“You wouldn’t be doing it for me,” he emphasized. “You’d be doing it for Mattio. What’s a few weeks out of your life? The poor kid hasn’t had much continuity in his so far.”

Even a compulsive liar had to speak the truth occasionally, Maya thought sardonically as her half sister’s words floated through her head. You don’t know what Samuele is capable of.

Well, she now knew one thing he was capable of after this breathtakingly blatant attempt to play on her feelings for Mattio.

“For future reference,” she told him crisply, “I don’t respond well to moral blackmail. Not that there will be—a future, I mean,” she tacked on, wincing, because the only thing she’d managed to do was make it sound as though they had a past.

They didn’t have a past, present or future.

It was just the entire off-the-scale hothouse weirdness of everything about the last few hours that had fed this strange feeling of intimacy, utterly misplaced intimacy, between them, she told herself.