slumbering lion.
‘For two years I lived like that and it was no fun.’
‘That’s not the impression you gave to the world.’ Valentina ignored the little voice of conscience that reminded her that Gio hadn’t looked happy in any of the photos she’d seen of him in the press. He’d looked intense, as if driven by something.
Now Gio emitted a curt laugh that made Valentina flinch. He put a hand through his hair and stalked away from her to stand looking out the window with his back to her. Finally Valentina could breathe again. Every line of his body was taut. Shoulders broad, leading down to slim hips in low-riding worn jeans. Even now, in the midst of this high emotion, her attention was wandering, gaze captivated by his perfect backside, those powerful thighs and long legs.
Disgusted with herself, she swallowed back a curse and crossed her arms and lifted her gaze to the back of that dark head. And something inexplicably tender lanced her. She didn’t have time to question it before Gio started talking in a cool voice.
‘I ran away from here, something I’m not proud of.’
He turned around then and Valentina sucked in a breath at the bleakness on his face, in his eyes. ‘If I could have been the one to die, do you not think I wished it a million times? Every time I woke up in the morning? I knew what I had done … I know. If we hadn’t been friends, if I hadn’t badgered him into coming out that night, if I hadn’t had that damaged horse at my stables …’ He broke off and then continued huskily. ‘Do you not think I know that Mario’s death was my fault? If I hadn’t been arrogant enough to assume I could tame the most untameable of horses … Mario wouldn’t have wanted to try himself, to prove me wrong.’
Bitterness laced Gio’s voice now. ‘I came from a life of excess I hadn’t even earned, from a family connected only by their disconnectedness. Mario came from everything that was good and real.’
His eyes seemed to be skewering Valentina to the spot. She couldn’t move. His voice roughened. ‘The night Mario died … I went back to the palazzo and put Black Star down, even though he was physically uninjured. He was untameable, there was something wrong in his head, or genes, but I’d let him live. Me. He should have been put down months before, when that jockey had died.’
Gio’s mouth was impossibly flat. ‘It took another death before I saw through my sheer arrogance. When I left here I wanted to die too. I wanted to kill myself but that would have been too easy, too self-serving. So I did everything imaginable to court death, without it actually being by my hand.
‘I jumped out of planes, I climbed impossible mountains, I went to war-torn regions in Africa—ostensibly for charity purposes but secretly hoping I’d find myself a target of some drug-crazed faction.’
Something cold went down Valentina’s spine when she thought of the cavalier way in which Gio had played with his life.
But he wasn’t finished. His mouth twisted in evident self-disgust. ‘Instead I found myself being lauded as a champion of philanthropists, and became a pin-up for extreme-sport enthusiasts. So then I immersed myself in the debauched and shallow world of the truly idle and rich. Because that’s what I deserved.’
He laughed curtly. ‘After all, isn’t that what I was? I’d never done a decent day’s work in school and yet Mario, with infinitely less resources, had succeeded against all the odds. Do you not think that I know how much Mario’s life was worth over mine?’
Valentina felt as if she’d just been punched in the gut with his words. She even put a hand there as if she could stop pain from blooming outwards. She couldn’t say anything though, too stunned, too shocked….
Gio continued in a flat voice. ‘The days were meaningless and morphed into one another, interspersed with whatever my next desperate flirtation with death would be. I lost and won back my entire fortune in the space of twenty-four hours many times over. One night in a casino I was so drunk I could barely see straight, but I was about to use Misfit as collateral in a bet with a renowned and very ruthless gambler. He’d been waiting for his moment to get my horse.
‘And right then, I truly didn’t care about Misfit, I didn’t care about anything. I’d slept