Page 18 of The Truth About De Campo

She laid her head against his chest. “I wanted it that way.”

“I have condoms, you know.”

“It wasn’t about that.”

He sighed. “You don’t want to talk about it.”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. For the first time in so long, she felt at peace. As if there wasn’t a fractured part of her ready to disintegrate at any moment. She wanted to hold on to it. Savor it. Because it couldn’t last. This had been one night. One night to get Matteo through the fire and one night to make her feel whole again. That’s all it could be.

Minutes, hours passed. When she woke, Matteo’s chest was moving slowly up and down beneath her cheek. The sky outside was pitch-dark, not a sound in the air.

She eased herself off him, looked down at his beautiful, hard-edged face. Shadows were painted beneath his eyes, making her wonder when the last time he’d slept well had been. But his jaw was relaxed, his body slack. He was peaceful now and she thought he would sleep for a long time.

Quinn walked silently to the piano, picked up her underwear and made herself walk out the door.

* * *

Matteo woke to flickering shadows. He blinked and sat up. Struggled to get his bearings. He was alone, the suite dark, the sky over the volcanoes just beginning to lighten.

Quinn’s perfume lingered in the air. Her taste, her smell was all over him. Pieces of the night before stormed back, came together like puzzle parts. His near desperation. His struggle to rid himself of it at the piano. Quinn’s appearance. The mind-blowing intimacies they’d shared...

The fact that he’d broken the one promise he’d made to his brother...

His stomach lurched. Yes, Quinn had needed this as much as he did; she’d had her own demons to slay. But it still didn’t make it right. Nothing made it right.

A sheen of perspiration covered his body. Drove him to the fridge for water. He snatched out a bottle, twisted off the cap and tipped it into his mouth, the icy liquid chilling his throat like the most horrific of wake-up calls. He had slept with Quinn Davis. It would be impossible for him to believe he’d done it if she wasn’t all over him. If the image of it wasn’t so graphically implanted on his brain.

One night, she’d said. This has nothing to do with the deal.... Yet wasn’t that exactly what Angelique Fontaine had promised just before she had destroyed him crying out her sorrows to her father?

His stomach dropped. What if Quinn couldn’t handle what she’d done? What if she chose Silver Kangaroo because it was the only unbiased thing to do?

It occurred to him he might actually have a death wish. With a muffled curse he strode out onto the terrace. But the filtered light of early day only made his sins more blatantly clear. He raised his eyes to the rising sun and let it brand him with the truth. He had put his relationship with his family in jeopardy again over his inability to forget the past. To forgive himself for his trangressions.

He pressed his palms to his cheeks. Was it ever going to go away? Was he ever going to feel as if he deserved a place on this planet again when Giancarlo would never get to live out the best years of his life? Exactly how long was he going to punish himself? Destroy those around him?

Was there even any hope he ever would?

He thought about the trust Riccardo had put in him. Prayed his instincts were right and Quinn would not betray him. His chest tightened until it felt impossible to pull in air and everything went a hazy white.

He did not consciously register himself striding inside and pulling on swim trunks. Taking the stairs to the beach, walking straight into the water and setting out toward the volcanoes with powerful strokes.

Quinn had saved his soul last night. Now he had taken himself straight to hell.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“SAY, WAS THAT De Campo I saw swimming across to the Pitons this morning?” Daniel Williams slopped half a cow’s worth of milk into his coffee and looked across the breakfast table at Quinn. “I’m all off with my time zones and I sure as heck could have been seeing something, but I could swear I saw him out there and holy crow, that has to be some swim.”

Quinn’s spoon fell to her saucer with a clatter. “That can’t be right.” That swim was miles.

Daniel shrugged. “Like I said, I could be wrong but I thought I recognized him.”

Her stomach tightened. Lord knew what state of mind Matteo had woken up in this morning. Sharks weren’t a common worry in the waters here, but that was a bloody long swim. Even for a good athlete. He was supposed to have met them for breakfast a half hour ago before their trip to Le Belle Bleu...

She stood up abruptly. “I’m going to go see if he misunderstood the breakfast invitation. I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.”

She walked straight into Matteo as she exited the restaurant. Her heartbeat slowed to a more manageable rhythm as she took in his navy trousers, pale yellow shirt and the grim look he wore like a badge. At least he was in one piece....

“Daniel said you’d swum across to the Pitons.... I told him he must have been mistaken.”

“I did.”

She stared at him. “That was exceedingly stupid.”

“A skill I seem to be perfecting of late.”

“Matteo—”

“Later, Quinn.” His sharp tone stopped her in her tracks. “We need privacy for this discussion.”

She bit into her lip. Or they could avoid it all together....

He waved a hand toward the restaurant. “I need coffee. I’ll get one to take with us.”

Matteo strode into the dining room, leaving Quinn standing there watching him go. She spent the windy drive around the coast to Le Belle Bleu trying to ignore the fact she’d just slept with the man behind her. Engaged in no-holds-barred raw sex with a man who had proven that far from her being the frigid, unfeeling creature Julian had made her out to be, she was capable of losing herself in the moment. As in screaming losing herself in the moment.

Images from the night before flashed through her head like a real-time movie she’d played a starring role in. Her spread across the piano keys...Matteo feasting on her willing body...

An allover flush consumed her. She wanted to feel regret. And she did. Sleeping with the bidder of an open contract likely wasn’t spelled out in the Davis Investments ethics manual because they’d probably figured no one would ever go there. But if the board or Daniel Williams ever found out, there’d be hell to pay. Her judgment would be called into question and her reputation compromised.

Her head throbbed in her skull. The problem was she’d never felt so alive. Never knew she could. She had pulled Matteo back from the fire last night. And in a bizarre way, she had reinstated herself among the living too.

One night, one lapse of sanity might be acceptable. She could still make a decision on this contract with a clear head. If it never happened again. If she wiped it from her brain...

The irony of it all made her shake her head as the marina came into view, sleek, expensive sailboats bobbing in their moorings. The one man who did it for her was the one man she couldn’t have.

* * *

Le Belle Bleu was no Paradis.

Located on the northern tip of St. Lucia, on a peninsula that boasted the island’s best beaches, Matteo could see why it had once been described as “one of the most dramatic resorts in the Caribbean” by a famous luxury hotel magazine. “A mermaid’s paradise...” Surrounded on three sides by water, each suite boasting a million-dollar ocean view with a private plunge pool that connected to the sea, its world-class restaurants weren’t just set on the water, they were in the water with glass floors, walls and ceilings immersing patrons deep into the sea with the most incredibly colored tropical fish as dining partners. And then there was the spa which was undeniably impressive with its renowned organic sea treatments favored by the globe’s elite.

As far as Matteo was concerned, that’s where the travel brochure ended and reality began. Five minutes into their walk-through with the hotel’s manager, Raymond Bernard, it had become clear the property’s ten-million-dollar face-lift was more of a disaster than a fix. If the shoddy renovations didn’t bring the kitchen falling down around Quinn’s head, the questionable wiring would. There was no way this hotel was going to be ready for its opening in two weeks. And from the scowl on Quinn’s face, she’d figured that out too.

He asked another pointed question of Raymond since Quinn seemed to be too busy fuming. No doubt wondering how she was going to host every VIP in the Caribbean in this mess in two weeks for the relaunch of a hotel that was considered a national treasure.

Raymond gave a completely inadequate answer to his question. Quinn rolled her eyes. She appeared to have exactly zero patience for the manager who was obviously struggling in his role and wasn’t trying to hide it.

They followed Raymond through the glitzy, opulent lobby. His ill-advised swim this morning had managed to knock some sense into his brain. What he’d done last night had been the height of stupidity. There were no excuses for it. But what he could do now was make sure it never happened again. Give Quinn no reason to think what had happened between them should have any bearing on her decision. He was going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that De Campo was the right partner for Luxe. And Le Belle Bleu provided the perfect opportunity for him to do that. He’d been through restaurant construction with De Campo’s properties. Knew what to look for. Quinn’s ice cream and hamburger franchises were built on an identical blueprint that had nothing to do with this type of scale. Complexity. Right now, she looked as out of depth as he had been this morning in water way over his head, unidentifiable sea creatures lapping at his feet.

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