by Lynne Graham
Alex had the power to make her feel incredibly special. Alex had plunged her into a luxurious life of complete indulgence, and nobody had ever indulged Sara's wants and wishes before. Being spoilt, she had discovered, took a lot of getting used to but it had certainly done wonders for her shaky self-esteem. She had reeled dizzily through day after wonderful day of Alex's exclusive attention.
First he had taken her shopping. Now she had a wardrobe stuffed with gorgeous designer clothes, most of them outfits that she wouldn't have dared even to look at had not Alex insisted, and for the first time Sara found herself taking a real pride in her appearance. 'Such a shame that Sara's so plain,' she had heard her grandmother complain once after fondly admiring her other grandchild's blue-eyed blonde prettiness. Sara had never felt beautiful in her life until Alex had said that she was, and, secure in the conviction that in his eyes she was not unattractive, she was beginning to see herself in a very different light.
He took so much interest in her, in every tiny thing about her. He had had to dig through all the layers of her conviction that she was a deeply boring person to get her to open out without apology or embarrassment. But he had persisted and he had listened. Was he always like this with her sex—a stunningly charismatic male who was highly attuned to the female psyche, who knew exactly what it took to make a woman feel not only desirable but also fascinating? Or was this current in-tensity more typical of Alex at the start of a new affair...before the boredom set in? She hurriedly squashed that pessimistic thought flat.
'Wear the gold dress,' Alex suggested.
'Won't it be a bit... flashy?'
'I like flashy on you. And you owe me,' Alex drawled
teasingly.
'For what?'
'For destroying my appreciation of beauty with a year of ugly navy and brown suits.'
She laughed, caught the reflection of her own smile in a mirror as she dressed. There were stars in her eyes and she had a crazy, irrepressible feeling of happiness that was becoming more and more familiar with every day that passed. Quickly she looked away again. But there was no avoiding what was going on inside her heart Her head had nothing at all to do with it. Intelligence couldn't stop her pulses jumping every time Alex came within ten feet of her.
And if she was falling head over heels in love with her own husband it was not her fault, it was his. When a man made a woman feel this wonderful, what did he expect to earn in response? Cold, polite detachment? No doubt Alex wanted to make up for the rocky start of their marriage but, even so, he really did seem to care about her. He had to have cared to have asked her to marry him so quickly. He had to have wanted her an awful lot. It disconcerted Sara to realise that the manipulation that she had been so shocked by on their wedding day had now become something she hugged to herself as proof of the depth of Alex's desire for her.
'You look incredibly sexy...'
She turned. Cut on the bias, the fluid, simple lines of the gold shoestring-strapped dress accentuated the slender perfection of her figure. The gorgeous fabric shimmered seductively with her every movement.
'But rather bare...' Alex turned her back to the mirror and brushed her hair out of his path. He slid a slender diamond necklace round her throat, his cool, deft fingers brushing the nape of her neck as he fastened it. 'I bought earrings as well,' he murmured huskily. 'But they won't do. Your ears aren't pierced. Not very observant of me.'
Her fingertips shyly brushed the glittering jewels and her eyes suddenly stung. 'It's gorgeous, Alex ... Thank you.'
'It's been an incredible two weeks, bella mia. I believe the pleasure has all been mine.' Alex let his lips feather briefly, caressingly across one bare shoulder and then he drew lithely back and enveloped her in a soft velvet evening jacket.
Grasping his hand, Sara stepped uncertainly onto the motor-launch, not quite accustomed as yet to the wholly frivolous height of her strappy sandals. They dined out almost every evening but the enchantment of Venice by night could not fade. The splendid facades of the palazzo along the Grand Canal were floodlit, and against the rich indigo backdrop of the night sky and the dark, reflective water the sight was a magical one.
As the launch moved off, illuminated by the dazzling lights that framed the Rialto Bridge, Sara watched Alex with compulsive intensity. Sometimes she wanted so badly to get inside that sleek dark head and root around for answers that made sense. Why me? she wanted to ask suddenly. What was so special about me? She was an ordinary girl from an ordinary background and Alex was an immensely wealthy male with a blue-blooded pedigree that could be traced back centuries. He could have married any woman, yet he had chosen to marry her.
Was it utter madness or shocking vanity for her to wonder if Alex could be just a little in love with her? Maybe it was the shock of being treated with such incredible consideration and generosity which was encouraging her to cherish so wild a hope. No womaniser ever got successful by being less than charming, she reminded herself doggedly. He knows women inside out. Turning your head is probably just an ego-trip for him. Six months from now maybe he'll be treating you like a piece of furniture, any thrill you ever had for him staled by familiarity.. .so enjoy the Rolls-Royce treatment while it lasts.
'What's the matter with you?' Alex enquired as he handed her out of the launch onto solid ground again.
Sara tensed. 'Nothing.'
'You're very quiet.' Alex slanted a grim dark scrutiny over her taut profile. 'I suppose it was too much to hope that you would forget...'
'Forget what?' Sara queried, dismayed by the speed with which Alex's mood could change.
'Don't play games, cara. This is, after all, the day when you expected to drift blissfully up the aisle into Shorter's waiting arms!'
Sara was shocked by the unwelcome reminder. She turned pale, thinking that Alex only had to mention Brian and it was like having a freezer door slammed in her face. It was little wonder that she went out of her way to ensure that she never accidentally referred to the man who had been a big part of her life for almost two years.
'No, I did not think you were unaware of the fact,' Alex said very drily. 'You've put on quite an act today but it's beginning to wear thin.'
'Is it?' Sara gazed up at him, anxious green eyes clinging to the starkly handsome lines of his dark features, a distinctly strained smile curving her tense mouth. 'Alex, I'd actually forgotten that this was the day.'
His brilliant eyes hardened. He said something in Italian—something derisively suggestive of disbelief. 'I had”
'I know that certain look on your face.' Alex thrust open the door of the exclusive restaurant.
'No, you don't,' Sara protested, suddenly angry at being unfairly accused.
The conversation came to a frustrating halt as the maltre d' surged forward with alacrity. He was showing them to their table when a silver-haired older man thrust his chair noisily back nearby and rose with an exclamation. 'Alex?' The rest was in volatile Italian.
'Sara...' Alex drew her smoothly forward. 'Tony Bargani, a family friend.'
'You must join us.' Tony snapped his fingers imperiously to call up more chairs and settled her down firmly in his own seat. 'Alex knows everyone. My wife, Claudia.' He patted the shoulder of the stunning silver-blonde beside Sara with distinct pride of possession. 'Guy Chilton and his wife, Denise...'
Guy Chilton was already up, enthusiastically shaking hands. Tony was calling for drinks. His wife, who must have been a good twenty years his junior, was too busy competing for Alex's attention to take account of Sara.
The American woman, Denise, sighed with a wry smile. 'I believe this is your honeymoon, Sara. You should have avoided us. The men will be talking business for the rest of the evening.'
Claudia dropped down into her seat again and sent Sara a flickering glance of amusement. 'I'm quite sure Sara knows the score, Denise. She used to work for Alex, and with Alex business always come first and last. I remember my time with him well.'
'You used to work for Alex?' Sara sm
iled.
Claudia widened her eyes and uttered a sharp little laugh. 'Darling, do I really look as though I ever worked nine to five in some menial little office job? How frightfully uncomplimentary!'
Faint colour stained Sara's cheeks as the upper-class English accent cut through her. 'I'm sorry. I misunderstood.'
'Hardly surprising.' Claudia turned hostile blue eyes on her. 'I expect you're feeling rather out of your depth in this milieu.'
With difficulty, Sara kept her apologetic smile in place. 'I'm learning all the time.'
Tony toasted them with champagne, his natural warmth in strong contrast to his wife's air of dismissive boredom. 'I'm surprised the two of you aren't on the yacht,' he commented.
'Sara gets seasick,' Alex returned casually.
Her dark head shot up, surprise etched in her eyes. 'Who told you that?'
'Your aunt.' Across the table, rich dark eyes locked with hers, amusement shimmering in their depths. 'At the reception. The news necessitated a decidedly last-minute change of destination—'
'You mean you didn't know?' Tony's portly frame shook with mirth.
Sara hadn't known either. And if she could have got hold of her aunt at that instant she would have strangled her! One sickly day trip to France while she had still been at school was scarcely sufficient evidence on which to base such an assumption.
'How very inconvenient.' Claudia oozed sympathy. 'Will you be selling Sea Spring now?'
'Certainly not for my benefit. My aunt tends to exaggerate,' Sara interposed ruefully.
'Venice has to be the most romantic city in the world,' Denise Chilton commented warmly. 'I can't think of anywhere more wonderful to spend your honeymoon.'
'But then you didn't grow up here...Alex did,' Tony's wife slotted in sweetly.
A near-overpowering desire to empty her glass over Claudia's head assailed Sara as the first course was delivered.
The meal progressed. Alex smoothly engaged Tony in conversation. Sara's cheeks stopped burning. Their hostess was one of Alex's exes, Sara gathered grimly, dumped with the roses and the diamonds and still simmering over the blow to her ego. She would have to develop a thicker skin for such encounters.
'You know, the resemblance is really quite remarkable,' Claudia murmured very quietly over the coffee-cups when Denise had disappeared off to the cloakroom.
Sara lifted her head. 'Sorry?'
'Alex's father and Tony are old friends. We dined with them in London last week. Apparently Sandro was staggered the first time he saw you,' Claudia continued very softly.
'I'm afraid I don't follow...'
'You're the living image of Alex's one and only true love.' Claudia's eyes were bright with spiteful amusement. 'Sandro got a shock when he saw you coming down the aisle. For a moment he thought you were Elissa. Silly, of course.. .she'd be twenty years older than you now... but don't they say that everyone has a double somewhere?'
A creeping veil of coldness was slowly enclosing Sara. Her brain was in a fog. She could not seem to absorb what Claudia was telling her.
'I never actually met her,' Claudia confided. 'But when Tony and I got home I dug out some old family photo albums to satisfy my curiosity.'
'Family albums?' Sara questioned with a frown.
'Elissa was married to Tony's cousin at the time she took off with Alex... didn't you know that?'
Sara's tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip. 'His cousin?' she said weakly, shooting an involuntary glance at the three men on the other side of the table, who were enjoying an animated, friendly conversation. Elissa had been married when Alex met her?
'You do have a lot to learn. Everyone blamed her, even Tony. Alex was only a boy and she was one devastating lady. Very petite, hourglass figure, long black hair just like you. Alex never did get over her. She turned him into a cold bastard. But then you're something special, aren't you?' Claudia touched her glass against the rim of Sara's in a mocking toast. 'Only with you can Alex relive his fantasy...and he doesn't even need to switch off the light!'
CHAPTER EIGHT
'[ FEEL Like a bath...' Sara mumbled, heading for the en suite bathroom like a homing pigeon seeking sanctuary.
'Sara, did Claudia say something to upset you?'
Sara paused, her slim back rigid, and then turned her dark head. 'What on earth could she have said?' she managed with apparent blankness.
Alex loosened his tie and surveyed her with intent dark eyes that were sharp enough to strip paint. 'Five years ago I met her at a wedding and invited her to a dinner party. She amused herself by shredding the looks and reputation of every other woman present. She's poisonous. I didn't see her again, nor did I sleep with her.'
Hot colour had drenched Sara's former pallor. 'You don't need to explain that to me,' she told him uncomfortably.
'Because you really don't care either way, do you, cara?' A tiny muscle pulled taut at the corner of Alex's compressed mouth, his narrowed eyes more slivers of glittering gold intensity as he stared back at her.
'It's not like that...I mean, I'm not an idiot,' she muttered, her head pounding with so much tension that she was beginning to feel physically sick. 'I know you have a past... obviously.'
'And a wife who doesn't have a jealous, possessive bone in her body. I am so fortunate,' Alex breathed with the suggestion of gritted teeth.
Sara looked back at him, bewildered by a dialogue which barely a tenth of her brain could concentrate on. 'Alex...I'm not feeling very well,' she whispered strickenly, her stomach twisting more than ever with the tension in the room.
'You don't need to make excuses and you don't need to hide in the bathroom either,' Alex delivered in a slashing undertone. 'I have no desire to share the same bed with you tonight!'
Bewilderment seized Sara as he strode out of the room.
Her wretched tummy heaved. She fled into the bathroom and was very much preoccupied for some minutes. Finally, she rested her perspiring forehead against the cold surround of the bath and slowly got a grip on herself again before she began to undress. Claudia Bargani was vindictive. Alex had said it, Sara knew it for a fact. Normally she wouldn't have given credence to anything such a woman told her. But Claudia's revelation had still plunged Sara into deep shock. Why? Because taken in tandem with Sara's sudden marriage that revelation threatened to make a terrifying kind of sense.
Could Alex have wanted her only because she reminded him of Elissa? Did Alex even realise what might have attracted him to her? Or could the similarity be so striking that he had immediately recognised it? Whichever, she was left with the degrading possibility that she might well owe her present position as Alex's wife to something as agonisingly superficial as her face and her body. Not to mention being left at the mercy of a lot of really creepy, utterly degrading thoughts, she reflected in a tempest of angry pain.
Everyone had been stunned when Alex had married her. Sara had been stunned too when he'd proposed, She had been equally shaken by the discovery that Alex had been wildly attracted to her for the entire year that she had worked for him. But if she reminded Alex of the woman he had loved and lost, the woman he had never forgotten, what made her worthy of such ob-sessive desirability now seemed obvious. Was it possible that she owed everything they had shared since their marriage to the memory of another woman? The intensity of his interest, the exclusive attention, the extraordinary passion...?
She knew that she was tearing herself apart—in short, doing exactly what Claudia had wanted her to do—but she couldn't seem to stop doing it. But maybe Claudia had simply made it all up; maybe Claudia had a wildly inventive imagination. Sara curled up in a tight ball in a bed that felt horribly big, cold and empty. She was so tense that her muscles hurt, but it didn't really matter because it seemed to her that every fibre of her being was in agony.
She loved Alex... but suddenly she hated him too— for having the power to put her through such mental hoops of fire. Wild images of revenge swept her imagination. In every one of them Alex
stood looking totally defeated while she packed her bags with frigid dignity and disdain and left him flat, publicly deserted him after two weeks of marriage. The door opened. She ... sat up with a jerk, switched on the bedside lights.
Alex was already standing beside the bed, quite magnificently nude and characteristically unconcerned by the fact.
'What do you want?' she demanded fierily.
'You,' Alex said succinctly.
Anger gleamed like a hurricane warning in his golden gaze and her engrossing revenge scenario sagged like a sofa bereft of its stuffing. Alex was a long way from total defeat. Aggression emanated from every line of his lithe, sun-bronzed body as he slid into bed and reached for her with hands far too strong to be easily evaded. In one smooth movement he forced her down and flat again, anchoring her furious body into stillness with his own.
Her teeth clenched in disbelief. 'If you don't get off me, Alex, I'll hit you!'
Alex propped his chin on the heel of one hand, his tawny eyes ablaze with very male provocation. 'Be my guest,' he challenged.
Her hands bunched into fists. He lowered his glossy dark head and took her mouth with a raw heat that scorched. A splintering shard of answering passion pierced her, overpowering every other sense. He bruised her lips and yet still her hands opened out and clutched at him with a hunger she couldn't deny. Indeed the hunger felt sharper, stronger, more desperate than ever before, leaving her utterly defenceless. He leant back from her when she was breathless, her heartbeat racing fast enough to choke her, every skin cell and pulse thrumming with wild response.
As she struggled to focus on his intent dark profile, he closed hard fingers over the fragile silk screening her heaving breasts and quite coolly ripped it away, the sound of the rending fabric preternaturally loud in the throbbing silence. Momentarily Sara went stiff with fright, and then she watched his hand curve round the pouting swell of her own naked flesh, his thumb grazing across a straining pink nipple, and a hot, deep melting started inside her, reducing her to boneless, quivering collusion.