The Truth Behind his Touch by Cathy Williams

In fact, this is pretty much the first unscheduled vacation I’ve had in years. I don’t want to spoil it.’ He waited for a few seconds and then raised his eyebrows with amusement. ‘You mean you aren’t going to argue with me?’ He shot her a crooked grin that made her go bright red.
    ‘I hate arguing.’
    ‘You could have fooled me.’
    But he was still grinning lazily at her. She felt all hot and flustered just looking at him, although she couldn’t drag her eyes away. It was impossibly still out here, with just the sound of gentle water and the far-away laughter of people on the nearest sailboat, which was still a good distance away. Suddenly, and for no reason, Caroline felt as though they were a million miles from civilisation, caged in their own intensely private moment. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to be kissed by him again, and that decadent yearning was so shocking that her mouth fell half-open and she found that she was holding her breath.
    ‘Okay, but you have to admit that you give me lots to argue about.’
    ‘I absolutely have to admit that, do I?’
    The soft, teasing amusement in his voice made her blush even harder. Suddenly it seemed very important that she remind herself of all the various reasons she had for disliking Giancarlo. She loathed arguing and had never been very good at it, but right now arguing seemed the safest solution to the slow, burning, treacly feeling threatening to send her mind and body off on some weird, scary tangent.
    ‘So, what about girlfriends?’ she threw recklessly at him.
    ‘What about
girlfriends
?’ Giancarlo couldn’t quite believe that she was continuing a conversation which he had deemed to be already closed. She had propped herself up on one elbow so that she was now lying on her side, like a figure from some kind of crazily erotic masterpiece. The most tantalizing thing about her was that he was absolutely convinced that she had no idea of her sensational pulling power.
    ‘Well, I mean, is there someone special in your life at the moment?’
    ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘I … I just don’t want to talk about Alberto …’ Caroline clutched at that explanation. In truth, the murky business between Giancarlo and his father seemed a very distant problem as they bobbed on the sailboat, surrounded by the azure blue of the placid lake.
    ‘And nosing where you don’t belong is the next best thing?’ He should have been outraged at the cavalier way with which she was overstepping his boundaries, but he didn’t appear to be. He shrugged. ‘No. There’s no one special in my life, as you call it, at the moment. The last special woman in my life was two months ago.’
    ‘What was she like?’
    ‘Compliant and undemanding for the first two months. Less so until I called it a day two months later. It happens.’
    ‘I guess most women want more than just a casual fling. Most women like to imagine that things are going to go somewhere after a while.’
    ‘I know. It’s a critical mistake.’ Giancarlo never made it a habit to enquire about women’s pasts. The present was all that interested him. The past was another country, the future a place in which the less interest shown, the better.
    Breaking all his own self-imposed restrictions, he asked, with idle curiosity, ‘And what about you? Now that we’ve decided to shelve our arguments over Alberto for a while, you never told me how it is that someone of your age could be tempted to while away an indefinite amount of time in the middle of nowhere with only an old man for company. And forget all that nonsense about enjoying walks in the garden and burying yourself in old books. Did you come to Italy because you were running away from something?’
    ‘Running away from what?’ Caroline asked in genuine bewilderment.
    ‘Who knows? Maybe the country idyll proved too much, maybe you got involved with someone who didn’t quite fit the image, was that it? Was there some guy lurking in paradise who