by Lynne Graham
The fact was not immediately apparent in the way the car lurched round the side of the house but Ashley didn't waste any time in climbing in. Slamming his foot down on the accelerator, he thundered down the highway and they shrieked out on to the road on two precarious wheels.
'Could you drive more slowly?' Ashley gasped. 'Very slow, Kumar go very slow.' They raced down the road at what felt like ninety miles an hour. Kumar was curved round the wheel like a racing driver.
'Slow!' she finally shouted in terror about ten minutes later when she recalled the drop down to the tea terraces on the outer edge of the road. Kumar jumped on to the brakes in an emergency stop. The car skated out of control from one side to the other. The nearside wheel hit the ditch and the car careened into a skid before finally lurching to a halt. Ashley was screaming. Kumar was screaming even louder. The car rocked. Silence fell.
'Go slow, have accident,' Kumar groaned. 'Not go slow in movies, go fast.' Undoing her seatbelt, Ashley staggered out on to the road and threw up in the ditch. She was shaking all over in reaction and was only dimly aware of her companion’s shouted monologue of woe in his own language until a tremendous grinding noise drew her attention. In the moonlight, she stared in disbelief as the car simply rolled off the edge and went crashing down on to the terraces below. Kumar had forgotten to put the handbrake on. The steep incline had done the rest.
He gave a great shriek of horror and threw himself down on the road. He was in such a state that it was some time before she could reassure him that he would not lose his job and that Vito would not blame him for the loss of the car. He was unconvinced, his misery making her feel guiltier than ever. Finally she managed to establish that there was a small rest-house some miles down the road. They started to walk. It took an hour and the heel snapped off one of her sandals when she went over in a pothole. By the time Kumar had roused the owner of the rest house and the portly owner, soon joined by curious wife and excited children had heard the whole story, it was three in the morning and Ashley was wondering how on earth she could have been so crazily impulsive.
She was shown with warm hospitality into a small, sparsely furnished room. After washing at the cold tap over the ancient corner sink, she slid between the patched but scrupulously clean sheets and stared up into the white blur of her mosquito net.
Wasn't she a clever girl, then? But then, when had she ever been clever with Vito? Inexorably her thoughts turned back the years and found no comfort in the past either.
The morning after that fateful party she had persisted with her assertion that she never wanted to see Vito again right up until it came to the point of actually leaving him. Then grudgingly she had allowed him to drive her home. He had asked her out to dinner that evening. She had told him she was busy. He had suggested the following evening and she had told him that she would be busy for the rest of her life.
And he had laughed and said nothing. But that night he had simply arrived complete with an enormous bunch of roses. Her flatmates had been struck dumb. She had reasoned that it wouldn't be cricket to shoot him down in front of an audience, so she had gone to dinner.
'You really don't have to do this,' she had kept on saying, as prickly as a cactus in his company and ordering scrambled egg on toast in the five-star restaurant because she didn't want him to spend his money on her.
'Every day I start with a clean sheet,' she had told him. 'Last night? It never happened. You don't owe me anything.'
'Why are you so determined to drive me away?' he had finally asked.
Clearly it was a very new experience for him with a woman. He had switched on the charm with a smoothness an oil slick would have envied. Last night… it had happened too fast. He was older, wiser, should have known better. It was all his fault, his responsibility, and he wanted them to start over as if it hadn't happened.
'Why?' she had queried baldly.
A wry smile had formed on his beautiful mouth. 'I think I've fallen in love with you.'
'Lust,' she had countered stiffly. 'Fallen in lust.'
'I also think that I'm going to marry you if you ever keep quiet long enough for me to ask you,' he had drawled with complete confidence. That had shaken her, but she had quickly decided that he could not possibly be serious. Even so, she had spent the remainder of the evening explaining in no uncertain terms why she would never marry him or anyone else.
'So we have an affair,' Vito had murmured with immovable calm.
'I don't have time for an affair.' She had been seriously rattled.
An ebony brow had quirked. 'You will find time for me,' he had responded without a single doubt in the world.
And he had been right. But between them they hadn't found quite enough time, she conceded with wry hindsight. No two people could have had less free time available. Banking, at the highest level, was a very demanding career. With barely an hour's warning, Vito could be off to Europe for an unspecified number of days. Ashley had had her classes, her course-work to complete and the necessary hours she put in as a waitress to keep the wolf from the door. And she had also had male and female friends she didn't intend to drop entirely for his benefit.
Although the plan had been that they would start over and get to know each other properly, it hadn't worked out that way. The frustration of their conflicting schedules had meant they scarcely saw each other the first three weeks, and when he took her back to his apartment one lunchtime passion had, quite without prompting, once more flamed out of control. They had never actually discussed living together. He had suggested that she use the apartment when he was abroad to study in peace away from her crowded flat. Piece by piece her possessions had drifted over there, and night after night Vito had contrived to ensure that she didn't go home..
But no sooner had she begun hanging her clothes in one of his wardrobes than the disagreements they had frequently had had escalated into full-scale rows. Now that Vito really knew her schedule, he expected her to drop the commitments that he considered either unnecessary or unimportant. The fact that she insisted on holding on to her waitressing job had outraged him. He had never understood that she could only cope with the vast disparity between their finances by ensuring that she did not live off him like some parasite.
Her equal determination to retain her friends and attend occasional student functions had infuriated him as well. At the outset he had been irritated, but when one evening he chose to join her and discovered her sitting at a table with a male friend, irritation had become outright jealous, possessive suspicion.
When Vito had a relationship with a woman, he expected twenty-four hour exclusive rights. If he wasn't available, he had expected her to sit at home weaving little-woman dreams about him and hanging by the phone waiting for his call. The rows had become increasingly more passionate and destructive. A case of the irresistible force and the immovable object. Neither of them had been prepared to give an inch and Ashley had become more and more insecure, dismayed by how harrowing she found it when Vito was angry with her, trapped by the awful truth that she just didn't have the strength to walk away from him. More and more the bedroom had become the only place where they were ever in complete harmony. When he criticised her, argued with her or even attempted to reason with her, she had started to slam out of the apartment. She'd begun to lie awake nights worrying while he slept like a log. One of her tutors had told her plainly that her work was no longer up to standard. Her concentration was gone. All she'd thought about was Vito… Vito… Vito. He had tried to help her with her work but when one evening she had blamed him for the problems she was having he had lost his temper and told her that she was out of her element in accountancy because she couldn't seem to grasp the intricacies involved.
He had apologised, but she had known that he was telling her the truth, and bitterly had she resented hearing it from someone as effortlessly brilliant in the financial world as he was. It had driven another wedge between them, and then, when they were at daggers drawn, he had disappeared off to Italy
one day and taken an entire week to actually phone her.
Elena had visited the day before he returned. And Vito had returned with an ultimatum. He was moving back to Italy. His father was ill. He had family and business obligations that could not be dealt with from London. 'We'll have to get married,' he had said over his shoulder, breaking off to instruct his housekeeper to pack for him.
'It's time you grew up,' he had said.
'I want a family while I'm still young enough to enjoy them,' he had said.
'I am really bored with this feminist sh… rubbish,' he had said.
'You have to accept that my position in the bank and my responsibilities quite naturally take precedence over yours,' he had said..
And when it had finally penetrated-and it had taken a long time-that she was not biting off his hand in her eagerness to grab that generously offered golden ring, he had said, absolutely incredulously, 'But you've been sharing my bed for months!'
A blazing fight had ensued. Ashley had told him a few home truths, the sort of home truths he had never heard before. For someone who loved to dish out criticism, he had been amazingly over-sensitive. In a nutshell, he had gone through the roof. Everything she had ever done to annoy him had been dug up. Everything she had ever failed to do to please him had been resurrected. Even in her anger, she had seen that Vito truly believed that her entire world should revolve round him.
The iron hand had emerged from the velvet glove with a vengeance. For five months Vito had really been babying her along, humouring her, controlling that cuttingly cruel tongue of his, presumably with the greatest of difficulty. For when that glove had come off she discovered that he could demolish her every argument in scathing one-line sentences and make her feel really, really stupid and weak. She had seen her mother, head bowed in submissive silence, and she had seen herself reduced by Vito to a similar level… and that vision had petrified her.
Shifting on the hard mattress, Ashley slid back to the painful present. She got up after eight. Vito would know that she was gone by now. Dully she wondered where she had imagined she could run. Not only did she have a duty to ensure that Kumar didn't suffer for her foolish flight in the middle of the night, she also had the lowering awareness that, even had she made it to Colombo she would have been leaving Sri Lanka with a great bleeding wound where her heart had once been. Her heart didn't just beat a little faster when Vito was around. It jumped up and down and did acrobatics. As her host showed her to a rickety table overlooking the tumbling waterfall at the rear of the property, she was again blinking back the tears she so despised.
Around dawn it had hit her, the truth she had fought so hard to deny. A huge blinding flash of unwelcome enlightenment. There had been so much pain since he came back into her life that she had floundered in bewilderment and a near constant emotional overload. She loved Vito. Only love could give him the power to hurt her this much. Had she ever really hated him? Right now, she didn't know. She was too devastated to think of anything beyond the fact that loving him, the way he felt about her now, was a death sentence.
A faint sound made her head fly up from the menu she was studying. She froze. Vito was standing on the bleached boards of the sagging veranda. He was unnaturally still, his pallor pronounced. One brown hand was fiercely clenched in the cream jacket he had discarded. A white shirt was carelessly open at his throat, his thick black hair damp and tousled, and a most uncharacteristic black shadow of stubble marked his tense jaw line. Slowly he swallowed, incredibly intent dark eyes clinging to her startled face. 'I thought you were dead,' he breathed roughly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VITO tossed back a large glass of arrack brought by their bustling host before he spoke again. The fiery liquid seemed to revive him. The harsh lines of strain engraved between his nose and mouth smoothed out. The natural colour gradually returned to reanimate his dark, taut features.
'Priya woke me up to tell me that a car carrying a European woman had gone off the road last night. Then she informed me that you were gone-'
Ashley paled. 'I'm sorry.'
'When I saw the car, I knew nobody could have come out of that alive.' He continued to stare at her as if he still couldn't quite accept the evidence of his own eyes. 'I came in here to find out if they knew where… where you had been taken-' His uneven tone cut off harshly.
'Kumar and I got out before the car went off the road.
He forgot to put the handbrake on.' An uneasy laugh bubbled in her throat but she didn't let it escape. 'The accident wasn't his fault.'
'Like hell it wasn't!' Vito ground out. 'He has no driving licence. He could have killed you!'
'He can't drive?' Ashley was shattered and then she thought back to the previous night's conversation. Kumar had offered to get Bandu and she had asked him to take her instead. He had been both flattered and excited by the request. 'That didn't occur to me. I was very pushy,' she added hurriedly. 'I insisted that he take me. You can't blame him. He was only trying to please me.'
Vito contrived to look both unconvinced and uninterested at one and the same time. 'I'll leave him to Priya. He's her nephew. And she's a holy terror when she's roused.'
'He won't lose his job?' she persisted.
'You're alive. I'm in a forgiving mood.'
She took a deep breath. 'Are you? When my brother was at fault, you were ready to send him to prison.' 'Kumar doesn't have a sister I wish to marry,' Vito quipped humourlessly. 'I shall choose to forgive instead.'
'You're probably wondering what I'm doing here-'
He signalled their hovering host. 'I was depending on you to make our wedding night a little out of the ordinary,' he incised in a smooth aside. 'Let's have breakfast. You haven't lived until you've sampled hoppers.'
The cup-shaped pancakes made from a batter of rice flour, palm toddy and coconut milk came with a variety of delicious fillings. Ashley was surprised to realise that she was really hungry. They finished up with guava and passion fruit and beautifully fragrant tea.
Vito's silence troubled her. After all that had happened, the last thing she had expected him to do was sit down and eat a good meal. Awkwardly she cleared her throat. 'I expect you think I'm really a cheat now. We had an agreement-'
'But I haven't been fulfilling my part of it,' he cut in flatly.
'It's been an emotional time for us both,' she muttered unhappily.
'But I haven't been making it any easier. I had no right to pry into your past last night and no excuse to taunt you.' He surveyed her with grave, measured emphasis but a betraying tautness edged his sensual mouth, revealing that he didn't find it easy to make that admission. 'After all, I'm no celibate myself.'
'It was understandable.' Suddenly, now that he was giving ground, she found herself pathetically willing to forgive. She gritted her teeth on the discovery, reminding herself of the need to be cautious. The last thing she needed right now was for Vito to guess how she felt about him. The only thing she had left was her pride.
'I've had a mistress for the past eighteen months.' The announcement paralysed her. She bit her tongue and tasted blood. Vito released his breath audibly. 'I finished it a few months ago, but do you know what attracted me to her?'
Nausea stirred in her stomach. Vito was not of the confessing variety. She really didn't know why he was doing this and she desperately wanted him to shut up, because she did not want to be forced to think of him making love to another woman.
'She had hair the same shade as yours,' he proffered in a raw offering of deep self-contempt. 'But she wasn't you.'
'No. She wouldn't have gone charging off down a mountainside in the middle of the night and crashed your car, I guess,' she muttered tightly.
'Nobody but you would do that,' he pointed out in an almost gentle tone, and in a gesture that was curiously clumsy for one of his grace he narrowly missed toppling a cup as he reached for her hand.
The heat of his fingers engulfed her smaller ones and she bent her head. She wanted to tell him that sh
e had never had another lover. She focused instead on the tumbling gush of the waterfall, shining with blinding brilliance in the bright sunlight. Not only did he not require that information from her, he would also very probably refuse to believe her, and every time he refused to believe it hurt just that little bit more deeply.
'I'm five days late with this but I still need to say it,' he breathed. 'The night of the party you hit me hard with what you called the view from your side of the fence-'
'I don't want to talk about that.' It was her turn to interrupt and deny him the opportunity to have her listen. The baby… that subject was too painful in the light of his disbelief.
'Ashley… '
'No!' she said fiercely, sharply withdrawing her hand from his.
'We have to talk about it.'
'But I don't want to!' Snatching in oxygen, she rose unsteadily upright, ready to run if he persisted.
'Maybe it's too soon,' he conceded with surprising generosity.
Perhaps not so surprising, she allowed when she thought about it. He had been badly shaken by the sight of that crashed car and the conviction that, if she had not been killed she was at the very least severely injured. But for how long would this greater gentleness and understanding last?
Ten days later, she stood on the heights of the ramparts of the Dambulla Cave Temples, her bare toes heated by the sun warmed ground, and conceded that Vito was making a very real effort to be well-mannered, entertaining and non-controversial. She was beginning to learn that in some ways she had not known Vito at all four years ago. That annoyed her but it was true. For a start the charm wasn't switched on, it was entirely natural. The tension that had once underscored their every moment was gone now that all sources of possible confrontation were banned. He was far more conservative than she had ever appreciated. The way he had swept her off her feet the night they met had distorted her image of him, much as it had distorted his image of her. She could see now that in the past she might well have put Vito and his traditional values through one hell of an emotional wringer. She had gone out to well and truly shock him every time he roused her temper-a pattern learned in defiance of her father. But that pattern had been highly destructive. If Vito had been guilty of a desire to dominate and control, she had been equally guilty of replying with provocation. It had only inflamed the situation.