A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN Ashley came round, she was lying on her bed. In a flash, everything came back. Vito knew she was pregnant. All her ridiculous precautions had been a complete waste of time. In addition, she now knew why he had changed towards her. At the back of her mind, she had feared the cause had been that last row when she had raved at him like a madwoman. Now she knew differently.

'How do you feel?' Vito enquired with an anxious tremor in the normally level tenor of his voice. 'Should I call a doctor?'

She refused to open her eyes. 'No, that would be making a fuss.'

Vito sighed. 'I'm afraid I have already made a fuss.

I've called the family doctor out.'

'Then why did you bother asking me?'

'I was hoping for a sensible answer,' he admitted heavily. 'You know that I know now-'

'How?'

'That last night in Sri Lanka… I overheard your conversation with Priya.'

Her lashes flew up, revealing incredulous green. 'You didn't look as if you'd overheard!' she protested.

Gracefully he shrugged a shoulder. 'The ability not to betray emotion is useful in the banking world.'

She flinched, turned her head away. 'You should have told me. I feel a fool-'

He released his breath. 'I did hope that you would tell me freely if I gave you time. I was also very surprised,' he confessed quietly. 'Was it that nigh-' 'Yes!' she whipped the word at him to shut him up on a painful subject.

'You won't believe me, but I really am sorry-' 'You're right… I don't!'

'You weren't ready for this. It was badly timed,' he murmured tautly.

'My pregnancies usually are. I'm astonished that you're not over the moon!'

'Am I allowed to be?'

She said nothing, drained of response. She stared at the wall. His behaviour since they had returned to London was understandable now. He had been conserving her energies for the baby. Nothing but peace, quiet and tranquillity for the baby's benefit. Nothing else mattered, obviously.

'You've got what you want, so leave me alone,' she mumbled bitterly.

'Do you really think that this is what I want?'

His only answer was her defensively turned back. 'If you hadn't fainted, I might have throttled my nephew,' he remarked, trying a new tack. 'He wouldn't be much of a loss.'

'I was about to enter the room when I heard something that he was saying. I waited until I heard it all,' he delivered. 'And if I don't sound quite myself, it could be because I've had a number of severe shocks this afternoon. '

She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. Exactly how much had he heard? Slowly she turned over again. Vito was standing by the window, tall, dark and very still. He was emanating turmoil in waves though. The atmosphere was crackling with tension.

'It would appear that Pietro lied to me about his dealings with your brother-' 'My delinquent, violent brother?'

Vito flinched, and, annoyingly, the sight gave her no satisfaction. Instead she found herself wanting to offer comfort. Vito was one of those people who very rarely found themselves in the wrong. A perfectionist with a strong sense of fair play, he now found himself in a most invidious position. Tim had certainly not deserved a prison sentence for losing his head. Tim had been most brutally provoked – Ashley was sure of that after what she herself had undergone at Pietro's hands. And Tim hadn't even told her about the accusation concerning the money she had supposedly taken. Tim had known it for a lie. But did Vito?

'I misjudged him as badly as I misjudged my nephew. My only excuse is that I have had very little contact with Pietro in recent years and until I actually heard him speaking to you I would have continued to defend him because… because he is family.' He made the admission through bloodlessly compressed lips. 'Since his father died, we have all spoilt him, indulged him, self-evidently ruined his character.'

'Oh, stop blaming yourself,' Ashley groaned. 'He's a conceited, nasty, vicious little creep. Any family as large as yours is bound to have at least one revolting specimen.'

'I very much regret that both you and your brother should have had to suffer at his hands-'

'I've suffered more at yours.'

As quickly as she said it, she regretted it. She didn't know him in this mood. He was under great strain. His stance, his clenched features and pallor told her that. But he was also still very much in control. There was iron in Vito's soul. A lesser man might have buckled beneath the revelations he had had to endure. But not Vito. He was ashamed of his nephew's behaviour. He felt it as a personal slight. However, he was not about to set her free in restitution. Not now that she was pregnant, she acknowledged painfully.

'Is it true that my mother gave you money?'

The iron control was under threat now. She sat up, meeting the savage darkness of his challenging gaze and she knew that he very much wanted to hear that Pietro had been talking rubbish. 'She came to see me the day before you asked me to marry you-'

His even white teeth gritted in a flash against his dark skin. 'And she offered you money to get out of my life?'

Ashley bent her head. 'No, she wasn't as crude as that. She put the cheque on the table as she left. I expect she thought you were keeping me and she didn't want me to-' She winced as he said a very rude word in Italian. 'That's all there really is to it.'

'If you don't tell me, I'll get it out of her,' he spelt out icily, but his tone belied the smouldering anger of humiliation in his hard stare. 'I want to know exactly what was said.'

Ashley didn't have the energy for a struggle with the sheer overwhelming force of Vito's will. 'What do you think?' she muttered dully. 'That I wouldn't be able to fit, that I wouldn't be able to cope, that I'd embarrass you. I didn't have the right background, the right religion, the right anything. In short, I would ruin your life.'

His back was turned to her, the defensive bunching of his muscles visible even through his well-cut jacket. Without warning, he struck the wall with a coiled fist, making her flinch. 'She was wrong,' he whispered, savagely sardonic. 'I didn't need you to ruin my life. Then and now, I was perfectly capable of doing that for myself.'

'She did it with the best of intentions. She didn't know me. She must have been worried about your father-'

'I'll never forgive her,' Vito swore violently. 'I was no helpless teenager in need of her protection!'

'A son is always a son no matter what age he is.' 'You defend her?' He surveyed her with complete incredulity. 'Why?'

Ashley sighed. 'I think she saved us from making a bad mistake.'

Harsh lines indented the curve between his nose and mouth. He was rigid, palpably restraining the rawness of his emotions with the thinnest remaining edge of control. 'What a shame that she couldn't whisk you out of harm's way this time. It seems that she would have done both of us a very big favour.'

Ashley turned white as though he had struck her, and in a way he might as well have done, so complete was that bitter force of his rejection. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, struggling to absorb the immensity of her pain and conceal it from him.

The doctor's arrival was a welcome interruption. He walked into an atmosphere that could have been cut with a knife. Complete rest and calm and no upsets was his practical prescription. Dinner was brought to her on a tray. She napped for a while after she had eaten, having given up waiting for Vito to reappear. '

Much later she opened her sleepy eyes on lamplight. Vito was casting a long shadow by the window. He wore neither tie nor jacket. With his black hair tussled and his jaw line darkly shadowed, he failed his usual standards of perfect grooming. He also had a glass in his hand.

'What time is it?' she muttered.

'Midnight…later.' With an infinitesimal shrug, he sighed. 'I really don't know.' The syllables dragged ever so slightly.

That very faint slur betrayed him. His mother was right all along, she decided. I'm the kiss of death to Vito… I'm driving him to drink.

He cleared his throat. 'I've seen Lorena, Pietro's mother. She knows now what he has done. She intends to return to Italy with him. She is very close to her late husband's family and believes that they will help her to exercise greater control over his son. I am not so optimistic. I suspect that Pietro will remain a problem.'

Ashley surfaced from the bedding with the sensual glide of a mermaid emerging from the waves. She sat up, righting the slipping satin strap of her diaphanous nightdress. 'You've had a busy evening,' she said, combing her fingers slowly through her vibrant mane of hair so that it fell in a silken mass across her pale shoulders. It was so much wasted effort. The male who would have been electrified by such a display a mere fortnight ago still didn't spare her a glance. 'I'm feeling much better,' she added.

'Good.' The tone was strained. He stared moodily down into the crystal glass he held. 'I seem to have this extraordinary talent for destroying what you hold dear. Yet you must accept that I never intended, never planned for it to be that way. I thought I had the right… I thought that you owed me this chance-'

Unbearably taut, she whispered, 'I'm not sure I follow.'

He threw back his head and laughed with savage amusement. Her entire attention was fiercely locked to him, her heartbeat racing even in that moment of stress to the raw, virile power of his male beauty. 'I have never been afflicted by any great degree of humility,' he confided shamelessly. 'You see, I thought that I could make you love me.'

A hoarse sound of distress escaped her. A shudder of reaction forced a passage through her tense body. He confirmed her own suspicions but it had been many weeks since she had dwelt on those suspicions which would have clouded and ruined that final, glorious month in Sri Lanka.

'I actually thought that if I pushed all the right buttons, it would happen. You would wake up one day and, far from wanting to stick a knife between my ribs,' he asserted harshly, 'you would think, I cannot live without this guy. And you would cling like ivy, cleave like Eve to Adam in the Bible-'

'I think I get the picture, Vito.' It took her a full thirty seconds to even make her voice work and it emerged rusty and flat, unable to rise above the tremendous pain she was fighting to hide. No wonder he had decided not to get her pregnant. He had been far more intent on revenge and he had gone to a lot of effort… in fact he had gone to the most unbelievable lengths to push what he had called 'the right buttons'. And had she been honest with him, he might have been spared all that tedious exertion. He had actually got what he wanted far more quickly and easily than he could ever have guessed. She was so desperately hurt, so horribly humiliated that she wanted to die.

He released his breath in a hiss. 'I was incredibly conceited-'

'Yes.' And with just cause, she conceded wretchedly.

She had been a vulnerable target, a willing victim.

'To even think that after all that I had done to you, you could even… even begin to care for me again,' he practically muttered, sounding rather peculiar.

Since she hadn't brought herself to look once at him in the last few minutes, she presumed it was the effect of the alcohol. 'C-crazy,' she managed jerkily half under her breath.

'It was unforgivable.'

Dumbly she nodded agreement.

'Manipulative, calculating,' he breathed raggedly, an edge of something remarkably similar to desperation in his delivery. 'I can't help being like that… '

She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to shout at him and throw in a few adjectives of her own. It would make him feel better. But for the first time in her life with Vito, she had absolutely nothing to say. Her defences were down. She was in too much pain to feel anger. He would just have to live with his conscience.

'I can't bear your silence,' he admitted gruffly. Accidentally, she glanced up and collided with lustrous dark eyes. He looked shattered, as if every sentence he had spoken had taken a physical toll. She had never seen him like that before; vulnerable, unsure. No doubt she would never see him like that again. He had plunged them both into an unholy mess but she had every certainty that by tomorrow Vito would be concentrating his immense energy and brilliant mind on how to approach with tact the problem of the custody of her unborn children. Two for the price of one and he didn't even know it yet, she reflected mirthlessly.

'Perhaps you would prefer to talk tomorrow when we are both feeling calmer.'

She never wanted to talk to him again, but she nodded and went back to studying the sheet she was nervously pleating. There was no way she could sleep after he had gone. Could he take her children away from her? She hadn't signed anything. She wasn't a drug addict or an alcoholic. She couldn't see what possible argument he could put up in a court of law… Some time around dawn, she fell into an uneasy doze.

'You don't feel car-sick?' Vito shot her a concerned glance. Ashley's teeth clenched. That was the third time he had referred to her health. Add that litany to three other stilted remarks ranging from the weather to the beauty of the countryside and you had a far from scintillating dialogue. She had spent yesterday in bed. She had got up for breakfast and he had mentioned talking as in proper talking and she had suffered a sudden relapse, pleading weakness to escape. When had he turned her into such a coward? They couldn't live in limbo forever. Either she talked or she ran away, and if she ran away she would be running to the end of her days, despising herself for such cowardice.

Just about the last thing she had expected this morning was the announcement that they had a luncheon engagement in deepest Berkshire and that he had no intention of making excuses for her absence. With bad grace she had surrendered, marvelling that he could think a lunch date worthy of such attention in the present state of their marriage.

'I want us to stay together.'

The cool assertion dropped like a brick through the windscreen, momentarily depriving her of breath.

'Until the baby is born,' he added very quietly. 'That is very important to me.'

'Tough!' Biting her lip until the blood came, she stared out at the motorway stretching endlessly ahead and thought that he had chosen his time well. There was nowhere to run. Stay until the baby is born and then get lost. She felt sick, horribly sick, shrinking from the mere suggestion. Didn't he have any sensitivity at all? To continue to live with him would destroy her. She needed to get away to get over him. She needed to go back to her own world, away from his and every reminder of him. But the leaving would be hard because incredibly, even after all he had done, a shameful part of her still wanted to cling to what little of a semblance of a marriage remained.

'The last time I wasn't there-'

'I don't need you!' she spat jerkily. 'I don't need you for anything.'

'I didn't say that you did.' He was measuring his words with supreme tact. 'But I would like you to stay-'

'So that you can watch over me?' she cut in bitterly. 'Make sure I don't sneak off for another termination?' The lean brown fingers on the steering-wheel clenched to show white knuckles. 'You didn't have one the first time. Why should you want one now?'

Ashley was shaken. He was telling her that he believed her, he believed that she had had a miscarriage four years ago. 'When did you change your mind and decide that I wasn't lying?'

'Weeks ago, but you didn't want to talk about it,' he reminded her drily..

'I didn't see why I should have to keep on defending myself.'

'I really do want this baby,' he breathed almost roughly. 'I may have failed you in the past but that does not mean I have absolutely no rights this time.'

'I don't want to talk about your rights,' she whispered sickly.

'Why the hell have you never learned to speak my language?' he suddenly raked at her furiously. 'It is not easy for me to find the correct words to express my emotions in English. What do you think this is like for me? I am in the wrong. In every direction I look, I am even more in the wrong! If I spent the rest of my life telling you that I was sorry, it wouldn't change anything!'

'Five minutes of you saying sorry in any language would be a wonder to me. Let's not go overboard by talking about the rest of your life!'

'I'm getting off this motorway,' he gritted.

'Not one of your brighter ideas,' she said dulcetly, unable to stop stabbing at him. A row about nothing in particular was much more her style than a discussion about the burial arrangements for their marriage. 'And if you don't stop speeding we will probably be greeted with a roadblock at the next exit.'

He took the next exit in smouldering, simmering silence and shot into a lay-by five minutes later, killing the engine-purr with a suddenness that brought the silence rushing dangerously back.

'I'm sorry…is that what you want?'

Green eyes flashing, she dealt him a taut look of mutiny and turned her head deliberately to stare out of the side-window. He could never be sorry enough. Two and a half months ago she had been reasonably happy, hating him, and right now she was sickeningly miserable loving him for no return. So he wanted the baby. Well, that was scarcely news. 'Do you feel sick'? 'Do you feel faint'? 'Do you want to stop for coffee'? The message of his concern for the life in her womb had been beaten in with overkill.

'I'm sorry if I forced you to marry me. I'm sorry I threatened your brother. I'm sorry I got you pregnant,' he unleashed raggedly. 'Does that make you feel better?'

'Not so that you'd notice.' Her lips were compressed in a white line. She was terrified that she would burst into tears. Her hormones were sloshing about, threatening a scene. She really didn't want to hear how much he regretted getting her pregnant. That assurance merely underlined how eager he would have been to get rid of her had she not proved to be so distressingly fertile.

With a stifled curse, he reached out and tried to grasp her hand, but her fingers were clenched into a fist that had no welcome. He withdrew his hand, released his seatbelt and turned round. 'I care about what happens to you.'

'If you say anything more as nauseating,' she gasped, 'I'll be sick!'

Searching her white, shuttered face, he evidently registered that that was not mere dramatics. He leant back in his seat, palpably putting a lid on his frustration. Silence stretched and gnawed at her nerves.

'I can't change what happened between us four years ago!' he grated abruptly. 'You failed your exams. Your family turned their back on you. I married another woman and you lost the baby. I wasn't there and I should have been. I feel bloody guilty-'

'It won't last,' she said flippantly, masking her distress.

'It doesn't cost you anything to let me speak,' Vito responded harshly. 'I let you down badly. I accept that.' All of a sudden he was talking in jerky snatches and the silence came back for an entire minute before he breathed, 'I am deeply ashamed of my own behaviour. I took the easy way out. You hurt me and I walked away.'

'Don't forget the cheque-book.' As soon as she said it, she wished she hadn't. It had been below the belt. All these admissions of guilt, shame and regret were costing him blood. Vito was very proud, very confident of his own judgement. For the first time in his magnificently successful existence, Vito was forcing himself to acknowledge mistakes openly. Unfortunately she didn't want his guilt any more than she wanted his apologies. Neither was capable of healing her own pain. He didn't love her, and right now she hated him for it.

He ignored the unforgiving dig but he was very pale beneath his golden skin, taut as a drawn bow. 'I didn't know that I had the power to hurt you then. I didn't understand you. I was afraid of losing you. I resented everything you put before me. The more freedom you demanded, the more angry I became. Sometimes…sometimes I hated you almost as much as I loved you-'

Accidentally she collided with brilliant dark eyes in an instant of perfect mutual understanding. She glanced away again instantly.

'You made me feel insecure, and nobody had ever made me feel like that before…'

She was astonished, green eyes flying to him involuntarily. His sensual mouth had a grim, bitter twist as he gazed fearlessly back at her. 'You were far too young for me.'

'Yes,' she conceded unsteadily. 'I didn't understand what I was doing. I was trying to protect myself. I didn't want to be hurt. I didn't want to love you. I didn't want you to get the upper hand.'

'I didn't,' he murmured with dark satire.

But he had. He had. His life had gone on afterwards.

Hers had stopped dead. It hadn't been worth it, none of her proud defences had been worth it four years ago. In one sense she had driven him away, had brought about her own downfall. Had he known that she loved him, he would have trusted her more than he had and that day he wouldn't have sat in the car instead of crossing the street to speak to her.

'I phoned you…I phoned you in Italy,' she told him in a rush. 'I was going to tell you about the baby-' His ebony brows drew together. 'I received no call-' 'Giulia came to the phone. She said you were in the middle of your engagement party…I didn't say anything,' Ashley confessed starkly. 'There really wasn't anything to say.'

He groaned something in Italian but he said nothing in his own defence. His dark features broodingly tense, he avoided meeting her eyes, but a surge of blood lay like a betraying line across his blunt cheekbones. He started up the car again. 'It's getting late,' he said flatly.

'Can't we forget about lunch?' she enquired hopefully. 'Phone and make an excuse?' He tensed. 'No.'

'I don't feel like socialising.'

'It's out of the question. We have to show,' he asserted wryly.

Half an hour later, she was dredged from the all consuming energy of her thoughts by the strange realisation that the car was passing familiar landmarks. They were within ten miles of her family home, she registered uncomfortably.

'Where do these people live?' she asked stiffly. 'Not far from here.'

'I grew up around here,' she divulged reluctantly. 'You could be more precise.'

'You can give me directions when we reach your home town.'

Ashley stopped breathing. 'Is that where they live?' she demanded.

Vito cast her a rueful glance and sighed. 'I'm taking you home, cara.'

She froze in shock. 'I don't believe you!'

'I phoned your mother yesterday and she invited us down to lunch-'

'Stop the car!' Ashley gasped. 'I'm not going!' 'Yes, you are,' Vito contradicted flatly. 'And you're going to mend fences. It's my fault that you're at odds with your family. This is the one thing that I can do for you-'

'Do for me?' she echoed, on the edge of hysteria. Completely misunderstanding the source of her distress, Vito dealt her a soothing but arrogant smile. 'They won't reject you. Your mother can't wait to see you. She was in tears on the phone.'

Ashley could believe that, but she was equally well aware that her mother had made not the slightest effort to see her in recent years. Sylvia Forrester had abided obediently by her husband's rules, so why on earth was she inviting them to lunch? Was it possible that time had softened her father? She wanted to believe that so much it hurt. She had missed her mother desperately, would have long since arrived up on the doorstep of her own volition had she not been conscious that such defiance would only cause more trouble for her mother. 'My father hates me,' she confided tightly.

'Fathers don't hate their children. My father would have been equally outraged if one of my sisters had lived with a man outside marriage. The situation is quite different now that we are married, and tempers will have cooled long ago,' he drawled with complete conviction.

He didn't understand, and already they were driving through the town. He didn't need her directions. Staverston wasn't that big and her father's car showroom dominated the end of the main street. Her home was only fifty yards beyond, set back from the road, an Edwardian detached behind a low brick wall. Climbing out of the car, Vito scanned her paralysed stillness. 'Come on,' he urged.

Susan answered the doorbell, looking pale and tense. Vito introduced himself with immense calm. 'We're out in the garden,' she said uncomfortably. 'Mum invited us down. I hope you don't mind.'

'The more, the merrier,' Ashley quipped. 'Tim?' 'He's in Greece with his friends. Dad's treat.' Ashley moved towards the French windows which led out to the garden and abruptly Susan barred her path, embarrassment and anxiety mingling in her gaze. 'Dad doesn't know you're coming,' she shared in a tremulous rush. 'I can't believe Mum's doing this-' Before Ashley could respond, her father's harsh voice sounded forth from the kitchen. 'You utterly stupid woman!' he was thundering in a well-remembered tone that brought Ashley out in a cold sweat. 'I'm not going to eat foreign muck like that! All this palaver for that gutless fool Arnold? How dare you waste my money on…'

For a timeless moment of horror the three of them were a frozen tableau. Ashley could hear her mother's voice raised in a hideously familiar whine of apology and placation. Her stomach turned over sickly.

'Do come out into the garden,' Susan said almost pleadingly to Vito.

Ashley was cringing with humiliation, unable to look at Vito, her cheeks as scarlet as her sister's. Vito would have to draw on every ounce of his well-bred savoir-faire to get through even a brief meeting with her father. She was unnerved by the prospect of the coming scene and devastated by the news that her mother had invited them without her father's permission.

Beyond the French windows, she watched her father’s stocky but broadly built figure powering angrily out to the patio where Arnold was sitting reading a newspaper. Her hand touched Vito's, staying him. 'I think I'd better do this on my own,' she said tautly.

'Good idea,' Susan cut in brightly. 'Let me get you a drink, Vito.'

Ashley crossed the patio. Her father was telling Arnold that only wimps played golf and Arnold was calmly agreeing with him, impervious to the insult intended. A quiet, unaggressive man, Arnold flatly refused to be drawn into disputes with his difficult father-in-law.

'Dad.' Her voice wavered as she fell still in the sunlight, her shoulders back, her chin raised high. Hunt Forrester rose like an angry bull at a gate, his full face set in lines of disbelief. 'What the hell are you doing here’. Ashley forced herself forward. 'D-don't you think it's time we made peace?'

'You shameless little bitch, how dare you show your face here?' he roared, striding over to grip her by the shoulders. 'I told you never to come back, didn't I? You don't belong to this family any more! You never did, you little slut! But you can't leave us alone, can you? You damn near put Tim in prison with your shenanigans-'

'Dad, please…' His fingers were biting like steel pincers into her shrinking flesh. With every spitting syllable he was giving her a violent shake to punctuate his fury.

'Release my wife.' Vito's intervention carried at least ten generations of aristocratic cool and disdain.

'Stay out of this, Vito!' Ashley cried fearfully.

'Or you might get hurt,' Hunt Forrester sneered, sizing up the younger man's superbly well-cut suit and silk shirt, his contempt blatant.

'Your daughter is pregnant,' Vito delivered icily. Ashley was dizzy and sick. Somewhere in the background she could hear her mother quietly sobbing. It was all so horribly familiar but for the first time she realised that she didn't need to be afraid of her father. Vito would not allow him to harm her.

'So that's how you got him to the altar!' her father gibed hatefully. 'Second time lucky, it seems-'

Pressing her back with one formidable hand, Vito hit her father so hard that he went flying back on to the lawn. Susan screamed. Arnold flew upright. Ashley sagged back in shock against the table, her knees too wobbly to hold her.

'If you want a fight,' Vito was snarling, 'pick on someone more your own size!'