A Savage Betrayal

by Lynne Graham

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she muttered, because she really didn’t know.

  ‘Hearing you tell me that you love me has to be the biggest turn-off I know,’ Cesare imparted with chilling emphasis.

  She turned away from him, gripped by sudden comprehension, slaughtered by rejection. Only now did she recall what she had said at that blinding instant of climax when her body and her mind had been in passion’s grip.

  ‘But then maybe you said it out of habit,’ Cesare suggested with contempt.

  ‘Habit?’ she queried tremulously, astounded to hear her own voice.

  ‘Maybe Clayton likes the illusion…I don’t. I don’t have any illusions left about you and when you don’t have expectations you don’t get disappointed,’ he asserted with a harsh laugh. ‘And he must have been very disappointed today when he finally had to face that your “love” goes to the highest bidder!’

  Mina understood then and her stomach heaved. Her hands clenched, her fingernails scoring sharp crescents into the soft skin of her palms. Then, without any warning at all, the anger came, surging up out of the devastating pain of her emotions and taking over…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IN ONE wrathful movement Mina sat up, her delicate facial bones stiff, her amethyst eyes brilliant with rage. ‘I’ve had enough of this…I won’t listen to one more filthy insinuation!’ she told him furiously. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell me how Steve and I could possibly have carried on some sleazy affair with Roger and Winona looking on? You’re talking about four people who have known each other all their lives—and if you sneeze Winona notices!’

  Cesare had tautened in astonishment, deep-set dark eyes fixed intently to her. His sensual mouth took on an unexpected quirk of amusement. ‘I can believe that——’

  But not the rest of it?’ Mina cut in rawly. ‘Why do you think Steve hates you so much? Steve and I dated for four years and we were never intimate, never even partially intimate! But I only knew you for three months and he actually dared to tell me once that that was the hardest thing of all for him to accept…and I thought at the time, To hell with fragile male egos—and I still think it!’

  ‘Mina——’

  ‘So if you want to go on thinking that I bounced straight out of bed with you into bed with him, go ahead! I’ll phone and tell Steve…he would be absolutely delighted to know you think that! But how dare you try to drag me down to the level of a slot on some pathetic male sexual score card?’

  A dark flush of blood had highlighted his hard cheekbones. ‘That was not what I was doing,’ he told her rawly.

  ‘That’s exactly what you were doing! All that sophistication on the surface, and underneath what are you?’ Mina splintered tempestuously. ‘You’re so primitive you haven’t even made it on to the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder!’

  ‘Whatever turns you on, cara,’ Cesare murmured, eyes a sliver of flaring gold below his black lashes.

  Mina sucked in oxygen with an audible hiss, outraged by the comeback. ‘You’re not even listening to me, are you?’

  ‘I’m listening to you telling me what you know I want to believe,’ Cesare returned with a sardonic laugh.

  That was the last straw. If she tried to defend herself she was immediately suspected of some devious motivation. The anger went out of her, snuffed like a candle. ‘Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?’ she whispered bitterly. ‘I’m wasting my breath. Do you have to sleep here or do I get a reward for winning your lousy bet for you?’

  ‘That was a joke——’

  ‘That was an insult.’

  The silence thrummed with violent undertones.

  ‘That was an insult,’ Cesare finally conceded, startling her with the admission.

  ‘You hate me.’ Pain fractured her voice, making her seal her lips and swallow hard.

  ‘Sometimes.’ Not troubling to deny the fact, Cesare sprang fluidly off the bed. His vibrant features unusually still, he studied her with dark-as-night eyes and his beautifully shaped mouth hardened. ‘But four years ago you could have had it all, cara. That’s the real joke. You were so busy plotting and planning you couldn’t see what was right under your nose. You sold me down the river for a pittance when you could have had so much more.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And don’t much care, Mina completed inwardly, torn apart by the ever deepening gulf between them. It was a wedding night she would never forget, a humiliation she would never forget, and it seemed to her now that no matter what she did, no matter what she said Cesare would never listen. His prejudices were too entrenched after four years of brooding on what he saw as her betrayal.

  ‘I was in love with you.’

  Her lashes fluttered up, revealing dazed violet eyes. ‘No…you weren’t,’ she said jerkily.

  ‘It hit me like a bolt of lightening on the flight to Hong Kong. My moment of truth,’ he drawled with derision.

  Mina had turned white, shock reverberating through her. ‘No,’ she protested again. ‘You weren’t in love with me.’

  ‘Madly in love. I was thinking wedding-bells, honeymoons, christenings,’ Cesare reeled off with a scornful smile that chilled her.

  Mina was paralysed by what he was telling her. It was like being told she had won a fortune and then discovering that she had lost the ticket required to prove her claim. It also ripped asunder her view of the past. For so long she had believed that Cesare had simply used her for a few hours of light entertainment and then regretted it but the picture he drew now devastated her, filled her with an embittered sense of loss and a raging resentment against the injustice which had parted them.

  ‘But not for long,’ she whispered unsteadily.

  ‘No, not for long,’ Cesare agreed. ‘But the subject of your wheeling and dealing on the stock-market is currently closed.’

  ‘It can’t be closed. It can never be closed!’ she told him in disbelief. ‘If you had once given me the opportunity to speak to you without Susie around before the wedding, I would have demanded that you produce the evidence that you say you have!’

  Cesare dealt her a look of savage derision. ‘Meet your partner in crime…’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I destroyed the evidence.’

  ‘You did what?’ Mina gasped incredulously.

  ‘Think about it,’ Cesare advised. ‘You’re the mother of my child. You’re my wife now. To retain documents which could be used against you in criminal proceedings would be utter madness. Suppose that by some accident that evidence fell into the wrong hands? It was a risk I could no longer take. As long as you are my wife, I will protect you.’

  She stared at him in shattered silence. Cesare had immense respect for the forces of law and order. That he had actually disposed of the evidence of an apparent fraud shook her rigid. It was not an act which he would have undertaken lightly. Indeed she was convinced it would have gone very much against his natural inclinations. ‘Meet your partner in crime’, he had said grimly, bitter at the role which he felt had been forced on him. He would protect her because she was Susie’s mother.

  ‘But I needed to see that evidence,’ Mina told him tensely, a giant surge of frustration currenting through her taut body. ‘I wanted to——’

  ‘Make up nonsensical stories to explain every piece of it away?’ Cesare derided. ‘That’s why I wouldn’t have shown it to you.’

  ‘So I’m not to be allowed the chance to defend myself——’

  ‘I want no more lies,’ Cesare interposed coldly. ‘I’ve heard enough of them. As for the money…on that count I suspect you are telling me the truth. I don’t think you have anything left to stash away.’

  Mina took a deep breath, ‘I didn’t do it,’ she murmured with taut emphasis. ‘You have to give me the chance to prove that.’

  His strong face hardened. ‘When you talk in this vein, you anger me more. The subject is closed until you are prepared to admit the truth. Buonanotte, cara.’

  If t
here had been anything within reach she would have thrown it at him! Balked of even the smallest chance to clear her name, Mina was inflamed by raw resentment. But she had learnt something which she had naively failed to grasp until now. Cesare was still determined to make her pay for her supposed crime. He might not have been prepared to report her to the authorities but that was only because he intended to deal out punishment personally.

  And he was considerably more ruthless than any judge would have been. She was not to be allowed any form of hearing. Cesare had decided that she was guilty and that was that and now the sentence was being carried out. She was to be marooned in isolation until she showed signs of repentance.

  What form of repentance did Cesare envisage? She was to confess and no doubt do a lot of weeping and begging for forgiveness until honour was satisfied. He was really putting on the thumbscrews, she reflected hysterically. No shopping, no nightclubs, no other men…wow! How on earth would she ever survive such deprivations? He even seemed to think that simply being at home with Susie all day would be a punishment, not realising that that was a luxury she was eagerly looking forward to.

  But Cesare had also told her that he loved her four years ago…That tore her in two. Yet what kind of love had it been that he had judged her guilty with such immediacy that he had instantly sacked her? He hadn’t even been prepared to wait until he returned from Hong Kong. He had not questioned her guilt. Nor had he allowed his feelings to come between him and his sense of right and wrong. It occurred to Mina for the first time that the evidence against her must have been overwhelming.

  Right now if she persisted in raising the subject and continually reiterating her innocence it would push them even further apart, and yet how could she remain silent? Someone in Falcone Industries had set her up. She no longer had any doubt of that fact. Cesare had only been in Hong Kong for ten days and on the fifth day she had been sacked.

  So who had given Cesare the information which had made her the victim of someone else’s fraud? It had all happened so incredibly fast. And finally, where had that fifty thousand pounds gone when it had finally been removed from her account?

  She decided to write to her bank but she wondered ruefully if they would even consider divulging such information or if they would retain records of such a transfer this long after the event. Yet surely whoever had accepted back that money had to be the real perpetrator of the crime, or at the very least an accomplice? The ability to prove that that money had left her account again would mean nothing. Cesare would merely assume that she had shifted it somewhere else. But she had to try, didn’t she? She had to at least try.

  Impulsively she scrambled back out of bed, yanked a nightie out of a drawer, slid into it in a rush and then opened the communicating door. The room beyond was in darkness but for a triangle of light showing from an ajar door at the other end. She could hear a shower running. She switched on the light beside the bed and hovered.

  A few minutes later, Cesare emerged towelling his hair dry. He stopped dead, flaring golden eyes shimmering over her slender figure. Suddenly Mina became awesomely conscious both of the flimsy nature of the silk nightdress and the nudity of his lean, golden body.

  ‘Do you ever think of anything else?’ she heard herself demand helplessly, her skin burning with awareness at the explicit sensuality of his unashamed appraisal. ‘I came in here to talk seriously about something and I only want you to listen.’

  He cast aside the towel, shifted a shoulder in an infuriatingly careless shrug. It was not encouraging but Mina was determined to say her piece. She told him about the money which had appeared and then disappeared from her bank account four years previously. His dark features remained maddeningly uninformative. When she came to a breathless halt, he strolled past her and closed the door between their bedrooms.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ she prompted tautly.

  ‘For a story right off the top of your head, it’s agile…even clever. It would be very difficult to prove or disprove after this length of time,’ Cesare drawled.

  Mina linked her hands together tightly and looked levelly back at him. ‘I thought that maybe you could help me to check it out.’

  ‘Madre di Dio…do I look that gullible?’ he raked back at her incredulously.

  Wild colour sprang up in her cheeks, her eyes glittering. ‘No, you look stupid!’ Mina hissed back at him hotly. ‘Stupid…stubborn and self-satisfied, and I’m fed up to the back teeth with you!’

  Cesare quirked an ebony brow. ‘Is that why you drifted in here dressed to kill?’

  ‘Dressed to what?’ Mina gasped, studying him with splintering amethyst enquiry. ‘You’d find a sack an enticement, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘On you…probably,’ Cesare conceded without skipping a beat as he strolled closer. ‘As you said, I’m way down the evolutionary ladder, cara.’

  ‘Back off, you conceited jerk! If you think I came in here——’

  ‘To stay? I do think that,’ he confirmed, reaching out a lean hand and snapping it round her wrist. ‘Dio mio, cara…do you really think I’ll let you walk away in a huff just because I neglected to swallow your entertaining but wholly improbable fairy-tale?’

  As he propelled her closer, Mina attempted to free herself from his hold. ‘It wasn’t a fairy-tale, damn you!’

  In a lightning-swift movement he enclosed her other wrist and drew her firmly towards him, a fiercely intent look stamped on his lean features.

  ‘Cesare, let go of me!’ Mina panted in a fury, shaken to rediscover that she was absolutely powerless against that effortless strength.

  ‘I want you again.’ He lowered his dark head and let the tip of his tongue pierce erotically between her parted lips.

  Her knees wobbled, a glow of instantaneous heat igniting treacherously inside her. Involuntarily she opened her mouth for him but he played with her, an expert erotic gamester, enforcing surrender without giving her a tithe of what she helplessly sought. The breath was trapped in her throat as the remorseless heat spread through her, making her tingle and tense, charging every nerve-ending with drowning weakness. He nibbled teasingly at her lower lip and a stifled sound of frustration escaped low in her throat.

  ‘I could make you beg…’ Cesare whispered thickly. ‘But I don’t think I have that much control.’

  She shivered violently as he settled a powerful hand to the soft swell of her hips and crushed her against him. He was hotly aroused. The thin silk was no barrier against the throbbing heat of him. Her lower limbs turned to water. His hands brushed aside the straps on her shoulders, thrusting them down over her arms while she stood there entrapped by her own wanton susceptibility.

  His breath fanning her cheek, he licked along the tremulous line of her reddened lower lip and let his fingers rise to the swelling fullness of her breasts, his thumbs glancing across the pouting tautness of her nipples. A hot damp ache stirred unbearably between her thighs and she swayed, weak in the ruthless grip of the sensations he could evoke. Her body wasn’t her own any more. He shifted sinuously against her and then closed his arms round her, lifting her up, and when he kissed her the whole world went into a tailspin and she clutched wildly at his hair, at any part of him she could reach, and kissed him back.

  With a guttural groan, he brought her down on the bed, pinioning her beneath him, one hand twisted in her golden hair as he ravished her mouth over and over again until she was dizzy and breathless and utterly bemused by the extent of her own quivering, shameless excitement.

  ‘This time…you really are mine,’ Cesare murmured roughly, framing her hectically flushed face with hard, possessive hands as he looked down at her, eyes of molten gold alight with desire and primitive satisfaction. But those hands weren’t quite steady and that big, powerful body trembled in the circle of her arms. On a very female level, she was fully attuned to that awareness.

  ‘Absolutely mine,’ Cesare savoured, lowering his dark head to her breasts, circling a taut bud with the tip of his
tongue and then hungrily engulfing her achingly tender flesh with the raw heat of his mouth.

  Sensation shot lightning bolts of fire through her and she lifted a hand, clenched it fiercely into the smooth skin of his shoulder. He rolled on to his side, taking her with him, and kissed her again, hotly, invasively, triumphantly, making every sense sing wildly. Desperate to touch him, she splayed her fingers against the hard wall of his chest, feeling the pull of his muscles as he tensed, instinctively following the arrowing dark furrow of hair and then hesitating fatally, passion pierced by sudden recall of her own ignorance.

  ‘Don’t stop now,’ Cesare groaned, his teeth nipping at the extended line of her throat, making her jerk and twist and then still in shock as he told her raggedly exactly what he wanted and carried her hand down over the fiercely contacted muscles of his taut stomach to the thrusting power of his arousal.

  In the lamplight her eyes flew wide, hectic pink firing her cheeks. ‘I—I——’

  Gazing down at her with a look of wonderment, Cesare suddenly threw back his dark head and loosed a husky laugh of amused understanding. ‘No, we didn’t do that before.’ He murmured something soft in Italian, raking her with slumbrous eyes as he eased her back to him. ‘So sometimes you do tell the truth, cara…’

  Before she could regain the power of speech, he devoured her mouth with compelling urgency, enforcing the response that he had already learned was his to call up at will. He pushed her back against the pillows with unexpected gentleness. Reason drifted away again as though he had slammed a door shut. He ran his tongue in a glancing foray down the valley between her breasts, employing his caressing hands with devastating effect as he slid down her quivering body.

  And long before she had even guessed his intention he had engaged her in something so impossibly intimate that she tautened in instinctive rejection, only to gasp and grit her teeth and find control flying out of reach within seconds. The intensity of pleasure overwhelmed her. The tormenting ache inside her expanded, the pressure built and intensified and she sobbed, raking her nails down the sheet beneath her, her hips rising in a feverish supplication as old as time. Wild need screamed through every torturously sensitised inch of her.