A Legacy of Secrets - By Carol Marinelli Page 0,19

to have to make some phone calls.’ Of course the real world was waiting and she was more than used to Santo on the phone. All too often he wandered off, or stepped into another room, but this afternoon, privacy was somewhat discarded and they ate and drank champagne as he made a couple of rather terse phone calls to various family members. From the gist of things there was a lot of fallout from last night, which Santo confirmed when he hung up on the previous call and asked her to divert all calls unless it was his brother.

‘Unless it is Alessandro I’m staying out of it.’ He lay back and rested his hands above his head and looked up at the ceiling, examining yesterday’s events a touch more calmly now. For once he wanted to talk about it with someone who wasn’t family—not, of course, that he could tell Ella everything.

‘You know we are going for the contract to renovate the docklands?’

‘Sort of.’ Ella, who was trying to decide between the sweetest figs she had ever tasted and the last of the chocolate-covered strawberries, looked over at him. Everything was so guarded with the Correttis and yet so intertwined. The docklands they were hoping to renovate was in fact being used for filming. She knew that the Correttis were hoping to breathe new life into the area and, naturally, bring a lot of money in.

‘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‘Battaglia has withdrawn his support.’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