A Vengeful Passion

CHAPTER SIX

'How could you do that to me?' Ashley gasped. 'How could you embarrass Josh like that?' Wrathfully unrepentant, Vito poured himself a whisky from the decanter on the library table. 'I warned you. If I hadn't felt sorry for the poor bastard, I'd have hit him! Dio, what sort of a woman are you?'

'What's a kiss on the cheek?' she demanded. 'Josh is an old friend.'

'And presumably the bed sheets have yet to cool,' Vito breathed with stinging derision.

'I won't even dignify that with an answer.'

His sensual mouth was set in a cold line of austerity. 'He's in love with you. As a former victim, I'm an expert on the symptoms. Did you give him the same run-around that you gave me? Was he weak enough to beg? He's a fool. If anyone begs in our relationship, it will be you.'

She shivered, the bite of that menacing assurance making her skin prickle with fear. 'You'd have to kill me first.'

'No, cara,' Vito contradicted silkily. 'All I have to do is take you to bed. Something I plan to do over and over again in the very near future. It would seem it was a mistake to neglect you all week.'

'I-I don't know what you're talking about,' she muttered tightly.

'You looked across at me and then you were all over Hennessy like a second skin.' A heady flush washed her complexion. Yes, she had known he was watching her, indeed had been aware with every fibre of her being. She was too honest with herself to deny the fact. He had hurt her and she had reacted as impulsively as she usually did. She was suddenly ashamed of encouraging Josh to put himself in such an awkward position.

'So why did you do it?' Vito drawled.

Whipped on the raw once too often, she flung back her glorious head of hair and lifted her chin. 'Go to hell,' she said fierily.

'If I go to hell, I take you with me.' His strong, dark features taut with anger, he reached for her. 'I want to know why you found that cheap little exhibition necessary.'

A powerful hand was welded to her narrow shoulder, denying her the retreat she had been about to make. Involuntarily she collided with narrow dark eyes fringed by dense black lashes and the effect was paralysing. Her breath tripped in her throat. 'We should get back to the party.' Vito ran a blunt brown forefinger up the extended line of her throat and she swallowed jerkily. The atmosphere was heavy, intense. Her mouth ran dry, her soft lips parting as she snatched in air. Heat was beginning to surge up inside her. Long fingers glanced caressingly along her jawbone and she had to fight the temptation to turn her cheek into his palm like a sensuous cat begging to be stroked. The hand on her shoulder slid down her rigid spinal cord, tracking her raw tension and then sinking into the narrow indentation just below her waist to ease her closer still.

'The party,' she repeated shakily, struggling to hold on to thoughts already blurred round the edges. His brilliant gaze glittered over her wide eyes and tremulous mouth as his fingers spread over the curve of her hip and pressed her into the hard cradle of his lean thighs. Excitement, wild and inescapable, shock-waved through her. The bold thrust of his erection against her stomach electrified her. She quivered in response and shut her eyes tightly in soundless despair, wanting to feel revulsion, wanting to feel anything but this insane compulsion to uncurl her taut fingers and force him even closer.

'Why?' he persisted.

'Why what?' she mumbled, despising herself. 'Hennessy?'

'Giulia… you hurt me.' The words came in an unsteady rush.

His hands dropped from her and he stepped back, relocating his glass. He left her marooned in the centre of the carpet. Dazedly, she looked at him, the shock of separation shrilling through her nerve-endings with a butcher's efficiency. In the soft pool of the lamplight, he had the beauty of a dark angel but the hard, ruthless angles and sleek lines of a predatory animal. Neither, she registered dully, could have been more coldly merciless in administering punishment. And she was painfully reminded of how easily he had walked away from her once before.

Her legs were wobbling. Her stomach felt seasick but worst of all was that clawing hunger of arousal still clamouring for assuagement. She sank down on to a sofa, pale and drained and deeply ashamed that he could exercise such effortless power over her.

'You really do hate me, don't you?' The question that sought no answer simply slid from her tongue. 'And you blame me for everything that happened four years ago. You don't want to accept that the view is very different from my side of the fence.'

'Is it?' There was no emotion whatsoever in the flat response.

'You walked out, not me,' she condemned in an undertone. 'I needed to find somewhere else to live and I was broke-'

'The rent on that apartment was paid up until the end of the year,' Vito incised drily. 'There was no need for you to move out. I also opened an account for you so that you would not be short of money.'

'Yes…' A choky little laugh escaped her. 'I'll never forget that most sentimental of final farewells. A cheque-book delivered by special messenger. Just what every woman wants as a last touching memory of your undying devotion. What did you think I was? Some little bimbo you had to payoff?'

An almost imperceptible flush demarcated his high cheekbones. 'I was responsible for you. I discharged that responsibility in the only way open to me at that time.'

'I didn't take your money when I lived with you. Why would I take it when you were gone?' she whispered hoarsely. 'I couldn't go back to the flat I'd shared because I sublet it two weeks before you left. That's why I ended up on Steve's couch.'

'The baby… was it mine?' He shot the question at her without warning. He was out of context but she could see by his stillness, his cold concentration that it was really the only topic he was ready to focus on. 'The subject is closed', he had said a week ago, but even Vito was human.

The raw cruelty of that question pierced her like a knife. And the strength of her own pain surprised her or she had believed that she was prepared for that suspicion. 'How can you ask me that?' she gasped.

In the smouldering pulse of the silence, Vito elevated a satiric ebony brow. Ashley bowed her head, quivering with a hatred that was but a thin patina over a painful surge of confused emotions. Where was her anger? She wanted her anger, she needed that anger. But instead she was suffering a desperate sense of loss and futility. Why did it hurt so much to hate him? Why did she feel so terrifyingly vulnerable? Why all of a sudden did it matter so much that he believed her?

'It was yours.' She surrendered, despising herself for the weakness. 'And-'

'That's all I want to know,' Vito interrupted fiercely. 'But how did you know?' she demanded finally.

'I put a private investigator on you. I was curious.' Vito cast her a freezingly shuttered glance but one brown hand clenched into a fist in betrayal as he spoke. 'I believed that there was another man involved. In the end that angle was immaterial. Purely by accident, I discovered that you had a far more powerful reason for wanting me out of your life.’

Ashley flinched. He thought that she would have gone to any lengths to ensure that she had the freedom to dispose of their unborn child. It was a sordid picture and one she did not have the means to dispel. In her absence she had been convicted and sentenced four years ago and he was allowing her no right of appeal.

'You won't listen to me,' she pointed out strickenly. 'But I didn't have the abortion. I changed my mind. I had a miscarriage a couple of months later.'

'We should return to the party.'

'Vito, you can't do this to me!' she cried.

He expelled his breath in a savage hiss. 'It's in the past. Let us bury it forever. I should never have told you that I knew-'

'But you did,' she interrupted emotionally. 'So you can't bury it again!'

'We have to.' He surveyed her ashen pallor and his dark features tightened. 'I accept that I was mistaken in assuming that the decision you made cost you no pain. Clearly it did if the subject still causes you such distress, but you have to accept that we are each the products of a very different upbringing and I am as much a victim of that conditioning from childhood as you. I cannot change what I feel, but I can learn to put those feelings behind me. It is something I should have done a long time ago.'

In a passion of pain and bitter frustration, Ashley rose to her feet. Strive as he could, his judgemental attitude of reproach and a complete inability to understand emanated from him in waves. Hot tears brightened her beautiful eyes to luminescence. 'Why don't you put those feelings behind you and try concentrating on what you should be feeling?'

'Meaning?' he prompted drily.

'Where the hell were you when I needed you?' Raw emotion shrilled from the embittered demand. 'Where were you, Vito? I was nineteen years old and there was nowhere I could turn! You got me pregnant. You walked out. You married another woman. And you say that you I-loved me? Well, the only response I have for you now is… where were you, and where was that love when I needed it?'

He was rigid with shock, all the natural vitality bleached from his golden skin. His classic bone structure stood out in harsh relief, his dazed dark eyes twinned nakedly with hers as he was finally forced to take account of his own sins of omission.

Ashley drew in a deep shuddering breath. 'You don't live in the real word, Vito. You never have and you never will,' she condemned. 'You have a loving, supportive family and an obscene amount of money. You know about as much about how the rest of us live as a cartoon character! In the whole of your life you have never been in a position where you had no easy choice. So, you can afford to have ideals set in stone. You've never had to wonder where your next meal is coming from or how you're going to survive… and that's when ideals get compromised!' A dark rise of blood had banished his pallor. He raised a not quite steady hand and brushed away the tears streaking her cheeks. In one of those lightning-fast switches of mood that disturbed her, she found herself within an ace of throwing herself into his arms. The compulsion was so strong that she might have given in to it had not Vito abruptly withdrawn his hand and straightened again, having belatedly mastered the shocked turmoil she had briefly seen in his strained gaze.

A soft knock on the door prefaced Elena's carefully slow entry. 'I do hope I'm not interrupting, but there is a party out here lacking the two principal guests.' 'Ashley will join us in a moment.' Deliberately placing himself so that Ashley's distraught profile was shielded, Vito guided the older woman out of the room.

In the buzzing silence he left behind, she fought harder than she had ever fought for self-possession and calm. Somewhere a clock struck midnight, and she trembled beneath the awareness that in less than thirty-six hours she would be Vito's wife.

'We should reach the villa in another hour.' Vito settled back in his seat, having enjoyed a long and apparently effortless conversation with their driver, Bandu, in Sinhalese. The house in the hill country had been in the Cavalieri family for four generations. He, had dropped that fact casually as they boarded the plane in London, modestly neglecting to mention that he also spoke the language.

Even after a nerve-racking hour, Ashley was still on the edge of her seat at the sheer death-defying style of driving in Sri Lanka. Bandu wove in and out wildly at what seemed far too great a speed for safety, jumping on his horn with gusto and making absolutely no use of any other form of signal. Behind them an ox was pulling a cart piled high with pineapples, unconcerned by the jam building up to its rear. In front was an incredibly dilapidated lorry. A lanky youth was sleeping precariously on top of the sacks, quite unaware that a sack near him had come open and was dropping coconuts at regular intervals beneath their wheels. An ancient old man, balancing a basket of fish on his head, jay-walked out in front of them at an unbelievably leisurely pace and actually stopped to adjust the load he carried. Ashley vented a stifled shriek, certain they would hit him, but Bandu simply swerved violently and continued on.

'Driving in Colombo requires nerves of steel,' Vito commented with wry amusement. Still shaking with reaction, Ashley suppressed a yawn.

'You are still tired?' Vito looked politely astonished. 'A bit.' Yet she had slept throughout most of that endless flight. Perhaps that was why none of this seemed real. The wedding had taken place yesterday and they had spent the night on the plane. She couldn't understand why she was still so tired. Possibly it was the immense strain of striving to accept that she was now Vito's wife.

It didn't seem possible. Ashley di Cavalieri. The Press had been outside the church, dealing yet another shock to her system. She had expected a very quiet wedding. True, Vito had not said it would be, but she had assumed that, since this was not to be a normal marriage, he would prefer a register office and an absolute minimum of frills.

As a result, she had been quite unprepared for the delivery and last-minute fitting of an oyster silk wedding gown and equally unprepared for the bouquet, the two hundred guests, the private party afterwards and the exquisite wedding cake flown in specially from Rome. Actually, by that stage, Ashley had gone beyond shock. She had played a starring role in the sort of grand bridal soap opera that she had never dreamt she would experience. At the back of her mind screamed the awareness that today, thanks to the power of the media, her entire family would learn that she had married.

Her mother would be deeply hurt by her total ignorance of the proceedings. Her father would be furious that that same ignorance would be equally obvious to their neighbours. Susan would be offended. And Tim? Ashley's soft mouth took on an anxious curve. Her brother would probably be very suspicious of the extraordinary speed and secrecy with which the marriage had taken place.

The streets, crammed to capacity with children, cattle, bicycles and every other possible form of transport, were now behind them. The narrow winding road climbed through coconut and cashew plantations. Rice grew in paddies along the way and in every direction palm fronds were etched like lacy sentinels against the deep blue unclouded sky.

A trio of dark-skinned girls, wrapped in colourful sarongs, stood washing themselves at a standpipe by the side of the road. Bandu braked to avoid the staggering steps of a naked little toddler stamping in a puddle near the pipe. Ashley grinned. Children were the same the world over. The attraction of water play was universal.

'What a beautiful child.' She craned her neck to catch a last glimpse of the engaging toddler.

'The Sinhalese are a very attractive people.' Something in his tone made her turn her head. A questioning glint lit his perceptive gaze. Suddenly conscious that she had accidentally jettisoned her role of indifference to children, Ashley avoided his eyes and stiffened.

A few miles further on, the car turned up a steep, gated drive through a grove of cassia trees. Ashley climbed out into the hot, still air and dazedly studied the building before her. Dropped into an English village, it would have looked perfectly at home there. It had all the solid charm of a Victorian country house with the addition of a wraparound veranda to permit greater enjoyment of the tropical climate.

'My great-grandfather bought the estate from a British planter. I turned the tea plantation over to a workers' co-operative,' Vito explained. 'But I retained a considerable amount of land to ensure the seclusion of the house.'

An astonishing number of smiling faces were gathering on the veranda to greet them. Scorn in her eyes, Ashley whispered, 'Surely even your dignity does not require this number of staff?'

Vito sent her a stinging look of reproof. 'Employment is far from plentiful here. While wealth may cushion me from what you choose to call "the real world",' he derided in an undertone, 'I follow a policy of providing work for as many people as possible.'

Scorched by the rejoinder and flushed, Ashley was propelled forward to meet the staff. It was a long drawn-out process. Such chattering friendliness could not be swiftly concluded. All but the youngest spoke good English and it was clear from Vito's questions that he was well acquainted with each and every one of them.

Another yawn crept up on Ashley. Seeing her stifle it, Priya, the small, rounded housekeeper, smiled and swept her upstairs into a large bedroom, full of beautifully carved mahogany furniture in the colonial style. But Ashley barely had the time to admire it because the first thing she saw was a large photograph of Carina set in prominent position beside the enormous bed.

Quick as a flash, Priya registered the source of her sudden tension. 'You want that I should remove?' she pressed anxiously. 'I did not like to without instruction.'

'Oh, please leave it there.' Alarmed at being so easily read, Ashley forced a casual smile, behind which she boiled with a confusion of angry sensations. Were there photographs of Carina everywhere? Was she expected to lie in Vito's arms tonight with the saintly first wife staring down at her from the sidelines? A sense of deep humiliation and rage intertwined inside her.

After Priya had finished showing her the adjoining bathroom and dressing-room with touching pride, Ashley said that she wanted to lie down for a while and refused the offer of refreshment. She threw herself on the bed. That photograph, she reflected fiercely. There could be no stronger reminder that this was not to be a normal marriage. She rather thought that Vito, who excelled on small sensitive details when he so desired, would have tactfully banished the photos had this been a different sort of alliance. And why did she kid herself that Carina was the one on the sidelines?

It was she, Ashley, who was on the outside. If Carina hadn't died, Vito would still be with her. They would have had children by now. Dear God, why did she persist in denying the obvious? Why shouldn't Vito have come to love his first wife? They had shared so much; family, friends, background and outlook. He held her memory in the highest possible esteem and spoke of her only rarely but then with repressed but strong emotion. In every way they had been very well matched. Why couldn't she face up to the fact that Vito had loved Carina? Until now she had flatly refused to accept that Vito might have married for more than the 'right reasons' supplied by their similarities. Jealousy and resentment had blinded her. Once he had called Carina a very dear friend. Ashley had been the infatuation, Carina the woman he turned to and finally stayed with. And suddenly she was agonisingly conscious that all Vito wanted from her was a baby and a quick exit from his life. From the outset he had made it abundantly clear that that was the only use he had for her now.

A small sound roused her from an uneasy doze. She sat up abruptly as a lamp went on. Her stomach heaved in protest, her head swimming. Vito, dark and devastating in a white dinner-jacket, surveyed her from the foot of the bed. A slight frown pleated his ebony brows, a look of spurious concern in his searching gaze. 'Are you ill?' he enquired.

Swallowing hard on her nausea, she stared back at him with loathing. Obviously her system didn't take to jet-lag too smoothly, and not eating much in recent days probably hadn't helped.

'I'll call a doctor.' Vito straightened with decision. With a look of smouldering resentment, heightened by her sense of being absolutely trapped, Ashley snapped, 'I don't need a doctor! I just don't want anything to do with you!'

He absorbed the colour flooding back into her face. 'Dinner in half an hour, then,' he drawled succinctly. 'I'm not getting up,' she muttered, and rubbed her hot brow. 'I'm so warm.'

'You can hardly expect to be anything else with the windows closed, the curtains drawn and the air-conditioning switched off.' Vito responded flatly and strode into the bathroom.

She heard the gush of running water. 'I didn't know there was air-conditioning.'

From the doorway, he tossed her a blessedly cool cloth and she wiped her face with it blissfully. Sliding upright, she smoothed her creased clothing, wishing she had had the sense to undress before she lay down. Vito was surprisingly silent.

'I'll be down soon.' She sighed. 'How long have you been on these?'

Glancing at him, she froze. In one brown hand, Vito displayed three little boxes. Her supply of the Pill. Ashley was so shattered by the sight that her mouth fell inelegantly open. She couldn't believe he had them. They had been right at the very foot of her suitcase inside her toilet bag. 'Where did you get them from?' she demanded shrilly.

'One of the maids must have unpacked for you while you slept,' Vito breathed. 'They were sitting beside the sink.'

'I don't know how they got there,' she said stupidly. 'Perhaps you would like me to ask the maid?' Ashley paled, her fingernails biting into her clenched palms. The silence went on and on and on, brick piling steadily on brick, and Vito wielded that horrible silence with merciless efficiency.

'We have an agreement.' Vito slid the boxes into the pocket of his jacket. 'And you are a cheat.'

'B-because what you're demanding is…is-'

'What you agreed to,' Vito incised unyieldingly. 'And I don't intend to be defrauded by technology.' Agreement… cheat… defraud. The terminology of the business world and the law courts. Didn't he realise that she was a living, breathing human being ruled by emotion? Or didn't that matter? For him, emotion clearly didn't enter the equation. The week before last in London when he had made love to her… that, at least, had been full of emotion. Anger, bitterness, revenge, at least he had been feeling something. But now they were down to the bare bones of the cruellest contract and Vito had just shut down her one escape hatch.

'It will only be for a year.' The assurance was delivered harshly as though the sight of her emotional disturbance was unwelcome. 'If you don't conceive in that year, I'll let you go.'

A year. She squashed back an hysterical laugh of disbelief. A year. You couldn't even say he was prepared to waste that much time on her. A year. She wondered wildly if he would ask for his money back at the end of the trial period. She refused to think about what would happen if he was successful.

She came downstairs in an ice-blue Versace gown that glittered under the lights. While she was dressing, she had vaguely wondered where all the noise was coming from. But, as Priya led her outside, the singsong rise and fall of many voices ceased. They were to dine by candlelight on the veranda but not in splendid isolation, she realised, dazedly taking in the flaming coconut torches set up to light a large circular arena in front of the house. Like a stage, the rear was screened by a laced fence of palm leaves.

As Vito pushed in her chair, he murmured, 'This is a complete surprise to me as well. The staff arranged the entertainment in honour of our marriage.'

They were about to enjoy a performance of the Kolam Natima, a folk drama worthy of the theatre, he explained. A narrator made his appearance, two drummers and a piper backing his entrance. One by one the dancers appeared in glorious costumes and enormous masks, playing the parts of gods, demons and other mythical beings in a celebration of Sinhalese folklore. Ashley was entranced and, although Vito translated, he occasionally fell silent for some reason.

When Priya approached with two tiny glasses of a liqueur made from arrack, Sri Lanka's favourite alcoholic beverage, Ashley asked, 'But what is Kolam all about? I'm confused.'

Priya gave her a wide smile and chose to intervene on Vito's behalf. Indicating the two most spectacular masked figures, she said, 'This is the King and that is the Queen. She desires to have a baby, no?' Giggling, she stepped back into the shadows.

Stupid, how stupid she was! Reddening to the roots of her hair, she belatedly read the significance of the dancers' erotically symbolic movements. A very traditional drama for a newly married couple, she conceded. She refused to look at Vito. A brown forefinger skimmed her clenched hand where it rested on the table. 'This wasn't my idea,' he reminded her. In rejection she snaked her hand back out of reach, keeping her attention glued to the dancers below although in truth she could no longer see them.

'You're making this a fight every step of the way.' 'What did you expect?' she muttered bitterly. 'This is not the place for an argument.'

When the performance was over, Ashley smiled until her jaw ached. Vito requested coffee in the drawing room. The evening was becoming an endurance test. 'Is giving a little so impossible for you?' He slung the demand with savage impatience as soon as they were alone.

'Yes.' She bent her head. Give a little, end up giving the lot. Vito would accept nothing less than complete surrender to his will. It would be a battle to the death. She saw no other course. She was fighting for her own emotional survival.

'Dio! Madre di Dio!' The sudden eruption of anger took her by complete surprise, so calm and so cool had he been over the past days. 'What do you want from me? The past is past,' he stressed fiercely.

'You're my past and you're here!' she shrieked back at him, losing control with a speed that shook her. 'I can't get away from you!'

'I have tried so hard to be reasonable,' Vito raked back at her. 'You didn't even smile for the wedding photos!' Ashley loosed a wild laugh, seething at him from the back of a carved settee. 'If you want a smiling bride, you certainly don't need me!' she condemned explosively. 'You've got them all over the place in all your houses. Carina… everywhere I look! Surprise, surprise, there's another one on that table!'

Taken aback, Vito followed her accusing finger to the source. He flashed her a glittering appraisal. 'I'll have them all put away. Or would a ceremonial burning be more appropriate?'

'Meaning?' she launched back at him furiously. 'You're jealous,' he murmured very quietly, though the idea was a positive revelation to him.

Halted on the tremulous edge of another outburst, she gritted her teeth. 'Insulted by your insensitivity,' she contradicted. 'But then, with your track record, that's nothing new to me!'

Slamming out of the room, she raced up to her bedroom and locked herself in the bathroom. As she peeled off her clothes and stepped under the mercifully cooling flow of water from the shower, she wondered why, in Vito's company, her greatest enemy was nearly always herself. She lost control, she opened her mouth too wide and that was usually that.

When she emerged from the bathroom she expected him to be in the bedroom but he wasn't. That infuriated her. She wasn't finished with him yet. Dragging the towel from her head, she started to ease a comb through the tangled mass of her hair. So absorbed was she in the task that she didn't hear him enter; she suddenly saw him in the mirror. Reaching over her head, he took the comb from her suddenly nerveless hand and calmly began to employ it with a dexterity that took her back four years.

'Don't do that,' she said weakly.

'It was insensitive of me to say it out loud. I should have savoured it in silence,' he drawled mockingly. 'Why don't you do us both a big favour and leave alone?'

'But you know the answer to that.' His reflection threw back the reckless, dangerous glitter of the smile his sensual mouth. Ashley sat there like a statue while he removed the last snarl from her hair. But as his hands cupped her shoulders to slowly draw her up from the dressing-table, she started to tremble.

'This… us.' He seemed to savour the words. 'It's inevitable.'

Under that dark spell, she had to struggle to find her voice. 'Doesn't have to be.'

The sash of her robe slid free and she stopped breathing. Already she could feel the anguish of her body's anticipation. He pulled her back against him, burying his mouth hungrily in the curve of her arched throat, his hands sliding up her ribcage to find the aching fullness of her taut breasts. She moaned as expert fingers toyed with the prominent buds of her nipples, an unbearable spasm of excitement seizing hold of her. 'Why should you be able to fight it when I can't?' Vito demanded roughly, a husky, masculine growl of arousal in his accented drawl as he tugged her round to take her mouth.