The Sicilian's Red-Hot Revenge

by Kate Walker

  ‘But I can’t accept what you said. I don’t want to marry you.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  This time she couldn’t stop herself. Her eyes flew open, looked straight up into the darkness of his. And what she saw there made the nerves in her stomach bunch and twist painfully.

  He was standing right beside the bed, looking down at her, but the bleakness in his eyes, the way that mental distance had turned them clouded and opaque made her shiver where she lay. The long, powerful frame that she had just caressed so lovingly, the beautiful body that he had shared with her so intimately was now held stiffly taut, so far away from her that it was as if some transparent screen had come down between them, cutting him off from her. And for all that he was still totally naked, his face was so set and cold that he might have been wearing invisible armour that closed off all his thoughts and feelings from her.

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘I know what I said, but I’ve changed my mind. I withdraw my proposal.’

  ‘What proposal?’

  Fierce, blinding pain drove the sharp question from her even though every instinct warned that she was blundering into very dangerous territory.

  ‘There was no proposal, only the ultimatum that we were getting married whether I liked it or not!’

  ‘Well, then I withdraw that ultimatum.’

  If a robot had words, then it would have just those same flat, unmeaning speech patterns. And Vito’s eyes had moved away from her face, hunting for something on the floor. When he stooped to snatch up his discarded jeans and pull them on, the brusque, determined movements he used were like a blow to her heart, speaking so eloquently of his rejection of her, the way that the heated passion of the lovemaking they had shared had now evaporated, leaving her body chilled and shivering.

  Awkwardly and hesitantly, she reached out for the sheet, struggling to pull it up around her, as much for comfort as concealment. She felt far too vulnerable with Vito’s cold, brutal gaze on her naked form.

  ‘And what—what—about the baby? Do you—?’

  ‘Oh, I still want my child,’ Vito cut in on her before she could finish the question. ‘But as you said, we can work out some arrangement for access. A relationship between us would never work. We would only end up hating each other.’

  ‘Hating each other more, you mean!’ Emily muttered viciously.

  Reaction was setting in hard and fast. She was just beginning to truly realise that while she thought she had been expressing the love she felt for this man, he had in fact just been using her. He’d taken everything she had to give and…

  ‘Well, having nothing but sex between us wouldn’t last very long.’

  ‘It didn’t last at all!’

  Unable to bear the thought of being exposed in any way to those coldly probing eyes, Emily tugged harder on the sheet and coiled it round her tightly, clamping the white cotton close with her folded arms. She was hugging herself for comfort, she knew, struggling to hold herself together, to stop herself from falling apart. Because inside she was breaking apart, splintering into tiny, raw, bleeding pieces so that she felt she would never, ever be whole again.

  It would last until he’d had enough, he’d said. Until I’m sated with you—or you with me. We might have six months; we might have a year…and when it’s over I’ll tell you straight. No pretence. No lies.

  Well, he’d certainly done that. Whatever else she could accuse Vito of, there was no doubt that he had kept to his word and told her straight. Absolutely, brutally straight.

  ‘Total honesty,’ Emily murmured, remembering. She’d told herself she could take that. She just hadn’t thought that all they’d have was one night. ‘Well, you certainly keep your promises.’

  She aimed for a sort of brittle carelessness and missed it by a mile.

  ‘Promises?’

  Vito frowned his confusion, not understanding her reference.

  ‘“But I promise you in all the time we are together, I’ll never look at another woman, never give you cause to be jealous”,’ Emily quoted, hiding her pain behind the stiffness of her lips, the cold, clipped tone she used. ‘You definitely did that—but then there was hardly enough time for any other woman to appear on the scene.’

  ‘The one thing I can assure you about this…’

  Something in the way that Vito spoke, some unexpected note threading through the beautifully accented voice caught on Emily’s already agonised nerves, drawing her eyes to his face to see what had changed.

  ‘…Is that there is no other woman—and there will never be now.’

  ‘You can’t promise that!’

  ‘Oh, but I can.’

  There it was again, that disturbing undertone that tugged at something in her heart, made her need to search his face, to find just what was hidden behind those carefully hooded eyes.

  Carefully? Her own choice of adjective brought Emily up sharp, made her pause, made her frown.

  Carefully implied deliberate action, deliberate restraint. And deliberate action meant that Vito had planned the response he was making or—rather—planned the response he wanted to show to her. He was not speaking openly, not showing her the truth.

  Which meant that the truth was something other than what he was saying.

  Emily felt as if her head was spinning, her thoughts tumbling like jigsaw pieces thrown up into the air and she was not at all sure where each one fitted. Suddenly it was as if a new and very different light had been shone on things, making her look again at things she had taken one way.

  Was there in fact another way that everything Vito had said, everything he had done, could be interpreted? And if so, how did she find out just which one was real?

  ‘How can you promise that?’

  Tentatively, she dipped her toe into the waters of exploring the truth, watching his stunning face closely and seeing the way that his mouth tightened, a muscle jerking in his jaw. Her words had hit home—but in what way?

  ‘No woman will ever come between you and me—now or in the future,’ he said, obviously choosing his words with such care that she had the very strong feeling that in some way she didn’t quite understand he was actually on the run, backing away from her, with his defences up all around him.

  ‘Well, obviously! Because now you’re dumping me and moving on, you’re quite free to be with anyone you choose. You’ve had enough of being intimate with me and you can—’

  ‘No!’

  It was the roar of a wounded lion, loud and savage and devastatingly powerful—but ragged all around the edges as if some cruel lash of a whip had driven him to the point of no return.

  ‘No, you’re not dumping me?’ Emily managed, totally confused. ‘I don’t understand—because that’s what you said—that you don’t want to marry me—that a relationship with nothing but sex wouldn’t last—’

  ‘Nothing but sex would not be a relationship, can’t you see that? And how the hell can I ever grow tired of being intimate with you when the truth is that that has never happened?’

  ‘It hasn’t?’

  Emily sank back on the pillows in shock, then just as quickly sat up again as thoughts bombarded her thick and fast—shocking in their potential for what Vito might mean, and devastating in their potential for destruction if he didn’t mean what she thought.

  ‘But we…What did we just do here, just now?’

  Her rather wild gesture indicated the disarray of the bed around her, her nightdress flung on the floor. Vito’s dark eyes followed the wave of her hand very briefly then swung back to her face.

  ‘I believe you have already dismissed that “sharing of our bodies” as not being intimate in any real way.’

  Did he know what the sharpness of his tone, the flash of something in his eyes gave away? Emily wondered. Vito was hurting. Really, genuinely hurting. And the way that he quoted a previous conversation back at her gave her the reasons why.

  ‘When I said that we weren’t intimate, except in one particular way? T
hat matters?’

  ‘It matters.’

  It mattered more than he could say, Vito admitted to himself. Something had happened here, in the darkness of the night, in that bed, when he had held Emily and his unborn child in his arms. When he had been able to touch and caress them both, when he had felt them both respond to him. But above all else something had happened when he had made love to her and for the first time ever had known what it felt like to want to be truly intimate—totally intimate with a woman.

  ‘It matters,’ he said again. ‘Because sharing our bodies is no longer enough.’

  He had sex—but that was not what he wanted. Not all he wanted. He wanted that intimacy she had spoken of and without it he now knew that sex alone could never be enough.

  ‘But you said…’ Emily began, letting the sentence drop as he turned a blazing glare on her.

  ‘I know what I said—and I know I was a fool to have said it. I thought that I came here to work through this. To have as much of you as I could. To sate myself on you. Get you out of my system. But now…’

  He shook his head, despairing at how stupid he had been not to see what was happening to him.

  ‘Now I know that I could never have enough of you. Never ever get you out of my system. I could sleep with you a thousand times—a hundred thousand—and still end up wanting more. Needing more.’

  He’d stunned her; that much was obvious. Emily was sitting totally still, blue eyes wide, her soft mouth slightly open.

  ‘Needing…’ she echoed huskily, her voice shaking on the single word. ‘Needing what?’

  ‘Needing you.’

  There, now he’d said it. He’d committed himself and there was no going back. Well, there had been no going back anyway, damn it. It was all or nothing—if she didn’t want what he wanted, then there was no way he could go on with second best.

  ‘Needing me for sex.’

  ‘Dannazione, no—not just for sex!’

  This time had been so very different. This time he had felt that true intimacy—at least with his child and, he had thought, with Emily. But if she did not feel that way then he could not go on. He couldn’t make love to her—there, that was the difference—he had been making love to this woman in a way that he had never, ever done in his life before. No other woman had ever made him feel this way. And because of that he could not continue to make love with her if all that it meant to her was just sex. Wonderful, mind-blowing sex—but just sex all the same.

  ‘With other women that might have been enough—might have been all that I wanted. But with you it was just not enough.’

  Just not enough. The words echoed over in Emily’s thoughts, sounding more wonderful each time she heard them. Vito had never actually said the word ‘love’ but surely this was as close to a declaration of that feeling as he could possibly get?

  ‘But you thought that I could—that I should marry you just because of the baby. That I could put up with that “not enough”.’

  Vito sighed, nodded slowly, pushing one hand through the sleek blackness of his hair.

  ‘I did and I was wrong. I realise now that I was trying to tie you down—trying to make you mine without making the real commitment myself. But tonight taught me how wrong I was. When you said you would marry me—that you would accept the little that I’d offered I knew I couldn’t go through with it.’

  ‘But you would have got what you wanted.’

  ‘What I thought I wanted, not what I realised tonight that I really wanted. And I couldn’t go through life with that longing, that wanting, leaving an empty hole in my heart, a yearning space in my soul. With you, it has to be all or nothing—and if you can’t give that all then I have to take the nothing and set you free to be what you want. I would still need to have a connection with you because of the child and I don’t know how I am going to cope with that—but that’s my problem. I won’t ever make any claim on you in the future—I have to let you fly free.’

  Her heart was flying now, Emily knew. It was soaring, spinning, dancing in joy at the ardent declaration of love that Vito had made, somehow without ever actually mentioning the word.

  ‘And if I don’t want to be free?’ she asked softly, the glow in her heart growing even stronger as she saw the way his proud head went back, the stunned look in his deep dark eyes.

  ‘You don’t want…?’he echoed, his voice hoarse and raw in a way that made her smile just to hear it. ‘But you said that you had vowed never to let a man into your life in that way again.’

  ‘I did—why do you think I said that I couldn’t marry you at first? It was because I thought that was all you offered me and I couldn’t let that happen again. That was because of Mark. Because he would never let me be free. His form of love was controlling—bullying—we never shared that true intimacy you spoke of. But if you were prepared to set me free because you love me…’

  ‘Love,’ Vito echoed softly, a note of something close to awe in his voice. ‘Of course. It’s such a simple word but it encompasses everything I was trying to say.’

  Moving forward, he came to sit down on the bed, taking her hand in his and pressing a long, lingering kiss on the backs of her fingers.

  ‘I love you, Emily. You have my heart and I never, ever want it back.’

  ‘And I love you, Vito Corsentino. I love you and I want to be with you.’

  Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to his, felt the catch of his breath against her mouth before he gave himself up to the kiss that said even more than the words he’d given her already. Eventually she drew back with a reluctant sigh. There were things she still needed to make clear.

  ‘I said just now that I would marry you but it wouldn’t have been right—not then—not like it is now. Then I didn’t know that you loved me. I thought my love for you would have been enough, but you were right—if I’d married you then, there would have been that hole in my life, in my heart, and I could never have been happy. Now it’s all so very different.’

  Her smile lit up her whole face, matched the joy that blazed in her eyes.

  ‘Ask me again, Vito. Ask me again so that this time it can be perfect—so that this time we both know what love is and that we can go into the future together.’

  The words choked off in her throat as Vito took her hand, looked deep into her eyes and said the words she had dreamed of him saying in just the way that she had longed to hear them.

  ‘Emily, adorata, tesoro—I love you and without you my life would be empty, sterile—nothing. Will you marry me and let me spend the rest of my life loving you and sharing with you that true intimacy that only people truly in love can know?’

  There was only one answer she could give him, and she couldn’t wait to say it, couldn’t wait to let him know how happy he had made her.

  ‘Yes, Vito, yes—with all my heart. I can’t think of any way I would rather spend my future than sharing it—truly sharing it with you.’

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-0284-3

  THE SICILIAN’S RED-HOT REVENGE

  First North American Publication 2007.

  Copyright © 2007 by Kate Walker.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Tradema
rk Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.eHarlequin.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-0284-3

  THE SICILIAN’S RED-HOT REVENGE

  First North American Publication 2007.

  Copyright © 2007 by Kate Walker.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.eHarlequin.com