A Legacy of Secrets(19)

‘For me,’ he said as she decided on a strawberry. Ella looked at him, aware almost that she was being tested.

She was.

She knelt over him and Santo took the food from her fingers. She watched as his teeth cracked the chocolate, as he took the last one, but at the last second he relented and pulled her head to his, let her have half. As she nibbled at the strawberry, she tasted, too, his mouth.

‘I want to ring down for more strawberries.’ Ella smiled as she spoke with her mouth full.

‘There are figs—’ he smiled ‘—and they are harder to separate and we don’t want disturbing.’ He looked at her glittering amber eyes and the pink on her cheeks that would soon be scalding again. He saw the new flare of arousal and he was about to pursue it, yet, surprising himself, he spoke. ‘Salvatore, my grandfather, put it all in place before he died—that was the point of the wedding.’

‘So it wasn’t a love match between Alessandro and Alessia?’ Ella asked. When Santo gave her a quizzical look Ella remembered she was in bed with a Corretti—and so she took it as a no!

‘Battaglia has withdrawn his support.’ What Santo didn’t add was that Battaglia was now throwing his might behind Santo’s half-brother, Angelo. There was just so much history in his family, so much feuding, and last night things had suddenly got a whole lot worse, not that he could tell her even half of it. ‘Right now, all I want to concentrate on is the film.’ Then he smiled over to her. ‘And you.’

‘I think you should save it for the film, Santo.’ Ella wanted things left at the hotel checkout. She had no intention to wait till Santo got bored, yet as the conversation turned to the film, as his hands lazily wandered, as they fed each other figs with their mouths, reluctantly Ella admitted that there was no place she would rather be than here with him today.

‘When did you first want to start directing?’ He had dusted her breasts with chocolate powder and was now licking it off. The white sheets—like Santo, an absolute disgrace—but right now, Ella didn’t care.

‘Always,’ Ella said.

‘Always?’ Santo checked. Ella thought for a moment, remembered being five or maybe six and just shutting herself in her room, closing off from the noises downstairs and making movies with her mind. Not just once, but over and over, changing the camera angle, concentrating on a scene, getting it so right. Any money she’d had went towards buying scripts, and later it was bliss to find them online. She was twenty-seven and had no experience, but she had been training for more than two decades now. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.’

‘So why are you a PA?’ Santo asked. ‘You told me that was your passion when I interviewed you.’ And he smiled as he remembered the very determined, extremely smart woman who had arrived in his office unannounced.

Then he licked around her areola till she was wet, rather sticky, and she thought she might die if he didn’t take it all in his mouth. ‘You told me you took great pleasure ensuring your boss’s life ran seamlessly.’

‘I lied.’ Ella smiled. ‘As one does at interviews. Being your PA is my second passion in life, Santo.’

He could hear the wry note to her voice and it should have offended him. Why then did she make him smile? ‘Third,’ Santo said, because he wanted her again, but Ella was still talking about the film and she was lost to his hands for a moment, sitting up in bed with the sheet loosely wrapped around her, as if hiding herself from him as she spoke about the script.

It was a beautiful movie about a soldier going missing at war, presumed dead, and his wife turning to the soldier’s best friend for comfort. Both drawing on each other in grief, resulting in her pregnancy, only to find out that her husband wasn’t dead.

‘It has to remain a love story,’ Santo said. ‘But really, there are a couple of parts where it doesn’t gel for me,’ Santo admitted. She loved that they could talk about movies, that they both shared this passion, because often Ella knew that she bored others with her observations and thoughts, but Santo was just as into it as her. ‘I can’t see how, if she loves him, she could just forget so soon.’

‘She doesn’t forget him though, not even for a minute.’

‘If she can so easily sleep with someone else so soon after—’ Santo was firm on this ‘—then he was not the one love of her life.’ He frowned at her smile. ‘What?’

‘You’re a fine one to talk.’