by Lynne Graham
‘I can see how popular I’m going to be,’ Daisy muttered helplessly, but he wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t expected. She was the fall guy in this newly formed triangle. Nothing would be allowed to come between Alessio and his desire to win his daughter’s affection. No excuses would be made for Daisy. He would emerge from the debris of their broken marriage shining white and squeaky clean. After all, Daisy hadn’t given him a chance to be a father.
‘On the contrary, you will be very popular, Daisy,’ Alessio drawled in honeyed contradiction. ‘You are about to play a leading role in fulfilling our daughter’s painfully obvious desire for a real family.’
Her violet eyes were strained. ‘I’m more than willing to meet you halfway for Tara’s sake. You can see her whenever you like.’
‘I expect much more than that from you.’
Daisy paled at that uncompromising assurance and curled her hands together on her lap. ‘I know that you’ll probably want to fly her over to Italy to meet the rest—’
‘Of the cast of the horror movie you mentioned?’
Daisy reddened fiercely, finding that reference ungenerous when she was bending over backwards to be reasonable. ‘You have to make allowances for the fact that I never knew that you would feel like this about Tara—’
‘And you have to accept that now I’ve found her I’m not letting go of her again.’
‘I am accepting that.’
‘And that either you share on my terms or risk getting left behind,’ Alessio extended drily.
Daisy struggled to work out what it was he wanted that she had not already offered. ‘What are your terms?’
‘Another home, two parents and complete security for my daughter.’
For a moment, Daisy looked back at him blankly. Then her sensitive stomach churned. Two parents? He could only be talking about marrying Nina Franklin. She vented a hiss of angry disbelief. ‘You’re planning to marry Nina and fight me for custody!’
‘Give me one good reason why I would try to take an already insecure adolescent girl away from the mother she adores and give her a stepmother she would undoubtedly loathe,’ Alessio invited with evident impatience.
‘You said that if it took you a lifetime you would punish me!’
‘Not at the cost of my daughter’s happiness.’
Daisy’s brain felt as if it was functioning at half its usual capacity. If Alessio was not talking about marrying Nina… But then he hadn’t actually mentioned marriage specifically, had he? He had referred to another home and two parents. So what was he talking about? He simply couldn’t be talking about what was currently crossing her mind. That would be sheer insanity.
‘When did you last have a good night’s sleep?’ Alessio asked.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘It shows. I feel as though I’m banging my head against a brick wall.
‘We were talking about Tara.’ Daisy was still shaken and embarrassed by the mad thought that had briefly occurred to her and she reached out for her cup of coffee with what she hoped was an air of cool, detached composure.
‘I’ve already made the decision which will best serve all our needs.’ Alessio studied her with brooding eyes, his wide, sensual mouth suddenly setting hard. ‘We will get married again.’
As her fingers involuntarily loosened their grip on the cup and hot liquid splashed down her jeans, Daisy vented a startled shriek of pain and sprang up, pressing her palms against her burning thighs. Alessio dealt her a split-second look of raw incredulity and then strode forward. Snatching her unceremoniously up into his arms and tumbling her down on the sofa, he proceeded to unzip and peel down her jeans at speed.
‘What are you doing?’ Daisy screeched in horror, endeavouring without success to evade his determined ministrations.
‘I heard a scream,’ Tara intervened. ‘Mum… ?’
‘Your mother has scalded herself. Where’s the bathroom?’ Alessio countered.
Thirty seconds later, Daisy found herself standing in the bath with Tara aiming the shower head at her bare thighs to cool the smarting flesh with cold water. Tears of mortification had now taken over from momentary tears of pain. Alessio was rustling, tight-mouthed with disapproval, through a first-aid box crammed with cosmetics.
‘You’re really cool in a crisis,’ Tara was saying appreciatively to her father. As she took her attention off what she was doing, the gushing water angled up to drench Daisy’s T-shirt as well. ‘I did a first-aid course last summer but I wouldn’t have remembered what to do so quickly.’
‘I’m all right now,’ Daisy murmured in desperation, cringing with embarrassment.
‘You need at least ten minutes of that treatment,’ Alessio overruled.
‘At least ten minutes. He’s right, Mum,’ Tara added, sounding like a little echo.
‘It was a very minor scald. The coffee wasn’t that hot.’ Daisy was trying somewhat hopelessly to tug the too small T-shirt down over a pair of minuscule white pants which were probably transparent now that they were wet.
‘You screamed,’ her daughter reminded her. ‘You scared me!’
‘Don’t tell me Daisy hasn’t done that to you before. She’s accident-prone but wonderfully resilient,’ Alessio put in reassuringly. ‘She came off my motorbike twice without breaking anything.’
‘Mum just hasn’t got very good spatial awareness,’ Tara told him informatively. ‘Aunt Janet thinks it’s because she was born weeks before she should have been. That’s probably why she’s so small and skinny as well. It was a real miracle that she survived. I mean thirty years ago a lot of premature babies died! I was only a couple of weeks early. It didn’t harm me but Aunt Janet said that Mum’s development was definitely affected—’
‘I thought you were tired,’ Daisy slotted into the flood of chatter, feeling older, smaller, skinnier, clumsier and less adequate than she had in years.
‘Yes, you should go back to bed,’ Alessio agreed, a slight tremor disturbing his smooth drawl. ‘I can handle this.’
Daisy wondered if her legs were turning blue. They were numb. The bathroom was freezing cold too. But it was no use; she couldn’t block out that shattering announcement one minute longer. ‘We will get married again.’ Though every rational thought denied that Alessio could have said that, she knew he had said it. And that unapologetic arrogance was at least familiar. Only the last time Alessio had told her that they were getting married Daisy had had no problem with being told rather than asked…
She had been weak with relief and, indeed, it hadn’t been very long before she’d begun feeling incredibly happy that she was going to stay on in Italy as his wife and share as many of his waking and sleeping moments as she could possibly manage. Sadly, her sunny belief that Alessio would soon reach that same blissful state of acceptance hadn’t lasted much beyond their wedding night, when she had had the poor taste to joke that she felt like Cinderella.
Alessio had looked at her for the very first time as if he could quite happily have strangled her. His wonderful sense of humour had vanished when he’d put that fatal ring on her finger and it had not reappeared. But had she then sown the first seed of his suspicion that she had been plotting all along to acquire a share of the Leopardi wealth? Daisy reflected that she could truthfully put her hand on her heart and assert that the very last thing that had ever been on her mind when Alessio had been making love to her was money…
Daisy emerged from an undeniably erotic reverie to find her T-shirt being whipped off. She emitted a strangled moan of protest just as her equally sodden bra was tugged down her arms. Alessio wrapped a towel round her bare, pouting breasts, met her outraged eyes and said tautly, ‘You’re cold and wet. I couldn’t undress you in front of Tara. It would have embarrassed her.’
He sank down on the corner of the bath and directed the shower head at her shivering legs, and then his smooth dark head angled down and a lean hand settled on her hip to twist her round. ‘Where the hell did you get those bruises?�
�� he demanded thunderously.
‘On the stairs at the bank.’ Daisy was resigned to humiliation now but striving not to show that it mattered.
‘Didn’t I tell you to watch out?’ Alessio gritted. ‘Didn’t I warn you?’
‘Yes… you’re always right,’ Daisy muttered with a speaking lack of appreciation.
He switched off the water and minutely examined her goose-fleshed thighs for patches of scalded pink. ‘Do you feel any heat anywhere?’ he finally enquired.
‘Are you joking?’
‘It could have been a lot worse.’ It was quite beyond Alessio to admit that he had overreacted.
He lifted her out of the bath and hunkered lithely down to pat her trembling legs as gently and carefully dry as if she were a baby. Daisy submitted, suddenly so choked up by tears that she was undyingly grateful that it was her skinny thighs that had all his attention. Below the discreet cover of the hip-length towel, her wet pants were tugged smoothly down. She didn’t notice, for beneath the overhead light Alessio’s black hair had the extraordinary iridescent sheen and lure of pure silk and involuntarily Daisy was entrapped by that compulsive view. She wanted to touch those gleaming strands so badly that her fingers tingled and she had to fold her arms tightly because, for a split second, she really didn’t trust herself not to surrender to temptation.
It didn’t even occur to her to wonder why Alessio was making her stand on one foot and then the other as the damp scrap of lingerie was deftly wafted away, for Daisy was by then in a hot-cheeked fever of self-loathing. Shame was flaming through her in punitive waves. She despised her physical weakness in Alessio’s vicinity. What had been excusable at a sexually naïve and besotted seventeen was in no way allowable in a grown woman of thirty. Raw resentment suddenly filled her to overflowing. She couldn’t understand how she could still be so disgustingly susceptible. One attack of Alessio ought to have conferred lifelong immunity.
And how dared he come into her home and upbraid her for her failings? He had given up on their relationship first, hadn’t he? What possible future could he have envisaged for their marriage when he had already been consoling himself with Sophia? Why hadn’t she faced him with that fact? But she knew why, didn’t she? She couldn’t have mentioned that final betrayal without revealing just how deeply she had been hurt by it. And, thirteen years on, she was too proud to expose herself to that extent.
Secure in the belief that she was ignorant of his extramarital activities, Alessio was aggressively determined to load her down with so much guilt that she wouldn’t dare to fight back. And why had she not yet said a word about that insane proposition he had made? Marry Alessio again? Always honest with herself, Daisy could think of several things Alessio might be able to persuade her to do in a weak moment, but a second trip to hell and back was definitely not one of them.
‘You should be in bed too,’ Alessio said very quietly. ‘You’re exhausted.’
Banging his head against a brick wall… she reflected furiously. Just how much affronted dignity could one effectively portray standing naked in a towel with intimate items of apparel scattered round one’s feet? Particularly one intimate item that she didn’t even recall being removed! She could almost feel Alessio consciously tempering his powerful emotions to the constraints of the situation. If she hadn’t been hurt, she knew he would have been laughing uproariously at what had happened. Instead he was practising tact. She hated him for that even more.
‘Tell me you weren’t crazy enough to say that we should get married again,’ she begged, hugging the towel round herself as if it were a suit of armour.
‘We’ll discuss that tomorrow.’
‘But there’s nothing to discuss,’ Daisy returned flatly.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘There isn’t!’ Stalking out of the bathroom, Daisy returned to the lounge and plonked herself down. Why was she now thinking that for the very first time Alessio had taken off her clothes and failed to make the smallest pass? she asked herself. Was there something wrong with her brain? Was she becoming obsessed with sex? He had been very impersonal about it, too, but teeth-clenchingly considerate. He had averted his attention from her naked body. Why had that only made her squirm more? Why did her ego suddenly feel as if it had been weekending in a concrete mixer?
‘Daisy…’ Alessio breathed tautly.
Daisy rigorously studied the wall to the left of him, and when he moved into that space found another section of wall. ‘If you’ve got something you feel you have to say, say it now and get it over with. I have no intention of making myself available tomorrow.’
‘Your towel’s slipping…’
Her cheeks burning, Daisy snatched the towel higher over the embarrassingly full thrust of her breasts. She fixed accusing violet eyes on him. ‘I want you to know that until this evening I truly believed that there was no sacrifice I would not make for my daughter’s benefit. But there is one. I would give her every last drop of blood in my body, but I would throw myself under a bus before I would marry her father again!’
‘You haven’t even taken time to consider the idea,’ Alessio returned very drily.
‘Time? You think I need time? Are you out of your mind?’ Daisy gasped with unhidden incredulity. ‘I couldn’t face being married to you again!’
A dark surge of blood had risen over Alessio’s savagely high cheekbones. He breathed in deep.
‘You always did have the sensitivity of a stone,’ Daisy condemned shakily, her temper suddenly engulfed by a violent tide of debilitating memory. Slowly she shook her silver head. ‘I would be a very wicked woman to deserve that much misery twice in one lifetime. Most people who sin have to die to go to hell but I got my punishment while I was still breathing.’
‘That is not very funny, Daisy.’
‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ Daisy stole a reluctant, fleeting glance at him.
Alessio was broodingly still, eyes of aristocratic ice fixed to her with chilling intensity. The temperature had dropped to freezing point.
‘I wasn’t trying to be rude. I was just being frank,’ she protested, intimidated more than she wanted to admit by the chill in the air but determined that he should realise that he had suggested an act of sheer insanity which it would be a complete waste of time to discuss in any greater depth. ‘I suppose you feel that if you’re willing to make a huge sacrifice for Tara I should be too… and that most women would take one look at you and your bank balance and flatten you in the rush to the altar… but—’
‘Not you,’ Alessio slotted in grittily.
‘Well, been there, done that…grateful to have got out alive,’ Daisy said helplessly.
As the heavy silence stretched unbearably, she suddenly scrambled up again. Walking out fast into the hall, she prayed that he would take the hint and leave without argument. ‘The next time you collect Tara, maybe you could just honk the horn…and I’d really appreciate it if you could keep any conversations you feel we must have to the phone—’
‘When you bolt from reality, piccola mia, you literally streak. And it is done with such a complete lack of shame, it takes my breath away,’ Alessio drawled with lethal emphasis.
Her face as hot as hell-fire, Daisy dragged open the front door. ‘Goodbye, Alessio.’
CHAPTER FIVE
DAISY slammed the door, shot every bolt home and sagged, until she heard movement in Tara’s bedroom. Creeping into her own room, she dropped the towel, grabbed up her nightdress, hauled it over her head and dived at supersonic speed into bed.
The door creaked open. ‘Mum…?’
Daisy shut, her eyes tight and played dead.
‘I won’t stay long…’ Tara promised, making Daisy feel a total heel. ‘I just can’t sleep.’
Daisy surrendered. ‘So what did you think of…Alessio?’
‘He’s terrific. We talked about just everything!’ Tara bounced down on the end of the bed and stuck her feet in below the duvet. ‘I even asked him about his girlfriend for you!
’
‘You did what?’ Daisy moaned in horror.
‘I knew you were dying to know if it was serious. Relax. We don’t need to worry about her. Dad’s finished with her.’
‘Has he? It’s none of my business,’ Daisy said, but not quite quickly enough.
‘Well, I thought it was very much our business,’ Tara returned with a meaningful look. ‘You should see the way women eye him up when you’re out with him… it would frighten the life out of you! He’s not going to be alone for long and you haven’t got time to play hard to get if you want him back. You need to get in there quick!’
Daisy was aghast. ‘Tara—’
‘Mum, I know you still fancy him like mad! That’s why you have that photo of him in your purse and read the Financial Times and look tragic when I mention him,’ Tara reeled off with overflowing sympathy in her eyes. ‘But don’t worry—I didn’t even drop a hint to him! I did ask him what he thought of you, though.’
Daisy rolled over and sank anguished teeth into the pillow.
‘Well, I mean, if Dad didn’t still fancy you even a bit, I thought we should know about it now. Mum, he’s still single and he hasn’t got anyone either! Don’t you think that kind of means he’s meant to be ours?’ Tara pressed, as if she were talking about a stray dog in need of a loving home.
‘No, I don’t think that,’ Daisy mumbled, but she had a terrifyingly inappropriate urge to giggle.
‘Dad said you would never have got divorced if he’d known about me. He said he really loved you but he wasn’t much good at being a husband when he was a teenager. He looked dead guilty too,’ Tara revealed with a satisfaction she couldn’t hide. ‘I think you should have told him about me when I was born. If I’d been you, I wouldn’t have let him go! It was his duty to be with us and he would have got used to being married eventually.’
That was definitely a self-centred Leopardi talking. Daisy’s blood was now running cold in her veins. Tara had already decided that she didn’t want Alessio as a part-time father and she was far too possessive to want to share him with any woman other than her mother. ‘Very open,’ Alessio had said of his daughter. Did that mean he had read Tara like a book? Very probably, Daisy conceded.