Sins of the Past by Elizabeth Power Page A

child’s father! he ruminated, checking his rearview mirror. As if she despised the very ground he walked on! Perhaps she did. Perhaps she despised all men, it occurred to him.
    He understood now, though, what Olivia Redwood had meant by the hard circumstances she’d said Riva had worked under, and also how hard she must have worked to achieve the standard she had already reached in her career.
    It couldn’t have been easy, he acknowledged, flicking on his indicator to overtake a cyclist. He was always ready, as the head of a multi-million-pound conglomerate, to commend hard work and dedication whenever he saw it. But itjust went to show how focused and self-sacrificing she must be, he found himself thinking, which didn’t quite tie in with the little gold-digger he had always believed her to be—the girl who, until this morning, he had suspected of living the high life night after night. That would have been impossible, though—he was forced to recognise it now—even without a child. The serious nature of her job probably still demanded a great deal of studying time.
    Something like admiration for her stirred in him for the first time—a sensation that made him feel even worse about the way he had treated her in the past.
    He’d had his reasons, he thought doggedly, vindicating himself—though with less conviction than usual—with the reminder that he had done it for Marcello.
    He was surprised by how much it angered him, however, to think of Riva sharing her bed with another man. To think that she had surrendered to this man—and who knew how many more?—since she’d surrendered her virginity to
him.
    He laughed harshly out loud at this possessive side of his nature, tormented with images of Riva in another man’s arms—lying in another man’s bed.
    It only strengthened his resolve, therefore, as he brought the Porsche into his company’s car park and swung into his own personally reserved space, that the very next man’s bed this redhead occupied would be
his.

CHAPTER SIX
    ‘Y OU’RE lucky,’ Olivia told Riva a couple of days later as she managed to secure a potential appointment with some decorators in case Damiano approved her brief and the work at the Old Coach House went ahead. ‘Things don’t always go as easily as planned—especially on your first major assignment.’
    No, but all she had to do, Riva was finding, to spur on the assistance she might need, was mention the D’Amico name and problems straightened themselves out like creases under a hot iron. Money meant influence, and influence meant clout. And he had it in bucketloads, Riva thought, resenting him and the power he wielded, even while she nursed a whole heap of guilt about not coming clean to him about Ben.
    What was she afraid of? His rejection for a second time? Because he wouldn’t just be rejecting her this time, but Ben as well?
    From the way he had interacted with her son, it was surprisingly plain that he liked children. But how he would react if he discovered that the common little trollop whom he had bedded and then accused of sleeping with him just to feather her own nest had not only laid but hatched an egg from that nest, didn’t bear thinking about. Nevertheless, that still didn’t do much to alleviate the feeling that she was being decidedly underhanded in not telling him—a feeling that was only made worse during the lunch he insisted she have with him two dayslater, under the guise of discussing some changes to the work she was planning to carry out on his grandmother’s room.
    They barely touched on that subject at all.
    ‘How long is it since you’ve been on a date, Riva?’
    Over her chicken salad, she eyed him warily. He outstripped every other man in the restaurant, she thought, with that air of ruthless confidence, those incredible looks, and that animal restlessness about him that even the dark designer suit couldn’t quit tame. ‘Is this what this is? A date?’
    ‘No,’ he said categorically,