‘You wouldn’t have given me a second chance if I’d asked for one. You hated me,’ he intoned, pale and taut. ‘I thought I could make you love me-‘

He had said exactly the same thing two days ago in her bedroom, only she had completely misunderstood what he was telling her. He had been telling her that he still loved her, asking if she could ever forgive him for what he had done – and she had made no response. ‘I can’t bear your silence’, he had said.

‘But you said you wanted a child!’ she cried.

He grimaced. ‘I didn’t want you to suspect how badly I needed you. And if there was a child, I intended to use that child to keep you. I was betting on a dark horse but I couldn’t believe that you would be able to walk away.’

‘You were right.’

‘One right and countless wrongs,’ he countered savagely.

‘No,’ she countered with a soft catch in her voice.

‘Your score is just a little higher. When did you realise that I wasn’t lying about having had a miscarriage?’ He flung her an impatient look. ‘Does that matter now?’

‘Yes,’ she insisted, thinking she was a heel to keep him in suspense like this, but she had to know.

‘After you had that accident in Sri Lanka. I really thought I had lost you. Such shocks tend to clear the head,’ he grated. ‘I realised that I loved you and that nothing else past or present mattered. My own obstinacy was the biggest barrier between us. I had to let go of my own bitterness. You had never lied to me, so why I had to ask myself-should you be lying now, in the present?’

Ashley was trembling with the force of her emotion. ‘You’d better unpack again. I don’t want you to go.’

He went rigid, slashed a hand through the air. ‘But I can’t live with you like this! This afternoon, I saw how you must always have seen me,’ he delivered half under his breath, his strong emotion palpable. ‘I saw what you must truly think of me. You believe that I am a man like your father.’

As she finally understood what had forced his decision to leave, she could have cried. Vito had seen the childhood source of all her defences and put the wrong interpretation on that new knowledge. ‘Never,’ she argued with determination, not yet ready to admit to him that she had ever been so foolish. ‘My father made me afraid of loving. He made me afraid of marriage. He made me afraid of turning out like my mother. Loving you terrified me four years ago! I just couldn’t handle it. But I can handle it now. Don’t you see that? I don’t hate you, Vito… I love you.’

The torment in his intense gaze as he struggled to believe threatened to tear her apart. He crossed the room, reached out two powerful arms and hauled her up against him hard. She met the hot violence of his drugging mouth with equally fierce demands of her own. She couldn’t get enough of him. He couldn’t get enough of her. Breathing was a challenge as she sunk her greedy fingers into the springy depths of his hair and trapped him in place.

‘Dio, it’s been so long,’ he groaned, surfacing for air. ‘I would give ten years of my life to make love to you now!’

‘No such sacrifice required.’ Ashley hauled him back into her arms with unashamed tenacity.

In the act of being dragged towards the bed, he stiffened and dug long fingers into her mane of hair to still their progress. ‘We can’t,’ he sighed. ‘The baby. I read this book.’

‘Wh-what book?’ she stammered, suddenly embarrassed by her own lack of inhibition.

He stared down at her, gravely serious. ‘If there’s a danger of miscarriage… no sex.’

‘My consultant told me that there’s no grounds for my worries,’ Ashley whispered, quivering in a white heat of excitement as he involuntarily responded to her proximity by grinding his hips against her in a movement of such blatant male need that her brain cells all turned simultaneously to sludge.

‘Are you sure?’

Single-mindedly, she ran teasing fingers down the line of his straining zip. As she leant against him, her hand lingered there in an uninhibited hunger of fascination. It was over a fortnight since he had touched her, and, now that she knew why he had practised such restraint, all inhibitions were cast to the four winds. He was incredibly, wonderfully aroused.

‘Dio, I would die if I lost you again,’ he bit out raggedly.

‘No chance,’ she asserted unsteadily. ‘Do you really love me?’

‘Passionately… madly… forever,’ she gasped under the wild onslaught of his hands and mouth. ‘Vito… your chauffeur must be waiting in the car!’

He fell back on the bed with her, deaf to all reasoning of the prosaic variety. ‘I can’t believe that you can forgive me,’ he groaned into her hair. ‘I screwed up at every turn.’

‘I’ll take it out of your hide… my way,’ Ashley told him. He bit sensuously at the ripe curve of her breast as he slowly dispensed with the scrap of lace depriving him of proper access. ‘I’m all yours,’ he confided. ‘My jealousy blinded me to what I was doing to you in the past. I spent four hellish years wanting you. I nearly worked myself to death trying to forget you. And then you walked into my office that day and suddenly I knew that I would move heaven and earth to get you back. That night, after the opera, I knew that I still loved you. I was devastated by how I felt. I wasn’t in control-‘

‘Neither was I, and that’s the way it should be.’ She ran loving fingers along the taut line of his mouth. ‘You brought us together again. How could I not forgive you for that?’ she teased.

‘I’ll never forgive myself for not being there when you lost the baby,’ he admitted gruffly.

Her green eyes shadowed. ‘I wanted it so much because you had gone. That was all I had left-‘ ‘Don’t-‘ As he buried his face in the sweet valley between her breasts, she felt the moisture on his cheeks, comprehended his sudden rigidity.

She smoothed his head in forgiveness but her own throat was closing over. ‘It happens, Vito. It just wasn’t meant to be.’ And maybe it would be the same this time too, she conceded painfully, but wishing and worrying weren’t likely to change her prospects either way. Perhaps tomorrow she would share those fears. But not tonight. Now was a time to celebrate the sheer joy of being together. But Vito was not so easily diverted. He had to know everything about that first pregnancy. How she had felt, what she had done, how she had managed,’ what the miscarriage had been like. Finally she felt the benefit of that sharing. The past slid back to where it should be, less painful than it had ever been.

‘I was so shattered when you wouldn’t marry me,’ he breathed. ‘But you were right. Much of it was my ego.’

‘I shouldn’t have moved out of the apartment so quickly. I was being childish, making a point,’ she muttered ruefully. ‘I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t come in search of me. That far, I did trust you even then.’

‘I love you so much.’ Vito wrapped both arms tightly around her. ‘I will never fail you again-‘

‘You’re failing right now.’ As he tensed and looked anxiously down into her dancing green eyes, she added softly, running a teasing hand down a long lean thigh, ‘I seem to remember something about this guy who gave me fabulous sex… and here I am offering solid gold I’ll-never-Iet-you-go commitment-‘

‘If you feel like it,’ he murmured lazily. ‘I do… I do!’

‘I’ll take them up for their nap.’ Fixing a mock-stern expression to her round face, Priya shooed the two giggling little boys up the slope towards the villa. Marco darted back to treat Ashley to a soggy kiss. He was the quiet twin. Carlo, not to be outdone, came tumbling back, dashed a kiss on her cheek and mumbled, ‘No nap, Mummy.’ He was the pushy one.

Sent back to rejoin Priya, he dragged his plump little legs and threw her a reproachful glance. For a split second he was Vito to the manner born. Susan laughed. ‘He’s a real little operator, isn’t he?’

‘I can’t believe they’re nearly two years old.’ Ashley rested back on her lounger and smiled at her sister, thinking how much closer they had become since the twins’ birth.