by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
‘This is Amy Redman. Could I speak to David please?’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Redman, but Mr Brooke is out of the office at the moment. But he said you might ring and asked me to take a message.’
‘Oh…’
So what did she say? David believed she was on holiday. He had been none too pleased when she had announced that she needed to take time off at such short notice and had agreed to it only reluctantly. He wasn’t the sort of man who was comfortable with impulsive decisions. He liked to build up to things slowly and carefully.
And just lately it had become obvious that he was slowly and carefully building up to asking her out. After three years of working for him, Amy was well used to her boss’s every mood, so she couldn’t miss the change in his attitude of late, the subtly dropped hints.
She didn’t plan on acting on any of those hints. David wasn’t her type at all. He was fine as a boss, but that was all. But his behaviour had made her look at her own life and forced her to question how long she was going to continue like this.
It was four years since she had left Vincenzo and in all that time she had avoided all other relationships, knowing that emotional complications were something she just couldn’t handle. But perhaps now was the time to start thinking about rebuilding her life, beginning again. David might not be the man for her, but there might be others. But she couldn’t even start to contemplate planning a future until she had sorted out the mess of the past.
And the first step towards doing that was seeing her husband and freeing herself from the shackles of her foolishly impulsive marriage.
‘I promised to let him know that I’d arrived safely,’ she said to the temporary secretary, recalling the scene in the office when David had insisted on her keeping in touch.
‘You never know when I might need you,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t trust these agency women.’
‘And please could you tell him I’m going out tonight, so he might not be able to call me.’
The last thing she wanted was her phone ringing when she was with Vincenzo. This evening was going to be difficult enough without having to explain just who David was. And besides, Vincenzo had no right to know anything about the life she had made for herself in England.
Vincenzo was her past. At least, that was the way she had seen things going when she had set out to come to Venice in the first place. She knew she couldn’t think of any sort of a future until she had freed herself from the travesty of her marriage. But Vincenzo’s reaction had put paid to her dreams of a quick and easy escape from the long shadow he cast over her life.
In spite of the warmth of the afternoon, Amy shivered. She didn’t have Vincenzo hooked at all. Instead, he had her trapped, able to grant her her freedom or withhold it from her on his slightest whim.
But she had come here to win that freedom. Without it she would have no hope of a future, no second chance at happiness. Somehow she had to persuade Vincenzo to let her go—but how?
Chapter Three
TWENTY-FOUR hours later, Amy was nowhere nearer answering that question. And she was beginning to feel as if the golden web of seduction and power that had held her prisoner the first time was now enclosing her all over again.
It had started the night before in the moment that she had opened the wardrobe doors and discovered something that shocked her rigid.
Knowing that Vincenzo’s family had always kept to the formality of dressing for dinner, she had cursed herself for not thinking to have packed something suitable. But then, of course, she had never anticipated staying in the Ravenelli home itself when she had decided to come to Venice. Foolishly, naively, she had imagined that she could call to see Vincenzo, explain why she was there, and then…
‘And then what?’ she asked herself out loud, frowning at her reflection in the ornate, gold framed mirror on the wall opposite the bed.
Had she truly believed that she would have told her husband that she wanted to end their marriage and he would say, ‘Okay, fine, go right ahead?’ That he would simply hold out his hands for the papers and meekly sign on the dotted line?
She had to have been dreaming if she had! The name ‘Vincenzo Ravenelli’ and the word ‘meekly’ were two things that could never be linked together in the same sentence—ever!
‘So now what do I do?’
The only thing she could do was to keep her morale as high as it was possible. Put on the bravest face she could manage and try to find some way of pressing home the slightest advantage she could find.
And that being so, she wished she had brought something else to wear. While she had been downstairs with Vincenzo, one of the small army of staff her husband employed had come into the room and unpacked her belongings from the small canvas bag. So now Amy flung open the high, carved wooden doors of the huge wardrobe, expecting to see the few clothes she had brought with her looking pathetically insignificant in its cavernous depths.
What she did find made her heart jolt painfully, her breath catching sharply in her throat.
‘I left almost all of my clothes behind.’ She could hear her own voice flinging the words into Vincenzo’s dark, proud face.
‘And what makes you think that I kept them?’ he had come back at her.
And yet now here she was staring in stunned disbelief at every item of clothing Vincenzo had ever bought her during those intense, sweet, heady days of their courtship, the few brief whirlwind weeks that had existed between the moment of their first meeting and the day that she had come to him as his bride.
‘Oh, no!’ It was a low, fearful moan, dragged from lips that were suddenly ashen with shock. ‘Oh, no, no, no!’
She couldn’t even begin to think what it might mean. Couldn’t understand just why Vincenzo would want to hold on to her clothes, let alone have them stored with such care. Every garment had been cleaned and pressed to perfection, displayed under protective covering on beautifully padded hangers. The whole wardrobe looked as if she had just left it that way only that morning instead of never having been near it for four long years.
So it was no wonder that when, late into that long, dark, endless night, she finally fell asleep, she found that she had tumbled back into the past. In her dreams she was once again reliving her first visit to Venice, her meeting with Vincenzo and the fateful consequences that had resulted.
A month in Italy. It had seemed like the perfect twentieth birthday present. And one that she had sorely needed after the traumas and tribulations of the past six months. But at first, she had been reluctant to take the holiday.
‘I couldn’t leave you alone, Mum, not at a time like this. You need me.’
Sarah Redman had refused to take no for an answer.
‘I have to start learning to live on my own sometime, darling! Besides, you need the break. You’ve done so much for me, these past six months. This is just my way of saying thank you. I’m proud of you and your—your father would be too.’
Amy couldn’t suppress the scowl that the thought of her father always brought to her face these days. Six months before, like her mother, she had been devastated when Bill Redman had collapsed and died within minutes after a severe heart attack.
But what had followed afterwards had been so much worse. The discovery, at the funeral itself, that her father had had not only a mistress but also a second family, had shaken her to the core.
The betrayal of her mother had been bad enough. But what had shattered Amy’s world had been the knowledge that her father’s mistress had two other daughters, one almost exactly the same age as Amy herself. She had always known that her father had never really wanted children. Her own arrival had been an accident, one he had been determined never to repeat, but he had gone ahead and had a second child with the other woman in his life.
‘I’ll never forgive Dad for what he did to you—to both of us! He might just as well have said, “You don’t matter—this is my real family.”’
‘It’s done,’ her mother had sighed. ‘All the anger
and regret in the world can’t change a thing. But we can’t let it blight our lives. We have to learn to live again and that’s what this holiday is all about. I want to see you smile again. I want you to go to Italy and find a new life, new excitement, new friends.’
What she had found was Vincenzo.
Amy would never know what sort of malign fate had led her first to choose Venice as the starting point of her trip, and then to book into the hotel at which Salvatore Cristaldi was the deputy manager. From the start it had become clear that Sal was looking for something Amy wasn’t. He had tried to get her into bed almost immediately, obviously believing that any single woman on holiday was looking for a ‘no-strings’ holiday affair.
But after that first date, Amy had found the initial effect of Sal’s charm and good looks very soon wore off. If he didn’t get what he wanted, he changed, becoming quite unpleasant in a way that made her feel he wasn’t really to be trusted. She had had to express herself more forcefully than she was used to, to make it plain that she had no intention of sleeping with him.
And then Sal had introduced her to Vincenzo.
It had been like being at the mercy of a wild, tropical storm that had swept her off her feet, carried her along for days. And when she had finally set foot on the ground again it was to discover that nothing was as she remembered it, and would never be the same again.
“You haven’t married her, have you?’ Sal’s voice echoed down through the years to torment her. ‘Per Dio, Cenzo! There was no need to go that far!’
If only Vincenzo had known that he needn’t have married her to get what he wanted. By the time he had proposed, she had been so deeply in love with him, she would have given him anything. But at the beginning, still wounded by her father’s betrayal, the way that it had made her feel, she had been too scared, too convinced that no man would stay with her if she let him make love to her. And so she had held out, insisting that only marriage would get her into any man’s bed.
And Vincenzo had seemed to understand. He had made it plain that he was as keen to make their relationship an intimate one as Sal had been, but he had also seemed to take her refusal much more easily, backing off when she had asked him to.
‘I know how you’re feeling,’ he’d said one soft, warm evening as they travelled back to Venice after a day spent at the Lido. ‘It can be frightening suddenly experiencing feelings like this when they’re the last thing you’re expecting. You meet someone who sets you back on your heels, rocks your whole existence, and you don’t know how to handle it.’
‘It’s all happened so quickly,’ Amy admitted.
Looking up into Vincenzo’s jet-black eyes, she’d known why. From the moment that she’d first met him, she’d only wanted to be with him.
‘And already more than half of my holiday is over,’ she added, a raw note of pain shading her voice. ‘Ten days from now…’
She couldn’t go on. Tears flooded her eyes and she bent her head as she struggled to control them.
‘I don’t want to leave…’
‘Then don’t.’
Vincenzo’s voice sounded almost as husky as her own, the warmth of his breath feathering over the sensitive coils of her ear as he bent his dark head close to hers.
‘Stay here with me—as my wife.’
‘Vincenzo!’
Amy’s head came up sharply, deep-blue eyes wide with shock and disbelief as she stared into his strongly carved face.
‘Vincenzo!’ she said on a very different note. ‘Don’t do this; it’s not fair! Don’t tease me—because I know this isn’t the truth. I can’t believe…’
One long-fingered hand came under her chin, lifting her face so that her eyes met his.
‘Believe it,’ he said, his voice deepening on the words. ‘Because I assure you, cara mia, that I never, ever lie—and certainly not about something like this. If I say I’ve never felt like this about any other woman, then that is the simple truth, nothing more, nothing less.’
‘You…you mean it?’
‘Every word,’ he assured her huskily. ‘I want you, Amy Redman. I want you more than any woman I’ve ever met. I was knocked off balance in the moment I first saw you and I’ve never been able to concentrate on anything but you since. I want you so much that I can’t sleep, can’t work. My hunger for you is like an ache that torments me day and night until I think I’ll go crazy if you leave me. I know it’s too soon—we hardly know each other—but I don’t think I can let you go back to England and out of my life.’
From that moment on she had been caught up in a whirlwind of excitement and happiness that had made every day like living in a dreamworld. She hadn’t even queried Vincenzo’s insistence that they have a small private wedding, as soon as possible, seeing it as just one more romantic touch in what was already a fairytale come true.
They could tell their families and friends later, he had assured her. Have a big society reception where everyone could meet up after the event. For now, the ceremony would be just the two of them and a couple of witnesses.
And, drifting along on a cloud of happiness, Amy had agreed to everything he had said. She was marrying the most wonderful man in the world, in the most beautiful city in the world, and that was all that mattered. She knew her mother would understand and be happy for her.
The bubble of happiness that had enclosed her had lasted for just a few more days. She had floated through the wedding, the intimate meal that had followed. Her wedding night had been everything she had ever dreamed off—more than that. Vincenzo had been the perfect lover, ardent, hotly passionate, yet so very considerate of her feelings, her enjoyment that the loss of her virginity had been nothing more than small discomfort, forgotten instantly in the ecstasy that followed.
She had drifted off to sleep in state of total bliss, wrapped tightly in Vincenzo’s arms, held close against the warm strength of his muscled body. She had had a long, dreamless night and had woken full of joy, anticipating the first of many long, contented days ahead of her, the rest of her married life.
It had taken just one hour to disillusion her completely.
Some small sound had disturbed her; she had no idea what. Yawning heavily, and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Amy frowned a little as she realised that she was alone in the bed. When she had drifted asleep, Vincenzo had been lying beside her; long, bronzed limbs tangled with hers, heavy eyelids drooping over eyes that were hazed by sensual satisfaction.
But now Vincenzo had left her, and she was anxious to find him again. Without his warm body close beside her, the big bed felt empty and strangely unwelcoming. She needed to find her husband, see his eyes light up as he opened his arms for her to go into them like a small, contented, homing bird.
Sounds from the living room drew her there, frowning in confusion as she heard two voices, blurred as a result of the closed door. Vincenzo’s and another that was vaguely familiar.
‘Cenzo?’
The first surprise was that Vincenzo had taken the time to put on his clothes. Unlike Amy herself, who had only pulled on a thin, silky robe, the colour of rich clotted cream, over her naked body, he was now fully dressed in oatmeal-coloured trousers and a softly clinging T-shirt in the tones of milky coffee.
The second shock was the identity of the person with him. Amy had never expected to see Salvatore with his cousin, and she felt distinctly uncomfortable at appearing in only the thin, clinging robe. Her discomfort was added to by the obvious amusement in Sal’s eyes, the lingering, almost salacious survey he subjected her to, bringing a rush of burning colour into her cheeks.
‘Buon giorno, Amy.’ He greeted her, his smile growing at her obvious consternation. ‘I see you have been making my cousin a very happy man.’
‘I…Cenzo?’
Confused and unsure of how to proceed, Amy looked to Vincenzo for help, surprised to find that instead of the warmly affectionate welcome she had expected, his features were set in an expression of watchful distance, his black eyes revealin
g no emotion whatsoever. Uneasily she pulled the cream robe closer around her slim body, tightening the belt at her waist.
‘I came round to congratulate him as soon as I realised.’
‘Sal.’ Vincenzo’s deep voice sounded a note of warning and suddenly everything seemed to make sense to Amy.
‘Congratulate…Cenzo, you told him!’
She was torn between relief and reproach. Vincenzo had promised that they would tell his family together; that he wouldn’t say a word until she was there with him. But at least if Sal’s reaction was in any way typical then she had no need to be afraid about the way the news would be received. She had been haunted by a lingering fear that the Ravenelli family would disapprove violently of their hasty marriage, seeing her as a gold-digger who couldn’t wait to get her hands on a wealthy man.
‘Told me!’ Sal’s amusement was even more pronounced. ‘Amy, sweetheart, it wasn’t a matter of telling me. I’d have to be blind to miss the evidence. The fact that your key was still at reception at the hotel was a major clue. The way your bed hadn’t been slept in, another.’
‘Sal, that’s enough,’ Vincenzo growled, but his cousin was unstoppable.
‘I’m sure you know you’ve made Vincenzo’s day,’ Sal went on, his smile wide and bright in a way that was beginning to grate on Amy’s nerves. ‘But I wonder if you know just how much you’ve done for him? Still, I’m sure he’ll be only too pleased to show his gratitude, won’t you, Cenzo?’
‘I said, that’s enough!’
When Vincenzo used that tone, Amy was surprised to find that Sal hadn’t turned to stone where he stood. Even loving him as she did, she still flinched inside when he snapped out a command like that, her blood running suddenly cold in apprehension. But Sal appeared completely uncowed.
‘No need for embarrassment, cousin!’ he returned blithely. ‘You won, fair and square, I’ll admit it. And to prove I’m a man of my word…’