Sins of the Past Read Free

selfless emotion.
    ‘No, you’re not.’ How could he even say that when he had contributed so directly to the woman’s inevitable slide into the despair that had finally killed her—and at such a brutally young age?
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘What do you care?’
    His features hardened at her lack of response. ‘Tell me.’
    She didn’t want to. It hurt too much to talk about her once effervescent young mother—who had insisted on Riva calling her Chelsea—especially in front of the one man she had hoped never to see again.
    His whole demeanour, however, commanded, and reluctantly she found herself yielding to the sway of his forceful personality by saying, ‘If you must know, it was an accidental overdose of drugs she’d been taking for depression.’ She had also been drinking too, although she didn’t tell him that. The doctors had said it was a lethal mix.
    ‘When?’
    ‘Just over a year ago.’
    That firm mouth compressed. ‘As I said, I’m sorry.’
    She gave a brittle little laugh. ‘Don’t be. After all, it wasn’t
your
fault she sank into depression after her wrecked engagement to the man she loved!’
    ‘You’re holding me responsible for that?’
    ‘If the cap fits.’
    ‘Unfortunately, Riva, it doesn’t.’ He glanced across to the window, his clean-shaven yet darkly shadowed jaw a statement to his hard and potent virility. ‘You know full well why Marcello broke off his engagement to your mother,’ he stated with dogmatic cruelty. ‘She was investigated and found wanting. You both were.’
    ‘Yes, but only by you!’
    ‘Because Marcello was too bewitched by a pretty face and a pair of dancing blue eyes to see beyond the superficially sweet smiles and the cleverly crafted cover-up.’
    ‘Which you weren’t, of course?’
    ‘Hardly.’ His jaw-line hardened as he expounded. ‘And, while my uncle might have been treated to a watered-down version of the truth from your mother, he wasn’t the one chosen to be the recipient of the most blatant lies.’
    He was talking about her, and she cringed now at the elaborate story she had woven around herself, around herbackground and her upbringing, shuddering from her naïveté in believing he would never find out. Nothing, though, could reverse that, and she could never tell him exactly why she had lied.
    ‘Now, if it’s all the same to you, you won’t mind if we get on and do the job you’ve been sent here to do.’ His outstretched arm demanded that she precede him out of the room.
    Glad to let their conversation drop, Riva complied.
    Watching the way she moved as he directed her back downstairs to the room he wanted redesigning, he couldn’t help noticing the proud little tilt to her pointed chin and the slim back held straight as a rod beneath the soft jersey top.
    She had spirit. He had to hand her that.
    He caught a waft of her perfume, flowery and fresh, and felt a kick in his loins that shook him to the very core of his being.
    With that fiery hair, that milky skin, and breasts that certainly couldn’t be called buxom, she wasn’t the tall, blonde, leggy type he usually gravitated towards, but there was something about her … something that attracted him even as it irritated him. He was having to acknowledge that he still wanted the arty little creature, as he had wanted her from the moment he had first laid eyes on her all those years ago in his uncle’s villa.
    When Marcello had informed him that he was getting married, he’d been naturally delighted, he remembered. His uncle—his late father’s brother—had been a widower for more than ten years. But Damiano couldn’t deny that when he had arrived at the villa at Marcello’s invitation, to meet his proposed new bride, he had been shocked to discover a woman half Marcello’s age with a fully-grown daughter in tow.
    At first he had thought they were sisters. On first name terms, and so alike in build and stature, with their loose floralskirts and their long straight