One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets

‘I bet Aldo Barado doesn’t like it,’ she had challenged him, and of course he had been forced to agree that she was right.

‘He is a good man,’ he had said in defence of the headman. ‘I value his advice and his knowledge.’

‘And his desire to keep his people locked into out-of-date customs—especially when those people are female? Do you value that as well?’ she had demanded.

‘He has his pride, and I would never want to damage that, but I can see that there are changes that need to be made—changes that I want and plan to make.’

Even now it still gave him a sharp shock of disbelief that he should have been able to confide in her so easily and so quickly. Even then there had been something about her that said she had an understanding of and a compassion for human nature that outweighed her years. Her choice of career had proved that.

It had been inevitable right from the start that he would take her to bed. Was it equally inevitable that she should have conceived his child?

His heart thudded into his ribs with truly ferocious blows.

It was simply because she had come to bed early that she couldn’t sleep, Louise assured herself as she stood on the balcony of the twin room she was sharing with Oliver, who was fast asleep in his own bed.

The gardens beyond the hotel sparkled with lights, in the trees and around the pools. Somewhere on the complex music was playing. From her balcony she could see couples strolling arm in arm. Couples. That was something that could never happen for her—being part of a couple. She’d always be far too afraid of somehow regressing to the needy, self-damaging girl she had been, and repeating her old mistakes. More important than that, though, was Oliver. She would never take the risk of introducing into their lives a man who might damage her son by letting either of them down.

Down on the ground below her a small group of teenagers passed by, reminding her of how she had been the last time she had come to Sicily. A teenager who had been punished so cruelly and so publicly. Louise could feel herself compressing her muscles against the savage bite of memories she didn’t want resurrected. Some things never stopped inflicting pain, no matter how much thick skin one tried to grow over the wound.

It had been midway through their holiday. Her father hadn’t spoken to her for three days because he was ashamed of her—both of how she looked and how she behaved.

Melinda, of course, had been looking like the cat who had got the cream, constantly drawing attention to Louise’s failings whilst making sure that her father saw how enchantingly pretty and well behaved her own daughters were in contrast. Pretty, self-confident little girls, who weren’t at all hesitant about begging sweetly for ice cream.

Since Melinda had come into her father’s life there had been a constant and—on Louise’s part—increasingly desperate war between them to win his loyalty. A war which Louise had felt deep down inside herself she was destined to lose—until she had met Caesar on the fateful solitary walk she had taken to escape from Aldo Barado’s son Pietro’s increasingly unpleasant attentions. She’d done nothing to encourage him. At least not in her own book. Yes, she’d initially enjoyed the fuss the local boys had made of her, feeling very grown up and streetwise compared with the village girls who had such cloistered lives. Yes, she’d broken an unwritten local rule by drinking beer in the village bar in the company of those boys, but she had never, ever given Pietro the kind of encouragement he claimed she had given him.

It was no exaggeration to say that meeting Caesar, realising who he was and accepting his invitation to the castello, had changed the whole course of her life. Not that she had guessed how radical that change would be on that first day. She had heard her grandparents talking about him, and knew the high regard, almost awe, with which he was revered, and had seized on what she had seen as an opportunity to outmanoeuvre Melinda via a relationship with Caesar. At eighteen she had been too naive to reason any further than that. It had been enough that Caesar had shown an interest in her.

By the time she had realised that being with Caesar was more important to her than winning her father’s approval it had been too late for her to pull back. She’d been in love with Caesar. When he’d visited the village she had made sure that she was there—even if that meant she had to frequent the bar and endure the unwanted attentions of the headman’s son to make sure she would bring herself to Caesar’s attention. She had hung on his every word, ignoring Pietro’s anger when the gang of boys who hung around with him made fun of him because he was being supplanted in her affections by their Duca.

‘You are a fool,’ Pietro had spat at her furiously. ‘He is not really interested in you! How could he be? He is a duca.’

It wasn’t any more than she had already told herself, but his unkind words had stung, making her determined to prove him and everyone else wrong. She hadn’t told him about those private ‘accidental’ meetings, when she had walked close to the castello, glancing up at the windows which Caesar had told her belonged to his private suite of rooms, and her persistence had been rewarded by Caesar’s appearance. Their walks together, the conversation they had shared, had been so precious to her. Caesar hadn’t laughed at her as others did.

It had only been a matter of a few very small steps for a girl of her emotional vulnerability to start creating inside her head a fairytale situation in which Caesar returned her love, and by doing so set her not just on a duchess’s throne but also a shining, happy pedestal from which she could bask in the admiration and the approval of her father. However, to her disappointment, despite the time they’d been spending together, Caesar had made no attempt to take their relationship any further. Instead of taking up her silent invitation he’d backed off from her—even if on one particularly hot, sultry afternoon towards the end of the holiday he had been so obviously furiously angry at finding her in the village bar with Pietro that she had been sure he was jealous.

‘You are risking your reputation with your behaviour,’ he had told her when she had accused him of jealousy later. ‘It is that which concerns me on your behalf.’

‘What about Pietro?’ she had challenged him. ‘Isn’t he also risking his reputation?’

‘It is different for a man—at least here in this part of the world,’ had been his answer.

‘Well, it shouldn’t be. Because it isn’t fair,’ she had told him, with all her own feelings about her relationship with her father intensifying her vulnerable emotions.

Instead of giving vent to her feelings about the unfairness of the community’s customs she should have paid more attention to his warning on a personal level, Louise acknowledged. It was too late for such regrets now, though. Far, far too late.

She had been such a fool, seeing in Caesar’s behaviour towards her what she had wanted to see instead of reality. She had convinced herself that Caesar loved her as passionately as she had him. Naively, even laughably, she had completely ignored the barriers between them, convinced that all that mattered was their feelings for one another, even though Caesar had given her no indication whatsoever that he felt the same way as her.

The night Oliver had been conceived she had been desperate to see him. He’d been away from the village on business, and when she’d heard that he had returned her need to be with him had been so great that nothing could have stopped her from doing what she had done. They were destined to be together—she had known it. Their fates, their futures would be entwined as surely as those of Romeo and Juliet.

She’d hoped that Caesar would come down to the village, and when he hadn’t, fuelled by her longing to be with him, she’d claimed a headache and pretended to go to bed. Instead she’d gone to the castello, sneaking in through the open kitchen door and finding her way to Caesar’s room.

He had been busy working on his computer when she’d walked in, a look of shock stilling his face when he’d seen her. He’d got up from his chair, but when she’d run towards him he had fended her off, demanding tersely, ‘Louise, what are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here.’

Hardly the words of a devoted lover. But she’d been too wrought up and possessed by her own emotions to pay any heed to them. Caesar loved and wanted her, she knew he did, and now she was going to show him how much she loved and wanted him. It had made her feel so grown up to take control of the situation like that. To be the one to drive their relationship forward to the intimate closeness that they both wanted.

‘I had to come,’ she’d told him. ‘I want to be with you so much. I want you so much, Caesar,’ she’d emphasized, closing the door and then walking towards him, removing her jacket as she did so, keeping her gaze fixed on his face as she mimicked a scene from a film she’d seen in London during which the actress slowly removed her clothes as she walked towards the hero.

It hadn’t take her long to get down to her underwear. She hadn’t been wearing very much—just a simple cotton dress under her denim jacket. Even her much prized Doc Marten boots had been exchanged for a pair of slipon flat shoes so that she could step out of them easily. She’d stretched behind herself to unfasten her bra, and then stopped to look right at him and beg huskily, ‘You do it, Caesar. You unfasten it,’ before hurling herself towards him.

He’d caught hold of her immediately, as she’d known he would. What she hadn’t known, though—until then—was how safe it felt to be in his arms, as well as how exciting. Safety and excitement—opposites. And yet right then in Caesar’s arms they had seemed to fit together perfectly—just as she and Caesar would also fit together perfectly when he made her his.

She’d kissed the side of his jaw, overwhelmed by what being so close to him was doing to her. It had been a clumsy, inexperienced kiss, and it had thrilled and shocked her when she’d felt the stubble of his skin beneath the softness of her parted lips. He had felt so male, so alien and dangerous, and yet at the same time so safe—because he was hers, because he loved her.

Believing that had given her the courage to demand, ‘Kiss me, Caesar, kiss me now. Now,’ she had repeated on a soft moan as she clutched at his arms and lifted her mouth towards his.

He’d tried to deny her, to push her away, insisting, ‘This can’t happen, Louise. We both know that. It must not happen.’

Louise hadn’t wanted to listen. She’d been beyond listening, she acknowledged now. She’d heard other girls talking about how it felt to be turned on by a boy, but this was the first time she’d experienced it.

She’d kissed him again but this time as he’d tried to wrench her arms from around his neck they’d fallen together onto the bed, and then she’d felt it—the hard evidence of his arousal.

She’d trembled violently with that knowledge and pressed herself closer to him, ignoring his savage, ‘No, this must not happen.’

Louise stared out into the darkness. It made her feel physically sick now to acknowledge how badly and self destructively she’d behaved. With maturity she could accept that within a man pushed hard enough a certain chain reaction could be activated, transmuting anger into a physical male desire that had nothing to do with any kind of tender emotion for the woman involved.

His hands had locked round her wrists and he’d held her beneath him. His thumb pads, she remembered, had found the racing pulse-points beneath her skin. Totally ill-equipped to understand or handle her own female sensuality, she had cried out in shock as the warmth of his touch caused a weakening longing to surge through her body. That was when it had happened. That was when she had lost all thought of why she was there and had only been able to think about what being so intimately close to him was doing to her. With one heartbeat she had slipped from one world to another, changed for ever by that happening. All her caution had left her, all sense of anything other than what was happening. Like the opening of a floodgate she had started to tell him how much she wanted him, how much he aroused her, how much she loved him, scattering kisses over his face and throat, clinging to him, pleading with him.

If she was trembling now, remembering that moment, then it was because of the night air against the bare flesh of her arms—nothing more. She wanted to go back inside and escape the memories of what it had meant to lie naked in a man’s arms in the scented warmth of the Sicilian night. Behind her the safety of her hotel room would no doubt be smelly with the reality of Ollie’s trainers, its silence broken not by the accelerated breathing of two people possessed by mutual sexual need but by those little noises Ollie was still young enough to make in his sleep. She needed that reality, but the memories linking her to the past, once unleashed, were too strong for her to deny. What had happened that fateful night couldn’t be denied. After all Oliver himself was the living, breathing evidence of Caesar’s possession of her.

From the unshuttered windows of Caesar’s bedroom she had been able to see outlined against the star-studded moonlit sky the distant mountains, and the white-hot heat running through her veins had been every bit as dangerous as Mount Etna’s lava flow.

The fierce grind of Caesar’s lower body into her own, so compulsively male, so previously unknown and yet somehow at the same time immediately recognised by her own flesh, the harsh possession of his kiss, her first true kiss—everything about their intimacy had had a dark magic about it that she had been powerless to resist. There in that Caesar-scented night-dark room she had come of age as a woman, and her body had gloried in that happening.

There was no point in trying to convince herself now that the thrill she had felt then had been solely engendered by the triumph she had felt in arousing Caesar’s desire, because she and her body both knew the truth. The thrill she had felt, the delight and the desire she had felt, had sprung from a need within herself that she had actively encouraged and celebrated—from the taut sensitivity of her nipples, where they’d rubbed against the hair-darkened masculinity of the chest Caesar had bared for her touch, to the liquid heat of female desire that had pounded so fiercely within her sex. She had wanted him, and her need to have him answer that wanting had been as unstoppable as her need to breathe.

There was no point telling herself that it was merely the wine she had drunk earlier that evening that had melted away her inhibitions. She knew that wasn’t true. There in Caesar’s bed, in Caesar’s arms, her need for his possession had surely sprung from an embedded age-old female pre-conditioning to mate with the man who was the strongest of his tribe and whose genes would most benefit the child he might give her.

Not that she had analysed her reaction like that then, of course. Then she had simply told herself that being there in Caesar’s arms, knowing that he wanted her, was the fulfilment of her ultimate fantasy and would prove she was worthy of another’s love.

There’d certainly been no holding back on her part when Caesar had invited her to touch him intimately, placing her hand over the thick, pulsing heat of his erection.

Her heart slammed into her chest wall, her hand trembling as she fought against the intensity of the physical memory invading her body and her senses. It surely shouldn’t be possible to have reconstructed that exact moment and those feelings—not when she had buried those memories so deeply. Sicily—it was Sicily and her blood heritage that was reviving them. That and the knowledge of what her grandfather had done, and the far more dangerous realities his letter had unleashed.

She tried to redirect her thoughts, but it was no use. They were as out of her control as her body had been that night, commanded by a far greater authority.

She could still remember how her heart had raced and pounded at the feel of his flesh beneath her touch, before settling into a heavy, fast rhythm that had matched the pulse within his sex and then within her own as it had taken up the beat his had set. She had been wet and ready when his fingers had parted her sex, slippery with the juices of desire and excitement, and her eyes had opened wide, her body arcing in disbelief before melting into shuddering climax beneath his skilled touch against her clitoris.

How naive she had been. Wholly caught up in her feelings of loss and abandonment, at eighteen she had had no real knowledge at all of her own sexuality. Technically she had known what happened, but that hadn’t prepared her for the reality of the hot gush of pleasure that had engulfed her, causing her to cry out Caesar’s name and cling helplessly to him as her body rode its first climactic storm.