Page 31

Despair laced her blood. “What, having sex with you?”

“Yes.”

“I wish it was,” she whispered, the despair now infecting her voice. “Because when this is all over, I’m going to have to live – that’s if I live through it – knowing that I’ve betrayed my parents’ memories and every person I love.”

His green stare held hers for the longest time. “Why do you see it as a betrayal?”

“Because the only emotion I should have for you is hate.” Humourless laughter suddenly cut through the despair. “I do hate you. I hate you with every fibre of my being.”

His stare intensified. “I sense a but.”

Oh, God, when he looked at her like that…

Lifting herself onto her elbow, she flattened her palm on his stubbly cheek. “I hate you with every fibre of my being, but I also want you with every fibre of it.”

The nostrils of the bird-of-prey nose flared, his lips tightening. His body twisting to her, he speared her hair and brought his face to hers. “I hate and want you too. More than any man should hate or want anyone.”

And then his lips fastened to hers and Elvira was lost.

Chapter Twelve

A beam of bright, afternoon sunlight penetrated the room and landed on Mattia’s face.

He opened his eyes.

He’d been at the halfway point between sleep and consciousness.

Curled into him, fast asleep, was Elvira. She looked peaceful. Beautiful.

His heart made a strange wrenching motion.

He’d never slept with a woman before. Not that he’d done any real sleeping, but he’d never had a woman fall asleep curled into him before either. His trysts usually happened in hotel rooms, and he never hung around long enough for sleep. He rarely stayed long enough to be judged as polite, but that hadn’t mattered. The women he’d had sex with had been using him as much as he’d been using them. They’d been a tick to satisfy his father of his eldest son’s heterosexual virility; he’d been a scalp for the women to brag about to their friends.

He looked at his watch. Five o’clock.

Elvira had been sleeping for three hours. She hadn’t moved at all.

With a smothered sigh, he inched away from her and climbed out of bed, padding naked to the bathroom. He needed to clean himself up, and he needed to eat. In a few hours, he would receive word about his mother. He needed to be prepared for it. Sharp.

He would have to wake Elvira for the call. He’d agreed that Elio could speak to her at the point of his mother’s release as proof of life and a sign of good faith.

Cursing himself, he let the hot water pour on him.

How would she be when speaking to her brother? Would Elio be able to judge from one look that his sister and her kidnapper had become lovers?

Mattia’s family were in no position to make judgments, what with Rico turning his back on the family business and Tommaso marrying a traitor for love, but Elvira’s family were not his. Their hatred of Mattia and his family ran deep.

That Elio would want to kill Mattia for sleeping with his sister was a given, but as Elio already wanted to kill him for kidnapping her and upending his vengeance over the Espositos, that was neither here nor there. Sure, he might be a little more ingenious in the pain inflicted to kill him, but you couldn’t be deader than dead. It wouldn’t matter to Elio that he’d married Mattia’s sister on the lie of uniting their two families, an act of vengeance that was merely the prelude to his ultimate revenge. Elio had married Siena for tactical reasons.

There had been nothing tactical in Elvira sleeping with Mattia. Elio wouldn’t kill her for it but she would suffer in a different way. She’d be pushed out into the cold, never to be trusted again.

At least, that’s how he assumed things would go down if she confessed or Elio guessed. Mattia couldn’t know. He barely knew Elio other than as the man who’d ripped the Espositos apart and taken everything from him. He was a lethal opponent, but who he was as a man was a mystery to him.

Mattia was coming to think that who he, himself, as a man was a mystery to him too.

Duty. Loyalty. Obedience. All the traits instilled in him and which he’d forced himself to observe since he was old enough to know what those words meant. He’d never had the chance to be anyone or anything but Lorenzo Esposito’s eldest son. His path had been forged before he was born. Elvira’s path had been forged when she was three. Had either of them ever had a choice but to take those paths?

His hair still damp from his shower, a towel slung around his waist, he went back to the bedroom.