When Priya approached with two tiny glasses of a liqueur made from arrack, Sri Lanka’s favourite alcoholic beverage, Ashley asked, ‘But what is Kolam all about? I’m confused.’
Priya gave her a wide smile and chose to intervene on Vito’s behalf. Indicating the two most spectacular masked figures, she said, ‘This is the King and that is the Queen. She desires to have a baby, no?’ Giggling, she stepped back into the shadows.
Stupid, how stupid she was! Reddening to the roots of her hair, she belatedly read the significance of the dancers’ erotically symbolic movements. A very traditional drama for a newly married couple, she conceded. She refused to look at Vito. A brown forefinger skimmed her clenched hand where it rested on the table. ‘This wasn’t my idea,’ he reminded her. In rejection she snaked her hand back out of reach, keeping her attention glued to the dancers below although in truth she could no longer see them.
‘You’re making this a fight every step of the way.’ ‘What did you expect?’ she muttered bitterly. ‘This is not the place for an argument.’
When the performance was over, Ashley smiled until her jaw ached. Vito requested coffee in the drawing room. The evening was becoming an endurance test. ‘Is giving a little so impossible for you?’ He slung the demand with savage impatience as soon as they were alone.
‘Yes.’ She bent her head. Give a little, end up giving the lot. Vito would accept nothing less than complete surrender to his will. It would be a battle to the death. She saw no other course. She was fighting for her own emotional survival.
‘Dio! Madre di Dio!’ The sudden eruption of anger took her by complete surprise, so calm and so cool had he been over the past days. ‘What do you want from me? The past is past,’ he stressed fiercely.
‘You’re my past and you’re here!’ she shrieked back at him, losing control with a speed that shook her. ‘I can’t get away from you!’
‘I have tried so hard to be reasonable,’ Vito raked back at her. ‘You didn’t even smile for the wedding photos!’ Ashley loosed a wild laugh, seething at him from the back of a carved settee. ‘If you want a smiling bride, you certainly don’t need me!’ she condemned explosively. ‘You’ve got them all over the place in all your houses. Carina… everywhere I look! Surprise, surprise, there’s another one on that table!’
Taken aback, Vito followed her accusing finger to the source. He flashed her a glittering appraisal. ‘I’ll have them all put away. Or would a ceremonial burning be more appropriate?’
‘Meaning?’ she launched back at him furiously. ‘You’re jealous,’ he murmured very quietly, though the idea was a positive revelation to him.
Halted on the tremulous edge of another outburst, she gritted her teeth. ‘Insulted by your insensitivity,’ she contradicted. ‘But then, with your track record, that’s nothing new to me!’
Slamming out of the room, she raced up to her bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom. As she peeled off her clothes and stepped under the mercifully cooling flow of water from the shower, she wondered why, in Vito’s company, her greatest enemy was nearly always herself. She lost control, she opened her mouth too wide and that was usually that.
When she emerged from the bathroom she expected him to be in the bedroom but he wasn’t. That infuriated her. She wasn’t finished with him yet. Dragging the towel from her head, she started to ease a comb through the tangled mass of her hair. So absorbed was she in the task that she didn’t hear him enter; she suddenly saw him in the mirror. Reaching over her head, he took the comb from her suddenly nerveless hand and calmly began to employ it with a dexterity that took her back four years.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said weakly.
‘It was insensitive of me to say it out loud. I should have savoured it in silence,’ he drawled mockingly. ‘Why don’t you do us both a big favour and leave alone?’
‘But you know the answer to that.’ His reflection threw back the reckless, dangerous glitter of the smile his sensual mouth. Ashley sat there like a statue while he removed the last snarl from her hair. But as his hands cupped her shoulders to slowly draw her up from the dressing-table, she started to tremble.
‘This… us.’ He seemed to savour the words. ‘It’s inevitable.’
Under that dark spell, she had to struggle to find her voice. ‘Doesn’t have to be.’
The sash of her robe slid free and she stopped breathing. Already she could feel the anguish of her body’s anticipation. He pulled her back against him, burying his mouth hungrily in the curve of her arched throat, his hands sliding up her ribcage to find the aching fullness of her taut breasts. She moaned as expert fingers toyed with the prominent buds of her nipples, an unbearable spasm of excitement seizing hold of her. ‘Why should you be able to fight it when I can’t?’ Vito demanded roughly, a husky, masculine growl of arousal in his accented drawl as he tugged her round to take her mouth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THAT taunt powered Ashley’s revolt. With a superhuman effort she denied herself the drugging heat of his mouth and broke free. Twisting away, hating herself, she rubbed at her reddened lips as though she needed to cleanse herself of his touch. ‘But I can fight it,’ she swore, as much for her own benefit as his.
‘Why fight yourself?’ Vito murmured softly. ‘You want me. I believe that you want me more than you have ever wanted any other man. That’s why you fight me. With me… you feel threatened.’
The calm confident assurance banished the colour from her cheeks. ‘And what book of pop psychology did you dig that out of?’ she managed shakily. ‘Don’t think I don’t know why you want to think that. From your point of view it’s a very flattering interpretation.’
‘Is it?’ Mercilessly he held her eyes with his own. ‘In my life many women have wanted me, cara. To be desired is scarcely a novelty.’
Hatred flashed through her. It was the truth. He had it all. Power, wealth, charismatic attraction and the kind of banked-down smouldering sexuality that magnetised the female sex. It had never surprised her that she had fallen madly in love with Vito. But the force of those feelings had terrified her. Her fragile security had been based on a need for total control of her own life. Instinctively she had known that, given the smallest opportunity, Vito would dominate her, making her choices for her, carving her up and rearranging her into the image he wanted.
‘So what picked me out from the common herd?’ she prompted with deliberate scorn. A broad shoulder edged up in a graceful shrug. ‘Your beauty, your individuality… and the little things-‘ ‘Such as?’ Defensively she folded her arms. A faint smile softened the hard line of his mouth. ‘The way you challenge me. The way you deliberately take the opposing view to mine in every discussion whether you believe in it or not. And you make me curious. You’re like a Chinese puzzle box.’
A box he intended to open. A mystery he intended to solve. He scared her. Yes, she did feel threatened. He was already stripping away those layers he had talked about, denying her any hiding place.
Tilting his dark head back, he studied her with brilliant dark eyes. ‘Why, for example, do you always take cover behind a large piece of furniture when we’re having an argument?’
‘I don’t,’ she denied and only then realised that she was standing on the far side of the bed, about as far as she could get from him and still be in the same room.
‘You do. Once, it outraged me, but now I’m used to it. Physically you’re afraid of me and four years ago I found that incredibly insulting,’ he confided, slowly closing the distance between them again. ‘How can you be afraid of me when I have never once hurt you? Which brings me to the obvious question… who did?’ Pale as snow and trembling, Ashley let her lashes drop to conceal the ravaged turmoil suddenly brimming in her eyes. She was incapable of movement as he folded her into his powerful arms, his extreme tension lost on her for she was far too absorbed in her own. ‘Because if I ever get my hands on him,’ Vito grated in a savage undertone, ‘I’ll kill him.’