Katherine Garbera - Mistresses - Lethal Attraction - Uncovering the Silveri Secret / If You Can't Stand the Heat... / Sizzle

‘How did you get so cynical?’ Bella asked.

His eyes moved away from hers as he reached to top up their wine glasses. The sound of the wine making a glock-glock-glock noise as it poured out of the bottle was deafening in the silence. ‘Born that way,’ he said.

‘I don’t believe that.’

He met her gaze, his mocking half-smile back in place. ‘Still trying to save my sorry soul, Bella?’ he asked. ‘I thought you gave up on that little mission years ago.’

‘Have you told anyone about your childhood? About where you came from?’ she asked.

A mask slipped over his features like a dust sheet over a piece of furniture. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘You must have had parents,’ she said. ‘A mother, at least. Who was she?’

‘Leave it, Bella.’

‘You must remember something about your childhood,’ Bella pressed on. ‘You can’t have blocked everything out. You weren’t born a teenager with authority issues. You were once a baby, a toddler, a young child.’

He let out a short, impatient-sounding breath and reached for his glass. ‘I don’t remember much of my childhood at all,’ he said and drank a deep mouthful of his wine.

Bella watched his Adam’s apple go up and down. Even though his expression was masked, there was anger in the action as he swallowed the liquid—anger and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. ‘Tell me what you do remember,’ she said.

The silence was long and brooding, the air so thick it felt like the ceiling had slowly lowered, compressing all the oxygen.

Bella continued to search his features. The stony mask had slipped just a fraction. She could see the flicker of a blood vessel in his temple. The grooves beside his mouth deepened as if he was holding back a lifetime of suppressed emotion. His nostrils flared as he took a breath. His eyes hardened to granite. His fingers around his glass tightened until she could see the whitening of his knuckles.

‘Why did you get kicked out of all those foster homes?’ she asked.

His eyes collided with hers. They were dark with a glitter that made the backs of her knees go fizzy again. ‘Why do you think I was kicked out?’ he asked with a tilt of his lips that looked more like a snarl than a smile. ‘I was a rebel. A lost cause. Bad to the core. Beyond salvation.’

Bella swallowed a thick knot in her throat. He was so intimidating when he was in this mood but she was determined to find out more about him. His enigmatic nature intrigued her. She had always found his aloof, keep-away-from-me manner compellingly attractive. ‘What happened to your parents?’ she asked.

‘They died.’ He said the words as if they meant nothing to him. He showed no emotion at all. Not even a flicker. His face was like a marble statue, a blank, impenetrable mask.

‘So you were an orphan?’ Bella prompted.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’ He gave a little laugh as he swirled the contents of his glass. ‘An orphan.’

‘Since when?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how old were you when your parents died?’

It seemed like a full year before he spoke; Bella waited out each pulsing second of the long, protracted silence. It was a silent battle of wills, but somehow she suspected the battle was not between her and him. It was between two parts of himself: the aloof loner who didn’t need anyone and the man behind the mask who secretly did.

‘I don’t remember my father,’ he said with the same blank, indifferent expression.

‘He died when you were a baby?’ she guessed.

‘Yes.’ There was still no emotion. No grief or sense of loss.

Bella moistened her lips, waiting a beat or two before asking, ‘What happened?’

At first she didn’t think he was going to answer. The silence stretched and stretched interminably.

‘Motorbike accident,’ he finally said. ‘He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Can’t have been pretty.’

Bella winced. ‘What about your mother?’

A tiny, almost imperceptible spasm tugged at the lower quadrant of his jaw. ‘I was five,’ he said and twirled his wine again, his eyes staring down at the liquid as it splashed against the sides of the glass.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died.’

‘How?’

There was another silence before he spoke. A bruised silence. ‘Suicide.’

She gasped. ‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’

He gave a careless shrug. ‘It wasn’t much of a life for her once my father died.’ He tipped back his head and drained his glass, setting it down on the table with a little thump.

Bella frowned as she thought of him as a young motherless boy. She had been totally devastated when her mother had driven away that day, but at least she had known her mother was still alive. How had Edoardo coped with losing his mother so young? ‘Your father was Italian, wasn’t he?’

‘Yep.’

‘And your mother?’

‘English,’ he said. ‘She met my father while on a working holiday in Italy.’

‘Who looked after you after she died?’

He put his napkin next to his plate and pushed back from the table, his expression closing like a door that had been clicked shut on a sliver of a view. ‘Fergus needs to go outside,’ he said. ‘He’s too stiff to use the pet door now.’

Bella sat back with a frown pulling at her forehead as she watched him stride from the room. He had told her things she was almost certain he hadn’t even told her father. Her father had said Edoardo had always refused to speak of his early childhood and he wasn’t to be pressured to reveal things he didn’t want to reveal. She, like her father, had assumed it had been because Edoardo was ashamed of his background, given that it was so different from theirs. His youth had been misspent on rebellious behaviour that had alienated him from the very people who had wanted to help him. He had used the very words the authorities would have used to describe him: a rebel, a lost cause, bad to the core, beyond salvation. Was he really all or any of those things? What had happened to make him so distrustful of people? What had made him the closed-off enigma he was today?

And why on earth did it matter to her to find out? It wasn’t as if it was any of her business.

He was her enemy .

He hated her as much as she hated him.

She chewed at her lower lip as she looked at his empty chair. It shouldn’t matter to her what had happened to him. He had been surly and uncommunicative for as long as she had known him. He had clearly inveigled his way into her father’s trust and taken control of her life. He had done nothing but taunt and ridicule her from the moment she had turned up at what used to be her house. He was threatening to ruin her wedding plans. He was the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment, the brick wall she had to climb over or knock down.

It shouldn’t matter … But somehow—rather surprisingly—it did.

EDOARDO waited for Fergus to sniff every tree and shrub in the garden as the moon watched on with its wise and silent silver eye. The air was cold and fresh; the smell of the damp earth was like breathing in a restorative potion.

It cleared his head.

It grounded him .

It reminded him of how far he had moved from his previous life—a life where he’d had no control. No hope. Only pain and miserable, relentless suffering.

Haverton Manor was his sanctuary, the only place he had ever called home. The only place he had ever wanted to call home.

He clenched his fists and then slowly released them. The past was in the past and he should not have let Bella get under his skin enough to pick at the hard crust that covered what was left of his soul. Inside him were wounds he would allow no one to see. The scars he wore on the outside of his body were nothing to the ones on the inside. He could not bear pity. He could not stomach people’s interest in what he wanted to forget. He didn’t want to be painted as a victim. He had no time for people who saw themselves as victims.