by Lynne Graham
Her stomach gave a nauseous lurch. With so much at stake, only a lunatic would have behaved as she had. It was useless to plead that she could never have foreseen this sequence of events… it did not make her any less responsible for the results. And what her mother had endured then would be as nothing to what she would endure at the mere thought of the son she idolised going to prison. Emotionally fragile as she was at the best of times, it was very possible that the crisis would push Sylvia Forrester into another breakdown. That danger was as unthinkable to Ashley as the risk of her little brother ending up in a cell, and the means to defeat both threats were, she registered dully, within her own hands.
Was it too late? Ashley straightened her shoulders and breathed in as she turned in her tracks. She had to dig very deep for the courage to walk back into the Cavalieri Bank. Hot-cheeked, she approached the reception desk, inwardly cringing at the necessity. One of the receptionists approached her. 'Mr di Cavalieri phoned down to say that you could go straight up, Miss Forrester. '
In bewilderment, Ashley blinked. How could Vito possibly be expecting her? How could he have known that she would return before she knew it herself?
In the lift she fancied that she felt the weight of a ball and chain on her ankle. Pacing down that wide corridor again, she imagined she could hear the clank of the heavy links as Vito rattled her chain. But already her agile brain was working back over their previous dialogue with greater cool. It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that Vito should demand that she marry him. Vito was highly sexed but he was no slave to that sex-drive. He had proved that fact when he walked away to marry another woman, disdaining any attempt to continue a relationship in which marriage would not be the end result. Furthermore, so much bitterness lay between them now-how could he possibly still find her desirable? Was it true after all, that old cliché which said that men were different, more easily able to separate all emotion from the physical? Was Vito playing some sort of crazy power game with her?
He was a tall, lithe silhouette by the tinted wall of glass that filtered light into the ultra-modem room. He contemplated her in silence. What lay behind those impassive dark eyes was anybody's guess. But suddenly she was aware as she had not allowed herself to be aware earlier that she was facing a brilliant adversary, infinitely more experienced in tactical warfare than she was.
'How did you know that I'd come back?' she prompted when it seemed to her that the nail biting silence might soon contrive to suffocate her if she didn't break it. An eloquent dark brow lifted. 'The fury, the walkout, the truculent reappearance? The pattern is not unfamiliar to me.'
Burning colour drenched her pallor. 'You've got me over a barrel.'
'Crude,' he acknowledged. 'But apparently true. I never credited you with so much family feeling.'
She evaded his scrutiny; conscious that he might believe he had some grounds to betray surprise on that point. In the past, she had strenuously resisted his desire to meet her family and had inevitably been forced to behave as though family ties were unimportant to her. But how could she have taken him home to witness at first hand the atmosphere in her own home? How would he have reacted to the discovery that her father loathed all foreigners? Her father had more prejudices than a roomful of people could acquire between them in a lifetime. Vito would have been politely appalled and she would have cringed with embarrassment. The difference in their backgrounds would have been even more mortifyingly apparent.
'What possible pleasure could you receive from forcing me into marriage?' she demanded in helpless frustration.
'What force do I employ? You have the gift of free choice.'
'That's not fair!' she argued in growing desperation. 'Life isn't always fair.'
'You're demanding the impossible!'
'Then we have nothing further to discuss.' It was said with cool finality.
'We could talk about this,' she proffered curtly, playing for time.
'We have a great deal to talk about. We'll lunch at my apartment.'
Thrown by the suggestion, she stared up at him. 'Lunch?'
'I'm hungry.' Vito was already shrugging his magnificent physique into a superb cashmere coat. Perfect calm and sublime insouciance blended in the graceful lift of one ebony brow.
'I thought you had a house here now.'
'The apartment is more convenient during working hours.'
A private lift ran from his office suite down to an underground car park where a car awaited them. 'So… what are you in?' Vito enquired as the limousine nosed a forceful passage out into the slow moving traffic. 'Your brother was not disposed to satisfy my curiosity on the evening that we met.'
'In?' she repeated uncertainly.
'Your career,' he clarified with impatience. 'The career that you chose in place of me.'
'Oh.' Studying her tightly linked hands, she paled and decided to lie. 'The retail trade.' It wasn't entirely a lie, she reasoned. Until she had obtained some qualifications in child-care at evening classes, she had been employed at a large department store.
'You surprise me. It was not the field I believed you would choose. I assumed you would choose something more high-profile.'
She shrugged, evading his sardonic scrutiny. No, she couldn't tell him. It would be the ultimate humiliation. How could he guess? she reasoned frantically. Had she completed her course in accountancy, this would only have been her first year in paid employment. Vito would scarcely be looking for the trappings of success. Why should she tell him that he had been right all along? Right to say that she was on the wrong course? Right to suspect that at heart she had neither the interest in the subject nor the natural affinity with figures to shine in that field?
She had gone against everybody's advice when she'd chosen accountancy. But she had been determined to go into business and childishly, hopelessly set on proving to her father that she could succeed in a discipline dominated by the male sex. Stubborn as she was, she had had to fail before she could face the truth, although she still believed that if it hadn't been for Vito deserting her the month before her exams started and the subsequent trauma of her pregnancy, she would at least have passed those exams.
She loved working with young children. That was a natural inclination which she had rigorously suppressed throughout her teens, deeming such employment as one more little womanly pursuit which she was too clever to fall into. Now the world had turned full circle for her. She was studying part-time for a degree with the hope that eventually she would be able to train as a teacher. And all that, she realised abruptly, was about to end. The life which she had painstakingly put together again for herself would be destroyed a second time, for no greater reason than a barbarously male need for revenge.
'Are there likely to be any contractual problems concerning your release from employment?'
'None.' She was briefly amused by the idea of the day nursery where she worked pulling out all the plugs to retain one humble employee. 'But I still don't see why you should want to marry me.'
'I have a strong motivation which I haven't shared with you yet,' Vito conceded, shooting her a veiled glance. 'I believe you may be relieved when you hear it.'
Curiosity flickered. 'Tell me now.'
'I prefer the greater privacy of the apartment.'
The apartment was mercifully not the one which they had once shared. It was smaller, more formally furnished and clearly designed only for occasional occupation, but a trio of Toulouse Lautrec pencil drawings still hung in the elegant dining-room for equally occasional appreciation. Ashley was quite certain they were originals. A Cavalieri with a world-renowned private art collection would not be satisfied with anything less. At a rough estimate those drawings had to be worth well over a million pounds.
The fish-out-of-water sensation she had often experienced in Vito's radius four years previously returned to haunt her. This was not her world. The daughter of a man who ran a car dealership did not belong in such a rarified milieu, and if she had ever thought otherwise she
had once received firm confirmation of her unsuitability from another Cavalieri. Not Vito… his mother. With the discipline of long practice she suppressed that most degrading memory. Somewhere she still had the cheque Elena di Cavalieri had left behind.
A manservant served the meal. Although Ashley had scarcely eaten from the hour of Tim's arrest, she could only manage to push the food round her plate and sip at the wine. Vito, on the other hand, worked with well-bred restraint and no lack of appetite through each light course, unperturbed by her stony response to his conversational sallies.
Coffee was served in the spacious lounge. Ashley flung herself down on a feather-stuffed sofa. 'Well, let's hear it, then,' she invited, tilting her chin in an upward thrust, 'this strong motivation for wanting to marry me that required greater privacy.'
'Naturally I'm not considering a lifetime commitment,' Vito asserted from his stance by the fireplace. 'But it has occurred to me that you could well be worth every pound your brother has cost me and more.'
'How?' she demanded baldly, tension tightening her muscles; she hadn't a clue what he could be driving at and she hated the sensation of being in the dark. It seemed that she had been right. Clearly Vito did have a more devious reason than rampant desire for the outrageous demand that they unite in holy wedlock -unholy wedlock, she adjusted inwardly, reflecting on the sheer frequency and violence with which they had fought in the past.
Vito continued to study her with curiously intent golden eyes. 'There is only one thing in life I really want which fate has so far denied me.'
'The British Crown Jewels?' Ashley gibed. 'I can't think of much else that you couldn't contrive to buy.' 'I want a child,' Vito imparted, as if she hadn't made that facetious remark.
The announcement hit her like a punch in the gut. It turned her to stone, freezing her usually expressive face, but she could feel the blood slowly draining away from below her skin, the sudden mad thump of an accelerated heartbeat and a twisting pulling of pain deep down in her stomach.
Could he know… could he possibly know about the child she had miscarried? A shred of sanity returned to soothe her. There was absolutely no way that Vito could know about her pregnancy back then.
'You don't have any children?' She had to force the question from between dry, strained lips. For the past four years she had rigidly refused to think about the fact that Vito would most assuredly be fathering the children he had always admitted he wanted with another woman, the children she had flatly refused even to consider having with him.
'Six months after our marriage, Carina became ill,' Vito volunteered with visible reluctance. 'She had leukaemia. With the treatment involved there was naturally no question of even attempting to conceive a child.'
Ashley was shattered. In the midst of her current plight, it had not even occurred to her to wonder how so young a woman had died, but she had dimly assumed it might have been a car accident, something like that. This was entirely different. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered dazedly, still too confused to put together what he was telling her.
'Why should you be?'
'Because I'm not a totally unfeeling bitch!' Ashley lanced back at him furiously. 'Is my sympathy less acceptable than other people's?'
Pale beneath his dark skin, Vito released his breath in a hiss. 'Yes,' he admitted. 'Somehow it is.'
She was trying to put together what he had so far said. A glimmer of the truth threatened and she thrust it away, unable to believe that her own reasoning was leading her in the right direction. 'What,' she began a little unsteadily, 'has the fact that you want a child got to do with me?'
'I'm prepared to marry you so that you can give me that child.'
Ashley slid slowly upright in a movement lacking her usual supple grace. A dark, deep flush had overlaid her translucent skin. 'You're insane!' she gasped.
'I don't see why it should be so impossible a request. It's certainly not insane,' Vito countered. 'You're absolutely perfect for the role of surrogate mother. You don't want children of your own. After the child was born we would divorce and you would be free to continue your life as you wish without any interference from me.'
Ashley raked a shaking hand through her tousled hair and stared at him, wild-eyed with disbelief. 'I don't believe I'm hearing this. It's the most obscene suggestion I've ever heard! You could go out there and marry any one of a dozen women, I'm quite sure, and have a family the same way anyone else does!'
'But I don't want another wife.' Vito cast her a grim smile. 'Not a "forever and ever" wife. It would be wickedly unfair of me to marry another woman purely and simply to have a child. I could not sustain such an empty pretence of a relationship-'
'But you evidently don't consider it wickedly unfair to do that to me!' Ashley interrupted tempestuously.
'There would be no pretences in our relationship and, in any case, you are scarcely in the normal run of your sex. You don't even like children. You have never had any intention of tying yourself down to such a responsibility or of risking your career by taking time out to have a family. You told me all that quite unforgettably four years ago.'
She wanted to scream at him that she had been nineteen years old and as opinionated and untried in her convictions as most teenagers were. Her shrinking distaste from the very idea of pregnancy had been formed while she watched her mother's health dragged down by a countless succession of miscarriages in pursuit of the son her father had been so selfishly determined to have.
'You have years ahead of you in which you could marry again,' she flung at him tautly.
'But I may never meet someone I wish to marry. Apart from that possibility,' Vito rejoined, 'I have no desire to be an elderly father. My father was nearly fifty when I was born, and now he's dead. We were never close. There was too big an age-gap.'
He had never told her that his father had been so much older. Elena di Cavalieri must have been at least thirty years her husband's junior. Ashley's mind shifted away from the side-issue, which was so much more easy to consider than the absolutely impossible proposition Vito was putting before her. A hysterical laugh fluttered in her throat. Dear God, if only he knew that he had so nearly become… but then, it hadn't been so nearly, she reminded herself, thinking of how tragically short-lived her pregnancy had been and then reflecting in the same almost hysterical vein that, if Vito knew the female gynaecological history of her family, she would be the very last woman he would have approached with such a demand!
'I never dreamt you would even consider me worthy of such an honour as providing you with an heir,' Ashley delivered, terrified that her perilously thin control would splinter into shards in front of him. 'Not with the opinion you have of me.'
Vito's hard mouth tightened. 'You are physically very attractive, mentally very bright, and morally very courageous. '
Ashley was beginning to shake. 'You mean I score straight A’s as a potential cuckoo-type mother but fail all along the line as a woman!'
'I don't believe I said that.' Vito watched her with veiled eyes.
'But that's what you meant!' Ashley lashed back at him painfully. 'You think a real woman puts a man before everything else in her life, including herself!'
'All I do know is that in your case,' Vito breathed harshly, 'I was not the man capable of persuading you to make the smallest compromise or sacrifice on my behalf.'
Ashley loosed a high-pitched laugh. 'A small compromise? A small sacrifice?' she echoed. 'Move to Italy, give up my studies and all hope of ever having an independent career, marry you against my most basic instincts and then proceed to produce progeny with rabbit like efficiency! All those months you pretended that you understood how I felt-'
'I was being remarkably patient and tactful,' Vito incised.
'You were being bloody devious and dishonest!' Ashley countered.
'I was compromising my own convictions in an attempt to save our relationship,' Vito bit out between clenched teeth. 'There were times I wanted to shake you until your teeth rattled! There we
re times I wanted to use physical force to make you listen to me! Times I wanted to get inside your head and rearrange the circuitry into some form of normality.'
'I always said the only sort of real woman you could cope with would be a housekeeping robot!' Ashley spat, grabbing up her bag. 'I've had enough of this, and I wouldn't like to tell you exactly what I think of your baby-boom proposition, although I would dearly like to tell you what to do with it!'
'You walk out of that door and your brother goes to prison!'
Ashley froze with her hand reaching out towards the door and slowly swung back. 'You bastard!' she gasped strickenly, recalled to reality again with a nasty jerk when for a few minutes there it had almost been like old times, when they had fought hammer and tongs, no insult too low to be utilised, no theme too sensitive to employ.
'I am what you made me,' Vito responded very softly, a dark brilliance simmering like the start of a summer storm in the back of his fierce gaze. 'The guy who gave you fabulous sex but no deeply unsatisfied longing for a permanent commitment.'
Ashley snatched up her abandoned coffee-cup and threw it at him with an unrepeatable word. 'How dare you talk to me like that?' she seethed.
The cup smashed harmlessly against the edge of the fireplace but the contents spattered Vito's jacket. It served him right, Ashley thought furiously. Vito had always seemed to have the opinion that it was somehow beneath him to duck when she threw things.
'You know, my father once assured me that a gentleman never hits a lady,' Vito murmured half under his breath. 'Therefore I should feel quite free to retaliate. After all, there is no individual worthy of the title of a lady currently in this room.'
'You lay a finger on-' Ashley broke off as a quiet knock on the door prefaced the entry of the manservant with the offer of a second cup of coffee.
'Thank you,' Vito stated straight-faced. 'But I've had all the coffee I can handle.'
As the door shut, a powerful hand closed round one of Ashley's wrists and yanked her bodily forward, her slender five-foot-two-inch figure suddenly twisting away from his proximity in dismay.