CHAPTER ONE
BIANCAAWOKE,FISTSCLENCHED, seething with fury. Damn, she’d had that dream again—the one that came in several variations but always, always,alwaysended the same way. The slash of a hand through the air. Curt, impatient words reaching her.
‘It’s over, Bianca. Over! Accept it.’
And Luca walking away from her…
She lay there, heart rate still elevated, staring up at the ceiling, willing the dream, the memory, to ebb.
Accept it? Her mouth thinned bitterly in the dim early-morning light. She’d had to accept it. His rejection of her, finishing their affair, had been absolute. He’d left her, left London, left the UK. Gone back to his own life in Italy.
She felt it come again. Her anger at his brusque dismissal—the reason he’d given for it.
‘We come from very different worlds,’he’d said.
And he hadn’t just meant that she was English and he was Italian. Far more than nationality had divided them. Far more. He’d gone back to his oh-so-aristocratic life in Italy, done with amusing himself with the likes of her…
Bianca Mason, born in the East End, raised on a council estate, a barmaid pulling pints.
Not good enough for him.
Except for sex, of course…
The words and all the searing memories that came with them were in her head before she could stop them.
A single glance from his dark, gold-flecked eyes had been able to melt her like honey…
Oh, God, I wanted him so much—so much…
She’d been helpless to resist and hadn’t wanted to. Had wanted only to grab hold of him, her own desire blazing from her, matching his, urgently, hungrily stripping the clothes from him, whipping off his silk tie, slipping the buttons on his pristine white shirt, shedding the jacket of his designer business suit. Hooking one leg around his, hands roaming wildly over the smooth, hard wall of his chest as she pressed her hips against his, feeling and glorying in his blatant arousal for her.
They’d hardly made it to the bedroom in his swanky City apartment, with him peeling down her off-the-shoulder top, hitching up her micro skirt to divest her of her skimpy lacy underwear, pulling her down with him on the waiting bed, his mouth finding hers, her lush, long hair cascading over her shoulders as their hunger for each other mounted and mounted…
With a stifled cry, and a strength she’d had to learn to apply to herself, she forced her mind away. She’d had six years to learn how to do it. Six long years to not think about those searing three months with Luca, when she’d blown all her long-schooled caution about men to the winds and fallen totally, helplessly for him. Weaving about him a longing that had possessed her, consumed her—until the brutal day when it had all come crashing down around her.
‘It’s over, Bianca. Over! Accept it.’
And when she hadn’t—couldn’t—he’d spelt out brutally, callously, the reason why she had to.
In words she had never forgotten. Never could forget. Never would forget.
They’d changed her life.
Deliberately, she checked the time. Her alarm had not yet gone off, but she might as well get up anyway. Better than lying there remembering what it was so toxic to remember.
Remembering Luca.
She threw back her duvet, padded to the tiny bathroom opening off her narrow bedroom. The whole flat was tiny—half the top floor of one of a terrace of Edwardian houses converted into flats—but it suited her, and she was grateful for it. She could afford the rent—just—on her new salary, and it was only a short bus ride from work. This outer suburb on the western fringes of London, pleasant and leafy, might only be less than twenty miles from the East End as the crow flew, but it was a world away from where she’d grown up.
But then, so was her life now.
I’ve left it behind—totally. And that includes everything that ever happened there. And that, above all, means the toxic poison that was my time with Luca.
She stepped into the shower cubicle, turning on the water. As it sluiced down over her head it washed away the last shards of the dream that had come unbidden, unwanted, and the memories it brought with it. Washed them away, down into the fetid sewers of the past.
* * *
Luca took the chair the hospital consultant was offering him across his desk. Tension was rigid in his spine.