by Lynne Graham
Daisy was not at all surprised. Alessio had the most gorgeous dark, seductive drawl. That rich voice sent tiny, delicious quivers down her spine. He also had the most incredibly beautiful eyes and the most fabulous bone structure, she acknowledged, fully concentrating on what really mattered… her own vulnerability. She could not remarry a man whom she had once loved so much and who had hurt her so terribly. It would be a suicidally stupid act. And she might have a bad habit of learning most of her lessons the hard way but nobody could ever say that she made the same mistake twice!
‘But then I am accustomed to dealing with individuals with some small measure of concentration,’ Alessio added softly.
‘This has been a very traumatic week for me,’ Daisy muttered evasively.
‘Really?’ Alessio prompted dangerously, causing her anxious eyes to shoot back to his strong dark face.
‘Yes, really.’
‘How could it have been traumatic?’ Alessio thundered in sudden, seething frustration. ‘You’re on another bloody planet! You might be here in body but you’re certainly not here in spirit!’
Daisy reddened with discomfiture. ‘I just lost the thread of the conversation for a—’
‘What conversation?’ Alessio derided. ‘You’ve hardly opened your mouth since we got out of the lift! Barely a word has crossed your lips—’
‘I was listening,’ she protested.
‘No, you weren’t,’ Alessio gritted with a flash of strong white teeth. ‘Dio, how this takes me back! You avoid things that you don’t like.’
‘I didn’t get very far with you, did I?’
Daisy was thinking about the mountain of recriminations that had already come her way. Not a lot to talk about there that she could see. There had been her denial of his parental rights. Fact. Her acceptance of cash in return for him—what other people called a divorce settlement but still fact, since she was technically in possession of that cash. Then there had been the lust and anger bit, followed by the pain and bitterness bit, neither of which had impressed her as being the conversational opener of the year. Alessio took account of only his own feelings and Daisy had not been tempted to reveal what she had suffered in the aftermath of their marriage…
Agonies, sheer appalling agonies, she recalled strickenly. She had been like one of those dreadfully clingy vines suddenly torn loose from its only support. Without Alessio, her world had collapsed. Day and night had fused into a progression of endless, miserable hours. If they hadn’t kept on remorselessly shovelling food into her in the hospital she wouldn’t have survived to tell the tale. But that was not a tale she was about to tell him. Wasn’t it better that he should believe that she had cheerfully grabbed the money and run? Alessio thought she had departed with a big, brazen, gold-digging bang. Why share the news that she had been one very damp squib?
‘Daisy,’ Alessio murmured grittily.
But Daisy was still being crushed by the weight of her memories. She had even missed the silences—those volatile, terrifyingly moody silences which had driven her into doormat mode on the least said, soonest mended principle. And yet now she couldn’t shut him up, she thought in bewilderment. It was as if he had a mission to talk her to death. Couldn’t he understand that she had nothing more to say to him on the subject of remarriage? At least nothing that would not be conducive to further conflict…and Daisy did not like conflict, unless she already had an escape route worked out.
‘That’s it!’ Alessio enunciated with grim emphasis.
Daisy flinched as he thrust back his chair and sprang upright. ‘Can I go back to work now?’ she asked in a small and not very hopeful voice.
Alessio spread his lean brown hands wide in a frustrated arc. His smouldering golden gaze sizzled across the room and landed on her quailing figure like forked lightning. ‘No, you may not go back to work!’
‘There’s no need to shout—’
‘It’s shout or strangle you!’
Daisy stood up. ‘I was listening.’
‘How much did you take in?’
‘Were you expecting me to take notes?’ Daisy demanded defensively.
In the act of leaving the room, Alessio stopped dead, his broad shoulders rigid. The atmosphere was electric.
‘Hang on every word the way I used to?’ Daisy continued with unconcealed rancour.
‘Even then your mind wandered places I could never follow,’ Alessio acknowledged gruffly without turning his head. ‘We are very different people.’
For some peculiar reason that reminder distressed her, yet it was an undeniable truth. Alessio was an extrovert, but he didn’t show his emotions—not the private ones anyway—and he was always in control. Daisy was an introvert, but love had smashed her barriers and she had poured out on Alessio all the fierce emotion and affection that no one else had ever wanted from her. She had been dangerously out of control. Afterwards, she had promised herself that she would never bare herself to another human being like that again. And, with the single exception of her daughter, she had kept that promise.
‘Yes…’ she acknowledged unevenly, and just in case he might be thinking of that humiliating inequality she added, ‘You’re organised and practical and sensible. You don’t lose things or forget things or… or fall over or off things.’ Sucking in a shaky breath, Daisy pinned her lips shut with an effort, her eyes suddenly smarting with tears. At seventeen she had been dumb enough to think that those differences meant that they complemented each other.
‘Exasperatingly efficient but with not much in the way of imagination?’ Alessio queried silkily. ‘Possibly I am about to surprise you.’
‘Surprise me?’ Daisy questioned.
He swung back another door and stood back for her to precede him. Her fine brows knit as she walked through and glanced round a room obviously used as an office. She cleared her throat uncertainly. ‘Why have you brought me in here?’
His strong dark face hardened. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this, Daisy.’
Goose-flesh prickled at the sensitive nape of her neck. ‘Do what?’
‘It was not my intention to use undue pressure.’
‘Undue pressure?’ Daisy queried slightly shrilly, already calculating the distance she was from the door, her fertile imagination running riot.
‘I have employed every means of rational persuasion within my power.’
‘Tara…’ Daisy sighed limply.
Alessio lifted a thick document from the desk and held it out to her.
Daisy tensed even more. ‘What’s that?’
‘A deed of purchase for Elite Estates. I have bought the agency.’
The taut silence thrummed in her eardrums.
Her brow slowly furrowed. ‘That’s not possible. Old Mr Dickson would never sell. It was his first business, and he may not take much of a direct interest these days but—’
‘The agency is not very profitable given the current state of the property market,’ Alessio returned levelly. ‘Lewis Dickson couldn’t dose with my offer fast enough.’
‘But what would you want with a London estate company?’ Daisy looked at him in perplexity. ‘You couldn’t have bought the agency!’ she argued with sudden conviction. ‘Giles would have known if there was anything like that in the wind.’
‘Carter is only an employee.’
‘But he manages Elite Estates—’
‘That does not grant him automatic access to his employer’s decisions, and discretion was part of the deal.’
Alessio had bought the agency? Daisy studied the document, intricate legal terms blurring beneath her searching gaze until she finally picked out sentences that had a frightening ring of reality. ‘I just don’t understand why…’ she muttered in a daze.
‘I could make a very tidy profit on the deal. The agency is sitting on a prime site with a great deal of expensive space wasted on that car park. It’s ripe for redevelopment.’
‘Redevelopment?’ Daisy repeated sickly. ‘Are you talking about closing the age
ncy down?’
Glittering eyes rested intently on her. ‘That’s up to you.’
‘Me?’ Daisy gasped. ‘What’ s it got to do with me?’
‘The fate of your former colleagues is in your hands,’ Alessio delivered softly. ‘If you marry me, the agency will continue to do business. If you don’t marry me, I will be consoled by a large profit but the agency will cease trading.’
A brittle laugh of disbelief was tom from Daisy. ‘You’re not serious!’
‘Never before has so much ridden on the back of one little deal,’ Alessio responded with complete cool.
‘But…but you wouldn’t do that sort of thing…make it personal like that,’ Daisy reasoned unsteadily. ‘That would be unethical.’
Alessio’s eyes met her expectant gaze in a head-on collision. ‘Blackmail is unethical.’
Daisy tried and failed to swallow at that unashamed acknowledgement. ‘You’re saying that if I don’t marry you you’ll put people out of work and it will be my fault. Why…why do you think that will influence me?’
Alessio’s gaze wandered over her, taking in her stark white face, the horror in her expressive eyes, and the hold she had on the desk to stay upright. His lush dark lashes lowered and his shapely mouth quirked. ‘I know you.’
‘You don’t know me. If you’re the new owner of Elite Estates, it’s got nothing to do with me!’ Casting aside the document, Daisy turned her back on him, her stomach twisting. She was reeling with shock but struggling desperately hard to hide it
‘Daisy, you couldn’t sleep knowing that you were responsible for one person losing their job.’
Daisy flinched from that confident assurance, inwardly counting up the ten other people who formed the agency staff. In recent times, many estate agencies had cut back on employees. It would be very difficult, if not impossible for some of her colleagues to find work elsewhere. Four of the men had families to support. One woman was a single parent like herself, another had a husband who had recently lost his own job. The sudden loss of their pay cheques and their security would devastate all their lives.
‘Daisy…you feed stray animals. You weep over soppy movies. You worry that plants feel pain,’ Alessio enumerated softly. ‘That bleeding-heart sensitivity may not have extended to me thirteen years ago but you are definitely not one of the world’s most ruthless women.’
‘I hate you,’ Daisy mumbled strickenly, her slight shoulders rigid with strain.
‘You hate spiders…but have you ever stepped on one?’
‘Don’t be snide.’
‘I was being realistic on your behalf.’
‘I am a very realistic person but I never, ever thought that you would do anything like this,’ Daisy confessed chokily. ‘I always thought that aside from all the flaws you couldn’t help or were just born with…well, that you did at least try to be a basically decent human being… and even if you weren’t very good at it at least the trying had to count for something. To find out that you’re not even trying any more… Well, words just fail me…’
They appeared to fail Alessio as well because the silence stretched and thrummed for enervating and endless seconds. Then a strangled little hiss of air escaped him and all of a sudden he went off into a bout of coughing.
‘I hope you choke,’ Daisy said thinly while she toyed wildly with the idea of telling Tara about his threat. Her daughter would be appalled. Didn’t Alessio appreciate that? If Daisy talked, Tara’s trust in her father would be destroyed. But such an act would damage and hurt her daughter most of all, wouldn’t it? Tara had so many hopes and expectations already centred on Alessio. Acknowledging defeat, Daisy sagged like a beaten but bitterly resentful rag doll down into an armchair.
‘You’ve won…’
Alessio swung back to her.
‘I’ll marry you,’ she whispered jerkily. ‘But I want you to know that you are making a very big mistake.’
Alessio was very still, not a muscle moving in his darkly handsome face. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘We will be utterly miserable together,’ Daisy forecast.
‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
‘Tara will be miserable too,’ Daisy stressed.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’
‘She just won’t believe that we’re getting married again this fast.’
‘No?’ Alessio queried silkily. ‘I wonder who it was who first filled her head with all that stuff about Romeo and Juliet?’
Daisy flinched and looked hunted.
‘Because, oddly enough, she’s a very practical girl,’ Alessio continued smoothly. ‘I wouldn’t have said that she had a natural bent for throbbing melodrama. None of my family have. In fact the only person I have ever known who could turn a broken cup into a stirring six-act tragedy is—’
‘So we’re getting married on Saturday, are we?’ Daisy broke in feverishly fast.
‘But we’ll still be lagging a long way behind the example set by Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers.’ Alessio contrived to look simultaneously soulful and sardonic. ‘They got hitched within twenty-four hours.’
Two spots of scarlet now burned over Daisy’s cheekbones. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read Romeo and Juliet,’ she said, crossing two sets of fingers the way she always did when she lied.
‘I’m reading it line by line. So far, it has been a most enlightening experience.’
Daisy’s soft mouth compressed and she tilted her chin. ‘This will be a marriage of convenience, right?’ she prompted snappishly.
‘Mutual convenience,’ Alessio agreed silkily. ‘What else?’
CHAPTER SIX
JANET and Tara chattered cheerfully the whole way to the register office. It was just as well. Daisy was not in a chatty mood. Her wedding day. Her second wedding day. She tried hard to concentrate on positive thoughts. She was not in love with Alessio, nor did she have any illusions about this marriage. Alessio had made no attempt to pretend that it would be anything more than a convenient arrangement for Tara’s benefit.
And Tara was ecstatic, Daisy reminded herself. Indeed her daughter had decided that her father was madly romantic and impetuous and that her mother was one incredibly lucky woman. But then Tara had been so absorbed in the end of the school term, packing for her French trip and contemplating the new life awaiting her in Italy on her return that she was currently suffering from a severe case of over-excitement.
Janet had remarked that Daisy had never been remarkable for her caution in Alessio’s radius. As a thought for the day, it had not been inspiring. And when her aunt had had the insensitivity to point out that, after all, she had always had this thing about Alessio and that it would be pointless to interfere when the two of them had always acted crazy around each other Daisy had almost choked on her sense of injustice.
This time around, she had withstood Alessio with the heroic self-denial of a chocaholic on a strict diet. When he had asked her to marry him again, it had been like a shot of aversion therapy. No blissful dream of drifting down the aisle to the tune of a heavenly chorus had afflicted her. She had felt ill, hadn’t she? She had not been tempted. But Alessio had employed blackmail. Alessio had defeated her only with cold-blooded threats and intimidation.
And Daisy had been truly shattered by that development. Now she asked herself why. All that inquisitive reading of the financial papers over the years had taught Daisy that Alessio was not a pussy-cat in the business world. Indeed, he was downright ruthless. In the world of international finance, the name of Leopardi was feared as much as it was respected. But the idealistic teenager whom Daisy remembered would never have sunk to using such brutal tactics in a personal relationship.
But then there was no personal relationship between them, Daisy acknowledged painfully. Before Alessio had learnt that she had his daughter, he had made it very clear that he wanted nothing more to do with his exwife. The sofa encounter had just been the knee-jerk response of an innately sexual predator. It had mean
t nothing. In fact, Alessio had been eager to believe that she was in his office to scrounge money, because he would have happily paid her to go away and lose herself again! So how could she feel anything but bitter and humiliated at the prospect of becoming his wife a second time?
‘You’re awfully quiet, Mum,’ Tara finally observed as Daisy clambered shakily out of the limousine which Alessio had sent to pick the three of them up.
‘Wedding-day nerves,’ Janet commented lightly.
Tara frowned at her mother. ‘I wish you hadn’t worn that black suit.’
‘It’s smart,’ Daisy muttered.
‘But you look like a pencil going to a funeral.’
A pencil, Daisy reflected wretchedly. She had barely eaten and slept for a week now and it showed. Alessio strolled towards them and her haunted eyes trailed over him in wondering disbelief. He exuded vibrant energy in surplus waves, his eyes diamond-bright, a brilliant smile curving his relaxed mouth. In an exquisitely tailored cream suit that accentuated his golden skin and black hair, he looked as if he had strayed off a Hollywood movie set. Daisy averted her attention again, menaced by the strength and resilience of the enemy.
‘As you can see, Mum is just overwhelmed,’ Tara burbled. ‘It’s nerves…not cold feet or anything like that!’
‘So you didn’t try to make a last-minute break for it through the bathroom window?’ Alessio murmured softly to Daisy.
Daisy sidled off one foot onto the other because, oddly enough, there had been an insane moment when Tara had been hammering on the door and telling her that the limo had arrived when she had considered using the fire escape. Alessio curved what felt like an imprisoning arm of steel round her slender back. Daisy went rigid. The scent of him so close flared her nostrils. Clean and warm and very male but, worst of all, agonisingly familiar. Her senses remembered him. In a pitch-dark room, she could have picked Alessio out of a hundred men. The knowledge absolutely terrified her.
* * *
The marriage ceremony was brief. A tide of sick dizziness ran over her as a slender platinum wedding ring was threaded over her knuckle.