by Lynne Graham
The curtains fell on the past, plunging her back to the present. She reflected sadly that that was where her proud pretence had begun. The very first day. She had refused to let Vito see her confusion and vulnerability. All she had wanted to do was escape. She had been furious with herself, furious with him but she had also known that what had happened to them both the previous night had been mutual, something incredibly powerful and special that she just couldn't bear to walk away from, something she had honestly never dreamt she could feel with any man. But to be frank, she allowed reluctantly, those feelings had frightened the hell out of her.
'Are you ready?'
She stood up slowly; desperate uncertainty and self-consciousness etched into her every movement. Tall, dark and extravagantly gorgeous in a dinner jacket, Vito audibly caught his breath. 'You look like a pre Raphaelite painting.'
'And I feel like a bimbo.'
His sensual mouth twisted wryly. 'I wouldn't worry.
The minute you open your mouth, any resemblance vanishes.'
In the car, she said, 'Your family won't accept me. Four years ago, they thought I was just some cheap little waitress you were slumming with!'
His gaze whipped over sharply. 'Exactly how do you know that they might think of you like that?'
In the heat of the moment she had been incautious but she was not prepared to tell him about his mother's visit. That would be too, too degrading. Not that Elena di Cavalieri had been rude or crude. Vito's mother had been far too much of a lady to behave like that. No, what had hurt the most had been Elena's visible desperation as she sought to persuade Ashley that she would ruin Vito's life if she married him. In fact, Elena had come pitifully close to begging. It might almost have been funny if it hadn't been so horribly humiliating.
'Ashley, I asked you a question.'
'I guessed how your family would think about me.' His dark eyes were nailed to her shuttered face. 'And did that influence your response to my proposal of marriage?'
Proposal? She held on to a howl of contemptuous laughter at that so flattering euphemism. Other women got soft lights and flowers. What had she got? Vito had not got down on bended knee or anything like that. She didn't quite recall how he had opened the subject, but she did recall being blistered with the reminder that she had been sharing his bed for five months and that she was damned lucky he didn't value her quite as cheaply as she valued herself. Her morals were not his, he had asserted. Women willing to share his bed were two a penny. What he wanted was a wife and future mother of his children.
'Ashley,' he prompted tautly. 'It didn't influence me. I didn't want to marry you.' But Ashley was grimly aware that that was not quite the whole truth. Two days after finding out about the baby, she had phoned Vito in Italy. Giulia had taken the call and she had told Ashley with audible embarrassment that Vito was in the middle of his engagement party and did she still want to speak to him? Ashley had replaced the receiver without replying, so shocked and incredulous that she hadn't been able to think of a single face-saving thing to say. It was absolutely impossible to guess now what might have happened between them had Vito not turned with such indecent haste to another woman.
'But this time you will marry me.' Vito's bone structure stood out starkly beneath his golden skin. His eyes splintered into hers in raw challenge. 'And very possibly you won't be so smug and self-satisfied when that marriage comes to an end.'
'I'm not smug about it!' Ashley argued with real vehemence.
Vito slung her a simmering glance of complete contempt. 'I'm going to chip you out of that aggressive little shell you live in, piece by piece. I'm going to strip off every layer you hide behind until there's nowhere left to run!'
'If you do that I'll hate you even more than I do now!' Dry-mouthed, Ashley stared back at him, paralysed by the terrifying amount of threat he could emanate. 'So what have I got to lose?' he gritted.
They dined at Nico at Ninety on Park Lane. A powerful ripple of interest, both discreet and otherwise, accompanied their entrance. Her pale skin flaming, Ashley dug her head into her menu and was confronted by a view of her own cleavage that made her feel even more hatefully self-conscious. She ordered her own meal. Vito didn't bat an eyelash. The veal braised in Madeira melted in her mouth and her tension began to mellow, her shoulders to straighten. As she rested back in her chair to sip at her wine, she thrust the heavy fall of her hair irritably back behind one small ear, exposing the slender length of her neck.
'Some day I shall have it all cut off,' she said, absently expecting him to argue at the very idea and inwardly acknowledging that her hair was her one claim to vanity. But silence greeted her and she tilted her head back to look at him. Vito was staring fixedly at her, and what she saw in his hard features shocked her rigid. Eyes as cold and treacherous as black ice were nailed to her. Perspiration broke out on her brow. 'What's wrong?' she demanded. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'
Vito tossed his napkin down beside the plate he had thrust away, his meal apparently abandoned. 'I believe it's time we returned to a subject I allowed you to ignore earlier,' he breathed very, very quietly. 'Where were you today?'
She frowned in bewilderment. 'I spent the day with Tim. He's leaving London to go home and swot for his exams.'
The flash of pure naked rage that illuminated Vito's dark gaze to piercing brilliance made her flinch. For a split-second she honestly believed that if a table hadn't separated them Vito would have clenched the brown fingers flexing on the arm of his chair round her throat instead. Her throat, yes, for, strange as it might seem, Vito was not directly meeting her eyes for longer than a second at a time. His smouldering gaze continually dropped below the level of her chin. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Even the naturally olive tone of his complexion couldn't hide the fact that he was literally white with the kind of rage that visibly threatened even his intimidating self-discipline. 'You're lying,' he murmured with raw menace. 'This morning, when I found your cases in the apartment, I telephoned your sister to see if you were with her. She told me that your brother had caught the train home a few hours earlier.'
Ashley instantly understood that Tim had told a white lie to her sister sooner than risk offending Susan with the news that he intended to spend his last day with Ashley, rather than her. 'He only pretended to be catching an early train. We spent the day together and-'
Vito elevated an ebony brow. 'Then no doubt he gave you that bite on your neck,' he incised in a bitterly derisive undertone.
'Bite?' she repeated, her hand flying up to her throat instinctively to feel the small tender spot just below her right ear. Was there a bruise there? Dimly she recalled stretching unwarily across an opened suitcase to pull something out from behind the lid. The protruding lock had caught her a painful blow which she had massaged and as quickly forgotten while she got on with her packing.
'You little slut…' Vito slashed back at her in a murderous undertone that chilled her blood in her veins and sent her heartbeat thudding in a race to the foot of her constricting throat. 'You filthy little slut. You spent the day being bedded by your lover.'
'Th-that's a lie,' Ashley stammered, so shattered by his unjust and ridiculous accusation that she could think of nothing more original to say in the confining spaces of a public place.
'And if I hadn't seen the evidence, I'd never have known,' Vito growled, lashing himself into a fury made all the more powerful by the suffocating constraints of their situation. He signalled for the bill. Dousing the waiter's anxiety that there had been something wrong with the meal, he waved him away again, to her disbelief. 'We'll finish our wine,' he said between gritted even white teeth.
'Vito, please…let's get out of here,' she whispered. Lounging back into his chair, he emitted a humourless laugh that bounced off her raw nerve-endings like a brick shattering glass. He threw back his darkly handsome head, seething golden eyes striking hers in unconcerned challenge. 'No,' he said very softly. 'You're going to listen, and here you are at least
safe. Outside, the way I feel right now, you'd be in considerable danger. I'm not sure I could keep my hands off you, because I really don't see why I should-'
'Vito-' she pleaded, sitting still as a graven image, mesmerised by a great spreading nameless terror of she knew not what. It was the way he was looking at her. She had seen Vito angry countless times but she had never seen him as angry as this… as though he could wipe her off the face of the earth without a moment's regret.
'You see, I've been far too soft with you. I always was. This evening you accused me of trying to create my fantasy woman,' he reminded her with a scornful twist to his grim mouth. 'I should have laughed like a hyena. Whatever you are to me, you are not and never could be my fantasy. That would require a miracle. I didn't intend to broach this subject now, but since you have chosen to remind me in the crudest possible way of what you are, I really can't let this moment go past-'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' she murmured tightly.
'But all over again you have just proved what you are,' Vito condemned with the ice that was already starting to close in the anger and that freezing calm was all the more deadly a weapon in his possession. 'Four years ago you moved out of my apartment within twenty-four hours of my departure. And where did you go?'
The oxygen she needed to breathe was being squeezed out of her lungs by a giant invisible hand. He watched the last scrap of colour slide from her cheeks. 'You didn't go back to the room in the dingy flat, did you? The room you insisted on holding on to throughout our entire relationship. So, where did you go? You leapt straight into bed with another man-'
'No!' she gasped, and as heads turned at a nearby table she bit her tongue and closed her eyes, fighting for self-control.
'He wasn't a man, though, was he? He was just a kid,' Vito continued in the same murderously quiet voice that now betrayed absolutely no emotion.
'He was just a friend,' she whispered in anguish. 'So you like to screw your friends as well,' Vito flicked back with chilling brutality. 'You moved in with him. From my bed to his bed within hours. Now how would you describe a woman who behaves like that?'
'You've got it wrong-' she began.
'No,' Vito contradicted with succinct emphasis. 'I would very much prefer to have it wrong, because the unlovely truth did nothing for my ego, but that sensation of entirely superficial hurt male pride was very swiftly to be replaced by something far more meaningful and far more powerful… '
He let the assurance hang there and she started to tremble, assailed by a premonition of disaster so strong that she was engulfed by it, silently waiting for the axe to fall.
'Yes,' Vito breathed flatly. 'A month after you moved in with him you kept an appointment at an abortion clinic to take care of the little problem that had so inconveniently arisen. And you didn't exactly kill that little problem with kindness, did you?' A great sob was rising in her throat like the wail of a trapped animal in agony. She bowed her head, unable to speak. If she had opened her mouth she would have broken down and utterly disgraced herself. She was in a state of such complete shock that she couldn't even think, and later she would not remember leaving the restaurant where Vito had chosen cruelly to rip away that last veil of privacy.
CHAPTER FIVE
ASHLEY was traumatised. She sat in the back of the limo like a zombie. Vito had hit her with the one condemnation against which she felt she had no defence. Indeed, she almost felt as though she deserved his revulsion. How he knew didn't matter. It was simply that he did know. It seemed pointless to explain that she had moved into Steve's flat because she had had nowhere else to go. She had sublet her room shortly before she broke up with Vito in an effort to cut down her expenses.
Steve had let her sleep on the sofa. He had been a good friend, supporting her when she'd most needed support but too young and immature even to begin to understand the complexity of a woman's feelings when she realised that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be. Ashley's first reaction had been sheer terror, and when she had learnt that Vito was getting engaged to Carina she had gone to pieces. She had been petrified of what her father would do if he found out. Steve had made the first appointment for her. He had pointed out that Vito was gone, that she was on her own, and furthermore that she had never wanted children. A termination was the only practical solution, he had said. She didn't have the money to keep a baby. How was she going to live? What sort of a life was she going to give the baby?
She had gone for counselling but it hadn't penetrated. She had felt ill and weak and wretched and desperately alone in spite of Steve's efforts to the contrary. And, when the day scheduled for the termination had arrived, she had gone. But ten minutes through the door her pregnancy had suddenly and for the very first time become painfully real to her. She had started to wonder whether the baby was a boy or a girl and whether it would have red hair or black hair or green eyes or dark eyes, and she had begun, slowly and agonisingly, to come apart at the seams as she finally faced up to the fact that practicality and pregnancy were two very uneasy partners.
When she had finally admitted that she just couldn't go through with it, she had been in such an emotional state that the staff had insisted they let her contact someone to come and collect her. She had given them Susan's telephone number because Steve had had an exam that day. And that was how she had come to tell Susan something that she would never have told her had she been more in control. She had told Susan that, no matter how hard it was, she intended to have her baby and keep it. And she had meant it, every word of it. Indeed it was that announcement which had nearly driven her father to violence. When she had miscarried she had felt as though it was some heavenly punishment, a judgement on her for not wanting her baby from the beginning. Her intelligence told her that was nonsense, but the feeling of immense guilt had somehow survived.
'Vito…' she muttered. 'The subject is closed.'
'Then why did you open it?' Ashley was distraught, wholly at the mercy of emotion and reaction, with no space left for considered thought. His hard profile was unyielding. 'I don't like secrets.
I should have faced you with it the first day.'
'I didn't have an abortion… I miscarried,' she whispered painfully. 'Your one great gift used to be the ability to tell the truth no matter how unwelcome it was! Don't insult my intelligence. '
'I never slept with Steve in my life!' Although something in the back of her mind was telling her to shut up, she just had to defend herself.
'Figuratively speaking, you may well be telling the truth,' Vito conceded with cutting bite. 'You didn't sleep very much in my bed either.'
He was inviolable, immovable, his beliefs set in stone. Yet, deprived of her usual mainstay of anger by the sheer depth of her inner pain, she still persisted. 'I was with Tim today,' she told him again. 'And that bruise happened when I bent over a suitcase this morning and collided with the lock. Furthermore, I haven't got a lover.'
'You have sex with your partners. Love would indeed be a euphemism.'
He actually took her to the opera. She couldn't believe that he could be that cruel but he was. And Ashley, who had always loved the opera, heard nothing but a deafening cacophony of soaring voices coming at her from all sides in their private box. He hadn't listened. He hadn't given her protestations even a fleeting hearing. He didn't believe her, he was never going to believe her and she had no proof to offer in her own defence. The tears coursed soundlessly down her drawn cheeks.
He took her back to the apartment before the intermission. The silence between them was like a great glass wall and she was too drained to try and climb it. She vanished into her bedroom without a word and tore off the finery he had chosen to frame her in before he smashed her down. She had never been so hurt that she physically ached, but she did now as she crawled naked into the bed like a wounded animal seeking sanctuary. She heard the thud of the front door shutting on his departure and then the dam burst again. He had brought it all back, opening up scars that had yet to heal.
'Ashley, please…' She was startled into a scream when a hand brushed aside the tangle of hair concealing the face she had buried in the pillow to muffle her sobs. 'Go a-away!' she sobbed.
The mattress gave under the onslaught of his weight. 'I was callous and sadistic. I was a total bastard. I admit it. I wanted to hurt you-'
'You did,' she gasped. 'Now go away and let me do my grieving in private.'
'In all the time we were together four years ago, I never once saw you cry. And now twice in a week…' His roughened voice broke off. 'You were always so tough-'
'I used to cry in the b-bathroom with the shower running.'
Vito loosed a laugh utterly devoid of humour. 'I wish I'd known.'
'You would have revelled in it,' she mumbled, and sat up, scrunching the sheet defensively round her and concealing her swollen face below the veil of her tousled hair. 'I thought you'd gone…'
'I couldn't leave you like this. I came back.' He slotted a brandy into her hand and she drank it down like a Cossack about to go into battle. The alcohol eased the ache in her throat but she still refused to look at him.
He laced long fingers into her hair and tipped up her face, preventing her retreat. 'We're getting married in ten days' time and then I have a six-week vacation which we will spend in Sri Lanka.' She trembled at the implacability she met in his fierce dark eyes. Other emotions were beginning to surface from beneath the crushing weight of feeling she had given vent to. No wonder he had called her a whore that first day in his office. Only a woman worthy of that name would have behaved as he believed she had four years ago and again today. He had talked about abortion as though she were so without female sensitivity that such a choice would have meant absolutely nothing to her. Hatred surged in a hot, reviving rush through the cracks he had made in her composure. Loathing at his injustice began to crackle in a series of little fires fed by bitter resentment. He had married another woman, yet he reserved the right to stand in judgement over her for almost making a choice that many women would have made in her position. The guilt she had long borne burnt out forever in that moment. The urge to clear her name that had weakened her response to his bitter prejudice earlier vanished entirely. He hadn't even asked if the child was his. Presumably he thought she couldn't possibly know whether it had been or not. So now she had it all. The truth as Vito saw it, and the motivation behind his coercion.