CHAPTER THREE
DO NOT BAIT ME, or you might find you get what you’re asking for.
His words were flying around her brain, filling her with confusion. Had she been baiting him? She’d certainly been trying to aggravate him.
And yes, she admitted, running a finger around the base of her drink. She’d been hoping to get a response out of him. But not that response.
She was on tenterhooks, sensual heat and anticipation at war with the anger and hatred she felt for this man. This man her father had loved so much, this man who had neglected her for years.
“That was delicious, Marta, thank you,” Claudia murmured as the housekeeper came to clear the plates.
“You hardly touched it!” Marta said with a shake of her head. “You didn’t like it?”
Claudia dropped her gaze to the duck and gooseberry pie, which had been delicious. Only she’d been too distracted to do it justice. “It was lovely, but I ate a late lunch, I’m sorry.” She blinked her long lashes towards her guardian, not looking away even when the full force of his stare was returned, landing squarely on her face. “I didn’t realise I’d be dining at Barnwell, enjoying your exceptional cooking, or I most definitely would have brought my appetite.”
“Ah, tomorrow,” Marta said with a wink. “I make you pork belly.”
Claudia smiled. “You remember?”
“Oh, it was your favourite, that summer. I could not give you enough pork belly.”
Claudia nodded. She had loved it, paired with red cabbage and crispy potatoes, it had been delicious. The kind of food she’d never tasted before. Her boarding school, though exclusive, served rather bland fare.
Stavros’s plate was empty and Marta clucked her approval as she removed it.
“There is dessert,” Marta said.
“Just coffee, for me,” Claudia said, rubbing a hand over her stomach. “I really couldn’t eat another thing.”
“You are going to make it hard for me to fatten you up, I see,” Marta grinned. “But I like a challenge.”
The housekeeper moved from the room, and they were alone once more, the tension crackling between them as ferociously as the fire in the grate and the wind beyond the walls.
“Why are you spending Christmas here?” Claudia asked, nervousness making her speak quickly. Or was that the martini she’d downed in record time, followed by a glass of pinot gris?
His eyes glinted when they met hers. “As opposed to?”
“At home, with your family.”
He leaned forward, and beneath the table his legs extended, brushing against her socked feet. She didn’t move away, though. She let herself enjoy the proximity, knowing how wrong it was. How stupid and foolish.
“I am thirty-five years old. You think I have to be at my mother’s side, even now?”
“I think Christmas is a time people generally get together, yes.”
“Ah,” he nodded sagely. “And so we are. I am your guardian, and I will spend this holiday with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I meant family.”
“You have no family,” he pointed out and the truth of that sentence filled her with a gulfing ache. Strange that she still wasn’t used to that.
“No. But I have good friends.”
“Like Artie?” He prompted scathingly.
“Yes, Artie, and Marianne. And Jasmine and Roger. Lots of friends I would choose to spend the holidays with over you.”
“Yet you do not have that choice this year,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, as though the taking away of her decision-making didn’t matter.
He’d shifted the conversation onto her with stunning ease, but Claudia was already beginning to realise that this was something he did often. When he wanted to deflect her interest away from himself.
“Has something happened?” She prompted.
“What do you mean?”
“I just think it’s weird that you’d choose to be alone in England rather than with your parents and bazillion brothers and sisters.”
“I have five siblings,” he corrected, the hint of a smile ghosting over his face. It made her stomach churn. He was gorgeous when he was sarcastic and brooding, but he was more so when he smiled.
“Whatever,” she waved a hand through the air, the charm bracelet she always wore jingling prettily with the simple gesture. “Isn’t your mother annoyed?”
“Why would she be?”
“Well, my mother died when I was six so I guess I have no personal experience here, but I imagine mothers generally like their children to be around for Christmas.”
He was quiet, and Claudia had no idea what he was thinking, only that he was thinking something. “Not this year,” he said finally.
She was sure there was a reason for it. That he was hiding something from her. And why shouldn’t he? They weren’t friends. They weren’t family. They were two people who barely knew one another, who had been thrown together by the death of her father and his mistaken belief that Stavros Aresteides would be a suitable guardian.
“Are you anti-Christmas, or something?” She pushed, frowning. “Is that why there’s no decorations?”
“Decorations?” He said the word as though he’d never heard it. “Where?”
“Here! In Barnwell. Where’s the tree? The garlands? The visual clue that Christmas is approaching?”
Marta entered the room at that moment, a tray in her hands. She placed it on the edge of the table, removing two fine bone china coffee cups and a plate of shortbread.
Her eyes held Claudia’s for a moment, as though she wanted to say something, and then she left once more.
Claudia frowned, reaching for the coffee pot on autopilot and filling both cups. She didn’t hand his over, though. She didn’t risk invading his personal space.
She didn’t risk touching him. She curled her fingers around hers and stood, moving to the large windows that, in the day time, framed a view of the formal gardens. On a clear night, the moon might have shone a light beam over the lawn, but not this night. On that night, overlooking the estate, it was wild and windy, and dark clouds blotted out the moon and the stars. It was pitch black. She could hear the storm and the river, though, like nature’s symphony.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said with a shrug, after a long moment. “Until a day ago, I thought I would be alone for Christmas. It seemed somewhat futile to have Marta decorate the estate just for me.”
Claudia turned to face him, disbelief etched in her features. “Of course Marta shouldn’t do it. She has her own home to do. It’s your job to decorate Barnwell.”
“Then it will not get done,” he said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I have no interest in something as frivolous as Christmas decorations.”
“Frivolous?” She repeated with surprise. “How can you say that?”
He shook his head. “It’s just another day of the year.”
Claudia’s eyes showed her disbelief. “It’s Christmas.”
“So?” He pushed back in his chair, studying her with undisguised interest. “Do I take it from your obvious shock that you are one of those people who make a big fuss of the holiday?”
She clamped down on her lips. His comment was an understatement. Claudia lived for Christmas, and always had. To her, it had long ago come to symbolize everything she didn’t have, everything she’d never known, and what she so badly wanted. It was a time of family and togetherness, of love and kind-spiritedness. It was about traditions that were passed down from generation to generation.
It was a time of year when she could completely overdo it and forget that she was alone. That even when she’d had a mother and father they’d been too busy in their own worlds to bother with her. It was a time when she could watch Hallmark movies about falling in love and dream that it would happen for her one day.
But the truth of her Christmas obsession hardly fitted with the part she was playing, with the image he expected of her.
“I just think you should have a tree,” she said with a shake of her head, sipping her coffee and turning back to the bleak night air.
“If it means so much to you, I will have Patrick collect one tomorrow.”
Claudia shook her head. “Don’t bother. I don’t intend to be here for Christmas. In fact, I expect to be back in my own home within a couple of days.”
Silence greeted this pronouncement, a silence she should have known to see as dangerous. But, in that moment, her heady moment of throwing down the gauntlet, she actually thought she’d won. That he’d taken her statement and accepted it.
“I will keep you at Barnwell until I am happy that you have changed.”
Claudia straightened her spine. “I don’t intend to change.”
“Then you can stay forever,” he snapped. “You are done making a fool of yourself. You are done dragging your father’s name through the papers. Do you know how much he would have hated that? He was a private man, Claudia. He never sought the headlines. How dare you take his money and live your life the exact opposite to what he would have wanted.”
“Don’t.” She spun around angrily, spilling a slosh of coffee onto the tiled floor. “Don’t you dare tell me what dad would have expected of me.”
“He made me your legal guardian. You don’t think we had conversations about it? You don’t think he discussed with me his worries for you?”
“What worries?” She pushed angrily.
“That you would turn out to be just like your mother,” he said quickly, so quickly that Claudia knew he hadn’t meant to admit as much. That he hadn’t meant to give that salient fact away.
She slammed her eyes shut and leaned back against the glass window, her mind running through that assertion.
Benita La Roche had died when Claudia was only six years old. She had a handful of memories of her mother. The way she could only make frittata, nothing else, and she would make them for Claudia’s breakfast and dinner, always arranging sultanas in the shape of a smile on top. Despite the fact Claudia hated sultanas and wasn’t especially fond of eggs. The way she would sing opera all day long, wandering around their enormous house making music out of air.
The way she would dance with Christopher.
The way she would drink.
The way she would argue when she was drunk.
The way she would go away for days at a time, without warning, leaving Christopher and Claudia alone at home. And on those days, Claudia would have eaten all the frittatas in the world if it had meant she could see her mother cook them, singing as she’d set the eggs in the little cocotte she used.
She had a clutch of memories, most of them conflictingly good and bad, but she had seen pictures of her mother. She had gleaned information that she’d painstakingly read over the years. Her mother had been a beautiful opera singer and performer, but she’d also been an alcoholic and she’d died driving a jetski in the Riviera while on holiday with a co-star who she’d had a long-running affair with.
Claudia was nothing like Benita, and yet she didn’t want to say that to Stavros. It smacked of disloyalty, even to the mother who’d died so long ago.
“He loved her,” she said instead, and Stavros was quiet. “For all her faults, my father loved Benita. If I am like her, I don’t think he would mind.”
“She was reckless, careless, and she broke his heart. Have you never wondered why he didn’t remarry? Why he withdrew into his writing and his books?” He stood and paced towards her. “And you look just like her.” He stared at her face, as if cataloguing her features, making sense of what he saw. “You are nothing like your father. Did you know that?”
Claudia’s gut twisted painfully. The unspoken question sat between them and she didn’t want to think of it. She had faced a lot in her short life, but she wasn’t sure she would survive if she discovered a definitive answer to the question that had been inside of her for a great many years.
Was Christopher really her father?
How could he be?
He had been a renowned writer and she couldn’t even read. She looked nothing like him. Did that explain his coldness to her? Had he discovered that she was the product of an affair?
Emotions sledged into her from all sides, but they were not new ones. It was not a fresh pain.
“Yes,” she said bravely. “I’ve known that all my life.” She swallowed, the fine column of her neck shifting with the small movement. “Excuse me, I think I’ll turn in for the night.”
She brought her coffee cup with her, but she didn’t need it. With the thoughts that had been uncovered, Claudia knew she wouldn’t find it easy to fall asleep.
*
What the hell had he been thinking?
The conversation with Christopher had been private, when Christopher had known he had only weeks to live, if that. He had spoken honestly. Perhaps more honestly than he’d intended, helped along by the heavy doses of morphine he was being injected with.
“Sometimes I wonder if she’s even my child. She looks nothing like me. She shows no interest in reading, writing, or stories, unless they’re movies. She’s like an alien to me.”
And Stavros could understand why his friend had felt that, though he’d long ago ascertained that she was, in fact, Christopher’s biological child.
Claudia had always been the spitting image of the gorgeous Benita La Roche, and now she seemed to have developed the same attitudes.
Well, that was going to change, if he had any say in it.
He just had to remember that his unwanted house guest was most definitely not going to end up in his bed. No matter how much she batted those sinfully long lashes and talked about her silk underwear, for Christ’s sake.
He reached for his whisky, swirling it around the glass so that the amber liquid formed waves against the glass walls, then brought it to his lips. He threw it back quickly. It was hard not to realise that he had bitten off more than he wanted to chew. Two weeks suddenly seemed like a lifetime.
Still, he’d choose just about anything over being home with his family.
His brothers and sisters, and his brother’s fiancé. The idea of spending Christmas as they always did, at their parents’ Florence home, unwrapping the silly gifts they’d selected, eating his mother’s panetone until they could barely move – he couldn’t face it this year.
It had been almost three years since he’d ended things with Rhiannon. Coincidentally, it hadn’t been long after Claudia had made her ill-thought out attempt to seduce him that he’d gone back to Greece and ended it with his girlfriend.
It had nothing to do with Claudia and everything to do with the fact that he’d woken up and realized he was in a serious relationship – and Stavros Aresteides didn’t do serious!
So why was he so angry that she’d turned up in his life once more, this time engaged to his brother? Apart from the squeamish idea of their having made love to the same woman, it was worse than that.
It was just downright weird.
His family’s acceptance of her, with open arms, made his gut twist.
He had no right to feel like this. He wasn’t a possessive bastard, and he hadn’t wanted Rhiannon any longer. But the idea of cosying up to her by the fire and saying, ‘welcome to la famiglia’ stuck in his craw.
So he’d bolted to England instead.
Possibly the worst idea he’d ever had, given that life in England brought with it a daily dose of his wayward ward’s misadventures.
This love triangle was the last straw. What was she thinking, moving in with the man who had been engaged to her best friend? Being photographed walking the streets with him, sipping coffee, talking as though she had not a care in the world? She was catnip to the sleazy tabloid press; didn’t she know that by now?
Still, he’d intended to handle things with a degree of finesse. He’d intended to speak to her, to cajole her into realizing the errors of her ways, to encourage her to make better choices. He’d intended to be reasonable yet firm, kind but strict.
Instead, he’d taken one look at her and started thinking with other parts of his anatomy.
And that was a huge, huge mistake.