He couldn’t help thinking of her: a little girl, traumatised by the violent death of her mother, with a sadistic and mercurial father who tried to discredit her as soon as he could. Somehow it wasn’t that fantastical to believe her father capable of such things.
He thought back to that night when he’d watched Siena come to bail Serena out of jail. The way she had tended to Serena like a mother to her cub...the way Serena had leant on her as if it was a familiar pattern. Both had been manipulated by their father’s machinations. Both had been acting out their parts. The good girl and the bad girl.
It all made a sick kind of sense now, because Luca knew he hadn’t imagined the vulnerability he’d sensed about her that night he’d first met her...
A sound from behind him made him tense and he turned around to see Serena, tousle-haired and dressed in the robe, standing in the doorway. She looked hesitant, shy, and Luca was falling, losing his grip. Everything he thought he’d known about her...wasn’t.
His hands gripped the bowl he was using to whisk eggs. ‘Hungry?’
‘Starving.’
Serena’s voice was husky, and it fired up Luca’s blood, reminding him of how she’d shouted out his name in the throes of passion just short hours before. How she’d begged and pleaded with him. How she’d felt around him.
Deus.
* * *
Serena came into the kitchen feeling ridiculously shy. Luca looked stern, intense.
‘I didn’t know you cooked.’
Luca grimaced in a half-smile, some of the intensity in his expression diminishing slightly as he continued whisking. ‘I don’t...I have a very limited repertoire and scrambled eggs is about as haute cuisine as it gets.’
Serena sat up on a stool by the island and tried not to let herself melt too much at seeing Luca in such a domestic setting in worn jeans and a T-shirt, his hair mussed up and a dark growth of stubble on his jaw.
‘Where did you learn?’
He was taking thin strips of bacon now, and placing them under a hot grill. He didn’t look at her. ‘When my mother left, my father let the housekeeper go; he always felt it was an unnecessary expense.’
Serena felt indignation rise. ‘But how did you cope? Did your father cook?’
Luca shook his head. ‘I was at boarding school outside Rio for most of the time, so it was only the holidays when I had to fend for myself.’ His mouth twisted. ‘One of my father’s many mistresses took pity on me when she found me eating dry cereal. She taught me some basics. I liked her—she was one of the nicer ones—but she left.’
More sharply than she’d intended, Serena said, ‘She wasn’t the one who seduced you?’
Luca looked at her, a small smile playing around his hard mouth. ‘No.’
Embarrassed by the surge of jealousy, Serena said, ‘Your father never married again?’
‘No.’
Luca poured some delicious-smelling coffee out of a pot into big mugs, handing her one. Serena bent her head to smell deeply.
‘He learnt his lesson after my mother walked away with a small fortune. She’d come from money in Italy, but by then it was almost all gone.’
Serena thought of his parents not even caring which boy went with who and felt sad. She remarked almost to herself, ‘I can’t imagine how I would have coped if Siena and I had been separated.’
Luca put a plate full of fluffy scrambled eggs and crispy bacon in front of Serena. He looked at her as he settled on his own stool. ‘You’re close, aren’t you?’
Serena nodded, emotional for a second at the thought of her sister and her family. ‘Yes, she saved me.’
Luca’s gaze sharpened. ‘It sounds to me like you saved yourself, as soon as you could.’
Serena shrugged minutely, embarrassed again under Luca’s regard. ‘I guess I did.’ She swallowed some of the delicious food and asked curiously, ‘Is your twin brother like you? Determined to right the wrongs of the world?’
Luca sighed heavily. ‘Max is...complicated. He resented me for a long time because my father insisted on leaving everything to me—even though I tried to give him half when our father died. He was too proud to take it.’
Serena shook her head in disbelief, and was more than touched to know that Luca had been generous enough to do that.
‘He had a tougher time than me—our mother was completely unstable, lurching from rich man to rich man in a bid to feather her nest, and in and out of rehab. Max went from being enrolled in an exclusive Swiss boarding school to living on the streets in Rome...’
Serena’s eyes widened.
‘He pulled himself out of the gutter with little or no help; he wouldn’t accept any from me and he certainly wouldn’t take it from my father. It was only years later, when he’d made his first million, that we could meet on common ground.’