by Lynne Graham
‘Signora Leopardi…’ Alessio carried her ice-cold fingers smoothly to his lips and kissed them.
The return of that name churned up Daisy’s stomach. Tugging free of his light hold, she rubbed her trembling fingers against her skirt. Her wavering smile, kept in valiant place for Tara, died away altogether.
Alessio swept them off to an early lunch at the Ritz. He ate a hearty meal, whereas his bride couldn’t manage a single lettuce leaf. He cracked jokes with Janet and teased Tara. No, there was nothing remotely sensitive about Alessio, Daisy reflected. When Alessio triumphed, he was never tempted to a show of mock humility. No, indeed. He radiated glowing satisfaction and that burning, wolfish smile flashed out with unnerving frequency. When a Leopardi was on top, all was bliss in the Leopardi world.
Repelled by that brazen lack of remorse, Daisy escaped to the cloakroom and, finding a comfortable chair, sat there for a while with the attitude of an earthquake victim waiting for the tidal wave that would surely follow. When she finally emerged again, she was startled to find Alessio waiting outside for her.
‘I thought you might have done a runner,’ he confided with complete calm. ‘Lucky for you that you didn’t. I would have called the police—’
‘The police?’ Daisy repeated in horror.
‘When your sense of tragedy overpowers you, you are very likely to fall under a bus. Dio, in the state you’re in right now, it would be like letting a rampaging toddler loose in rush-hour traffic!’ Alessio said with rueful amusement. ‘I have known people who have faced death with greater fortitude than you faced our wedding with today, but it has been a memorable experience for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I have been entranced from the minute you tottered into the register office in unrelieved black. Every lachrymose sigh, every sensitive shudder has held me mesmerised.’
Hot pink invading her extreme pallor, Daisy straightened her slight shoulders. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Oh, don’t stop drooping,’ Alessio pleaded, studying her with dancing golden eyes. ‘It makes me feel so wonderfully medieval and macho.’
‘I was not drooping!’ Daisy hit out in outrage.
‘And you look so incredibly feminine and fragile when you do it, I get this really erotic buzz,’ Alessio drawled with thickened emphasis, his golden eyes flashing over her with a sudden, startling smoulder of raw sexual appreciation.
Shocked to the core by the unexpectedness of that assertion, Daisy connected with that explicit look and jerked as if she had been struck by lightning. Instantaneous heat surged up inside her, making her slender thighs clench. Suddenly it was alarmingly difficult to breathe and her heart was pounding insanely fast. Horrified, she dropped her head, breaking that dangerous visual contact while she struggled to still her racing pulses and conceal the response he had so effortlessly evoked.
“That remark was inappropriate,’ Daisy managed to say in what she hoped was a lofty tone of disapproval. ‘This is a marriage of convenience.’
‘Convenience.’ The repetition deep and audibly appreciative, Alessio caught her hand smoothly in his to lead her in the direction of Tara and Janet, who stood across the foyer. ‘How do you define convenience, or haven’t you got around to that yet?’
‘Separate bedrooms,’ Daisy said in breathless clarification. ‘I should think that was obvious.’
‘Barry was so sweet last night,’ Tara was proclaiming loudly as they drew level. ‘I felt really sorry for him. He even brought Mum flowers.’
Alessio stilled. ‘Barry?’
Spinning around, Tara flushed and threw her father a startled look.
Daisy stiffened. ‘He called in to see me…and wish me well.’
Out of her daughter’s hearing, Barry had congratulated Daisy on being such a fast mover and had then implied that she owed him a favour for her good fortune as Alessio had, after all, been his client. ‘Maybe you would like to marry him instead,’ Daisy had said. Barry had roared with laughter and soon revealed the true motivation behind his visit. That very morning, Giles had told Barry that Alessio now owned Elite Estates. Barry, very much in barracuda guise, had called round to remind Daisy that she had always thought Giles Carter was a sexist pig. He had gone on to suggest that young, aggressive blood in management would bear much more profitable fruit.
They dropped Tara off with her luggage at the school. She hurtled onto the waiting coach to join her friends and waved frantically through the back window.
‘She’s scared that one kid on that coach will fail to see the limousine,’ Daisy groaned in embarrassment.
‘She’s happy,’ Alessio countered. ‘That’s all that matters.’
A few minutes later, the limo drew up outside Janet’s house. Her aunt smiled widely at them both, her eyes brimming with wry amusement, her indifference to the tense atmosphere profound. ‘Have a wonderful honeymoon!’ she urged with immovable good cheer.
‘What honeymoon?’ Daisy bleated as the door thudded shut.
‘We’re flying straight to Italy,’ Alessio informed her. ‘Janet packed a few things for you.’
‘What do we need with a honeymoon?’
‘I think we need one very, very badly.’
‘I thought I would be moving into your apartment until Tara got back—’
‘But you hadn’t packed for that eventuality either, had you?’ Alessio murmured drily.
The uncomfortable silence lasted all the way to the airport and onto the Leopardi private jet. After takeoff, the steward served them with champagne and offered them the flight crew’s best wishes.
‘Have you told, your family about this yet?’ Daisy asked Alessio abruptly.
‘Of course.’
‘I suppose it hit them harder than a crisis on Wall Street.’
‘They would have liked to have attended the wedding.’
Daisy turned as pale as death and helped herself to some more champagne with an unsteady hand. ‘And I thought the day couldn’t have got any worse…’
“There would have been no recriminations,’ Alessio asserted.
Daisy sat forward, dragged from her lethargy by a horrible thought. ‘We’re not going back to live with them, are we?’
Alessio expelled his breath in a hiss. ‘Of course not!’
Daisy sank back, weak with relief.
‘But they were extremely shocked to learn that I am the father of a teenage daughter,’ Alessio admitted tautly. ‘They feel very guilty.’
Daisy wasn’t listening. She had already switched off. One Leopardi at a time was enough for her to deal with. ‘This has been the very worst week of my life,’ she complained, looking back on a mindless blur of sleepless nights, abandoned meals and thumping tension headaches.
‘Last Saturday, I met you again. It destroyed my weekend,’ Alessio volunteered with velvet-smooth emphasis. ‘On Monday, you told me I was a father. I spent the night walking the floor. Tuesday was dominated by an almost overwhelming desire to seek you out and strangle you. I consoled myself by buying the estate agency. Wednesday, I met my daughter. I cooled down and started to laugh again. Thursday, I had to play games of entrapment. Friday, I prayed that Tara would prevent you from buying a one-way ticket to somewhere like the Bermuda Triangle. But today we got married and the games are over. I can now finally relax.’
Outraged by that assessment, Daisy studied his darkly handsome face and long, lithe, undeniably indolent sprawl. ‘How can you call what you did to me a game? You blackmailed me!’
Alessio surveyed her, his bright gaze a sliver of gleaming gold below luxuriant ebony lashes. ‘Stress is not for you, piccola mia. I thrive on it. You don’t. If I hadn’t gone for the special licence and the blackmail you might well have starved yourself into a lasting decline before I got you to the altar. You’ve already lost a lot of weight.’ His lean features were surprisingly taut.
The complete exhaustion which Daisy had been fighting off all week was relentlessly gaining on her. It was becoming an effort to think straight. An eno
rmous yawn crept up on her while she wondered why he was going on about her weight.
‘And let me assure you that you will not be staging a continuing decline under any roof of mine. The next meal that is put in front of you you will eat,’ Alessio spelt out as he sprang lithely upright. ‘Now I think you should get some rest.’
Daisy regarded the ring on her finger with a heart that sank, and then looked up. ‘You’re trying to manage me. I don’t like being managed. I don’t like being married either,’ she added helplessly.
‘We have only been married for five hours.’ A slow, teasing smile curved Alessio’s sensual mouth as he gazed down at her.
It was the most genuine smile that Alessio had given her over the past week but Daisy was even more chilled by the charismatic approach. Tara smiled just the same way when she was after something—usually something that cost two arms and a leg. ‘Five hours feels like long enough.’
‘When a challenge comes knocking on the front door, you’re already halfway out the back, aren’t you? You’re faster on your feet than a greyhound!’ Alessio censured her grimly as he bent down and without the smallest warning scooped her bodily out of her seat. ‘You’ve done that from the first night we met, right through our marriage and out of it again, and you were still doing it this week when you bolted from the bank. But there’ll be no escape this time, I assure you.’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she gasped, unnerved by his behaviour.
‘What I should have done an hour ago. You’re suffering from sleep deprivation.’ Alessio laid her down on the bed in the cabin. ‘Trying to talk to you now is like trying to talk to a drunk. I am getting nowhere fast. And it’s all my own fault. Mea culpa. I employed every device I could to nail you. I leant on your conscience. I crowded you. Your weaknesses were my strengths. I admit it. Does that make you feel better?’
Dumbstruck, Daisy stared up at him.
Alessio sank down on the edge of the mattress and calmly took off her shoes. ‘One bad week and we’re married. What’s one bad week?’
‘It was fourteen the last time… hell on earth—’
‘It was not hell on earth. Dio, give me strength!’ Alessio growled, searing her with exasperated eyes. ‘So we had a few problems…OK? But it wasn’t all my fault. You changed. All of a sudden you were creeping about like Little Orphan Annie, looking all wounded and pathetic.’
‘You stopped talking to me.’
‘I wasn’t talking to anyone.
‘You could have talked to me.’
‘You couldn’t have handled it. You were blissfully oblivious to the fact that life as I knew it had gone down the tubes.’ A wry smile twisted his well-shaped mouth and then faded again. ‘Superficial things that shouldn’t have mattered to me did matter then. My friends thought it was hilarious when you ended up pregnant. In fact, they thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Alessio had finally got caught.’
Daisy winced and paled. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘And anything but marriage would have been cool in my circle. I wasn’t very good at laughing at myself at nineteen. One day I was a social lion, the next a hermit… and then on top of that I had Vittorio trying to act the heavy father for the first time at the wrong time… you weeping over me, my mother weeping over me, Bianca weeping over me. You’re right,’ Alessio suddenly breathed, with the faintly dazed air of one making a long-unacknowledged admission. ‘It was sheer bloody hell.’
Daisy flipped over and looked at the wall. Her eyes stung, her mouth quivered. He was finally agreeing that their first marriage had been a nightmare. She felt astonishingly ungrateful for that agreement. Why was it that she should now recall odd little moments when the sheer hell seemed worth it? She was being very perverse. And at seventeen she must have been appallingly self-centred not to appreciate that Alessio might be suffering just as much as she was, if not more…
As she lay there, Daisy saw the past slowly rearrange itself along less familiar but perhaps more realistic lines, and it was not a pleasant experience. Alessio might have changed towards her but hadn’t she also changed towards him? The sunny romantic he had shared that summer with had turned into a weepy wet blanket. She had been a complete pain. Wasn’t it time she admitted that? Out of her own emotional depth and feeling painfully insecure, she had needed the kind of constant reassurance that no teenage boy would have been capable of giving her.
Alessio had not been deliberately punishing her. He had been getting by the only way he could. He had even tried to protect her by keeping quiet about his own problems. His friends laughing at him… Daisy shrank from that image, remembering with aching clarity just how proud Alessio had been then. It must have taken real guts to marry her in the face of that cruel adolescent mockery. His friends would have been far more impressed if he had given her the money for a termination and put her on the next flight back to London. She swallowed back the thickness ballooning in her throat.
And if Alessio had blamed her for just about everything that had gone wrong between them, hadn’t she been guilty of doing the exact same thing to him? When had she ever looked back and acknowledged that she had made mistakes too? She had dug her head into the sand and hoped and prayed that their problems would magically melt away. Paralysed by the fear that she was losing him, she had done nothing constructive either, she reflected with growing discomfiture.
‘Alessio…?’ Daisy whispered thickly, and then, frowning, she turned her head.
But Alessio had already gone, leaving her alone. Just as quickly the past lost the power to hold her. It was the present which was tearing her apart. Alessio could freely admit to having forced her back into marriage and yet his conscience remained clear. In his view, she had committed a far greater sin in denying him all knowledge of his child. And as Tara’s mother she was merely a useful adjunct to Alessio’s desire to have full custody of his daughter. As a woman, as a wife, she didn’t count.
With that depressing thought, Daisy fell asleep.
* * *
A hand on her shoulder shook her half-awake. Daisy focused blearily on the photo album lodged mere inches in front of her face.
‘Who is that?’ Alessio enquired, a lean finger indicating the male standing beside her and a three-year-old Tara in one of the photos.
Daisy made an effort to concentrate. ‘That was George—’
‘And this character?’ Alessio flipped over a page.
Daisy focused uncertainly on another male face. ‘Daniel… I think.’
Another page turned. A giant yawn crept up on her as she peered at the handsome blond man whom Alessio was now indicating. She looked blank. ‘I don’t remember him—’
‘You don’t remember him? I’m not surprised!’ Alessio blistered down at her, making her jump in shock. ‘Tara gave me six albums. Every one of them is full of strange men! You could run an international dating agency out of the male contingent in your photographs!’
Daisy gazed up at him with wide, drowsy eyes filled with incomprehension.
‘Tara told me that you didn’t date, that you hardly ever went out…’
Daisy’s sleepy eyes opened even wider. She was shocked that her daughter could have told such a whopper. She had always enjoyed a reasonably healthy social life.
With a not quite steady hand, Alessio snapped the offending album shut. ‘I suspected a certain amount of exaggeration on that point.’ Scorching golden eyes raked her small, sleep-flushed face accusingly. ‘But I had no idea what she was covering up! What about the toy boy?’
‘Toy boy?’ Daisy repeated dazedly, hanging on every explosive word that emerged from between his bloodless, compressed lips.
‘He was the latest, wasn’t he?’ Alessio surveyed her with sudden, icy derision, anger reined in as his expressive mouth clenched as hard as a vice. ‘Dio … you’ve been sleeping around ever since you divorced me!’
As the door slammed on his exit, Daisy’s jaw dropped. Sleeping around? Was he crazy? Sex
had just about wrecked her life at seventeen and she had learnt that lesson well. Casual intimacy was not for her. She might have had no shortage of male company over the years but she had never fallen in love again—hadn’t wanted to either, she acknowledged honestly—and it had always seemed easier to end relationships when they’d demanded more than she’d been prepared to give.
Janet, she reflected drowsily, might say that she had a fear of commitment that amounted to paranoia, but she herself thought that she had been very sensible. No man had caused her grief in thirteen years. She was proud of that record and not at all proud of the fact that she had been a mass of painful and grieving nerve-endings from the instant that Alessio had come back into her life.
* * *
Daisy shifted in voluptuous relaxation. The bed was very comfortable. Memory slowly stirred. A slight frown-line divided her brows. She had the oddest recollection of a meal being thrust under her nose when being forced to stay awake had felt like the cruellest torture. She had pleaded for the mercy of a bed.
And had Alessio really said, ‘If you don’t eat, you don’t sleep,’ and cut up a steak into tiny, bite-sized pieces while her head had sunk back down on the supporting heel of her hand and her eyelids had kept on closing no matter how hard she tried to keep them open? He had been so damnably domineering, but the chocolate gateau which had come next had melted in her mouth and for the first time in a week her stomach had felt settled instead of queasily empty.
They were in Italy… and Alessio was smouldering again but, unhappily, not in silence, she thought as she recalled that scene with the photo album. At nineteen, Alessio had told her that a boy who slept around was only gaining necessary masculine experience but that a girl who slept around was a tart. That might not be fair but that was life, he had informed her cheerfully. But Alessio could not find it within himself to be quite so cheerful now about the idea that he might have married a tart.
Daisy might have told the reassuring truth had she been asked, but she hadn’t been asked. Alessio was not prone to demanding direct answers on sensitive subjects. He was naturally devious. Being sneaky had put him into the hands of his equally sneaky daughter. Tara, bless her scheming and shrewd little Leopardi brain, had worked out exactly what her father wanted to hear and had given it to him in spades. Daisy felt no pity for Alessio. Her sex life…or indeed her lack of a sex life…was none of his business.