Shifting on the hard mattress, Ashley slid back to the painful present. She got up after eight. Vito would know that she was gone by now. Dully she wondered where she had imagined she could run. Not only did she have a duty to ensure that Kumar didn’t suffer for her foolish flight in the middle of the night, she also had the lowering awareness that, even had she made it to Colombo she would have been leaving Sri Lanka with a great bleeding wound where her heart had once been. Her heart didn’t just beat a little faster when Vito was around. It jumped up and down and did acrobatics. As her host showed her to a rickety table overlooking the tumbling waterfall at the rear of the property, she was again blinking back the tears she so despised.
Around dawn it had hit her, the truth she had fought so hard to deny. A huge blinding flash of unwelcome enlightenment. There had been so much pain since he came back into her life that she had floundered in bewilderment and a near constant emotional overload. She loved Vito. Only love could give him the power to hurt her this much. Had she ever really hated him? Right now, she didn’t know. She was too devastated to think of anything beyond the fact that loving him, the way he felt about her now, was a death sentence.
A faint sound made her head fly up from the menu she was studying. She froze. Vito was standing on the bleached boards of the sagging veranda. He was unnaturally still, his pallor pronounced. One brown hand was fiercely clenched in the cream jacket he had discarded. A white shirt was carelessly open at his throat, his thick black hair damp and tousled, and a most uncharacteristic black shadow of stubble marked his tense jaw line. Slowly he swallowed, incredibly intent dark eyes clinging to her startled face. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he breathed roughly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VITO tossed back a large glass of arrack brought by their bustling host before he spoke again. The fiery liquid seemed to revive him. The harsh lines of strain engraved between his nose and mouth smoothed out. The natural colour gradually returned to reanimate his dark, taut features.
‘Priya woke me up to tell me that a car carrying a European woman had gone off the road last night. Then she informed me that you were gone-‘
Ashley paled. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘When I saw the car, I knew nobody could have come out of that alive.’ He continued to stare at her as if he still couldn’t quite accept the evidence of his own eyes. ‘I came in here to find out if they knew where… where you had been taken-‘ His uneven tone cut off harshly.
‘Kumar and I got out before the car went off the road.
He forgot to put the handbrake on.’ An uneasy laugh bubbled in her throat but she didn’t let it escape. ‘The accident wasn’t his fault.’
‘Like hell it wasn’t!’ Vito ground out. ‘He has no driving licence. He could have killed you!’
‘He can’t drive?’ Ashley was shattered and then she thought back to the previous night’s conversation. Kumar had offered to get Bandu and she had asked him to take her instead. He had been both flattered and excited by the request. ‘That didn’t occur to me. I was very pushy,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I insisted that he take me. You can’t blame him. He was only trying to please me.’
Vito contrived to look both unconvinced and uninterested at one and the same time. ‘I’ll leave him to Priya. He’s her nephew. And she’s a holy terror when she’s roused.’
‘He won’t lose his job?’ she persisted.
‘You’re alive. I’m in a forgiving mood.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Are you? When my brother was at fault, you were ready to send him to prison.’ ‘Kumar doesn’t have a sister I wish to marry,’ Vito quipped humourlessly. ‘I shall choose to forgive instead.’
‘You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here-‘
He signalled their hovering host. ‘I was depending on you to make our wedding night a little out of the ordinary,’ he incised in a smooth aside. ‘Let’s have breakfast. You haven’t lived until you’ve sampled hoppers.’
The cup-shaped pancakes made from a batter of rice flour, palm toddy and coconut milk came with a variety of delicious fillings. Ashley was surprised to realise that she was really hungry. They finished up with guava and passion fruit and beautifully fragrant tea.
Vito’s silence troubled her. After all that had happened, the last thing she had expected him to do was sit down and eat a good meal. Awkwardly she cleared her throat. ‘I expect you think I’m really a cheat now. We had an agreement-‘
‘But I haven’t been fulfilling my part of it,’ he cut in flatly.
‘It’s been an emotional time for us both,’ she muttered unhappily.
‘But I haven’t been making it any easier. I had no right to pry into your past last night and no excuse to taunt you.’ He surveyed her with grave, measured emphasis but a betraying tautness edged his sensual mouth, revealing that he didn’t find it easy to make that admission. ‘After all, I’m no celibate myself.’
‘It was understandable.’ Suddenly, now that he was giving ground, she found herself pathetically willing to forgive. She gritted her teeth on the discovery, reminding herself of the need to be cautious. The last thing she needed right now was for Vito to guess how she felt about him. The only thing she had left was her pride.
‘I’ve had a mistress for the past eighteen months.’ The announcement paralysed her. She bit her tongue and tasted blood. Vito released his breath audibly. ‘I finished it a few months ago, but do you know what attracted me to her?’
Nausea stirred in her stomach. Vito was not of the confessing variety. She really didn’t know why he was doing this and she desperately wanted him to shut up, because she did not want to be forced to think of him making love to another woman.
‘She had hair the same shade as yours,’ he proffered in a raw offering of deep self-contempt. ‘But she wasn’t you.’
‘No. She wouldn’t have gone charging off down a mountainside in the middle of the night and crashed your car, I guess,’ she muttered tightly.
‘Nobody but you would do that,’ he pointed out in an almost gentle tone, and in a gesture that was curiously clumsy for one of his grace he narrowly missed toppling a cup as he reached for her hand.
The heat of his fingers engulfed her smaller ones and she bent her head. She wanted to tell him that she had never had another lover. She focused instead on the tumbling gush of the waterfall, shining with blinding brilliance in the bright sunlight. Not only did he not require that information from her, he would also very probably refuse to believe her, and every time he refused to believe it hurt just that little bit more deeply.
‘I’m five days late with this but I still need to say it,’ he breathed. ‘The night of the party you hit me hard with what you called the view from your side of the fence-‘
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ It was her turn to interrupt and deny him the opportunity to have her listen. The baby… that subject was too painful in the light of his disbelief.
‘Ashley… ‘
‘No!’ she said fiercely, sharply withdrawing her hand from his.
‘We have to talk about it.’
‘But I don’t want to!’ Snatching in oxygen, she rose unsteadily upright, ready to run if he persisted.
‘Maybe it’s too soon,’ he conceded with surprising generosity.
Perhaps not so surprising, she allowed when she thought about it. He had been badly shaken by the sight of that crashed car and the conviction that, if she had not been killed she was at the very least severely injured. But for how long would this greater gentleness and understanding last?
Ten days later, she stood on the heights of the ramparts of the Dambulla Cave Temples, her bare toes heated by the sun warmed ground, and conceded that Vito was making a very real effort to be well-mannered, entertaining and non-controversial. She was beginning to learn that in some ways she had not known Vito at all four years ago. That annoyed her but it was true. For a start the charm wasn’t switched on, it was entirely natural. The tension that had once underscored their every moment was gone now that all sources of possible confrontation were banned. He was far more conservative than she had ever appreciated. The way he had swept her off her feet the night they met had distorted her image of him, much as it had distorted his image of her. She could see now that in the past she might well have put Vito and his traditional values through one hell of an emotional wringer. She had gone out to well and truly shock him every time he roused her tempera pattern learned in defiance of her father. But that pattern had been highly destructive. If Vito had been guilty of a desire to dominate and control, she had been equally guilty of replying with provocation. It had only inflamed the situation.