.

  ‘Well, it’s been interesting to see you again, Ciro. But quite frankly you’re even more pathetic now than you were two years ago, if this is how little you’ve moved on. What would you have done if Henry hadn’t died? Kidnapped me? Seduced me away and then meted out your punishment?’

  Lara’s words fell like stinging barbs onto Ciro’s skin. They cut far too close to the bone. He had been keeping tabs on her. Getting reports on her whereabouts and her activities—which, as far as he could see, had consisted of not much at all. Not even socialising. Her husband had monopolised her attention, kept her all to himself.

  Ciro hadn’t articulated to himself exactly what he was going to do where Lara was concerned, but he’d known he had reached some kind of nadir when he’d bought this house, sight unseen, because it was around the corner from where she lived. He’d known that he was reaching a place where he simply could not go on without exacting retribution.

  Without seeing her again.

  He crushed that rogue thought.

  In the past few months, as a restless tension had increased inside him, he’d found himself contemplating seducing Lara Winterborne. He’d told himself it would be to prove just how duplicitous she was. But he knew that his motivations were murkier than that. Embedded in a place he’d locked them away two years ago, when she’d morphed into a stranger in front of his very eyes.

  When she’d shown him up as a fool who had cast aside his well-worn cynical shell in a fit of blind lust and something even more disturbing. Emotion. A yearning for a life he’d never known. For a woman who was pure and who would be faithful. Loving. Loyal. A good mother. Fantasies he’d never indulged in before he’d met Lara and she’d exposed a seam of vulnerability he’d never acknowledged before.

  The fact that he’d even considered seducing her away from her husband was galling for a man who had always vowed to conduct his life with more integrity than his mother—never to stoop to her level of betrayal. And yet he’d had to face the unwelcome realisation that his desires were no less base than his weak and adulterous mother’s.

  Lara watched a series of expressions flicker across Ciro’s face. They gradually got darker and darker, until he was glaring at her as if she was the sum of all evil. He started moving towards her then, all coiled lethal masculinity, and Lara took an involuntary step back.

  She wasn’t scared of his physicality—not even with this tension in the air. She was scared of something far more ambiguous and personal deep inside where she knew he had the ability to destroy her. Where he’d already destroyed her.

  He stood in front of her, his scent winding around her like invisible captive threads. He asked with lethal softness, ‘Are you suggesting my life has been on hold?’

  Before she could respond, a sound halfway between a sneer and a laugh came out of Ciro’s mouth.

  ‘Oh, cara, my life hasn’t been on hold for one second since you decided to take that old man into your bed.’

  Lara winced inwardly. She already knew that Ciro’s life hadn’t been on hold. Far from it. As much as she’d tried to block him out of her consciousness, it had been next to impossible. Since his kidnapping he’d become even more infamous and sought-after. He’d tripled his fortune, extending the wildly successful Sant’Angelo Holdings, which had been mainly focused on real estate, to encompass logistics and shipping worldwide.

  And he hadn’t been seen with the same woman twice—which was some feat, considering the frequency with which he’d been photogra
phed at every ubiquitous glamorous event on the European and the worldwide circuit.

  The gossip about his hectic love-life had quickly eclipsed any rumours about why his wedding to Lara hadn’t taken place. Most people had assumed exactly what her uncle had wanted them to assume—that the kidnapping and fresh stories of his links to the Mafia had scared off Lara Templeton, one of Britain’s most eligible society heiresses.

  If anything the tone of the gossip about her had been as sneering as about Ciro—especially when she’d got married so quickly after the event, to a man more than twice her age. It was as if she’d merely proved her own snobbishness. As if she hadn’t been woman enough to handle Ciro Sant’Angelo.

  Certainly all the women he had been photographed with since then had run to a type that was a million miles from Lara’s cool blonde, blue-eyed looks. Women with flashing dark eyes and glossy hair. With unashamedly sexy and curvaceous bodies and an effortless sensuality that Lara could never hope to embody. She was too self-conscious. Too...inexperienced.

  Ciro was shaking his head now, a look of disgust twisting his features and making his scar stand out even more. ‘Did you keep up the virginal act with your husband? Or did you fake it right up until—?’

  ‘Stop it!’ The sharp cry of Lara’s voice surprised even herself. She felt shaky. ‘That wasn’t an act.’

  Ciro made a rude sound, dismissing her words. More proof that she’d been utterly naive to try and defend herself. All she could hope for was that Ciro would get bored and ask her to leave.

  ‘Look, what do you want, Ciro?’ Lara’s voice had a distinctly desperate tone that she didn’t even try to disguise now.

  ‘It’s very simple. I want you, Lara.’ He folded his arms across his formidable chest. ‘It’s time to pay your debt.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  LARA’S SENSE OF panic and desperation increased. ‘I told—you I don’t owe you anything.’

  Ciro responded, ‘We’ve been through this and, yes, you do. You owe me a wedding.’

  Lara fought to stay calm. To appear unmoved. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to marry you.’