Scandals Of The Ruthless: A Shadow of Guilt

She started to stride away towards her accommodation fully intending to pack and leave and then felt a much larger presence beside her. He took her arm in his hand. Again. It was too much; she yanked free and glared up into his face. ‘Don’t touch me.’

Suddenly Valentina became belatedly aware of people stopped in their tracks around them, watching avidly. Gio noticed too. Grimly he took her hand instead, in a grip so tight it bordered on being painful, and said, ‘Not another word, Ferranti. We’re taking this somewhere private. We are not done.’

* * *

Valentina was tight-lipped and white-faced by the time Gio was opening a door on the same floor as his offices. Her hand was still clamped in his and the way his much larger hand engulfed hers was far too disturbing. He finally let her go when he opened the door and all but pushed her through. She snatched back her hand and held it to her chest; it was tingling.

Pacing away from him, she was so pumped up that she barely noticed what was a very starkly designed yet luxurious small apartment. Minimal furnishings in soft greys and muted colours in the living area led into a bedroom and what she presumed to be a bathroom en suite.

Gio closed the door behind him and she heard him turn a key in the lock. Valentina backed away, eyes huge on him, instantly her sense of threat spiked. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Gio was grim. ‘We’re not leaving here until we’ve come to some agreement as to how to proceed without you wanting to rip my head off at every opportunity. It doesn’t make for a good professional relationship.’

He crossed his arms. ‘And first things first, you are not quitting.’

Valentina crossed her arms too. She was valiantly ignoring the fact that she was now alone in a locked room with Gio Corretti and there was enough electricity crackling between them to light up the whole stadium.

‘I can quit if I want to.’

Gio arched a brow. ‘Really? Have you already forgotten that you came to me as a last resort?’

Valentina flushed. She had forgotten for a moment. She thought she had freedom. But she didn’t. If she left now she couldn’t allow Gio to pay for her parents’ care and she’d be right back to square one. And it would be so much worse because she’d be decimating her father’s chances of getting well again. It was inconceivable that she could do that to them.

‘Fine.’ She felt like a fool. ‘I won’t quit.’

Gio’s brow got higher. ‘That’s big of you—after that little public display of animosity I would have grounds to fire you if I so wished.’

Fear lanced Valentina. She looked at Gio properly. ‘But you just said that I couldn’t quit.’

Gio looked at Valentina and suddenly the bravado was gone and she looked achingly young and vulnerable. Her hair had been tied up in a ponytail but long tendrils had come loose and drifted about her shoulders. She was wearing tight black skinny jeans, flat shoes and a white button-down shirt. It was slightly too short and he could see a sliver of pale flat belly underneath.

She wore no make-up and she was the most beautiful woman Gio had ever seen. A shaft of desire hit him right in the solar plexus, spreading outwards to every cell in his body, even as the realisation that he could never have her failed to douse that desire. It only served to rouse it.

Anger made Gio spit out, ‘Let’s get to the real issue here, the elephant in the room—Mario.’

He saw how Valentina blanched and her eyes got bigger. He pushed down the urge to apologise. Saying his name out loud was like exploding a soft yet lethal bomb between them. ‘Come on,’ he sneered. ‘Aren’t you just waiting for another opportunity to hurl some more insults and accusations my way?’

Perhaps it was the easy forgiveness of Valentina’s parents working on him subconsciously, but for the first time in a long time, Gio actually felt a subtle shift in his ever-present sense of guilt. It wasn’t so black or all-encompassing.

Valentina was struggling to hold on to something real, tangible. Her hatred for this man, for what he had done. She clung to it now like a drowning person clinging to a buoy. Her voice shook with tension. ‘Don’t you dare mention his name.’

Gio looked fearsome, his face tight with anger, eyes blazing. Muscles popping in his jaw. ‘I have as much of a right to mention his name as you do.’

Valentina shook her head. ‘No, no, you don’t, you—’

‘I what?’ Gio cut in. ‘I killed him? Is that what you’re going to say?’

Emotion, thick and acrid and cloying, was rising up within Valentina, but it wasn’t the easily understood grief for her brother. That she recognised and knew well; this was something much more ambiguous and disturbing. It was something to do with this man and how he made her feel, how he’d always made her feel.

Not understanding this visceral feeling he effortlessly evoked within her and hating him for it, Valentina suddenly flew at him with her hands balled to fists. She took him by surprise and he fell back against the door with a thump. His arms came around her to protect them both just as she registered that his chest was like steel under her hands. And, in the same instance, that she wanted to unfurl her hands and run them up over his muscles and not beat him.

Valentina sprang back, breaking his hold, aghast at her bubbling emotions. She was breathing hard and she looked up at Gio, who straightened up carefully from the door, hands behind him. His polo shirt strained over his hard chest. He was breathing hard too, his chest rising and falling. Tension was even thicker now between them along that ever-present crackle of electricity.

She was suddenly desperate to cling on to something, anything that could keep a distance between them, because for a moment it had fallen away. Dissolved in a rush of heat. Dissolved by the shocking extent of her awareness of him.

Valentina turned away for a moment to try and collect herself when she felt as if she was coming apart and then turned back, her control flimsy. ‘You might not have killed him but you’re responsible.’

A stillness seemed to surround Gio now, making Valentina even more nervous. When he spoke he sounded weary. ‘And how long are you going to keep punishing me for that? Don’t you think I’ve been punishing myself for it?’

Valentina tried to ignore the way something in his voice caused an ache inside her. She emitted a hoarse laugh and put out a hand to encompass their general surroundings. ‘You call this punishment? Living in luxury? Making millions? Cavorting on yachts with celebrities?’

Gio’s face got even starker and inwardly Valentina quivered. She had to concede uncomfortably that it had been some time since he’d been pictured on the hedonistic social scene. It had all ended abruptly after those couple of years, when he’d returned to Sicily and immersed himself in his racetrack. He hadn’t even been pictured with a woman since then.

He came closer to her and she fought not to move back, every muscle screaming with tension. She felt as if she’d woken a slumbering lion.

‘For two years I lived like that and it was no fun.’

‘That’s not the impression you gave to the world.’ Valentina ignored the little voice of conscience that reminded her that Gio hadn’t looked happy in any of the photos she’d seen of him in the press. He’d looked intense, as if driven by something.

Now Gio emitted a curt laugh that made Valentina flinch. He put a hand through his hair and stalked away from her to stand looking out the window with his back to her. Finally Valentina could breathe again. Every line of his body was taut. Shoulders broad, leading down to slim hips in low-riding worn jeans. Even now, in the midst of this high emotion, her attention was wandering, gaze captivated by his perfect backside, those powerful thighs and long legs.

Disgusted with herself, she swallowed back a curse and crossed her arms and lifted her gaze to the back of that dark head. And something inexplicably tender lanced her. She didn’t have time to question it before Gio started talking in a cool voice.

‘I ran away from here, something I’m not proud of.’

He turned around then and Valentina sucked in a breath at the bleakness on his face, in his eyes. ‘If I could have been the one to die, do you not think I wished it a million times? Every time I woke up in the morning? I knew what I had done...I know. If we hadn’t been friends, if I hadn’t badgered him into coming out that night, if I hadn’t had that damaged horse at my stables...’ He broke off and then continued huskily. ‘Do you not think I know that Mario’s death was my fault? If I hadn’t been arrogant enough to assume I could tame the most untameable of horses...Mario wouldn’t have wanted to try himself, to prove me wrong.’

Bitterness laced Gio’s voice now. ‘I came from a life of excess I hadn’t even earned, from a family connected only by their disconnectedness. Mario came from everything that was good and real.’

His eyes seemed to be skewering Valentina to the spot. She couldn’t move. His voice roughened. ‘The night Mario died...I went back to the palazzo and put Black Star down, even though he was physically uninjured. He was untameable, there was something wrong in his head, or genes, but I’d let him live. Me. He should have been put down months before, when that jockey had died.’

Gio’s mouth was impossibly flat. ‘It took another death before I saw through my sheer arrogance. When I left here I wanted to die too. I wanted to kill myself but that would have been too easy, too self-serving. So I did everything imaginable to court death, without it actually being by my hand.

‘I jumped out of planes, I climbed impossible mountains, I went to war-torn regions in Africa—ostensibly for charity purposes but secretly hoping I’d find myself a target of some drug-crazed faction.’

Something cold went down Valentina’s spine when she thought of the cavalier way in which Gio had played with his life.

But he wasn’t finished. His mouth twisted in evident self-disgust. ‘Instead I found myself being lauded as a champion of philanthropists, and became a pin-up for extreme-sport enthusiasts. So then I immersed myself in the debauched and shallow world of the truly idle and rich. Because that’s what I deserved.’

He laughed curtly. ‘After all, isn’t that what I was? I’d never done a decent day’s work in school and yet Mario, with infinitely less resources, had succeeded against all the odds. Do you not think that I know how much Mario’s life was worth over mine?’

Valentina felt as if she’d just been punched in the gut with his words. She even put a hand there as if she could stop pain from blooming outwards. She couldn’t say anything though, too stunned, too shocked....

Gio continued in a flat voice. ‘The days were meaningless and morphed into one another, interspersed with whatever my next desperate flirtation with death would be. I lost and won back my entire fortune in the space of twenty-four hours many times over. One night in a casino I was so drunk I could barely see straight, but I was about to use Misfit as collateral in a bet with a renowned and very ruthless gambler. He’d been waiting for his moment to get my horse.

‘And right then, I truly didn’t care about Misfit, I didn’t care about anything. I’d slept with a woman the night before and couldn’t have even told you her name. She was just one of many.’

Valentina was silent. In shock. Not disgusted. Everything about him spoke of his own self-recrimination. She found herself inexplicably understanding his need to lose himself in something, anything.