Read the book: «A Clash With Cannavaro»

CHAPTER ONE

LAUREN RECOGNISED THE man as soon as he stepped out of the car, a shining silver monster of a thing that looked incongruous against the rustic outbuildings of the Cumbrian farmhouse and the verdant slopes of the fells above its wet slate roofline.

It was the man striding across the yard with his hair blowing like an untamed mane in the wind that her gaze was fixed on, however, as she finished securing the stable door for the night.

Tall, lean, in his early thirties, his expensive tailoring could do nothing to conceal a physique honed to prime strength and unquestionable fitness, or those shoulders which were wide enough to eclipse the moon. But he was a man she had never expected—or hoped—ever to see again, and she watched his approach now with a leap of something electric lighting her wary green gaze.

‘Hello, Lauren.’

If she was lost for words, then it was only because she was shocked to see him there on her Lakeland property. A property on which her late parents had blown all their savings to chase a dream of self-sufficiency—a dream that had never quite lived up to its promise and which was a world away from the glamorous capitals of Europe and the far-flung playgrounds of the mega-rich that the man before her inhabited.

‘Emiliano!’ She could have kicked herself for sounding so breathless and for wishing that she was wearing something other than her vest top and dungarees, or even that she had had a chance to comb her hair. After being out in the damp air, checking on the horses she stabled for the few paying customers who helped subsidise her meagre income from the local garden centre, she knew the flaming waves were falling untidily about her shoulders in a blaze of ungoverned fire. ‘What are you doing here?’

A definite wobble weakened the challenge in her voice. But then it wasn’t every day that she found herself facing Emiliano Cannavaro, Italian shipping magnate and steel-hard billionaire. The man who had taken the already international freight and ferry line his grandfather had founded and turned it into a global giant, spearheaded by a fleet of luxury cruise liners. A man who had used his Continental charm and his chocolate-rich voice to lure her into his bed, only to discard her in the most degrading and humiliating way after the marriage of her sister, Vikki, to his younger brother, Angelo, two years ago.

‘We have to talk,’ he said.

She had forgotten how tall he was, and how, without the benefit of high heels, she only just reached his shoulder. What she hadn’t forgotten was how it made her stomach flip just to look up into his olive-skinned features—features that had been redeemed from being too handsome by that slight bump in his nose, and by the glaring virility in that clean-shaven, yet heavily shadowed angular jaw.

She cupped a hand over her eyes to shield them from the low evening sun. ‘What about?’ Her tone was accusatory as she did her best to ignore the effect his sudden appearance was having on her.

‘About Daniele.’

Eyes fringed by lashes only a shade darker than her hair regarded him suspiciously. ‘Danny?’ Her voice cracked as she felt the burn of his hard masculine scrutiny over the flushed, perfect heart shape of her face.

With unsettling thoroughness he was taking in her rebellious green eyes, small chin and slightly turned-up nose with its cluster of freckles that her mother used to say was a sprinkling of stardust, before his gaze dropped with unconcealed insolence to her mouth. It was a full mouth, usually marked by a natural curve, but at this moment was definitely hinting at mutiny as his eyes came to rest disconcertingly on hers again.

His assessment made her feel weak, but it seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever as he gestured towards the ancient farmhouse and said, ‘Shall we go inside?’

Inside? Together? Alone? With him!

Her heart-rate doubled its pace. ‘Not until you tell me what this is all about.’

‘All right. If you want it straight. I would like to see him.’

‘Why? When you haven’t come near him or even rang to enquire after his welfare in over a year?’

If she wasn’t mistaken, Lauren heard him catch a breath. So he was feeling guilty. Good! she thought, cutting him no slack.

‘If I have neither telephoned nor been to see him,’ he responded with the firming of a mouth too sensual for any woman of child-bearing years to possibly ignore, ‘it is because you allowed none of us to know where he was.’

Lauren stared at him incredulously. ‘Is that what your brother told you?’ she exhaled, flabbergasted. ‘Or is that something you dreamed up yourself? Anyway, I didn’t think he mattered to you. Or to any of you Cannavaros,’ she expanded bitterly, recalling how his brother had as good as disowned his six-month-old son only weeks after Vikki’s death nearly a year ago. Still walking with the aid of a stick because of the injuries he had sustained in the car crash that had claimed her younger sister, Angelo Cannavaro had informed Lauren in plain, insensitive words that she could keep the baby her sister had used to trap him into marriage because he was cutting loose. That was the last time she had seen him. Or any member of the Cannavaro family! Though it had hurt her immensely for Danny’s sake, she couldn’t say that she hadn’t been relieved. And now here was Emiliano Cannavaro turning up and accusing her of being the one at fault! ‘You’ve got a nerve!’ she breathed.

He raked his hair back from his forehead with a long, lean hand. Hands which, in one weekend, had learned the pathways of her body and the whereabouts of every erogenous zone she possessed. His face was harder than she remembered, although even back then it had been a face stamped with authority, with a high forehead and cheekbones clearly defined. Add the midnight mystery of spectacularly dark eyes, thickly arched black brows—one of which was lifting now as though in dispute of what she had accused him of—and long ebony lashes that most teenage girls would probably have killed for, and she could see why she had been rendered helpless from the moment she had laid eyes on him.

‘As I suggested, could we go inside?’

His tone brooked no argument and so without a word she led him across the yard and in through the back door of the rugged little farmhouse, uncomfortably aware that he was probably enjoying a studied view of her back and the curve of her bottom and remembering...

‘So say what you’ve got to say.’ A strong sexual awareness made her tone excessively curt as she rounded on him in the large but shabby kitchen. But the memory of how this man had bedded her and then treated her as if she wasn’t even fit to tread the same ground as he did never failed to shame and humiliate her—even without suddenly coming face to face with him and having to relive it all over again!

‘As you wish.’ He didn’t seem at all perturbed by her unfriendly manner. ‘I shan’t...What is the term you use? Beat about the bush?’ Nevertheless, he seemed to hesitate for a second before continuing. ‘You are probably aware that Angelo died just over a month ago.’

She nodded. She had been shocked to read about it in one of the national newspapers. Accidental death, the verdict had been. Caused by a lethal mix of strong painkillers he’d been taking for his continuing back injury and an excessive amount of alcohol in his blood.

Lauren was sorry, but all she could say right then was, ‘So what does that have to do with me?’

‘Everything,’ he answered succinctly. ‘Because, from now on, this monopolising of Daniele is going to cease.’

‘I haven’t been monopolising him!’ she shot back. ‘At least, not intentionally. But if I have, it’s only because your brother took no interest in him whatsoever, which is one of the reasons Vikki left him.’ Among others, she thought with a mental grimace, before adding, ‘And neither have you.’

‘Something I fully intend to rectify,’ he promised. ‘But as I have already told you...’ he was beginning to sound impatient ‘...I did not have the first idea where Daniele was. As you probably...remember...’ his hesitation was marked, calculated, Lauren was sure, to remind her of an intimacy she didn’t even want to think about ‘...I live in Rome. But on those occasions when I visited this country, Angelo assured me that Daniele was being adequately cared for. It was only a short time before he died, when I put pressure on him to tell me where he was, that he said he had left Daniele with you and that he didn’t have a clue as to where you had taken him. Why would he have told me that if it was not true?’

‘Because he didn’t want you to know what the truth really was!’ Lauren returned hotly.

‘And exactly what is the truth, Lauren?’ Emiliano invited, in clearly sceptical tones.

‘That he abandoned Daniele because he couldn’t face the responsibility of being a father! He knew exactly where I was and how to find me. He could have come any time to see Daniele and I wouldn’t have stopped him,’ she fumed, hurting for her little nephew. ‘But he didn’t because he didn’t want to give up his gambling and his womanising and everything else about the self-indulgent high life that both of you enjoy so much!’

It was a cry from the heart at the injustice of what both her and her sister had had to pay for getting mixed up with the Cannavaro brothers. Heaven knew, Vikki hadn’t been any saint! But she hadn’t deserved the drunken abuse and infidelity that had forced her into leaving Angelo after less than ten months of marriage. Any more than she, Lauren, had deserved his brother’s scorn and bitter contempt...

‘Nevertheless,’ Emiliano said coldly, seemingly oblivious to her indictment of self-indulgence or to the pain that seemed to be turning her inside out, ‘Daniele is his son, and therefore my nephew.’

‘And you naturally want to see him.’ She had to concede that much. As the toddler’s natural aunt and uncle they were equal claimants for the little boy’s affections. Even so, she took some gratification out of being able to say, ‘Well, I’m afraid that it’s not going to be possible tonight because he’s already asleep.’

She sensed the tension in him and for the first time noticed the dark smudges beneath his eyes, caused, no doubt, by the recent loss of his brother. But then he gave the slightest tilt of his head, causing his hair to fall forward again in the way she remembered it doing. Somehow it seemed to emphasise the satanic darkness of his shadowed jaw.

‘I understand,’ he said, surprisingly compliant all of a sudden. ‘But I do not think you do, Lauren. You had, however, better know from the start what my intentions are and to be fully aware that I will be demanding much more than that.’

A queasy feeling took root in the pit of Lauren’s stomach. ‘Wh-what do you mean?’ she asked cagily.

‘The boy is a Cannavaro. Therefore it is only right that he should be with his family.’

‘He is with his family!’ she proclaimed, her face flushed with indignation to think he could even suggest anything else.

He was glancing around her kitchen, which she knew had seen better days with its chipped Belfast sink and genuinely distressed oak table and matching Welsh dresser that stood against the far wall, and he looked at her now with something remarkably like censure shaping the hard line of his mouth.

‘You think it fitting for a child of his background to be brought up in a place like this?’

His deprecating opinion of the home she had once shared with two loving parents and her sister cut Lauren to the quick, but she was determined not to let him see.

‘So it isn’t the mansion that you obviously think he should be living in,’ she bit back, fearful of what he intended to do about Daniele. ‘But, with respect...’ this last word was overlaid with sarcasm ‘...he’ll learn more above love and basic human values in this shabby old house than he’ll ever get to know in the sterile palaces your sort of people call home!’

Whether she had hit a nerve in his invincible armour, or whether it was just her audacity in speaking to him as she had that put that flush across his cheekbones and made his jaw tense as though he was clenching his teeth, Lauren wasn’t sure. But she was struck by the vivid recollection of seeing him look like that before. It was the second before he had driven into her hot and eager body and had finally succumbed to the release of his, until then, frighteningly controlled passion, taking her with him on a mind-blowing excursion to a fool’s heaven!

‘And what would you—or your sister—have learned about basic values?’ he challenged softly, as Lauren battled with spiralling and unwelcome sensations from remembering how it felt lying naked beneath this man’s warm and penetrating strength.

‘Nothing, according to you,’ she replied, with only the slightest quiver in her voice. Because, of course, he hadn’t listened to any explanation when he had labelled her and Vikki the worst kind of women, so there was no way she was going to try and convince him otherwise now, especially when he was adding child abduction to her sins as well!

‘And what do you imagine is my type of home?’

Strangely, she had never been able to place him anywhere, other than in the swish resorts where the rich and famous vacationed, or in some stark, state-of-the-art high-rise office at the heart of his maritime empire.

‘I don’t intend wasting any unnecessary thought over it,’ she retorted, wishing she wasn’t letting him reduce her to the level of sniping.

‘Not even to wonder where this nephew—whom you claim to be instilling with your own questionable values—is likely to be living?’

Lauren forced herself to bite her tongue. She was past caring over the last two years what Emiliano Cannavaro thought about her. Memories might shame, but they couldn’t hurt her. She had learned to shrug her shoulders, grit her teeth and carry on. But Emiliano Cannavaro wasn’t a memory any more. He was here—now as large as life, and he had it in his power to hurt her and would if she let him, by taking away the one thing she held most dear.

‘I don’t need to wonder, Emiliano,’ she said determinedly. ‘I know exactly where he’ll be living. And that’s with me. It was my sister’s wish that I should take care of Danny if anything ever happened to her before he became of age.’

‘Which she had no right to express or to request of you while the child’s father was still alive.’

‘She had every right!’ Lauren shot back, affronted by his dictatorial attitude. ‘Although she wouldn’t have needed to if Angelo hadn’t been as bad a father as he was a husband!’

‘You mean the husband she saw only as the key to a life of luxury? And one she had no intention of giving up?’

I’m going to screw him for every penny I can get!

Lauren didn’t want to remember Vikki’s venomous remark on that tragic day, eleven months ago, when her sister had gone off to see Angelo, leaving the six-month-old Danny in Lauren’s care. But it came back startlingly now with the things Vikki had told her on her wedding day, things that Lauren wished—if only for her own sake—that she had never heard.

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me.’ The deep Latin voice penetrated her thoughts, bringing her back to the present. ‘I am not defending Angelo’s actions.’

Lauren slanted a censuring look at him. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘My brother’s faults were glaringly obvious, but that didn’t stop him from being totally and utterly taken in.’

Which you never would be, she thought, skimming a reluctant glance down over his magnificent physique, and shuddering as she recalled the way he had reacted when he thought he had been.

Those dark assessing eyes of his seemed to be stripping her naked with their unsettling intensity.

‘No,’ he said, in a way that was lethal in its very softness, startling her into wondering if he had the power to read her thoughts

‘No what?’ she challenged, trying not to think about that day that had been the most humiliating of her life.

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to, Lauren thought, with colour tingeing her cheeks.

‘I did not come here to resurrect anything that might have transpired between us,’ he remarked coldly. ‘Though, heaven knows, if there had been a prize for driving a man crazy you would have won it hands down, would you not, mia cara?’ His tone made a mockery of the endearment. ‘You did not exactly hold back in your efforts to please me that night I took you to my bed.’

How she could feel a throbbing deep inside just from thinking about that night, Lauren didn’t know, and shaming colour stained her cheeks almost puce.

Somehow, though, she managed to say cuttingly, ‘Save it, Emiliano.’

He laughed, savouring her discomfiture and embarrassment like he’d savoured the nectar of her willing body.

‘Of course. There are far more pressing matters in hand.’

Like taking Daniele away from her?

‘If you think I’ll be handing my sister’s baby over to you just like that, you’ve got another thing coming!’

He smiled, the type of smile that had had the power to draw her to him that fateful weekend two years ago in a way she had never been drawn to any man before or since.

‘Of course, I would not be expecting you to hand him over—as you say—“just like that”. Naturally there would be a period of adjustment while the child became acquainted with me as his new guardian. And naturally you will be suitably rewarded for the time he has been in your care.’

Dumbfounded, Lauren couldn’t believe what he was saying.

‘Suitably rewarded?’ She flung the words back at him as if they were poison darts. ‘And what is the price you’d consider suitable for trading a child?’

A dark eyebrow shot up as he regarded her with something approaching disdain.

‘I am not buying him from you, Lauren, if that is what you’re imagining. I will simply be reimbursing you for the inconvenience and loss of earnings you will most certainly have suffered during the time you have been caring for him. But if it means that much to you, I will allow you to name your price. Within reason. I am sure that between us we can arrive at a figure that will suit us both.’

‘Oh, are you?’ Disbelievingly, Lauren stared up into the strikingly masculine face, trying not to baulk at the determination she could see stamped on every purposeful feature. ‘You think you and your kind can buy anything you want, don’t you? Well, sorry to disappoint you, Emiliano, but I’ve no intention of giving up my nephew any time soon. So you can take your fancy car and your over-stuffed wallet and go back to whatever cold, damp stone you happened to crawl out from under, because Daniele isn’t going back with you under any circumstances! Not now. Not ever!’

His mouth twitched at one corner as he contemplated what she was saying. ‘And there I was thinking that we could be civil about this,’ he remarked. ‘Do I understand you to be saying you would prefer a legal battle?’

And one he would surely win?

Tremulously, yet refusing to be fazed, she answered, ‘If that’s what it comes to.’

He clicked his tongue. ‘You are very foolish, Signorina Westwood.’ The formality only seemed to widen the glaring distance between them. ‘It seems I underestimated you in imagining we could come to a reasonable settlement without resorting to the needless involvement of expensive lawyers. Or does the idea of a court case whet your appetite for a taste of even greater pickings?’

‘You’re despicable!’ Lauren breathed.

‘Not nearly as despicable as you would find me if you drag me through a court of law.’

She looked at him askance. ‘Is that a threat?’

‘No, just some good advice.’

‘Well, you can stick your advice where the sun doesn’t shine!’

He laughed very softly. ‘Such spirit!

He was moving towards her and she backed away, sending a shocked glance over her shoulder when she came up against the solid bulk of the dresser.

Hardly daring to breathe, she stood stock-still, her eyes guarded and challenging as Emiliano’s hands came to rest on the dresser on either side of her, effectively trapping her there.

‘You know...that was the first thing that attracted me to you. Other than...’ One strap of her dungarees had slipped off her shoulder, dragging the bib down with it, and from the slide of his gaze over the vest it had exposed she knew he could see the outline of her naked breast. Breasts which were too full, she had always thought, in comparison with her small waist and far less curvy hips. Now, in response to his heated gaze, she felt the nipple swelling beneath the soft revealing cotton. ‘The way you tried to cut me dead in response to everything I said was a real turn-on. And it was not just me who was affected by it, was it, cara?’

He meant her, Lauren thought with shame, remembering how he had even gone as far as suggesting that she actually enjoyed arguing with him.

‘And that was even before you knew who I was.’

The softness of his voice and his nearness was making her head start to swim. She hated him! And yet it was taking all her willpower not to thrust out her breasts in invitation to those hands that had pleasured her like no other man ever had.

But she didn’t. And thankfully he didn’t attempt to touch her.

Instead, straightening up, with his face taking on grim lines, he said, ‘May I also advise that if you take me to court and you lose, then you will get nothing from me. Is that clear? Not a cent.’

‘That’s good,’ she returned, pulling up her strap, relieved at least to be able to breathe again. ‘Because I don’t deal in cents. Only common decency! Unlike you Cannavaros. But then you don’t ever think about anything else except making money!’

‘Which is marginally more commendable, I think, than being one of life’s takers,’ he remarked with an unperturbed, humourless curl to his devastating mouth. ‘Nevertheless, where agenda-armed little vamps are concerned I find that it is always best to be one step ahead.’

‘So you insult me with the promise of some disgusting pay-off!’

He sent another cursory glance around him at the obvious decay of her clean yet humble environment. ‘You look as though you could use it.’

‘Not half as much as I could use you getting off my property!’

‘Of course.’ Though he had stepped away from her now, the fresh masculine scent of him still lingered in her nostrils. ‘But I will be back. You can depend on that. And when I do return, I will see my nephew. Is that understood?’

He looked so commanding that for a moment Lauren could only nod. ‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to stop you,’ she riposted as soon as she found her voice.

‘In that case...I will see myself out,’ he said, obviously satisfied that he had achieved what he had set out to do, which was to scare her silly with his threat to take Daniele away from her.

Well, if he wanted a fight, she would give him one! she thought, calling on all the powers of survival she had had to engage as a teenager after losing both her parents. After all, since Vikki had died, Daniele was all she had, and Emiliano Cannavaro could swing before she would give up her little nephew to him or anybody else!

But the fear had taken hold and she couldn’t shake it off. And that wasn’t the only thing unsettling her as she listened to his powerful car growling away.

It was that raging sexual attraction that had flared into life the minute she had seen him again, coming across the yard. But, even worse, her body’s betraying response to it when he had had her trapped—without even touching her—against the dresser. An attraction, she thought hopelessly, which had been born in her the instant she had laid eyes on him across that crowded ballroom, and reluctantly she let her thoughts drag her back to those two days in that exclusive London hotel two years ago.