A manservant served the meal. Although Ashley had scarcely eaten from the hour of Tim’s arrest, she could only manage to push the food round her plate and sip at the wine. Vito, on the other hand, worked with well-bred restraint and no lack of appetite through each light course, unperturbed by her stony response to his conversational sallies.
Coffee was served in the spacious lounge. Ashley flung herself down on a feather-stuffed sofa. ‘Well, let’s hear it, then,’ she invited, tilting her chin in an upward thrust, ‘this strong motivation for wanting to marry me that required greater privacy.’
‘Naturally I’m not considering a lifetime commitment,’ Vito asserted from his stance by the fireplace. ‘But it has occurred to me that you could well be worth every pound your brother has cost me and more.’
‘How?’ she demanded baldly, tension tightening her muscles; she hadn’t a clue what he could be driving at and she hated the sensation of being in the dark. It seemed that she had been right. Clearly Vito did have a more devious reason than rampant desire for the outrageous demand that they unite in holy wedlock -unholy wedlock, she adjusted inwardly, reflecting on the sheer frequency and violence with which they had fought in the past.
Vito continued to study her with curiously intent golden eyes. ‘There is only one thing in life I really want which fate has so far denied me.’
‘The British Crown Jewels?’ Ashley gibed. ‘I can’t think of much else that you couldn’t contrive to buy.’ ‘I want a child,’ Vito imparted, as if she hadn’t made that facetious remark.
The announcement hit her like a punch in the gut. It turned her to stone, freezing her usually expressive face, but she could feel the blood slowly draining away from below her skin, the sudden mad thump of an accelerated heartbeat and a twisting pulling of pain deep down in her stomach.
Could he know… could he possibly know about the child she had miscarried? A shred of sanity returned to soothe her. There was absolutely no way that Vito could know about her pregnancy back then.
‘You don’t have any children?’ She had to force the question from between dry, strained lips. For the past four years she had rigidly refused to think about the fact that Vito would most assuredly be fathering the children he had always admitted he wanted with another woman, the children she had flatly refused even to consider having with him.
‘Six months after our marriage, Carina became ill,’ Vito volunteered with visible reluctance. ‘She had leukaemia. With the treatment involved there was naturally no question of even attempting to conceive a child.’
Ashley was shattered. In the midst of her current plight, it had not even occurred to her to wonder how so young a woman had died, but she had dimly assumed it might have been a car accident, something like that. This was entirely different. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered dazedly, still too confused to put together what he was telling her.
‘Why should you be?’
‘Because I’m not a totally unfeeling bitch!’ Ashley lanced back at him furiously. ‘Is my sympathy less acceptable than other people’s?’
Pale beneath his dark skin, Vito released his breath in a hiss. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Somehow it is.’
She was trying to put together what he had so far said. A glimmer of the truth threatened and she thrust it away, unable to believe that her own reasoning was leading her in the right direction. ‘What,’ she began a little unsteadily, ‘has the fact that you want a child got to do with me?’
‘I’m prepared to marry you so that you can give me that child.’
Ashley slid slowly upright in a movement lacking her usual supple grace. A dark, deep flush had overlaid her translucent skin. ‘You’re insane!’ she gasped.
‘I don’t see why it should be so impossible a request. It’s certainly not insane,’ Vito countered. ‘You’re absolutely perfect for the role of surrogate mother. You don’t want children of your own. After the child was born we would divorce and you would be free to continue your life as you wish without any interference from me.’
Ashley raked a shaking hand through her tousled hair and stared at him, wild-eyed with disbelief. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. It’s the most obscene suggestion I’ve ever heard! You could go out there and marry any one of a dozen women, I’m quite sure, and have a family the same way anyone else does!’
‘But I don’t want another wife.’ Vito cast her a grim smile. ‘Not a “forever and ever” wife. It would be wickedly unfair of me to marry another woman purely and simply to have a child. I could not sustain such an empty pretence of a relationship-‘
‘But you evidently don’t consider it wickedly unfair to do that to me!’ Ashley interrupted tempestuously.
‘There would be no pretences in our relationship and, in any case, you are scarcely in the normal run of your sex. You don’t even like children. You have never had any intention of tying yourself down to such a responsibility or of risking your career by taking time out to have a family. You told me all that quite unforgettably four years ago.’
She wanted to scream at him that she had been nineteen years old and as opinionated and untried in her convictions as most teenagers were. Her shrinking distaste from the very idea of pregnancy had been formed while she watched her mother’s health dragged down by a countless succession of miscarriages in pursuit of the son her father had been so selfishly determined to have.
‘You have years ahead of you in which you could marry again,’ she flung at him tautly.
‘But I may never meet someone I wish to marry. Apart from that possibility,’ Vito rejoined, ‘I have no desire to be an elderly father. My father was nearly fifty when I was born, and now he’s dead. We were never close. There was too big an age-gap.’
He had never told her that his father had been so much older. Elena di Cavalieri must have been at least thirty years her husband’s junior. Ashley’s mind shifted away from the side-issue, which was so much more easy to consider than the absolutely impossible proposition Vito was putting before her. A hysterical laugh fluttered in her throat. Dear God, if only he knew that he had so nearly become… but then, it hadn’t been so nearly, she reminded herself, thinking of how tragically short-lived her pregnancy had been and then reflecting in the same almost hysterical vein that, if Vito knew the female gynaecological history of her family, she would be the very last woman he would have approached with such a demand!
‘I never dreamt you would even consider me worthy of such an honour as providing you with an heir,’ Ashley delivered, terrified that her perilously thin control would splinter into shards in front of him. ‘Not with the opinion you have of me.’
Vito’s hard mouth tightened. ‘You are physically very attractive, mentally very bright, and morally very courageous. ‘
Ashley was beginning to shake. ‘You mean I score straight A’s as a potential cuckoo-type mother but fail all along the line as a woman!’
‘I don’t believe I said that.’ Vito watched her with veiled eyes.
‘But that’s what you meant!’ Ashley lashed back at him painfully. ‘You think a real woman puts a man before everything else in her life, including herself!’
‘All I do know is that in your case,’ Vito breathed harshly, ‘I was not the man capable of persuading you to make the smallest compromise or sacrifice on my behalf.’
Ashley loosed a high-pitched laugh. ‘A small compromise? A small sacrifice?’ she echoed. ‘Move to Italy, give up my studies and all hope of ever having an independent career, marry you against my most basic instincts and then proceed to produce progeny with rabbit like efficiency! All those months you pretended that you understood how I felt-‘
‘I was being remarkably patient and tactful,’ Vito incised.