Then he took a deep breath. A series of deep breaths.
He took his trousers from the floor, pulled his cellphone from his pocket and punched a button.
Matteo answered on the first ring.
“Luca? Where the hell have you been? We’re already on the road, heading for the airport.”
Luca spoke calmly.
Yes, he said, he’d figured that. He apologized for not returning to El Sueño. Something had come up, he said, his mouth thinning at the ugly pun.
“I’ll meet you at the airport,” he told Matteo. “Yes, fine, I’ll be there in plenty of time.”
“Did you finish with the McKenna woman?” Matteo asked.
“No,” Luca said, still calmly, “no, I haven’t finished with her.”
He disconnected. Took a hundred dollar bill from his wallet and left it on top of the lamp shards. Then he pulled out another hundred and placed it on a pillow on the bed.
He phoned the cab company. Took a fast shower. Dressed. And as he paced outside the motel, waiting for his taxi, he thought how much truth there had been in what he’d told Matteo.
He wasn’t finished with Cheyenne McKenna.
Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER THREE
He reached the airport in time.
Not that it really mattered.
The Bellinis were using a private jet; there was no particular schedule to adhere to other than everyone having agreed they wanted to be in New York by nightfall. Matteo and Luca had business functions they had to attend; Bianca was going to a lecture, and Alessandra, as usual, was mysterious about it all.
He made his way down the aisle of the luxuriously appointed Dessault Falcon 50 EX and took a seat. His sisters moved past him to a pair of loveseats in the plane’s midsection. Bianca took an iPad from her oversized purse; Alessandra took a copy of Vogue from hers. Matteo chose a seat and opened his laptop.
Luca took out his iPhone. All he could recall about tonight’s commitment was that it involved some kind of charity. He sighed. The last thing he was in the mood for was being in the company of people whose common bond was that they were rich.
Perhaps his P.A. had included some information about the evening in an email.
“Takeoff in two minutes, folks,” the pilot’s disembodied voice said. “Please fasten your seat belts.”
There was nothing from his P.A.
He probably wasn’t being fair to the glittering crowd that would attend tonight’s whatever. His P.A. accepted or declined invitations to such things on his behalf; she’d been with him almost from the start of Bellini Construction—he’d dropped the ‘Wilde’ from his name the day he’d turned twenty-one.
He trusted her judgment.
If he was attending a dinner or a cocktail party or an auction for some charity, it was surely one with a good cause. Jessica had probably filled him in on it, but the craziness of the past couple of days had driven everything else from his head, which wasn’t like him at all.
He prided himself on being organized. On being logical.
His mouth thinned.
There’d been nothing organized or logical about his behavior today…
Forget that.
Today was history.
Concentrate on tonight.
Tux or dark suit? Dark suit. He hated the stodgy formality of tuxes, always half-expected somebody to come up to him and say, you look good in that tux. Where’d you rent it? even though his tux was custom made.
The fact was, his family had been raised knowing they had to spend every lira and euro with caution. Had their father’s money gone to the American family he’d acknowledged? Did it really matter?
Maybe Bianca was right.
What was the sense in condemning the children for the sins of the father?
All six of the American Wildes had determinedly made it on their own. They’d worked themselves through school and attained success through their intelligence and determination.
There would be people like that at tonight’s whatever-it-was, people with money but with good instincts. Oh, there’d be the usual contingent who’d want to show the world that they were part of the fabled one or two percent, but most of them had a genuine interest in Doing The Right Thing.
Some few might even hope that an act of charity might cleanse their souls of past transgressions.
Still, he’d bet not one of them had transgressed as he had today.
The shabby motel room. The quick, no-emotion sex with a woman who was a stranger…
And, Dio, what was wrong with him?
Sex with a stranger? He’d done that before. Once at a masked ball in Venice, another time at a dinner high in the clouds at a Manhattan penthouse.
Exciting, each time.
As for what had happened today…
No emotion? There’d been plenty of emotion. Hunger. Heat.
And release.
He was a man, not a boy. Consensual sex of any kind was not a sin.
The jet was picking up speed.
He could feel the plane gathering itself for takeoff, for that power-pulsing climb that would leave the earth beneath its wings.
What had happened between him and the McKenna woman had been like that. The urgency. The rush. The sense of leaving all reality behind. Two people who’d just met, who had treated each other with cold removal…
But there’d been nothing cold about what happened in that room.
The sex had been like fire. Like flame. He had burned for her and he knew damn well that she had burned for him.
She used you.
Well, so what? They’d both gotten what they wanted.
She’d taken control of everything, from start to finish.
Yes, and what about it? He wasn’t a male chauvinist. He believed in gender equality.
Most men he knew would have been elated. Dammit, he should have been elated! A beautiful woman had driven him to a motel, torn off her clothes and his, and ridden him into ecstatic oblivion.
Still, there was something incredibly hot about a woman losing control under the stroke of a man’s hand. He thought about what it would be like to undress her with slow deliberation, to watch her eyes blur as he bared her, to hear her moans as he slid his hand between her thighs and felt her turning slick and wet for him…
No.
If he were with her now, he’d take her fast and hard, never mind those images of slow seduction; he’d tear off her jeans, her panties, bend her over the table, push himself into her again and again until she wept for mercy, for release, for him…
“Merda!”
Matteo looked up. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Luca said. “I’m fine.”
The hell he was!
The plane was big for a private jet, but not big enough for what he needed. A long walk. A five-mile run. A workout that would shut down his head, his hormones…
His insanity.
He unbelted, rose from the leather chair, went to the bar and poured himself some Johnny Walker Blue. Back in his seat, he sipped at the Scotch. Maybe it would ease the knot of anger lodged in his gut.
Luca turned his head and stared out the window.
The view was perfect. Pale blue sky. Cottony clouds.
Except, all he could see in his mind’s eye was Cheyenne McKenna as she must have looked when she rose from the bed, her expres
sion dismissive, her interest centered on dressing as quickly as possible without waking him so she could sneak away from that small, barren room.
Away from him. From the possibility of his waking and wanting another performance, because that was what the entire incident had been, a performance, a woman wanting quick sex, no strings attached…
His hand tightened around the glass of whisky.
“Luca?”
Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, twenty-first century style.
“Luca!”
He turned toward Matteo. “What?” he snarled.
Matteo raised his eyebrows.
“You hold that glass any tighter, you’ll bust it.”
“What in hell are you talking about?”
Matteo jerked his chin toward Luca’s hand.
“Your knuckles,” he said quietly. “They’re white.”
Luca followed his brother’s gaze. His fingers were so tightly wrapped around the glass that he could feel them cramping. Deliberately, he relaxed his muscles and put the glass on the small table beside him.
“I guess that’s what happens when a man finally gets his hands on good Scotch,” he said with what he hoped was a smile.
“I take it that your morning with the McKenna woman was…interesting.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey! At least growl before you bite my head off. It meant exactly what I said. That your visit with her was probably interesting.”
“It wasn’t a visit. I offered to stand in for Travis. She accepted.” Luca heard the sharpness in his voice. Carefully, he picked up the glass and took a drink. The whisky was warm, smooth and soothing. “And that was it.”
“It was even money on which one of you would make it through the morning alive,” Matteo said, grinning. “Devoted brother that I am, my money was on you.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Was the property any good?”
“The land was okay.”
“The buildings?”
“One good barn. The other outbuildings, the house—all write-offs.”
“The house isn’t worth repairing?”
“Not if you’re sane, no.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad.”