Was it too late? Ashley straightened her shoulders and breathed in as she turned in her tracks. She had to dig very deep for the courage to walk back into the Cavalieri Bank. Hot-cheeked, she approached the reception desk, inwardly cringing at the necessity. One of the receptionists approached her. ‘Mr di Cavalieri phoned down to say that you could go straight up, Miss Forrester. ‘

In bewilderment, Ashley blinked. How could Vito possibly be expecting her? How could he have known that she would return before she knew it herself?

In the lift she fancied that she felt the weight of a ball and chain on her ankle. Pacing down that wide corridor again, she imagined she could hear the clank of the heavy links as Vito rattled her chain. But already her agile brain was working back over their previous dialogue with greater cool. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that Vito should demand that she marry him. Vito was highly sexed but he was no slave to that sex-drive. He had proved that fact when he walked away to marry another woman, disdaining any attempt to continue a relationship in which marriage would not be the end result. Furthermore, so much bitterness lay between them now-how could he possibly still find her desirable? Was it true after all, that old cliché which said that men were different, more easily able to separate all emotion from the physical? Was Vito playing some sort of crazy power game with her?

He was a tall, lithe silhouette by the tinted wall of glass that filtered light into the ultra-modem room. He contemplated her in silence. What lay behind those impassive dark eyes was anybody’s guess. But suddenly she was aware as she had not allowed herself to be aware earlier that she was facing a brilliant adversary, infinitely more experienced in tactical warfare than she was.

‘How did you know that I’d come back?’ she prompted when it seemed to her that the nail biting silence might soon contrive to suffocate her if she didn’t break it. An eloquent dark brow lifted. ‘The fury, the walkout, the truculent reappearance? The pattern is not unfamiliar to me.’

Burning colour drenched her pallor. ‘You’ve got me over a barrel.’

‘Crude,’ he acknowledged. ‘But apparently true. I never credited you with so much family feeling.’

She evaded his scrutiny; conscious that he might believe he had some grounds to betray surprise on that point. In the past, she had strenuously resisted his desire to meet her family and had inevitably been forced to behave as though family ties were unimportant to her. But how could she have taken him home to witness at first hand the atmosphere in her own home? How would he have reacted to the discovery that her father loathed all foreigners? Her father had more prejudices than a roomful of people could acquire between them in a lifetime. Vito would have been politely appalled and she would have cringed with embarrassment. The difference in their backgrounds would have been even more mortifyingly apparent.

‘What possible pleasure could you receive from forcing me into marriage?’ she demanded in helpless frustration.

‘What force do I employ? You have the gift of free choice.’

‘That’s not fair!’ she argued in growing desperation. ‘Life isn’t always fair.’

‘You’re demanding the impossible!’

‘Then we have nothing further to discuss.’ It was said with cool finality.

‘We could talk about this,’ she proffered curtly, playing for time.

‘We have a great deal to talk about. We’ll lunch at my apartment.’

Thrown by the suggestion, she stared up at him. ‘Lunch?’

‘I’m hungry.’ Vito was already shrugging his magnificent physique into a superb cashmere coat. Perfect calm and sublime insouciance blended in the graceful lift of one ebony brow.

‘I thought you had a house here now.’

‘The apartment is more convenient during working hours.’

A private lift ran from his office suite down to an underground car park where a car awaited them. ‘So… what are you in?’ Vito enquired as the limousine nosed a forceful passage out into the slow moving traffic. ‘Your brother was not disposed to satisfy my curiosity on the evening that we met.’

‘In?’ she repeated uncertainly.

‘Your career,’ he clarified with impatience. ‘The career that you chose in place of me.’

‘Oh.’ Studying her tightly linked hands, she paled and decided to lie. ‘The retail trade.’ It wasn’t entirely a lie, she reasoned. Until she had obtained some qualifications in child-care at evening classes, she had been employed at a large department store.

‘You surprise me. It was not the field I believed you would choose. I assumed you would choose something more high-profile.’

She shrugged, evading his sardonic scrutiny. No, she couldn’t tell him. It would be the ultimate humiliation. How could he guess? she reasoned frantically. Had she completed her course in accountancy, this would only have been her first year in paid employment. Vito would scarcely be looking for the trappings of success. Why should she tell him that he had been right all along? Right to say that she was on the wrong course? Right to suspect that at heart she had neither the interest in the subject nor the natural affinity with figures to shine in that field?

She had gone against everybody’s advice when she’d chosen accountancy. But she had been determined to go into business and childishly, hopelessly set on proving to her father that she could succeed in a discipline dominated by the male sex. Stubborn as she was, she had had to fail before she could face the truth, although she still believed that if it hadn’t been for Vito deserting her the month before her exams started and the subsequent trauma of her pregnancy, she would at least have passed those exams.

She loved working with young children. That was a natural inclination which she had rigorously suppressed throughout her teens, deeming such employment as one more little womanly pursuit which she was too clever to fall into. Now the world had turned full circle for her. She was studying part-time for a degree with the hope that eventually she would be able to train as a teacher. And all that, she realised abruptly, was about to end. The life which she had painstakingly put together again for herself would be destroyed a second time, for no greater reason than a barbarously male need for revenge.

‘Are there likely to be any contractual problems concerning your release from employment?’

‘None.’ She was briefly amused by the idea of the day nursery where she worked pulling out all the plugs to retain one humble employee. ‘But I still don’t see why you should want to marry me.’

‘I have a strong motivation which I haven’t shared with you yet,’ Vito conceded, shooting her a veiled glance. ‘I believe you may be relieved when you hear it.’

Curiosity flickered. ‘Tell me now.’

‘I prefer the greater privacy of the apartment.’

The apartment was mercifully not the one which they had once shared. It was smaller, more formally furnished and clearly designed only for occasional occupation, but a trio of Toulouse Lautrec pencil drawings still hung in the elegant dining-room for equally occasional appreciation. Ashley was quite certain they were originals. A Cavalieri with a world-renowned private art collection would not be satisfied with anything less. At a rough estimate those drawings had to be worth well over a million pounds.

The fish-out-of-water sensation she had often experienced in Vito’s radius four years previously returned to haunt her. This was not her world. The daughter of a man who ran a car dealership did not belong in such a rarified milieu, and if she had ever thought otherwise she had once received firm confirmation of her unsuitability from another Cavalieri. Not Vito… his mother. With the discipline of long practice she suppressed that most degrading memory. Somewhere she still had the cheque Elena di Cavalieri had left behind.