Dark torment crept in, threatening to drown him every time he thought of what he’d let happen. He’d been too quick to believe...too swift to embrace his destiny.
And in choosing that path, he’d done the unforgivable.
The heart he thought had withered to nothing clenched hard. But within that torment, within the potent swirl of guilt and recrimination, a different emotion crept in.
Excitement. The guilt and recrimination were ever present, but alongside it a flood of hot excitement stole over his senses, awakening that treacherous desire he thought he’d slain a long time ago.
With every ounce of control he possessed, he tried to push it away, but like a drowning victim accepting the inevitable, he let it close in on him, submerge him deeper in its relentless maelstrom.
Dio, he felt...alive; from her single touch, he felt more alive than he had in a very long time. More than he deserved to feel after what he’d done.
Ava’s finger jabbed him again, but all he could think, could feel, was how much cleaner the air smelled—richer, bringing a clarity that had eluded him for a long time.
‘From the moment she was born, you abandoned her.’ Her rough, pain-racked whisper stabbed deeper than if she’d shouted. ‘And the day of the earthquake, you were supposed to spend time with her; instead you were on a conference call! You palmed her off on Rita—’
He wrenched back control and sucked in a breath. ‘The minute I knew what was happening, I went in search of her. We both did. We tore apart that Bali marketplace with our bare hands.’ Until they’d bled both inside and out.
Her hand dropped and she shook her head. ‘Do you know how it feels to know neither of us were with her when the earthquake hit?’ she whispered in anguish.
The thought tortured him day and night. ‘Sì, I know. I’ve lived with that horror every day since. I know how very easily we could’ve lost her. But I also thank God she was found.’ Someone else had dug his daughter out of the submerged marketplace. Someone else had cared for Annabelle, taken her to the hospital and taken the time to put her photograph on the missing person’s wall. ‘We may not have found her ourselves but she was found,’ he repeated. ‘She was all right. She was alive.’ Somehow, miraculously, his daughter had survived the devastating earthquake that had killed tens of thousands.
And, for as long as he lived, he intended to make sure his daughter never came to harm again.
‘She was all right,’ she repeated numbly. ‘So you just thought you’d carry on being emotionally unavailable to her again?’ Her words were hushed, but the pain behind them ripped through the silence.
Icy calm slowly built inside him, pushing aside his pain. Cesare welcomed it. ‘I was there, Ava.’
Her face hardened and she folded her arms around her ribcage. ‘You mean just like you’re here now? In the same room but wishing you were somewhere else?’
His jaw tightened. Ava would never know how difficult it had been to keep from roaring his gut-ripping pain when he’d believed Annabelle was lost to him. She thought him cold. But he’d had to be, he’d had to shut off his emotions, to shut off any hint of yearning for what he couldn’t have.
Except for Annabelle.
His daughter was the one thing he wasn’t prepared to give up.
It’d taken him years to finally heed the warning he’d blindly ignored. To accept that he had no business taking a wife, never mind fathering a child.
He might be astute when it came to business but his personal relationships had always come at a price. A very steep price, he’d come to realise.
‘And now you’ve decided you want your daughter you think you can just click your fingers to make it happen?’
‘It was always going to happen. I’m sorry if you believed otherwise.’ The horrendous events of the past few weeks had painfully brought home to him that Annabelle was the only child he’d ever have. And now she was here—albeit earlier than he’d anticipated—he had no intention of letting her go.
‘Your arrogance is astounding, you know that?’
‘Isn’t it one of the things about me that turns you on?’ He had the fleeting satisfaction of watching colour surge under her skin. Anger soon replaced her blush.
‘Dream on. Your attraction level has dropped lower than the temperatures in the Antarctic.’
His fiery moglie had the tendency to lash out first and think about the consequences later. Wasn’t that what had drawn him to her in the first place? Her vibrancy? Her blind, uncontrollable passion for life?
He sidestepped that reminder.
With a swish of her brightly coloured skirt, she stalked to the window. Cesare caught himself following the sway of her hips and reined himself in. Things were fast getting out of hand.
Again.
Their first meeting had been a heady, mind-blowing experience. She’d been a potion to end all sweet potions, lighting up his days, blazing through his nights like a spectacular comet. Against his every instinct, he’d let his guard down.
Once again he’d let a woman get under his skin. Something he’d sworn to himself and to his brother, Roberto, he’d never let happen again.
Cesare had walked out of his last meeting in Abu Dhabi the minute he’d learned Ava had summoned his plane. He’d even contemplated ordering his pilot to return her to Bali. But he’d known she would’ve found another way of achieving her goal.
She turned, arms folded in battle stance. He suppressed a grim smile. His Ava hadn’t changed. Corner her and the fierce lioness emerged.
Except she wasn’t his. He never should’ve taken her in the first place—although the exhilaration of being her first lover still made his blood pump faster—never should’ve placed the di Goia emerald on her finger...
His gaze fell to her bare fingers. ‘Where is your wedding ring?’ The burning need to know erased every other thought from his head.
Surprise widened eyes the same colour as the famous di Goia family heirloom. ‘My wedding ring?’ she echoed.
‘Sì. Where is it?’
‘In a box...somewhere. What does it matter?’ she challenged.
Cesare had the completely irrational urge to grab her arms and shake her, demand to know why the ring wasn’t on her finger. Instead, he jammed his fists into his pockets and forced himself to stay put.
‘Just checking that you hadn’t donated it to the commune you were growing fond of in Bali.’
Her arms tightened. ‘I’m glad to see you think so highly of me, Cesare. And I don’t need to pawn your jewellery off to help the causes I believe in. I’m more than well compensated for my job to fund my charitable endeavours.’
Did she realise how gripping her arms so tightly pushed her breasts up, so they looked even fuller, more tempting? The faint outline of her areolas against the white of her cotton halter top and the faint freckles marching across her chest sent the pulse kicking in his groin.
‘Do you have a lover?’
Dio, where the hell had that come from? He raked unsteady fingers through his hair, the sheer astonishment his question caused clearly reflected in the slack-jawed look on Ava’s face. But then was it really that astonishing? They’d spent so much time apart in the past year, he didn’t even know which circle of friends she moved in these days.
Whose fault is that?
Her hand fluttered to her neck, crept around to her nape and flipped her flaming hair over one shoulder. He followed the movement, his fascination with