A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER THREE

Tim had defended her. And in her name he had been baited, beaten up and humiliated. Tormented by his inability to silence Pietro, Tim's rage and resentment had inevitably centred on Vito, the male he viewed as the author of all his sister's misfortunes. He had probably intended to drive Vito's Ferrari away and leave it somewhere, giving Vito a scare. Ashley was absolutely certain that Tim had not meant to damage it. Like most teenage boys, Tim was car crazy. The wanton destruction of such an exclusive car would have been beyond him. Ashley was convinced that, filled with Dutch courage and fired by an adolescent desire for the only revenge within his reach, Tim had embarked on a stupid, boyish prank that had concluded in the kind of disaster he could not have dreamt up in his worst nightmares. But no court would view his outrageous conduct in such a mellow light. The court would not hear about the provocation Tim had endured for so many weeks beforehand either. Hadn't Tim already suffered enough? 'Aren't you responsible for everything that drags our family down?' Susan had condemned bitterly. All of a sudden the stark truth of that accusation seemed cruelly apt.

You break the rules, you pay the price. Four years ago, she had moved into Vito's apartment, well aware that she was contravening her father's staunchly moral principles. Faced with his fury, she had refused to hang her head in shame. She had been defiant to the last and in the end she had paid a high price for that defiance, but it had occurred to her recently that she had not been the only one to pay that price.

The scant references Tim had made to that period of their lives had made it painfully obvious that· her behaviour had caused her mother tremendous distress.

'Unlimited sex, whenever I want it…' Ashley's teeth ground audibly together as she elbowed her passage out of the lift. Seething over the treatment she had received, she stalked from the building. How dared he speak to her like that? How dared he? Well, you did what you could and you failed, she told herself bracingly. Tim's stricken face lurched into her conscience. Missing her step, she stumbled and nearly fell, horror darkening her eyes. And it was there, right there in the middle of the crowded pavement with people pushing past her on either side, that the harsh reality of Tim's predicament finally struck home hard. Her self-righteous fury evaporated, leaving her limp and shaken.

Dear heaven, was she actually planning to stand back and watch her kid brother go to prison? Guilt swallowed her alive. Vito had at least agreed to see her. And what had she done with that opportunity? Instead of pursuing Tim's cause with suitable tact and humility, she had gone off on an emotional tangent, dredging up personal issues which had had no place in the dialogue. She had blown Tim's one hope of freedom, wilfully, recklessly blown it for the selfish satisfaction of provoking Vito.

Her stomach gave a nauseous lurch. With so much at stake, only a lunatic would have behaved as she had. It was useless to plead that she could never have foreseen this sequence of events… it did not make her any less responsible for the results. And what her mother had endured then would be as nothing to what she would endure at the mere thought of the son she idolised going to prison. Emotionally fragile as she was at the best of times, it was very possible that the crisis would push Sylvia Forrester into another breakdown. That danger was as unthinkable to Ashley as the risk of her little brother ending up in a cell, and the means to defeat both threats were, she registered dully, within her own hands.

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.

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.

'You were being bloody devious and dishonest!' Ashley countered.

'I was compromising my own convictions in an attempt to save our relationship,' Vito bit out between clenched teeth. 'There were times I wanted to shake you until your teeth rattled! There were times I wanted to use physical force to make you listen to me! Times I wanted to get inside your head and rearrange the circuitry into some form of normality.'

'I always said the only sort of real woman you could cope with would be a housekeeping robot!' Ashley spat, grabbing up her bag. 'I've had enough of this, and I wouldn't like to tell you exactly what I think of your baby-boom proposition, although I would dearly like to tell you what to do with it!'

'You walk out of that door and your brother goes to prison!'

Ashley froze with her hand reaching out towards the door and slowly swung back. 'You bastard!' she gasped strickenly, recalled to reality again with a nasty jerk when for a few minutes there it had almost been like old times, when they had fought hammer and tongs, no insult too low to be utilised, no theme too sensitive to employ.

'I am what you made me,' Vito responded very softly, a dark brilliance simmering like the start of a summer storm in the back of his fierce gaze. 'The guy who gave you fabulous sex but no deeply unsatisfied longing for a permanent commitment.'

Ashley snatched up her abandoned coffee-cup and threw it at him with an unrepeatable word. 'How dare you talk to me like that?' she seethed.

The cup smashed harmlessly against the edge of the fireplace but the contents spattered Vito's jacket. It served him right, Ashley thought furiously. Vito had always seemed to have the opinion that it was somehow beneath him to duck when she threw things.

'You know, my father once assured me that a gentleman never hits a lady,' Vito murmured half under his breath. 'Therefore I should feel quite free to retaliate. After all, there is no individual worthy of the title of a lady currently in this room.'

'You lay a finger on-' Ashley broke off as a quiet knock on the door prefaced the entry of the manservant with the offer of a second cup of coffee.

'Thank you,' Vito stated straight-faced. 'But I've had all the coffee I can handle.'

As the door shut, a powerful hand closed round one of Ashley's wrists and yanked her bodily forward, her slender five-foot-two-inch figure suddenly twisting away from his proximity in dismay.

'Let go of me!' she seethed, and when her demand was ignored something snapped inside her. Determined to break that controlling hold, she went wild, arms flailing, legs kicking. Vito lifted her off her feet with frightening strength, shook her once in mid-air, making her feel maddeningly like a rag doll, and brought her down again in a similarly controlled landing.

'If you want to behave like a wild animal,' Vito intoned in even addition, 'I will be more than happy to supply you with a cage.'

Shocked and winded by the merciless speed of his response, she clashed with glittering golden eyes. The collision left her breathless. The final token struggle, she conceded dully, was over. Not surprisingly, she had lost. She had never won many points with Vito. If she was strong-willed and stubborn, Vito was doubly so. With a knife at his throat, Vito would disdain retreat. His temperament was as fiery as her own but his was controlled by the cool of intellect, not by passion. And in any confrontation he would always triumph on the ruthless edge of that streak of cruelty that was uniquely his. And now it seemed that he had her precisely where he had always wanted her… absolutely and irrevocably within his power.

Abruptly her thought-train was broken by the awareness that Vito had not yet freed her from his hold. Forced into rawly intimate acquaintance with every sleek, hard angle of his lean, muscular length, she attempted to edge out of reach. An imprisoning hand splayed across her hipbone, reinforcing the physical contact she was suddenly desperate to avoid.

'Leave me alone!' she demanded wildly.

Ruthless fingers knotted and twisted into the tangled fall of her hair, tipping her head back.

'You're behaving like an-'

'An aroused male?' Vito vented a low-pitched laugh that did something inexcusable to the level of support offered by her knees. 'But I am. Very aroused.'

'V-Vito… no!' But he had already pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse flickering wildly in the hollow of her throat and she moaned, beginning to tremble like someone caught unexpectedly in a violent storm. Somewhere in the bemused reaches of her brain she was recalling that she had this one weak spot where Vito was concerned. When he touched her… oh, God, when he touched her! The tip of his tongue delved provocatively between her mutinously closed lips and withdrew again. A choked whimper broke low in her throat, sudden raw and delicious tension of a different kind jerking her every muscle tight, driving every single rational thought from her swimming head.

Involuntarily her whole body was reaching up and out, reacting to the lure of an anticipation that dug painful claws of need into her flesh. Slowly, unbearably slowly, so that her hands clutched pleadingly at his broad shoulders, he brought his mouth down to the now opened invitation of hers.

He kissed the same way he made love: with fire and passion and unholy sexual intensity. Her every skin cell came alive in one gigantic whoosh of feeling. Her skin was clammy, her breasts were swelling and her nipples were pinching into aching tightness. Liquidity ran in a river of drowning weakness through her limbs and she would have sagged if he hadn't been holding her upright. For long timeless moments, she was in a hot, swirling darkness where only the primitive demands of her own body held sway. He moved against her, lithely erotic as a jungle cat, letting her feel the thrusting evidence of his masculinity. She gave up on the unequal fight and folded into the heat and hardness of him, abandoning herself to the savage potency of his hunger as he swept her off her feet and carried her out of the room.

'Take the rest of the day off.'

She heard that. She heard him speaking to someone.

That penetrated the haze of passion even as she registered that Vito sounded most unlike his usual cool, controlled self. Some physical sense of where she was penetrated as he brought her down on some unyielding horizontal surface, and her eyes flew wide open, trained to his darkly handsome face above hers, taut and flushed and determined with the force of a hunger she too well understood.

'It's like the first time all over again,' Vito swore huskily. 'Except this time you still have too many clothes on.'

After an arrested pause, Ashley stared up at him in horror, delivered from the voracious grip of passion by a deluge of powerful emotions. Caressing fingertips were exploring beneath her T-shirt, and, before she could quench it, her body betrayed her all-over again. A long sobbing sigh escaped her as he shaped her breasts, an expert thumb teasing at the sensitive peak of her engorged flesh.

Attacked simultaneously by the extremities of shock, disbelief and a cringing sense of shame, Ashley froze. She was too devastated to cope with anything beyond her own reactions to what had just happened between them. The impossible… the unmentionable… the unforgivable. She wasn't a teenager with overactive hormones any more. How could she let him do this to her? In unwitting anguish, she looked up at him, seeking an answer to the inexplicable.

Vito's hands slowly stilled, virtually unnoticed by her. 'It hasn't changed, has it, cara? We have an insatiable hunger for each other. Something so powerful I didn't even believe it existed until I met you. That wasn't enough for me the last time,' he breathed in an unsteady undertone. 'But this time, it's going to be the icing on the cake.'

'Don't be disgusting!' Ashley made another feeble attempt to dislodge herself from his hold so that she could rearrange her disordered clothing. Little tremors of physical after-shock were still quaking through her, nor was she yet in any fit state to deal with the ramifications of her own failure to maintain control of the situation.

'And what a relief it is to be with a woman who believes she can treat sex as casually as a man, who expects none of the traditional touches of courtship and romance and who would certainly never dream of demanding that I do something as boringly conventional as wait until after the wedding,' Vito continued smoothly.

Something perilously close to naked panic assailed her in the wake of that most enlightening speech. 'Something wrong?' Lustrous dark eyes were tracking her every change of expression with the efficiency of a scanner tuning in to easily read airwaves.

An awful lot of somethings. So many that she couldn't put them all together at once. Without the smallest preparation she was being confronted with all the false images she had put up for Vito's benefit four years ago, when it had seemed so desperately important that he did not wring an admission of undying love from her. Being loved gave immense power to the loved one. Her father had wielded that power over her mother throughout their marriage. Ashley had been determined that Vito would never receive that weapon from her.

It's chemistry, it's my age, it's infatuation, she had told herself then. I do not love him, I do not need him, I will not look for him when he is not there. That had been her mantra of self-defence. And she had behaved accordingly, refusing verbally to grant him the exclusive commitment he demanded and loudly disclaiming the double standards which made sexual experimentation acceptable for a man but not for a woman.

Certainly she had not behaved that way without some justification. And from the outset Vito had had that exclusive commitment whether he had chosen to believe it or not. But Vito had acted as though he owned her. She had played her role with the nervous defiance of someone being beaten back into an increasingly tight corner by an overpoweringly masculine male, who thought liberation was something to do with occupied territories and absolutely nothing to do with the female sex. Looking at Vito now, so cool and so calm, it was hard to recall the furious violence of their arguments and the ferocious jealousy and possessiveness he had demonstrated when she dared to show him that he did not have the right to dictate her every move.

'Vito… I…' It occurred to her that all those proud pretences of hers had truly come home to roost with her now. Vito had an utterly mistaken impression of her true character. Vito had always had a most unendearing habit of misinterpreting what she said, especially when she flung things she didn't mean in a temper. And now, not unnaturally, Vito expected her to practise what she had once so loudly preached.

"'If you feel like it, go for it,''' Vito challenged in an accented drawl as smooth as black velvet. 'And you can't say that you don't feel like making love because I already know that you do.'

'I wish you'd stop throwing every s-stupid thing I ever said back at me!' she launched and subsided again as a blunt forefinger skimmed across her midriff and lingered just above her waistband.

'So you admit that some of it was stupid,' Vito probed mercilessly. 'Or is it just that you would admit to anything sooner than share this bed with me right now?'

In despair she turned her head away, wondering dully if sharing his bed now was Vito's callous method of sealing the bargain she had yet to agree to or merely the first in a long line of heartless humiliations, designed to reduce her pride to rubble. Dear God, if her brother's freedom was to hinge on this, what was she to do? If Vito made that demand now, she felt that she would walk out of this apartment and under the nearest bus, because she would never be able to look either him or herself in the face again.

'I've never been promiscuous,' she mumbled. Vito dealt her pinched profile a grimly amused smile. Had she seen it, rage would have revived her, but she did not see it. Nor did it occur to her that Vito was being astoundingly patient for a male bent on immediately slaking his lust.

And, without warning, what she was to do was taken care of in the most unwelcome fashion possible. Forty-eight hours of frantic worry, powered by insufficient sleep and food, abruptly took their toll. Ashley burst into floods of tears, shocking herself as much as she shocked him. Her most pressing need then was for privacy but Vito caught her back before she could reel off the bed.

'Let go!' she sobbed.

'How can I’. He tugged her into his arms.

'I can't take any more!' Blinded by the raining gush of tears, sobs wrenched at her throat. 'I'm… I'm not a c-call girl or something.'

'No, you have entirely the wrong attitude and far too much class,' Vito assured her instantly, encouraging her to weep all over his shirt-front while he smoothed her tousled hair back from her brow.

'I c-can't cope with you right now and you know it!' In a surge of mortified frustration, she struck weakly at his solidity with a loosely coiled fist. 'I n-never cry! I despise w-women who do this!'

He murmured incomprehensibly soothing things in Italian. She cried even harder because, God help her, she liked it. The scent of warm male flesh, so achingly familiar, enveloped her and was as strangely reassuring as the rock-steady beat of his heart. She couldn't remember when anyone had last put their arms round her… it had probably been him. Something akin to despair engulfed her, adding to her bitter burden of defeat.

A cruising forefinger drifted confidently down over one damp cheek. She didn't move. She was comfortable, comforted, and as he deftly eased her on to the sofa at the foot of the bed she burrowed unconsciously closer. Physically and mentally drained by complete exhaustion, she refused to question the incongruity of her behaviour.

'I should apologise.' Vito hesitated. 'Sometimes you bring out something in me that I don't like very much.' 'That makes two of us. You must see how utterly hopeless it is to expect me to-'

Long fingers tipped up her face. A faintly chilling smile slanted his mouth. 'Don't fight me.' Dark eyes held hers by sheer force of will. 'If you fight me, you'll get hurt.'

'Do you always kick people when they're down?' 'You're not down.' He stood up. 'You're just recharging your batteries. I suggest you move into this apartment while I'm away.'

'Away?'

'I'm leaving for Geneva in a couple of hours. I'll be back next week. Maybe I'll take you to the opera. You like the opera,' he reminded her with the attitude of someone presenting a sulky child with a consolation prize.

She gritted her teeth. 'Tim?' 'I will contact the police.'

'They mightn't listen.'

'The entire episode took place on private property. Whether I choose to prosecute or not is my business,' Vito pointed out with inborn arrogance.

A shuddering spasm of relief slivered through her. He had done this to her, she realised fearfully, encouraged her to dash herself to pieces against that absolute obduracy that was his greatest strength. Four years ago, he had ripped her to shreds by the simple act of walking out. A giant black chasm had opened below her feet and she had drowned. But while she had drowned in the emptiness, the loneliness and the savage agony of loss, Vito had been getting married and moving on coolly to put together the kind of brilliant deals which had made his name in the circles of international finance, his eventual reward that of becoming the youngest ever president of the Cavalieri Mercantile Bank. There was a lesson to be learned in that comparison and it terrified her.

Maybe she was paranoid, maybe it was her overactive imagination, but she had the horrible suspicion that each and every one of her experiences today had been exactly choreographed with the precise intention of reducing her to her current level of emotional devastation.

'I'll make you a lousy wife, Vito,' she whispered. '''Rien ne chatouille qui ne peinée".'

Her French wasn't up to the translation. 'Montaigne,' Vito supplied. '''Nothing gives pleasure but that which gives pain".'

'I'm not a masochist,' she said dully.

'Think of it as a business arrangement – an exchange of mutual benefit. If you endeavour not to be a lousy wife, I will endeavour not to be a lousy husband. What happens between us after the wedding will therefore be your responsibility.'

'Oh, neat cop-out, Vito!' Ashley flung him a glance of weary scorn. He was already pressing a button on the cordless phone, ordering the car to be brought round, impervious, it seemed, to her attitude.

'To all intents and purposes it will be a normal marriage.'

'If we lived in a lunatic asylum, I guess it would be.' He cast her a genuinely amused smile. The immense charm he was capable of sprang out at her for the first time that day. Involuntarily her gaze clung to his, zapped by that almost forgotten power-surge. 'I knew it wouldn't take long for your batteries to pick up again. Oh, yes, before you go,' he drawled. 'One more little thing. Ground rules.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I believe in highlighting the small print of any contract with an unwary partner,' Vito asserted. 'I expect you to be pleasant to my family. I will also expect you to dress in a manner appropriate to your status. We'll sort that out next week.'

Her teeth gritted, her lips firmly compressed.

Vito stilled. 'And, last but not least, no men,' he added very, very quietly. 'No flirtations, no male friends, platonic or otherwise. If you break that rule, life won't be worth living, I assure you, cara.'

Her sensitive stomach executed a nervous somersault.