Lara’s blood drained south. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Is it? Really? People have married for a lot less, Lara.’
She looked at him helplessly, torn between hating him for appearing like a magician to turn her world upside down and desperately wanting to defend herself. But she’d lost that chance when she’d informed him coldly that she’d never had any intention of going through with their marriage because she was already promised to someone else—someone eminently more suitable.
She’d told him that it had amused her to go along with his whirlwind proposal, just to see him make a fool of himself over a woman he could never hope to marry. She’d told him all her breathy words of love had been mere platitudes.
She’d never forget the look of pure loathing that had come over his face after she’d spoken those bilious words. That had been the moment when she’d realised how deluded she’d been. And on some level she’d been glad she was playing a role, that at least she knew how he’d really felt.
He was almost killed because of you.
Lara felt sick again. He hadn’t deserved that just for not loving her. And he hadn’t deserved her lies. He’d saved her from the kidnappers. He’d offered up his life for hers. And then she’d learned she’d never really been in danger. He didn’t know that, though. And right now the thought of him ever finding that out made her break out in a cold sweat. However much he hated her already, he would despise her even more.
Suddenly a ball of emotion swelled inside her chest. Lara couldn’t bear it that Ciro thought so badly of her, even if it was her fault that she’d convinced him so well. Seeing him again was ripping open a raw wound inside her, and before she knew what she was doing she took a step forward, words tumbling out of her mouth.
‘Ciro, I did want to marry you—more than anything. But my uncle...he was crazy...he’d lost everything. He didn’t want me to marry you—he saw you as unworthy of a Templeton. He forced me to say those awful things... They were all lies.’
Lara stopped abruptly and her words hung in the air. The atmosphere was thick with tension. Taut like a wire. Ciro was expressionless. She could remember a time when he’d used to look at her with such warmth and indulgence. And love, or so she’d thought. But it hadn’t been love. It had been desire. Physical desire and the desire for success.
He lifted his hands and did a slow and deliberate hand-clap, the sound loud in the room. Lara flinched.
He shook his head. ‘You really are something, Lara, you know that? But the victim act doesn’t suit you and it’s wasted on me. You really expect me to believe you were coerced into marrying a man old enough to be your father and rich enough to pay off the national debt of a small country? You forget I’ve seen your extensive repertoire of guises, and this innocent, earnest one is overdone and totally unnecessary.’
Her belly sank. She’d known it was futile to try. How could she explain how her uncle had manipulated and exploited her for his own gain since the moment he’d taken over her guardianship after her parents had died? The extent of his ruthlessness still shocked her, even now.
And she should recognise ruthlessness by now. She should have known Ciro hadn’t been making idle threats two years ago. After all, he was Sicilian through every fibre of his being. He came from a long and bloody tradition of men who meted out revenge and punishment as a way of life, even if they had tried to distance themselves from all that in recent generations.
Ciro had told her once that his ancestors had been Moorish pirates and she could well believe it. She could see that he’d been wounded beyond redemption—not in his heart, because that had never been available to wound, but in his fierce Sicilian pride. Wounded when she’d walked away, and by the ruthless kidnappers when they’d physically altered him for ever and demonstrated that even he wasn’t invincible.
She did owe him a debt. But it was a debt she couldn’t afford to pay emotionally.
Lara’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and she cursed herself for even trying to defend herself. She couldn’t bear for him to find out just how vulnerable she really was—how nothing had really moved on for her since she’d known him. How the last two years of her life had been a kind of lonely torture.
She ruthlessly pushed aside all those memories and shrugged one shoulder minutely, affecting an air of boredom. She’d played this part once before—she could do it again.
‘Well, it’s been interesting to see you again, Ciro. But quite frankly you’re even more pathetic now than you were two years ago, if this is how little you’ve moved on. What would you have done if Henry hadn’t died? Kidnapped me? Seduced me away and then meted out your punishment?’
Lara’s words fell like stinging barbs onto Ciro’s skin. They cut far too close to the bone. He had been keeping tabs on her. Getting reports on her whereabouts and her activities—which, as far as he could see, had consisted of not much at all. Not even socialising. Her husband had monopolised her attention, kept her all to himself.
Ciro hadn’t articulated to himself exactly what he was going to do where Lara was concerned, but he’d known he had reached some kind of nadir when he’d bought this house, sight unseen, because it was around the corner from where she lived. He’d known that he was reaching a place where he simply could not go on without exacting retribution.
Without seeing her again.
He crushed that rogue thought.
In the past few months, as a restless tension had increased inside him, he’d found himself contemplating seducing Lara Winterborne. He’d told himself it would be to prove just how duplicitous she was. But he knew that his motivations were murkier than that. Embedded in a place he’d locked them away two years ago, when she’d morphed into a stranger in front of his very eyes.
When she’d shown him up as a fool who had cast aside his well-worn cynical shell in a fit of blind lust and something even more disturbing. Emotion. A yearning for a life he’d never known. For a woman who was pure and who would be faithful. Loving. Loyal. A good mother. Fantasies he’d never indulged in before he’d met Lara and she’d exposed a seam of vulnerability he’d never acknowledged before.
The fact that he’d even considered seducing her away from her husband was galling for a man who had always vowed to conduct his life with more integrity than his mother—never to stoop to her level of betrayal. And yet he’d had to face the unwelcome realisation that his desires were no less base than his weak and adulterous mother’s.
Lara watched a series of expressions flicker across Ciro’s face. They gradually got darker and darker, until he was glaring at her as if she was the sum of all evil. He started moving towards her then, all coiled lethal masculinity, and Lara took an involuntary step back.
She wasn’t scared of his physicality—not even with this tension in the air. She was scared of something far more ambiguous and personal deep inside where she knew he had the ability to destroy her. Where he’d already destroyed her.
He stood in front of her, his scent winding around her like invisible captive threads. He asked with lethal softness, ‘Are you suggesting my life has been on hold?’
Before she could respond, a sound halfway between a sneer and a laugh came out of Ciro’s mouth.
‘Oh, cara, my life hasn’t been on hold for one second since you decided to take that old man into your bed.’
Lara winced inwardly. She already knew that Ciro’s life hadn’t been on hold. Far from it. As much as she’d tried to block him out of her consciousness, it had been next to impossible. Since his kidnapping he’d become even more infamous and sought-after. He’d tripled his fortune, extending the wildly successful Sant’Angelo Holdings, which had been mainly focused on real estate, to encompass logistics