Sins of the Past. Elizabeth Power

gift of your virginity just one more clever ploy to try and feather your own nest? The older woman takes on the uncle, while the younger little siren makes a bid for the even wealthier deluded nephew!’

      Even now Riva winced from the spearing cruelty of his words. He had been using her, although she hadn’t realised it then, but he hadn’t been able to swallow the knowledge that he might possibly have been a victim of the same treatment—which he certainly hadn’t been.

      ‘No!’ she’d flung back, rejecting every cruel sentence he’d seemed to think it was his right to throw at her. ‘And anyway, I am on the pill!’ She couldn’t bear him knowing she had been such a fool—not after his cold and lacerating accusations. ‘And my mother hasn’t snared Marcello. How you can say that?’

      Ignoring her wounded question, he said only, ‘You were a virgin.’

      She gave a miserable little shrug. ‘So? I knew I was coming to Italy.’ Wretchedly she went on, compounding the lies and worsening the situation for herself in an attempt to prevent him thinking that she was reckless and foolish, and most of all that she might possibly be in love with him. ‘Every girl has to start somewhere.’

      ‘So you chose me to initiate you?’ He began pulling on his clothes, his body fit and tanned and agile. ‘I’m flattered!’ His voice, his face and the hard purpose of his actions assured her he was anything but.

      ‘Why not?’ She was near to tears but dared not show it, although her voice was so close to trembling that she didn’t risk saying any more.

      ‘Well, I sincerely hope I didn’t disappoint you! Unless those cries of pleasure to which you treated me were as fake as you are!’ He left her then, with his shirt flying open, his angry exit punctuated by the thunderous closing of the door.

      A couple of days later her mother came crying to her because Marcello had broken off the engagement. Damiano, it seemed, had had both women investigated, and had convinced his uncle of their unsuitability to marry into the D’Amico family. He had found out about Riva’s father, Chelsea’s protest marches, her jobs in downmarket pubs and restaurants. Her emotional breakdowns. The flat she had once vacated, dragging a sleepy six-year-old with her in the night, in a hurry, and without paying the rent.

      Though she’d never actually disclosed any of this, Riva realised that it was the innocent seeds she had sown in his mind during their long conversations which had nurtured the suspicions he’d already had about them both, and led him to discover all the things that her mother—that both of them—had tried to cover up, or rather wanted to forget.

      Riva confronted him about it, shaking with anger and wounded pride, and it was then that he took great satisfaction from calling her a liar. After all, she was, she thought, unable to defend herself. The way she had behaved with him, pretending to be sophisticated, experienced, not letting on about her true background, her upbringing.

      ‘You’ll excuse me if I’m not too distressed by not seeing the name of my family dragged down by the likes of you and your mother, carissima.’