Trying valiantly to keep her features nonchalant, Livia gave the bottle to Massimo and twisted in her seat so her back was to him.
The anticipation of his touch was almost unbearable. And when it came…
Her breath caught in her throat.
Darts of awareness spread through her, memories flooding her of the first time he’d applied sunscreen to her skin. They’d been on their honeymoon in St Barts. They’d sunbathed naked, secure in their privacy. Massimo had rubbed the lotion sensually over every inch of her skin. By the time he’d rolled her onto her back and driven deep inside her, she’d been wet and aching for him. It had been the quickest she had ever achieved orgasm.
Now, he applied the lotion to her back briskly. His indifference made her heart twist with sadness but she worked hard to keep her lips curved upwards.
His hands pulled away with an abruptness that made the twist in her heart turn to an ache.
‘Turn around and I’ll do your back,’ she ordered, proud that her voice was as bright as she intended for their watching audience.
As he was so tall and broad, there was a lot more skin to cover than the small area of exposed flesh on her own back.
Resisting the temptation to squirt it straight onto his back and have the fleeting enjoyment of watching him squirm at the quick shock of cold on his warm skin, she placed a healthy dollop into her palm, rubbed her hands together to spread it equally between them then placed them on his shoulder blades.
He still flinched.
She worked as briskly as he had to rub the lotion into his smooth skin.
When had she last touched his back? She couldn’t remember. The coldness that had entered their marriage hadn’t appeared overnight. It had accumulated over time until one day there was nothing but ice where once there had been love.
She had forgotten how much pleasure she got from simply touching him. Massimo carried so much on his shoulders. She’d loved to massage his knots away and feel him relax beneath her fingers. There were knots there now beneath the pads of her fingers, at the top of his spine and around his shoulder blades. Big ones.
Livia gritted her teeth and, dragging her hands from the knotted shoulders, swept down to the base of his back and covered the last bit that needed protection from the blazing sun.
The weight on his shoulders and the knots formed by it were none of her concern.
The moment she was done she pulled her hands away with the same abruptness that he’d done with her then breathed a quick sigh of relief when the captain appeared on deck, distracting everyone’s attention. It was time to sail back.
His family’s natural exuberance, which Massimo had never inherited, made sailing a noisy affair. The three women were in the pool swimming with his niece, laughing and splashing, leaving him at the table with his father, grandfather and brother-in-law, answering questions as best he could about the carbon filter he was days away from testing the prototype of. He could see the effort it was taking for them to concentrate.
He couldn’t help his gaze drifting to the swimming pool, his attention as attuned as it had always been to Livia’s every movement.
He was also intensely aware that she’d left her phone on the table and intensely ashamed that he wanted to snatch it up, take it somewhere private and trawl through all her communications over the past four months. He wondered how she would react if he were to throw it overboard and give it the same fate she’d threatened his own phone.
As if it were aware of his attention, her phone suddenly burst into life.
His father peered at it. ‘Livia, Gianluca’s calling,’ he called to her.
‘Coming!’ She scrambled out of the pool, snatching her towel as she padded to the table, but her brother’s call had gone to voicemail before she reached them.
Her brow furrowed. ‘Excuse me a moment. I need to call him back.’
As she climbed the stairs to the top deck, Massimo’s mother got out of the pool and joined them at the table.
‘How is Gianluca doing?’ she asked him in an undertone, concern writ large on her face. ‘I know Livia has been very worried about him.’
But he never got the chance to ask what she was talking about for Madeline had sneaked up behind him and suddenly thrust a soaking Elizabeth into his arms. ‘Here you go, Massimo. You can hold Elizabeth for me.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere.’ She stood at the balustrade with a cackle of laughter that produced laughs from his parents and a sound that could have been laughter too from his grandfather.
With a wriggling baby thrust upon him, Massimo filed away his mother’s comment about Livia’s youngest sibling as something to query later. Gianluca was the only member of Livia’s family he’d met. He’d turned up at their wedding looking furtive, constantly looking over his shoulder. His behaviour, Livia had later explained, was a mirror of her own when she’d first left Naples, a habit it had taken her years to break.
He hoped Gianluca hadn’t finally fallen into the life Livia had escaped from and which she’d so dearly hoped he would follow her out of.
Teenage boys were pack animals. That was Livia’s theory for why he hadn’t attempted to escape yet. He went around the Secondigliano with his gang of friends on their scooters, chasing girls, playing video games, employed by the brutal men who ran the territory to keep watch for enemies and the police. Livia was convinced that it was a life her brother didn’t want but Massimo was equally convinced that Gianluca had been as seduced by it as the rest of her family had been and that sooner or later he would be seduced into committing a crime from which there would be no going back. Livia’s strength of mind and moral code were rare.
He stood his niece on his lap and stared at her cherubic face and felt the tightness in his chest loosen. This little one would be raised with security and love. She would never be exposed to the danger and violence his wife and her siblings had lived.
Huge blue eyes stared back. Unable to resist, he sniffed the top of her head. She smelled of baby.
‘When are you two going to have one of those?’ Raul asked with a grin.
Ice laced like a snake up Massimo’s spine in an instant.
All eyes focused on him…and the presence he sensed behind him. Livia had returned from her phone call.
She sat back down, phone clutched in her hand. ‘It’s not the right time for us to have a child,’ she said and shrugged apologetically. ‘You know the hours Massimo puts into his work.’
‘You would work those hours if there was a child?’ his mother said, looking at him with an air of bewilderment. It was a look he’d become used to during his childhood, a physical expression that the differences between Massimo and his family were felt as keenly by them as they were by him.
‘My work is important,’ he pointed out cordially. He didn’t expect her to understand. To his parents, work was only important in as much as it paid the bills. That hadn’t stopped his parents from accepting the luxury home he’d purchased for them and for which he footed all the bills and the monthly sum he transferred into their bank account for everything else they could possibly need. He did the same for his sister and his grandfather and for his father’s siblings and their offspring. He would have done the same for his mother’s siblings if she’d had any.
He had stopped them ever having to work again—work being something none of the extended Briatores had been enamoured with either—and still his work ethic bewildered them. He provided for them all