by Lynne Graham
'It wouldn't abate my anger one jot.'
Ashley thrust up her chin. 'OK. What about financial restitution?’
Vito dealt her a cold smile. 'Your family do not have the means. That "stupid fountain" you referred to was a sculpture, a quite irreplaceable work of art. The car? A Ferrari F40 with one or two little extras custom-built to my requirements. I paid four hundred thousand pounds for it four years ago and it's already a collector's item.'
'Four h-hundred th-thousand pounds for a car?' Ashley stammered in disbelief.
'It was a limited edition put out to celebrate Ferrari's fortieth anniversary.'
'It's obscene… all that money for a car!' Ashley gasped helplessly. 'And the money means nothing to you!'
Vito shifted a lithely expressive hand. 'And everything to you.'
'Once we loved each other… ' Every charged syllable hurt her throat, decimated her pride.
'Really?' Vito prompted. 'How strange that you should talk of love now when you made no reference to the emotion while we were together.'
Golden eyes dwelt unreadable on her hot cheeks and she evaded that appraisal. 'Can we stick to Tim?' 'You were the one who chose to stray into the past,' he reminded her.
'Only because I was stupid enough to try and appeal-'
'To some vein of sentimentality I might possess?' he guessed with derision. 'I'm not sentimental about sex.' The assurance roared like a shockwave through her.
She felt not only humiliated, she felt cheated. 'But you-'
'You destroyed what I felt for you.' It was an icy growl.
'You had a pretty similar effect on me!' she traded. A dark, forbidding anger glimmered in his gaze. 'I actually believed that you would grow out of your ridiculous ideas. I actually honoured you with a proposal of marriage-'
'Oh, let's not make the mistake of referring to that offer in terms of honour!' Ashley flung back at him furiously. 'You made it painfully apparent that you thought you were doing me one very big favour. And you wanted a good excuse to avoid the gold-plated Plain Jane your parents kept on throwing at your head! That is, until you came to your senses and got your calculator out and snatched at her with both greedy hands!'
Without warning, Vito sprang up and strode forward to face her. His dark features were set like granite. 'If you ever refer to my late wife like that again, I may well choose to forget that you are a woman and give you the response that you truly deserve!'
'L-Iate? As in g-gone?' As he towered over her; six feet three inches of ferocious threat, she bowed her head, shattered by the news and cursing her impulsive tongue and the venom that could trip off it so easily in his radius. 'I'm sorry.'
'No, you're not,' Vito grated.
'All right. I can't really be sorry because I didn't know her!' Ashley slammed back at him with more truth than tact. 'But I'm sure she was a saint and a wonderful person, quite unlike me.'
'Most unlike you,' he breathed tautly in agreement. 'You have the face of a Botticelli angel, the temperament of a virago and the amorality of a natural whore. On no count do you have the smallest resemblance to Carina.'
Ashley had turned very pale, beads of perspiration dampening her brow. She was devastated by the vicious response she had invited. 'Dear God,' she muttered shakily. 'I must have been out of my mind when I got mixed up with you!' A tiny pulse was beating in the hollow below one aristocratic cheekbone. 'We were both temporarily insane.'
Ashley slowly shook her head. Carina was dead. Carina was just a name and a face in a glossy magazine spread to her. It had been the wedding of the year in Italy, the amalgamation of two great fortunes. Vito hadn't wasted any time. One month after he had walked out on her, he had become engaged, and one month after that he had married. Carina had floated down the aisle, radiant in blinding white. And she had been radiant, ecstatically happy to have won Vito even by default. The bride had very obviously been in love.
However, Vito had married without love, without even the spur of sexual attraction. On their wedding night, Ashley had felt suicidal… the pain had been that bad, that unendurable. Until that day, she had been unable to bring herself to believe that he could actually go through with it. But Vito had gone through with it. He had cut Ashley out of his life with terrifying immediacy and precision. And no regrets. Remembering still had the power to chill her to the marrow. She, who had once been so strong, had been broken like a toy and cast aside. She had learnt the hard way that she was no cleverer and no less vulnerable than any other woman in love. In the long, anguished months that had followed, she had lived in a kind of twilight world where she had co-existed with a ghost. In the end, she had been forced to confront and accept the most painful truth of all. Vito had never loved her. If he had, he couldn't have married another woman.
Stilling a reflexive shiver, she stared at his hand stitched Italian leather shoes. He hates me, she thought weakly, he hates me because once he was foolish enough to ask me to marry him and I had the audacity to say no. Dear lord, how had this appalling confrontation developed? She was supposed to be here for Tim's benefit, wasn't she? And so far, she was guiltily aware that she had made a very poor showing.
'I'm sorry.' It stuck in her throat but she persisted for her brother's sake. 'I shouldn't have lost my temper.' Nobody ever taught you how to curb it,' Vito murmured harshly. 'But I could have.'
You and who else, mister? But the aggressive question remained sensibly unspoken. She felt like a volcano about to erupt. And she knew she couldn't. Only two people m the world had this effect on her. One was her father, the other was Vito. Rage took her over. Rage and fear. Instinctively she stifled her acknowledgement of that second emotion. Survival, to Ashley, meant never ever admitting that anything or anybody frightened her.
She cast him a glance in which desperate defiance and loathing mingled as blatantly as a blow. 'I'm not into crawling.'
A winged dark brow elevated. 'I wouldn't know. I've never seen you attempt such a feat.'
'But you'd like a ringside seat, wouldn't you?' She leapt upright, too restive to remain still, too threatened by his proximity to stay so close. The sudden movement dislodged the loose topknot which confined her hair and a curling tangle of Titian red rippled down far below her shoulders in shining disarray. Irritably she thrust the fiery strands back from her slanted cheekbones, accidentally intercepting a lingering stare from Vito as she lifted her head high. 'I know what you want to hear,' she said. 'I know what you're thinking right now. In fact, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you've been thinking from the moment I walked into this room!'
'For the sake of peace, I hope not.' It was a low-pitched growl which made the sensitive skin at the nape of her neck prickle.
His intonation threw her off balance for a second. Intent golden eyes watched her still with the grace of a gazelle in flight, sunlight glittering fire in that amazing curtain of vibrant hair. Her return look was blank.
'You want to hear that I deeply regret not marrying you,' she stated with characteristic bluntness.
'Do I?' Vito didn't move a muscle.
She squared her shoulders, hoping that he was bigger than his fragile male ego when the cards were down. 'I have to be honest so that we can get this hangover from four years ago out of the way.'
'Oh, please be honest, cara,' he encouraged lazily. She swallowed hard. 'If you must know, I'm still proud of the fact that I refused to become your possession. A life of round-the-clock surveillance and subjugation at your hands would have stifled me. It would never have worked.'
'It worked in bed. Dio,' Vito interposed in a sizzling undertone, 'how it worked…'
Fierce heat pooled in the pit of her stomach. Flustered and embarrassed out of all proportion to the remark she said nothing. '
Vito surveyed her with formidable cool. The chill factor in the air was powerful. 'It would have been such a sacrifice? To be my wife? To wear silk next to your skin, diamonds at your throat? I valued you far beyond your true worth.'
'Well, if you
have to think like a tradesman in enumerating the material advantages I missed out on, I expect you did,' Ashley parried between clenched' teeth. ‘But you knew from the start how I felt about marriage.
You can’t say you weren't warned. Marriage is a patriarchal institution which benefits men and oppresses women. It conditions my sex into dependence and passivity, lowers their status and deprives them of individuality.'
'Feminist claptrap. Dio. I've never heard so much rubbish!' Vito raked back at her in a lion's roar of intimidation.
Her breasts swelled with anger. Jerkily she shrugged. You are naturally, entitled to your own opinion – as I am entitled to mine. In any case, I'm not here to resurrect a past that we'd both prefer to forget. Why can't we leave personalities out of this? I didn't come here to antagonise you. You make me say things I don't mean to say. You always did,' she completed accusingly.
'You apologise with such finesse.'
In a passion of frustrated emotion, she whirled away. It had been a long time since she had voiced the beliefs she had first formed in her early teens. For some inexplicable reason, she didn't feel the same religious fervour of conviction that she had once had. But that scarcely mattered now. Why should she apologise for saving them both from the long-drawn-out agonies of a disastrous marriage?
After five months, they had been at each other's throats at least twice a day. Near the end, it had been like living on the edge of a precipice when you had a pronounced fear of heights. Tears stung her eyes. She was the one person who could reason with Vito on Tim's behalf and yet she was the very worst messenger he could have had.
Time had not lessened Vito's antipathy. She stole a covert glance at his rock-hard profile, absorbing the innate ruthlessness stamped into every slashing lines of his stark bone-structure. No, they could never have parted friends. Vito came from a long line of blue-blooded, immensely wealthy and arrogant people. Negative responses had figured rarely in his experiences. Everything he wanted, he got. Everything he wished, happened. When your name was Cavalieri, the world was your oyster and the pearl at the centre was always yours. That Vito had been prepared to marry her in the very teeth of his family's opposition had made her flat refusal all the more heinous a crime in his eyes.
'If you could just bring yourself to withdraw the complaint against Tim,' she pleaded tightly..
'Why would I do that?' Vito fielded drily. 'If I think like a tradesman, I would obviously be striking a most unequal bargain. Freeing your brother from the punishment he most assuredly deserves would not fill me with any warm feeling of benevolence. His freedom is worth nothing to me. What is it worth to you?'
The casual enquiry struck her as savagely cruel. She trembled. 'Anything… everything,' she whispered, thinking of Tim's smashed future and her mother's fragile mental stability and the unending guilt which would be hers alone if she could not persuade Vito to change his mind.
'Is it worth your own freedom?'
Her delicately pointed profile turned to him. 'I don't understand. '
Black-lashed golden eyes flamed over her tense figure, skimming across the feminine curves that even the unflattering clothing could not disguise and finally fanning at an outrageously leisurely pace back up to her burning cheeks. Only a hot-blooded Italian could have projected that much sexual menace into a single look. 'Anything… everything? Intriguing,' he murmured softly. 'If you returned to my bed, it is possible that I might be persuaded to withdraw the complaint.'
Her slim hands closed convulsively together, the heated colour draining from her complexion. 'That's not funny, Vito.'
'It wasn't intended to be.' He sank down with inherent grace on the edge of his immaculately tidy desk. 'You come to me on my terms-entirely on my terms,' he stressed, 'and your brother goes free.'
'That's obscene!' Ashley gasped.
'You shared my bed once without love. You could surely share it just as happily with hatred,' he drawled.
Her hands parted and knotted into balled fists.
'Your body language is so uniquely expressive,' Vito remarked. 'Bring some of that fire into the bedroom and I might even be persuaded to buy your delinquent brother a Ferrari of his own.'
She shuddered with rage, fought the emotion and won only by dint of trapping her tongue painfully between her teeth. How dared he? How dared he send her up like this? For, of course, that was what he was doing. He was settling old scores. He wanted to humiliate her. In the situation she was in, it was inhumanly cruel. But that was Vito. The dark side of Vito. The ruthless, unrelentingly vengeful side of Vito which she had clashed with unforgettably on the day he'd married another woman.
He flung his dark head back and laughed soft and deep in his throat. He was utterly pagan in his unashamed enjoyment of her mortification. 'Allara, cara. Once you said to me, "If you feel like it, go for it". I am, as you so succinctly advised, going for it.'
'But you can't be serious… you can't be,' she stammered.
Glittering dark eyes rested on her with a fierce, wholly physical intensity. 'It would have to be marriage…'
'Why the hell would you want to marry me now?' she blistered back at him, abruptly relocating the power of proper speech.
A satiric smile slanted his expressive mouth. 'But you know the answer to that question, cara,' he said smoothly. 'You told me why four years ago. I want a servant to pick up after me, a devoted slave to massage my ego and a bimbo to show off in designer clothes. And, last but not least, sex… unlimited sex, whenever I want it. Only marriage could supply me with all these essentials. '
Involuntarily her jaw dropped, oxygen escaping her lungs in a shattered sound of disbelief. She had long since forgotten those bitter words. Vito, she registered with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, had not.
'In addition,' he continued, luxuriant lashes dropping reflectively low as he looked her over again with incredibly offensive thoroughness, 'beneath that ridiculous miniature terrorist outfit you sport lurks a perfect body and a very beautiful woman. I still want to possess that woman. And why should I not when the means are within my grasp?'
'You're crazy!' she cried. 'Absolutely stark, staring mad!'
'Am I?' Vito surveyed her with a brand of cold, grim satisfaction that made her skin crawl. 'Are you telling me that I could get you any other way? I want you, Ashley. That is the only card you have to play. Whether or not you choose to play it is entirely up to you.'
'I'd sooner be dead than married to you!' Stinging conviction lanced from every biting syllable.
'Is that your final answer?'
In three enraged steps, Ashley reached the door and swung helplessly round to vent yet another last word. 'You vengeful bastard!' she hissed in disgust. 'I hope you burn in hell for what you've said to me today!'
'And I would warn you that "where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury".' Contemptuous amusement glittered in his unyielding gaze as he absorbed her bewilderment. 'Haven’t you ever read The Taming of the Shrew, Ashley?'
In her desperate haste to depart, she cannoned into the stalwart solidarity of his secretary, who was hovering anxiously outside. 'How can you work for a chauvinistic, woman-hating swine like that?' she demanded shrilly on her way past.
CHAPTER THREE
Tim had defended her. And in her name he had been baited, beaten up and humiliated. Tormented by his inability to silence Pietro, Tim's rage and resentment had inevitably centred on Vito, the male he viewed as the author of all his sister's misfortunes. He had probably intended to drive Vito's Ferrari away and leave it somewhere, giving Vito a scare. Ashley was absolutely certain that Tim had not meant to damage it. Like most teenage boys, Tim was car crazy. The wanton destruction of such an exclusive car would have been beyond him. Ashley was convinced that, filled with Dutch courage and fired by an adolescent desire for the only revenge within his reach, Tim had embarked on a stupid, boyish prank that had concluded in the kind of disaster he could not have dreamt up in his
worst nightmares. But no court would view his outrageous conduct in such a mellow light. The court would not hear about the provocation Tim had endured for so many weeks beforehand either. Hadn't Tim already suffered enough? 'Aren't you responsible for everything that drags our family down?' Susan had condemned bitterly. All of a sudden the stark truth of that accusation seemed cruelly apt.
You break the rules, you pay the price. Four years ago, she had moved into Vito's apartment, well aware that she was contravening her father's staunchly moral principles. Faced with his fury, she had refused to hang her head in shame. She had been defiant to the last and in the end she had paid a high price for that defiance, but it had occurred to her recently that she had not been the only one to pay that price.
The scant references Tim had made to that period of their lives had made it painfully obvious that· her behaviour had caused her mother tremendous distress.
'Unlimited sex, whenever I want it…' Ashley's teeth ground audibly together as she elbowed her passage out of the lift. Seething over the treatment she had received, she stalked from the building. How dared he speak to her like that? How dared he? Well, you did what you could and you failed, she told herself bracingly. Tim's stricken face lurched into her conscience. Missing her step, she stumbled and nearly fell, horror darkening her eyes. And it was there, right there in the middle of the crowded pavement with people pushing past her on either side, that the harsh reality of Tim's predicament finally struck home hard. Her self-righteous fury evaporated, leaving her limp and shaken.
Dear heaven, was she actually planning to stand back and watch her kid brother go to prison? Guilt swallowed her alive. Vito had at least agreed to see her. And what had she done with that opportunity? Instead of pursuing Tim's cause with suitable tact and humility, she had gone off on an emotional tangent, dredging up personal issues which had had no place in the dialogue. She had blown Tim's one hope of freedom, wilfully, recklessly blown it for the selfish satisfaction of provoking Vito.