The curtains fell on the past, plunging her back to the present. She reflected sadly that that was where her proud pretence had begun. The very first day. She had refused to let Vito see her confusion and vulnerability. All she had wanted to do was escape. She had been furious with herself, furious with him but she had also known that what had happened to them both the previous night had been mutual, something incredibly powerful and special that she just couldn’t bear to walk away from, something she had honestly never dreamt she could feel with any man. But to be frank, she allowed reluctantly, those feelings had frightened the hell out of her.
‘Are you ready?’
She stood up slowly; desperate uncertainty and self-consciousness etched into her every movement. Tall, dark and extravagantly gorgeous in a dinner jacket, Vito audibly caught his breath. ‘You look like a pre Raphaelite painting.’
‘And I feel like a bimbo.’
His sensual mouth twisted wryly. ‘I wouldn’t worry.
The minute you open your mouth, any resemblance vanishes.’
In the car, she said, ‘Your family won’t accept me. Four years ago, they thought I was just some cheap little waitress you were slumming with!’
His gaze whipped over sharply. ‘Exactly how do you know that they might think of you like that?’
In the heat of the moment she had been incautious but she was not prepared to tell him about his mother’s visit. That would be too, too degrading. Not that Elena di Cavalieri had been rude or crude. Vito’s mother had been far too much of a lady to behave like that. No, what had hurt the most had been Elena’s visible desperation as she sought to persuade Ashley that she would ruin Vito’s life if she married him. In fact, Elena had come pitifully close to begging. It might almost have been funny if it hadn’t been so horribly humiliating.
‘Ashley, I asked you a question.’
‘I guessed how your family would think about me.’ His dark eyes were nailed to her shuttered face. ‘And did that influence your response to my proposal of marriage?’
Proposal? She held on to a howl of contemptuous laughter at that so flattering euphemism. Other women got soft lights and flowers. What had she got? Vito had not got down on bended knee or anything like that. She didn’t quite recall how he had opened the subject, but she did recall being blistered with the reminder that she had been sharing his bed for five months and that she was damned lucky he didn’t value her quite as cheaply as she valued herself. Her morals were not his, he had asserted. Women willing to share his bed were two a penny. What he wanted was a wife and future mother of his children.
‘Ashley,’ he prompted tautly. ‘It didn’t influence me. I didn’t want to marry you.’ But Ashley was grimly aware that that was not quite the whole truth. Two days after finding out about the baby, she had phoned Vito in Italy. Giulia had taken the call and she had told Ashley with audible embarrassment that Vito was in the middle of his engagement party and did she still want to speak to him? Ashley had replaced the receiver without replying, so shocked and incredulous that she hadn’t been able to think of a single face-saving thing to say. It was absolutely impossible to guess now what might have happened between them had Vito not turned with such indecent haste to another woman.
‘But this time you will marry me.’ Vito’s bone structure stood out starkly beneath his golden skin. His eyes splintered into hers in raw challenge. ‘And very possibly you won’t be so smug and self-satisfied when that marriage comes to an end.’
‘I’m not smug about it!’ Ashley argued with real vehemence.
Vito slung her a simmering glance of complete contempt. ‘I’m going to chip you out of that aggressive little shell you live in, piece by piece. I’m going to strip off every layer you hide behind until there’s nowhere left to run!’
‘If you do that I’ll hate you even more than I do now!’ Dry-mouthed, Ashley stared back at him, paralysed by the terrifying amount of threat he could emanate. ‘So what have I got to lose?’ he gritted.
They dined at Nico at Ninety on Park Lane. A powerful ripple of interest, both discreet and otherwise, accompanied their entrance. Her pale skin flaming, Ashley dug her head into her menu and was confronted by a view of her own cleavage that made her feel even more hatefully self-conscious. She ordered her own meal. Vito didn’t bat an eyelash. The veal braised in Madeira melted in her mouth and her tension began to mellow, her shoulders to straighten. As she rested back in her chair to sip at her wine, she thrust the heavy fall of her hair irritably back behind one small ear, exposing the slender length of her neck.
‘Some day I shall have it all cut off,’ she said, absently expecting him to argue at the very idea and inwardly acknowledging that her hair was her one claim to vanity. But silence greeted her and she tilted her head back to look at him. Vito was staring fixedly at her, and what she saw in his hard features shocked her rigid. Eyes as cold and treacherous as black ice were nailed to her. Perspiration broke out on her brow. ‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
Vito tossed his napkin down beside the plate he had thrust away, his meal apparently abandoned. ‘I believe it’s time we returned to a subject I allowed you to ignore earlier,’ he breathed very, very quietly. ‘Where were you today?’
She frowned in bewilderment. ‘I spent the day with Tim. He’s leaving London to go home and swot for his exams.’
The flash of pure naked rage that illuminated Vito’s dark gaze to piercing brilliance made her flinch. For a split-second she honestly believed that if a table hadn’t separated them Vito would have clenched the brown fingers flexing on the arm of his chair round her throat instead. Her throat, yes, for, strange as it might seem, Vito was not directly meeting her eyes for longer than a second at a time. His smouldering gaze continually dropped below the level of her chin. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Even the naturally olive tone of his complexion couldn’t hide the fact that he was literally white with the kind of rage that visibly threatened even his intimidating self-discipline. ‘You’re lying,’ he murmured with raw menace. ‘This morning, when I found your cases in the apartment, I telephoned your sister to see if you were with her. She told me that your brother had caught the train home a few hours earlier.’
Ashley instantly understood that Tim had told a white lie to her sister sooner than risk offending Susan with the news that he intended to spend his last day with Ashley, rather than her. ‘He only pretended to be catching an early train. We spent the day together and-‘
Vito elevated an ebony brow. ‘Then no doubt he gave you that bite on your neck,’ he incised in a bitterly derisive undertone.
‘Bite?’ she repeated, her hand flying up to her throat instinctively to feel the small tender spot just below her right ear. Was there a bruise there? Dimly she recalled stretching unwarily across an opened suitcase to pull something out from behind the lid. The protruding lock had caught her a painful blow which she had massaged and as quickly forgotten while she got on with her packing.
‘You little slut…’ Vito slashed back at her in a murderous undertone that chilled her blood in her veins and sent her heartbeat thudding in a race to the foot of her constricting throat. ‘You filthy little slut. You spent the day being bedded by your lover.’
‘Th-that’s a lie,’ Ashley stammered, so shattered by his unjust and ridiculous accusation that she could think of nothing more original to say in the confining spaces of a public place.
‘And if I hadn’t seen the evidence, I’d never have known,’ Vito growled, lashing himself into a fury made all the more powerful by the suffocating constraints of their situation. He signalled for the bill. Dousing the waiter’s anxiety that there had been something wrong with the meal, he waved him away again, to her disbelief. ‘We’ll finish our wine,’ he said between gritted even white teeth.