A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER ONE

ASHLEY couldn't sit still. She got up to pace her sister's kitchen again. Dear lord, how much longer would they be at the police station? Surely by now they realised that they had the wrong person? Her brother wasn't a car thief or a joy rider. He had respect for other people's property… hadn't he?

Tim was no angel-what teenager was? But he was intelligent. He had a promising academic future ahead of him. He would soon be sitting his final exams. Why would he go off the rails and attempt to steal a car? He had a car of his own, for goodness sake! Tim had been living here with her sister for the past two months. While their parents were in New Zealand, enjoying a long-anticipated reunion with relatives, there had been nowhere else for him to go. Unfortunately, Tim hadn't wanted to stay with Susan and Arnold. And Ashley had understood his reluctance. She wouldn't have wanted to live with Susan's rules and regulations either.

The white space-age kitchen reminded her of an operating theatre. It was sterile. There was no clutter, Susan would not allow clutter. Her home was obsessively clean and tidy. Just like Susan herself. On the phone, though, she'd been hysterical, or as close to hysterical as someone as repressed as Susan could get. Tim's arrest in full view of the neighbours had smashed her composure. Break beyond the guidelines of Susan's rigid moral code and you were out in no man's land all on your own. A pariah. Nobody knew that better than Ashley. On the day Susan had discovered that her unmarried teenage sister was pregnant, Susan had turned her back without hesitation. When you threatened to become a social embarrassment, Susan would literally cross the street to avoid you.

Ashley took sudden ironic strength from that awareness. If Susan had had the slightest suspicion that Tim might be guilty, she would have let Arnold go to the police station alone.

'Can I get you a cup of tea, Miss Forrester?'

Ashley spun round with a nervous jerk. Her sister's housekeeper, Mrs Adams, stood in the doorway, rotund in her sensible dressing-gown, her discomfort palpable. 'No, thanks. I couldn't,' Ashley muttered.

'Any word-?''Nothing yet.'

'He's such a… spirited young man,' the older woman remarked.

Ashley paled at the reminder. Tim had his father's temper. When he was roused, Tim was hot-headed and aggressive. Hunt Forrester rejoiced in Tim's ability to stand up to him. A boy was supposed to have grit and guts. A girl wasn't. Just as baby girls were the mistakes you had to accept on the road to fathering an all important son, the second chapter in her father's book of sexist 'do's' and 'don’ts' said that girls were supposed to be sugar and spice, rarely seen and never heard. Ashley had never fitted the rulebook. In one way or another she had always transgressed.

Ashley had rebelled but Susan had always conformed. Arnold had come along when Susan was eighteen. Although he was nearly twenty years older, he had been her sister's first and last boyfriend. Susan had never spread her wings in the outside world, never fought for a taste of the freedom which other young women took for granted. Ashley had often wondered if her sister had rushed into marriage to escape their domineering bully of a father and a home atmosphere riven with tension and frequent angry scenes.

'That's the car…' Mrs Adams tensed. 'I'll go back to my room, Miss Forrester.' Ashley pushed a nervous hand through her dishevelled mane of red-gold curling hair and took a deep, steadying breath. Susan didn't know she was here waiting and her sister would probably see her presence as an act of unwelcome interference. As she heard the key in the front door, she walked out to the hall, praying that Tim would walk in, angry and shaken but unafraid… in other words, an innocent accused. Dear God, she couldn't even bring herself to consider the alternative!

The lanky youth who lunged through the door at full tilt didn't even see her standing there. Tim raced upstairs and the loud slam of a door ricocheted through the house. Arnold appeared next. In the act of shedding his raincoat, the older man froze. 'Ashley?'

Susan thrust past him. Her oval face was a waxen mask, stamped by bruised eyes and two burning spots of enraged red. 'Ashley?' she exclaimed shrilly. 'Susan-' Arnold planted a restraining hand on his wife's sleeve. 'Stay out of this!' Susan rounded on her husband furiously. 'She's here and I'm glad she is. I want her to know what she's done!'

'What I've done?' Ashley echoed after an incredulous pause.

'This is all your fault!' Susan hissed at her. 'What am I supposed to tell Mum and Dad when they come home? They put Tim in our care. He was our responsibility. When Dad finds out about this, he'll blame me for ever letting you near Tim. You don't need to worry! Dad won't come calling on you for his pound of flesh!'

Susan in a rage was a stranger to Ashley. She had the weird feeling that she had stepped into a crazy mirror-world where familiar people become unrecognisable. As a rule her sister was frigidly unemotional, but tonight she was a woman possessed, alien in her spitting belligerence.

Ashley moved a pleading hand. 'Susan, please. I don't know what you're talking about. How can I be involved in this?'

'Aren't you involved in everything that drags our family down? Do you know whose car he wrecked?' Susan ranted. 'Do you know why he wrecked it?' Ashley was in a daze, devastated by the obvious admission that Tim was apparently guilty as charged.

'Our stupid little brother went out to get his revenge on the man who left you in the lurch four years ago!' Susan's enraged face suddenly crumpled and she half covered her wobbling mouth with her splayed fingers, denying the tears that were threatening. 'So what does he do? He takes his car and goes berserk with it in the grounds of his home! He's caused thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of damage. That car cost more than this house did! And it's a write-off!' Her shaking voice was rising steeply. 'He's demolished their b-bl-blasted stupid fountain and ripped up their bowling-green lawn! And for that, he's likely to go to prison!'

'But that's impossible,' Ashley whispered through bone-dry lips. As Arnold attempted to comfort his wife, he was elbowed rudely away. Her sister fled upstairs as Tim had done minutes earlier. In the earth-shattering silence that she left behind, another door slammed. 'She can't bear to have anyone see her cry,' Arnold sighed, steering Ashley into the lounge. 'Best leave her to herself until she calms down.'

A wave of dizziness was assailing Ashley. White as a sheet, she swayed and braced herself with both hands on the back of the sofa. It was impossible. It couldn't be true. Tim didn't even know who she had been involved with while she was at university. Somehow Susan had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, lost her head and made quite insane accusations.

Over by the drinks cabinet, Arnold was talking to himself. 'None of us is to blame. The boy's out of control, but he was out of control long before he came to us.'

'Tim couldn't possibly have taken… Vito's car,' Ashley said unsteadily.

Arnold sipped at his whisky. He had forgotten to offer her a drink. That oversight spoke volumes for his state of mind. 'I'm sorry, my dear. You're still in the dark, aren't you? Take it from me, you'd be wiser staying there,' he completed heavily.

'Arnold!' Ashley wanted to scream and shake him out of his lethargy. 'I need to know what's going on!' Her brother-in-law took a deep breath. 'Tim goes to school with-er… Cavalieri's nephew, Pietro.'

'He never told me that!' Ashley burst out.

'Until recently, Tim had no idea that there had ever been any previous connection between our family and the Cavalieri clan.' Lines of strain were grooved into Arnold's thin features. 'At one stage, believe it or not, the two boys were actually firm friends. Pietro moved with a fast crowd and Tim was popular with them. It was Pietro who started up that trouble at that nightclub, but since his family have more influence than we have, poor Tim carried the can alone-'

'What trouble?' Ashley interrupted blankly.

Arnold groaned. 'He was up before the magistrates in the spring for disorderly conduct and criminal damage after getting into a fight.'

Ashley closed her stricken eyes. 'Does nobody tell me anything?'

'To be fair, he got in with the wrong crowd.' Arnold sighed. 'And after that nightclub business he did realise that he'd been handpicked as the fall guy. The club had no intention of pursuing a Cavalieri to court.'

'So this wasn't Tim's first offence,' Ashley registered in horror.

'The friendship with Pietro cooled after that, but last month Tim attended a party at Pietro's home,' Arnold continued with visible reluctance. 'Someone there identified him as your brother. The two boys had already been involved in some silly rivalry over a girl. Pietro jumped on the bandwagon, made certain offensive remarks concerning-er-your past-er-relationship with his uncle, and there was a fight.'

Ashley's knees gave. She felt her passage down into the nearest seat, her stomach knotting up with nauseous cramps. Arnold managed to avoid her anguished stare.

'Tim thumped hell out of the little swine and he was thrown out,' he said grimly. 'But unfortunately, Pietro wasn't prepared to take his come-uppance lying down. He and his friends, having found Tim's weak spot, continued to bait him at school. And last month, four of them cornered him and beat him up.'

An inarticulate gasp of distress escaped her bloodless lips. She remembered how uncommunicative Tim had been about that episode. She had got nowhere when she tried to find out what had lain behind that attack. Tim had stared at the wall. He had almost stormed out when she'd persisted. In the end, she had minded her own business. She had been the black sheep of her family for over four years and her only recently renewed link with Tim had been too tenuous and too precious to risk.

She bent her head sickly. 'Go on.'

'Susan and I were extremely disturbed when he refused to tell us what had provoked that attack. We did think about approaching the school but I felt that Tim would find that humiliating. I expected it all to blow over. Believe me, I regret that decision now.'

'But why didn't he tell us what was happening? Ashley moved her head in a numb motion, too shaken to think straight..

'You have to view this situation and the players involved without rose-tinted specs,' Arnold said flatly. 'I'm afraid I've never had much time for your father's determination to exclude you from the family circle. It has caused enormous stress to everyone concerned, particularly to your mother and Tim…',..

The carpet blurred beneath Ashley s swimming eyes. 'Tim's very attached to you and very loyal. He didn't trust us enough to tell us what was happening.' He hesitated. 'And, much as I love my wife, I find it incredulous that after twelve years of marriage Susan is still so desperate to win her father' s approval that she is willing to cut her only sister out of her life just because he demands that she do so.'

It was coals of fire on Ashley's head. Susan had scars from their childhood as well. She simply dealt with them differently. Ashley tasted blood in her mouth. Involuntarily she had bitten her tongue. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered.

'You have nothing to apologise for. Tim went out to level a personal score,' Arnold asserted. 'He broke into the grounds of the Cavalieri home, started the car, couldn't control it and left a trail of destruction behind him. He ran off before he could be caught but he had been seen.'

Ashley was feeling physically ill. Her past had obtruded painfully into Tim's present. In her name, he had been provoked, humiliated and driven into an attempt to strike back. 'Has he been charged?'

'Of course. The Cavalieri’s own one of the biggest banking concerns in Europe. Tim won't talk his way out of this little lot. But he's brought it on himself.' 'How can you say that?' Shaking briefly free of her shock, Ashley leapt upright. 'He defended me and now he's paying for it!' Tears streaked her cheeks. 'Vandalising someone else's property is hardly in line with a gallant defence of one's sister.'

'How else could he hit back?' Ashley gasped. 'I know he's acted like a great overgrown child but Vito's family are so filthy-rich and powerful, he couldn't have touched them in any other way!'

A dismayed furrow divided Arnold's brows. He didn't like the direction the dialogue was taking. 'We'll get him the best legal representation we can afford,' he replied stiffly. 'But it ought to be your father in the dock. Tim should have been disciplined long ago.'

'I'll go up and see him.' Ashley had no time for his fastidious platitudes. They were not going to help Tim now.

Tim was sitting at the foot of the bed, his hands clasped white-knuckled between his thighs, his untidy auburn head bent. He didn't look up. 'I didn't know you were here until I heard your voice downstairs.'

'Arnold's told me everything.' She leaned back weakly against the door. 'Why, Tim? Why? Vito never did anything to you.'

His head flew up. 'Oh, no? What about you?' he demanded bitterly. 'He wrecked your life. You had to drop out of uni. You're not allowed in your own home. You live in a lousy bedsit; work in a lousy, demeaning job because of him!'

Her brother's bitterness pierced her flesh like so many knives.

'And that foul-mouthed little creep Pietro sneers about you like his uncle did something to be proud of!' 'You don't know what happened between Vito and me,' she said haltingly.

'You were nineteen and he was twenty-eight,' Tim flared. 'That tells me all I need to know.'

'Our relationship just didn't work out, Tim.'

'He dumped you when you were pregnant and married someone else,' Tim snapped back rawly.

She was drenched in pain by the blunt reminder of the child she had eventually lost. Grey-faced, she whispered tightly, 'It wasn't like that, Tim. He didn't know I was pregnant. In fact, at the time we broke up, neither did I and I never told him. There wasn't much point once he was married.'

Her brother stared at her incredulously. 'Don’t lie about it! I'm not a kid any more.'

'But that's how it happened.'

His complexion had a sickly hue now. 'I don't believe you. He let you down. He left you in the lurch. He used you! He must have known about the baby! He must have…'

'Does Pietro?' 'Well, no, but-'

'Vito didn't know.' Her nails had bitten sharp crescents into her palms. Too late now to wish she had told him the whole story. But how could she have told him so that he would have understood? Some things you didn’t want to talk about. Some things you couldn't explain to a teenage boy, who was determined to see his much maligned sister in the guise of an innocent victim, seduced and abandoned. In one sense, it had been that brutal, but in another sense she had chosen her own fate. And Tim's response to her questions had confirmed her every suspicion. What had driven Tim over the edge was her situation, not his own.

'Try not to worry too much,' she murmured. 'It may…it may just come all right.'

'I'm not a baby, Ash,' he muttered jerkily. 'I fouled up. In the pub, it was all just spinning round and round my head. What they'd done to you. What they'd done to me. I just couldn't take any more. I just… I just saw red, you know?'

Yes, she knew exactly. In temperament, she and Tim were very alike. They had their father's quick, seething temper and it was a curse. A curse and a weakness she abhorred.

Arnold was waiting downstairs for her. 'I'll drive you home.'

'No, really… there's no need.'

He draped her jacket round her slumped shoulders. 'Come on. I need some fresh air.'

She had to give him directions. Apart from one enquiry as to how she was getting on with the Open University degree she was studying for, there was no further conversation. Both of them were buried in their own thoughts. But Ashley felt that she had the advantage.

After all, she knew what she had to do. She had to see Vito. He had at least to give her a hearing. And if she had to crawl, well, she would do it. If that was what it would take, so be it. Ashley and her pride were an inseparable duo but, where Tim's freedom and her mother's peace of mind were concerned, no sacrifice would be too great. It would be her penance for what Tim had had to suffer in her name.

As she slid tiredly into bed, the paralysis of shock was seeping away. The full horror of the night's revelations was sinking in. Oh, dear heaven, why had this had to happen? How many times did she have to pay for one mistake, a mistake that, given her background, should have been easily avoidable? The mistake had been falling blindly, hopelessly in love with the wrong person. Her mother had made the same mistake after all.

Sylvia Forrester didn't have a strong personality, however. Quiet and gentle, her mother would always follow where others led. After thirty-odd years of her husband’s bullying, she was an apologetic, self-effacing woman, far too weak to cross a man who had made a proud god of masculine domination. She had already had one nervous breakdown.

At eighteen, Ashley had been supremely confident of her ability to control her own emotions. She had her entire future mapped out like a battle plan before her. University, a top-flight degree followed by a meteoric rise to prominence in the business world. Instead she had plummeted like a stone in the first year of her course. Why?

For a crazy five-month span she had lost sight of her goals. She had forgotten the lessons ground into her by her own upbringing. And, to make it even worse, she had honestly believed that she knew what she was doing. It was wonderful the excuses you could make to yourself when you wanted something you knew you shouldn't have. And that put her feelings for Vito then into a nutshell.

Something forbidden, something dangerous, something out of control. Once she had prided herself on her self-discipline. There had been no place for a man in her battle-plan. Men took, men demanded, men expected, men complicated things. Maybe when she was at least thirty, she had thought with the naive certainty of youth, maybe when she was comfortably established in her career, she would let a man into one compartment of her busy, fulfilling existence. 'He' would be enthusiastically supportive of her ambition, content to accept that only that one tiny little compartment was his…

Fate had had the last laugh on her. Fate had thrown up Vito, a male as diametrically opposed to her ideal as he could possibly be. Once Vito had believed that he had her where he wanted her, so besotted she couldn't think straight, he had tried to change her into a totally different person. Piece by piece he had eroded her confidence, criticising this, censuring that. Thank God she had woken up.

One day she might have looked in the mirror and seen her mother staring back at her. An unhappy woman, hooked on a man who was poison for her but too drained of strength and self-worth to take the antidote. It would be news to her sister, but in Ashley's opinion there could have been no worse fate than to end up respectably married to Vito di Cavalieri…

'There is no point in waiting any longer.' The receptionist flashed an irritated look. The phase of meaninglessly polite smiles was long past. 'I did warn you that Mr di Cavalieri wouldn't be available. When he's in London, he's exceptionally busy. His appointment book is filled weeks in advance.'

He wasn't available on the phone and he was no more available in the flesh. He had to see her. He simply had to. He knew why she was here and he had to understand. There was nobody more family-orientated than Vito. She had called in sick at the day nursery where she worked as an assistant. On the dot of opening time, she had entered the Cavalieri Bank. Two hours on, she was still on the ground floor of a twenty-storey building. Perhaps it was naive of her, but she was appalled by the growing suspicion that Vito wouldn't even give her five minutes of his time.

Her surroundings reeked of expense and elegance. Cross a brain like a steel trap with the family bank vaults and you got success, the sort of success that even the receptionist wore like a mantle of superiority. Ashley reddened, painfully conscious that four years ago she would have strolled into this impressive building in jeans and a T-shirt and an unconcerned smile. Then, it wouldn't have bothered her that she looked shabby and out of place. In those days she had been secure in herself. But she wasn't now. As the axe of retribution had fallen on every hope, dream and attachment she had ever cherished, her self-confidence had dive-bombed accordingly.

Vito wasn't going to see her. She tasted the concept, retreated from it fearfully. All right, so they hadn't parted friends. In fact, they had parted on the most violent terms of mutual hatred, but somehow she had assumed that Vito would opt for the civilised response.

'Miss Forrester?' It was the receptionist again. 'If you're prepared to wait for another hour, Mr di Cavalieri may be able to see you. It's not definite now,' she warned. 'His senior secretary is trying to squeeze you in before lunch.'

Ironically, that condescension sent fury hurtling through Ashley. 'How very kind of her,' she said sharply. 'You can wait on the top floor,' she was told frigidly. The top floor was sumptuous. Involuntarily she was impressed, and that annoyed her again. The svelte brunette on the desk looked her over covertly. The loose khaki jacket and cotton trousers she wore were the closest thing she had to a suit. Her hair was doing its usual stint of falling down, dropping untidy tendrils round a face that already felt horribly hot. In all, she felt a mess.

By the end of another hour, she was a limp rag. All her carefully thought out opening speeches and follow-ups had deserted her. Vito, she was convinced, was deliberately keeping her waiting. Vito had the art of subtle, mind-bending cruelty at his polished fingertips.

'Mr di Cavalieri will see you now.'

Gulping, she scrambled upright, hating him for having reduced her to a bag of nerves, harassed by unwelcome memories. A middle-aged woman greeted her at the foot of the corridor. 'I'm afraid Mr di Cavalieri can only give you ten minutes.'

Ten minutes to plead Tim's case to a male who not only loathed her but also equated dropping a sweetie paper on the pavement with crime? She hung on to a hysterical howl of laughter. Ten minutes was better than nothing and, knowing Vito's capacity for holding on to a grudge, nothing was what she had almost received.

Double doors spread wide into an enormous office. An acre of plush carpet stretched before her. She could see a desk with a computer bank and several phones. Psychologically, it was a most intimidating backdrop, reminding her quite unnecessarily that she was entirely on Vito's ground with nothing between her and desperation but the flimsy hope that he did not recall their last meeting quite as accurately as she did…

Her skin dampened. Vito was in view now. Taller than she remembered, darker than she remembered, about a hundred times more staggeringly attractive than she had ever allowed herself to remember. All the sophisticated trappings were there; the superbly elegant suit, the absolutely unshakeable good manners that were prompting that coldly polite smile. But they were only a facade on a fiercely elemental nature and an immense and arrogant ego, a galaxy away from her New-Age-man ideal.

'Thanks for seeing me.' It wasn't the opening she had planned. Indeed, it sounded demandingly humble to her own ears.