CAROL MARINELLI - Scandals Of The Powerful - Uncovering the Correttis / A Legacy of Secrets

‘Emily...’ He knew he should withdraw, only this wasn’t just sex, even if he tried to deny it. He rocked deeper within her. He could feel her sobbing, feel her orgasm building to meet his, and he wanted to feel. For so long he hadn’t, and it actually hurt to feel good.

Intimately she gripped him, pressed herself back into him as his mouth found her cheek. Emily’s neck craned for his mouth, for his tongue, for the close of his eyes as she throbbed to her first intimate spill on the inside, and she knew, she just knew, they belonged together.

They lay in silence, still locked together, as unspoken, reckless possibilities were entertained. It was Emily who voiced them. ‘Anton.’ She did not turn to him. Instead she felt him tense at her tentative suggestion. ‘I’ve got some annual leave....’

‘You need to get back.’

‘I know that but maybe in a couple of weeks...’ He was pulling away. ‘You spoke about the Corretti Cup. Maybe I could come back—’

She was interrupted by his phone, but she felt the relief from Anton at the reprieve, and he spoke for a few moments in Italian, his back to her, not wanting to turn around because he knew that he had gotten too close.

‘Maybe you could visit again,’ was his response to her offer, ‘but don’t come back for me.’ Only then did he turn to her. ‘That was a colleague. Alessandro has been arrested. I know the station. You could go there and get the scoop.’

‘Poor guy.’ Emily shook her head. ‘Just leave him alone.’

‘You’re not tough enough.’ Anton’s words were terse.

She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. ‘So people tell me whenever they’re about to break up with me.’

‘Break up?’ he said. ‘It was a weekend.’

Absolutely she wasn’t tough enough, because Emily started to cry.

‘For God’s sake,’ he shouted. ‘It’s been two nights.’

It had been the most amazing two nights of her life. She should be more sophisticated, Emily knew that.

She tried. She got out of the bed and dressed, and he lay there, hand behind his head, not watching, but as she went to leave the room, he halted her.

‘What happened before...’ Anton said. ‘We need to discuss...’

‘Am I to stop off at the farmacia?’ Emily asked. ‘How very thoughtful of you. Don’t worry, Anton, I’m on the pill. The condoms were only necessary in case I had an urge to shag a stranger the whole weekend.’ She just looked at him and couldn’t hide the hurt from her eyes. ‘It would seem that I did.’ She stared at his guarded, closed-off face and she saw the stranger he chose to be.

‘You’re right, it is time for me to leave.’

‘Then go.’

She took off the ring, but she would have her say.

‘It’s not your love for your wife that’s holding you back, Anton. It’s your hate for them.’ He just lay there and she knew she was right. ‘I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t want to be around a man who spends his time booking restaurants in advance and looking for vantage points, who’s no doubt got pole position booked for the Corretti Cup.’ Tears did not make her weak, Emily realised, though she fought them. ‘That kiss on the stairs...’ She could see it all now. ‘You were turned on by revenge, when you should have been turned on by me.’

‘I lost my family.’

‘So you think you have nothing more to lose.’ Emily could be tough when it was called for. ‘That’s a dangerous place to be, Anton.’

She closed the door on him.

He waited for relief.

She was gone.

He could get back to...

To what?

He did not want to think. He flicked on the television. He met Dianne’s cold eyes as she reported on the most recent findings, as she barely blinked as she read the latest news.

Tough, jaded, bitter.

No, Anton corrected, Dianne was focused, determined.

And then his own words haunted him.

A little naive, a little sweet.

What would you choose?

CHAPTER TEN

EMILY STEPPED into her hotel room. One that she had been in for all of an hour. She changed quickly and threw her clothes into the suitcase and was out of the hotel in moments.

She jumped into a taxi ahead of a couple of tourists, and if she was rude, if she wrong, it was better than relenting, way better than charging back to his room.

As if to taunt her, her phone bleeped and it was Gina.

Thought you might like a little memento (and congratulations on the scoop).

How could her career seem not to matter?

How could what had been so vital on Friday seem almost obsolete now?

Why did this have to be love?

Attached were the pictures Gina had taken of her and Anton. Emily saw her smiling face beside his closed one and she knew she could not let his pain darken her soul, which it would if she stayed.

He did not want her to stay, Emily reminded herself, but that did not soothe. She wanted on the plane and in the air and away from him.

Away from a dangerous love.

‘Fai presto!’ Emily urged the driver to go faster. She could see the airport, yet she felt as if the devil itself were chasing her. And it was.

She could hear the sirens, knew without turning that he had changed his mind, knew before he had overtaken them that the car the flashing lights belonged to was his.

Emily thrust the money at the driver, dragged her case from the car and just refused to look where he stood waiting.

‘I’m going.’

‘Emily.’

He took her wrist and she shook him off.

‘Emily.’ He went for the top of her arm and she turned in fury to him. ‘Unless you’ve got your cuffs with you, I’m...’

It was not her poor choice of words that halted her speech; it was the smile that met her gaze. It was an Anton she had never seen. A smile was the first thing her mind had begged from him, and if she had thought she had seen it in the restaurant that night, then she had been mistaken. For what she had witnessed then did not even come close. All the stress had vanished. The eyes hers met were no longer navy; they were the colour of a waking Mediterranean. There were shimmers and specks she should choose not to see.

‘There is someone I do not want to lose,’ Anton said.

‘Anton...’ Emily looked at him, saw the tenderness unhidden. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Fattispecie,’ Anton said as he confessed to her his lie by omission. ‘Louanna was pregnant. She had told me just that morning.’

Ah, fattispecie, Emily thought. Such a sad word.

‘I swore revenge that day and I vowed it again at their graves, but I am letting it go.’

‘For now.’

‘For good,’ Anton said, and then he said it again but with different meaning. ‘For good. A good that I do not want to lose.’ He did not want to crowd her. He did not want her to leave. He did not want another decade of bitterness. ‘Come back, not for the Corretti Cup. Come back, or I come and visit you. We can take it slow if you need to.’

‘I need to take this.’ It was her phone ringing hot now and she had to answer because it wasn’t Adam. Instead it was the chief of the newspaper, calling on a Sunday morning, no less. ‘I need a moment,’ Emily said to Anton.

‘Of course.’

Her career was not quite so obsolete, Emily realised as she struggled to keep the nerves from her voice as she took the call.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Have you got more?’

‘Alessandro Corretti was arrested last night.’

‘That’s already broken.’

‘Taylor Carmichael—’

‘I saw that she was back.’

‘And deliciously misbehaving,’ Emily said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Plenty,’ Emily said, ‘and it’s not going away anytime soon.’ She told him about the docklands and about Carlo’s illegitimate son, Angelo, who looked set to make a move against the family that had disowned him. They spoke for a few moments, then she turned off her phone and looked over to Anton. Then, taking a deep breath, she wheeled her case over to him.