‘Vito, please…let’s get out of here,’ she whispered. Lounging back into his chair, he emitted a humourless laugh that bounced off her raw nerve-endings like a brick shattering glass. He threw back his darkly handsome head, seething golden eyes striking hers in unconcerned challenge. ‘No,’ he said very softly. ‘You’re going to listen, and here you are at least safe. Outside, the way I feel right now, you’d be in considerable danger. I’m not sure I could keep my hands off you, because I really don’t see why I should-‘

‘Vito-‘ she pleaded, sitting still as a graven image, mesmerised by a great spreading nameless terror of she knew not what. It was the way he was looking at her. She had seen Vito angry countless times but she had never seen him as angry as this… as though he could wipe her off the face of the earth without a moment’s regret.

‘You see, I’ve been far too soft with you. I always was. This evening you accused me of trying to create my fantasy woman,’ he reminded her with a scornful twist to his grim mouth. ‘I should have laughed like a hyena. Whatever you are to me, you are not and never could be my fantasy. That would require a miracle. I didn’t intend to broach this subject now, but since you have chosen to remind me in the crudest possible way of what you are, I really can’t let this moment go past-‘

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she murmured tightly.

‘But all over again you have just proved what you are,’ Vito condemned with the ice that was already starting to close in the anger and that freezing calm was all the more deadly a weapon in his possession. ‘Four years ago you moved out of my apartment within twenty-four hours of my departure. And where did you go?’

The oxygen she needed to breathe was being squeezed out of her lungs by a giant invisible hand. He watched the last scrap of colour slide from her cheeks. ‘You didn’t go back to the room in the dingy flat, did you? The room you insisted on holding on to throughout our entire relationship. So, where did you go? You leapt straight into bed with another man-‘

‘No!’ she gasped, and as heads turned at a nearby table she bit her tongue and closed her eyes, fighting for self-control.

‘He wasn’t a man, though, was he? He was just a kid,’ Vito continued in the same murderously quiet voice that now betrayed absolutely no emotion.

‘He was just a friend,’ she whispered in anguish. ‘So you like to screw your friends as well,’ Vito flicked back with chilling brutality. ‘You moved in with him. From my bed to his bed within hours. Now how would you describe a woman who behaves like that?’

‘You’ve got it wrong-‘ she began.

‘No,’ Vito contradicted with succinct emphasis. ‘I would very much prefer to have it wrong, because the unlovely truth did nothing for my ego, but that sensation of entirely superficial hurt male pride was very swiftly to be replaced by something far more meaningful and far more powerful… ‘

He let the assurance hang there and she started to tremble, assailed by a premonition of disaster so strong that she was engulfed by it, silently waiting for the axe to fall.

‘Yes,’ Vito breathed flatly. ‘A month after you moved in with him you kept an appointment at an abortion clinic to take care of the little problem that had so inconveniently arisen. And you didn’t exactly kill that little problem with kindness, did you?’ A great sob was rising in her throat like the wail of a trapped animal in agony. She bowed her head, unable to speak. If she had opened her mouth she would have broken down and utterly disgraced herself. She was in a state of such complete shock that she couldn’t even think, and later she would not remember leaving the restaurant where Vito had chosen cruelly to rip away that last veil of privacy.

CHAPTER FIVE

ASHLEY was traumatised. She sat in the back of the limo like a zombie. Vito had hit her with the one condemnation against which she felt she had no defence. Indeed, she almost felt as though she deserved his revulsion. How he knew didn’t matter. It was simply that he did know. It seemed pointless to explain that she had moved into Steve’s flat because she had had nowhere else to go. She had sublet her room shortly before she broke up with Vito in an effort to cut down her expenses.

Steve had let her sleep on the sofa. He had been a good friend, supporting her when she’d most needed support but too young and immature even to begin to understand the complexity of a woman’s feelings when she realised that she was pregnant and she didn’t want to be. Ashley’s first reaction had been sheer terror, and when she had learnt that Vito was getting engaged to Carina she had gone to pieces. She had been petrified of what her father would do if he found out. Steve had made the first appointment for her. He had pointed out that Vito was gone, that she was on her own, and furthermore that she had never wanted children. A termination was the only practical solution, he had said. She didn’t have the money to keep a baby. How was she going to live? What sort of a life was she going to give the baby?

She had gone for counselling but it hadn’t penetrated. She had felt ill and weak and wretched and desperately alone in spite of Steve’s efforts to the contrary. And, when the day scheduled for the termination had arrived, she had gone. But ten minutes through the door her pregnancy had suddenly and for the very first time become painfully real to her. She had started to wonder whether the baby was a boy or a girl and whether it would have red hair or black hair or green eyes or dark eyes, and she had begun, slowly and agonisingly, to come apart at the seams as she finally faced up to the fact that practicality and pregnancy were two very uneasy partners.

When she had finally admitted that she just couldn’t go through with it, she had been in such an emotional state that the staff had insisted they let her contact someone to come and collect her. She had given them Susan’s telephone number because Steve had had an exam that day. And that was how she had come to tell Susan something that she would never have told her had she been more in control. She had told Susan that, no matter how hard it was, she intended to have her baby and keep it. And she had meant it, every word of it. Indeed it was that announcement which had nearly driven her father to violence. When she had miscarried she had felt as though it was some heavenly punishment, a judgement on her for not wanting her baby from the beginning. Her intelligence told her that was nonsense, but the feeling of immense guilt had somehow survived.

‘Vito…’ she muttered. ‘The subject is closed.’

‘Then why did you open it?’ Ashley was distraught, wholly at the mercy of emotion and reaction, with no space left for considered thought. His hard profile was unyielding. ‘I don’t like secrets.

I should have faced you with it the first day.’

‘I didn’t have an abortion… I miscarried,’ she whispered painfully. ‘Your one great gift used to be the ability to tell the truth no matter how unwelcome it was! Don’t insult my intelligence. ‘

‘I never slept with Steve in my life!’ Although something in the back of her mind was telling her to shut up, she just had to defend herself.

‘Figuratively speaking, you may well be telling the truth,’ Vito conceded with cutting bite. ‘You didn’t sleep very much in my bed either.’

He was inviolable, immovable, his beliefs set in stone. Yet, deprived of her usual mainstay of anger by the sheer depth of her inner pain, she still persisted. ‘I was with Tim today,’ she told him again. ‘And that bruise happened when I bent over a suitcase this morning and collided with the lock. Furthermore, I haven’t got a lover.’

‘You have sex with your partners. Love would indeed be a euphemism.’

He actually took her to the opera. She couldn’t believe that he could be that cruel but he was. And Ashley, who had always loved the opera, heard nothing but a deafening cacophony of soaring voices coming at her from all sides in their private box. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t given her protestations even a fleeting hearing. He didn’t believe her, he was never going to believe her and she had no proof to offer in her own defence. The tears coursed soundlessly down her drawn cheeks.